The Perils of Interlibrary Loans

It’s nice to know you can lay your hands on almost any book you want if you’ve got the patience to wait a few weeks. And all for free. The privilege only becomes hazardous when the books you request all arrive at the same time. They can’t be renewed, so you’re suddenly struggling under the onus of reading quite a few esoteric books almost simultaneously. Such a crisis is sometimes compounded by the untimely arrival of once-wildly popular books in your local library’s general collection, books that you put in a request for last summer—number 88 on 4 copies—and forgot about completely.

It would be criminal to simply ignore such riches, returning them unexamined, especially considering how hard library staff work to make them available to you. On the other hand, no one but a Harold Bloom could possibly read them all in so short a span of time.

I found myself with just such a glut a few weeks ago, and I gave it my best shot. Here are the results.

The Sum of Small Things:

A Theory of the Aspirational Class

I came across a reference to the title in a N Y Times  editorial; I suppose I was attracted by the word “aspirational.” I have long had it in mind to write an essay focusing of aspirational energy as the force that not only “makes the world go ‘round” but also gives life meaning. (Haven’t gotten around to it yet.) I also liked the phrase “small things,” being reminded of one of my mother’s favorite expressions: “Small deeds done are better than great deeds planned.” Perhaps faint echoes of W. H. Hudson’s classic essay collection, A Traveller in Little Things, were also making themselves felt in my brain.

Though it was published by Princeton University Press (or perhaps because of that fact?) the book turned out to be a snooze—but an instructive one. The author, Elizabeth Currid-Halkett, aspires here to very little except to do an update on Thorstein Veblen’s theory of conspicuous consumption among the leisure classes at the turn of the twentieth century. Currid-Halkett makes the case that nowadays, due to various social and demographic changes,  the same pernicious impulse to “show off” that Veblen described manifests itself among the upper-middle-class “elite” in the form of little things.

 A single example will serve to prove the point, or lack thereof. Here is how she describes those individuals who try to impress their friends by taking expensive exercise classes: “These classes signal financial stability and free time for leisure activities,” she says, adding that such conspicuous leisure “operates on a number of levels.”

She mentions the high cost of the classes and adds that they constitute an exhibition of “conspicuous leisure to anyone who has also shown up,” and goes on to elaborate this obvious point in some detail—so much so that she loses sight entirely of a more important point she had stressed just one page earlier.

“These exercises really worked. Because the exercises isolated specific muscles through discrete movements, one’s body really looked different—toned and tightened in ways that an ordinary run, game of tennis, or visit to the gym could not accomplish.”

So which is the motive here? Develop a “buff” physiognomy or impress your peers by flaunting your wealth and free time. Both impulses are perhaps at work in some cases, but it seems odd for Currid-Halkett to lay such heavy emphasis on the second one. After all, participating in an excruciating exercise routine for many weeks is an unnecessarily difficult way to show off, unless you also happen to be interested in fitness, muscle tone, and so on.

More generally speaking, Currid-Halkett, in her dissection of the “many levels” of consumer behavior, repeatedly ignores the most important one: that people, regardless of class, have a desire to improve themselves, often accompanied by the desire to help others. That’s the “aspirational energy” that animates the universe and drives it forward. Her slant, superficially cunning and statistically well-founded, exposes one of the core intellectual defects of our time. 

The philosopher Paul Ricoeur gave it a name in 1965: “the hermeneutics of suspicion.” Ricoeur was referring to the reductive theories of thinkers like Nietzsche and Freud, but the same attitudes are widely held today, when worldly-wise scholars and pundits feel called upon to demonstrate that every human activity harbors a secret motive, and is more shallow and self-serving than it appears. 

Let me suggest we take a clue, not from Currid-Halkett or even Thorstein Veblen, but from Veblen’s contemporary George Simmel: “Life is that which seeks to go beyond life.”

Made in Sweden

This is sociology at its best, which is to say, not sociology at all. Elisabeth Åsbrink offers vignettes of twenty-five individuals and cultural habits that shaped the Swedish character and nation, some for the better, others not so much. The book’s subtitle, “how the Swedes are not nearly so egalitarian, tolerant, hospitable or cozy as they would like to (have you) think” might give you the impression that it’s yet another shallow exercise in debunking grass-is-always-greener fantasies, but it’s richer than that.

Among the individuals she portrays are the novelist who wrote a proto-feminist work about a couple who do not get married but treat each other as equals—this back in 1815. In another essay she describes how eager the Swedes were in the late nineteenth century to practice eugenics and sterilization, and how comfortable they seemed to be, as a “neutral” nation during World War II, helping the Nazis with all sorts of logistical problems. One chapter deals with the Swedes’ equivalent of the  social security number: we protect ours religiously, they recite theirs at the grocery store checkout to accumulate points for gasoline discounts. Another chapter relates how Astrid Lindgren spearheaded an effort to ban all forms of psychological and physical violence towards children in Sweden.

One thing I especially liked about this book is that the author makes no attempt to connect the dots. Sweden is a complex society. Why reduce it to a formula or a simple-minded theory?

How Natives Think

Nowadays no politically correct reader would so much as glance at a book with a title like this. Too bad. The author, Lucien Levy-Bruhl, was a landmark anthropologist, among the first to speculate seriously, on the basis of his and other field research, on the fact that indigenous peoples in other parts of the world often apply a "logic" to their common experiences that differs markedly from the one we're familiar with. I requested this book after coming upon a reference to him in a book about shamanism that I was thumbing through, along with the phrase "participatory mystique." I like that phrase, though I imagine that if it were translated correctly, in might come out as "mystical participation," which means largely the same thing but doesn't sound so good to my ear.

The was published in 1922 with an English translation a year later.  This particular copy came to me by way of the collection of the Minneapolis Atheneum, later absorbed into the Minneapolis Public Library, later absorbed into the Hennepin County system.

"Primitives see with eyes like ours, but they do not perceive with the same minds. We might almost say that their perceptions are made up of a nucleus surrounded by a layer of varying density of repre­sentations which are social in their origin. And yet such a simile seems somewhat clumsy and inexact, for the primitive has not the least feeling of such a nucleus and surrounding layer; it is we who separate them ; we, who by virtue of our mental habits cannot help distinguishing them... The profound difference which exists between primitive mentality and our own is shown even in the ordinary percep­tion or mere apprehension of the very simplest things. Primi­tive perception is fundamentally mystic on account of the mystic nature of the collective representations which form an integral part of every perception. Ours has ceased to be so, at any rate with regard to most of the objects which surround us."

Isn't this one of the great challenges we all face: to participate in a meaningful way in life? Work, family, recreation, service. But these types of involvement are concrete. It seems to me that the phrase "mystical participation" would apply to the affinities we feel toward a football team, say, or a scheme of religious observance, or a riverside getaway that we've been returning to since childhood.

I didn't get far in Levy-Bruhl's book, but I think he was on to something.

 

A Thousand Small Sanities

Adam Gopnik is a talented, erudite, and good-natured writer well-known to readers of the New Yorker. His book about living in France with his family, Paris to the Moon, became an instant classic, and several of his more recent books about living in Manhattan also make for a good read.

In A Thousand Small Vanities Gopnik extends his range to take up the issue of liberalism, and the results are mixed. The book draws heavily on profiles he wrote for the New Yorker, and that fact leads to some odd areas of emphasis. And Gopnik frames his long essay as if he were explaining to his young daughter where liberalism comes from, and this gives it, at times, a vaguely flippant tone.

Yet there is plenty of meat on the bones, too. Gopnik reminds us of the role played by common-sense British philosophers of the eighteenth century in shaping liberal values, and that’s good.

“Hume, following Shaftesbury, thought that sympathy was the primary human faculty, our key gift. It’s the emotional mucilage that brings men and women together and keeps them together. Sex may make us want someone else’s company, but that’s an animal desire: it’s our ability to feel for someone, rather than to just, uh, feel them, that makes us human.”

He finds a similar bent in the works of Adam Smith, better known today as the high priest of capitalism than for his earlier work on moral sentiments. “Adam Smith believed, not that markets make men free, but that free men move toward markets.”

This whirlwind tour of what we might call humanist theory is refreshing. It leads Gopnik to the conclusion—echoing the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas—that “the coffee-houses and salons of the 17th and 18th centuries helped provide the foundation of the liberal Enlightenment—a caffeinated pathway out of the clan society into cosmopolitan society. Democracy was not made in the streets but among the saucers.” 

It’s an attractive theory—especially if you’re a long-winded coffee-drinker like me—but I’m not sure it’s entirely true. For example, Gopnik largely ignores the impact of religious thought on the development of liberal values. I seem to recall that in his classic History of European Liberalism (1934) Guido de Ruggiero emphasizes the role played by the Presbyterian church, among other institutions, in developing the idea that the people have a God-given right to choose their own leaders. These ideas eventually made their way from Scotland to the New World. And on a deeper level, Benedetto Croce emphasizes the fact throughout his long career, but especially in History is the Story of Liberty, that the only things we care to remember, in the long run, are acts of creativity—scientific, aesthetic, juridical, or whatever—and such acts are intrinsically “free,” hence liberal. Conservatism might preserve a few things, but almost by definition, it produces nothing.

Gopnik’s book is riddled with fine turns of phrase, and he is to be commended for devoting entire chapters to such questions as why conservatives hate liberals. But here he gives too much credit to political argument, whereas conservative postures are usually based largely on irrational resentment, low self-esteem, bigotry, the love of guns, and the success with which conservative politicians exploit the gullibility and irrational fears of their “base.”

Yet even here, Gopnik’s historical perspective is valuable. He describes Disraeli’s hunch that the working classes would be likely to side with imperialist pride over social betterment as “one of the shrewdest guesses” in modern political history, and goes on to note that in the US, the white working class doesn’t side with the social democrats because “identity, or national pride, if you prefer, has proven time and again to be incomparably more powerful than economic self-interest narrowly defined.” De Gaulle was also among those who intuited that myths matter. “Without a sense of common significance and shared symbols, it is impossible for any modern state to go on.”

Conservatives find few symbols to savor in the liberal agenda, which, according to Gopnik, they see as “a moral atrocity and a practical failure, a baleful compendium of bad ideas,” including secularism, cosmopolitanism, relativism, and permissiveness.”

He devotes another chapter to why progressives hate liberals, but here, too, it’s largely breath wasted. A single sentence would suffice, and he provides it. “Liberals believe in reform rather than revolution because the results are in: it works better.”

In the end, Gopnik’s vision is that of a literary man who imagines that if everyone is given the opportunity to express themselves in a coffee-shop or a brew-pub while imbibing among friends who’s views don’t differ much from theirs, all will be well.

I learned more about the world we live in today, which includes China, Russia, Turkey, Brexit, white nationalists, and all the rest, in the first chapter of Edward Luce’s The Retreat of Western Liberalism than in the 100-odd pages of Gopnik’s book that I got through. But I enjoyed Gopnik’s book more—probably because I share his vision.

See you at the coffee shop?