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?
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