Consider this a short addendum to the list of novels in my last post. I warn you that most of the paragraphs below are a record of my irritations this year.
The most disappointing book I read this year was Francis Fukuyama’s Liberalism and Its Discontents. I am one of the small number of people who have a high regard for Fukuyama’s unjustly maligned, and largely misunderstood, The End of the History and the Last Man (1992). Two friends/colleagues of broadly similar intellectual temperament have made the case for taking him seriously in more detail that I can manage: Paul Sagar and Daniel Luban.
I consume books about ‘liberalism’ by the dozen, typically ones written by anti-liberals of various stripes. I do this in part as research towards an intellectual history of Anglo-American post-war liberal thought that I hope some day to write, although I’ve only got so far as devising a title: The Last Liberals. Very few books in this genre are much good (Anne Applebaum’s Twilight of Democracy is probably the best of a bad lot, and Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed is mildly interesting in places); some are pretty dreadful (Edward Luce’s The Retreat of Western Liberalism). But it is quite painfully apparent that Fukuyama is not now that strength which once moved anti-liberals of every kind to fury (his appearance on the sorely missed Talking Politics podcast a couple of years ago revealed a painfully evident diminution of intellectual power).
Fukuyama’s book does a few things well, in particular, articulating the case for liberal tolerance as part of an attempt to ‘calm political passions’, particularly those aroused by religious disagreement, itself part of an attempt to ‘lower the aspirations of politics’. The point has been made before, but seldom as succinctly and unpretentiously. But I had many complaints. I wrote in my review of the book for the Telegraph:
Fukuyama has the bad habit of using the verb “argue” without a “because” or “therefore” in sight. It is not reassuring that he gets so many small things wrong. To pick a couple of blatant examples: “deontological” ethical theories are not so named because they are “not linked to any ontology” (it comes from the Greek for “one must”). If he insists, pretentiously, on including untransliterated Greek in his text, he and his editors should not give pedants the chance to point out that it is spelled wrong. Crucial passages of philosophical exposition are, at best, tendentious. He claims that philosopher John Rawls’s academically influential theory of social justice “would seem to be empirically wrong”, pointing the reader to an endnote that contains no empirical data. He consistently conflates two importantly different ideas: the liberal insistence that the final ends of life may not be knowable and the quite different claim that there is no truth about these things.
I was more entertained by Lucy Moore’s extremely readable history of modern anthropology, In Search of Us. I was reminded of a good deal that I had forgotten about the discipline’s pioneers and learnt much that I had not known about others: W. H. R. Rivers, Daisy Bates, Audrey Richards and Zora Neale Hurston. Reviewing it for the Spectator, I identified a problem I see both in Moore’s presentation of the history and anthropology and in the pronouncements of many anthropologists about the moral significance of their work.
Moore recognises rightly that the pioneering anthropologists saw their refusal to judge other cultures as part of an argument ‘for greater understanding and generosity of spirit’. But one wonders how much more interesting her book might have been if she had put that argument under some pressure. What, for instance, of the old concern that the liberalism of toleration might itself be a cultural product? The anthropologist Robert Lowie is paraphrased as saying: ‘The corollary of the idea that one must not impose moral evaluations on the subjects of an enquiry is that one must not impose moral evaluations on anyone.’ But of course, this is not a corollary at all, not unless we fallaciously conflate a methodological precept with a moral one; we are not all always doing fieldwork.
Lowie seems to have held that anthropology should no more denounce the practices of another culture (cannibalism, infanticide, clitoridectomy) than a zoologist should denounce ‘the wickedness of a rattlesnake’. The analogy is confused: taken at face value, it denies precisely what anthropologists in their liberal universalism were rightly anxious to show – that the ‘savages’ they met in the field were fellow human beings and not animals.
It is useful to have Wittgenstein’s First World War ‘private’ notebooks in an easy-to-consult English translation with the original German alongside, but I would have wished for a different translator than Marjorie Perloff. I complained in my review:
Perloff wisely declares, “The translator of the Private Notebooks, finally, has to respect Wittgenstein’s own silences.” She does not, alas, always do so. “Were Wittgenstein alive today, he would be questioning such buzzwords as systemic and intersectionality,” she writes at one point, proceeding to give us what are indubitably her opinions on such subjects, rather than any that might be attributed to a resurrected Wittgenstein. Whether they represent a translator’s arrogance or a publisher’s demand for “relevance,” they fall afoul of what we might call [Elizabeth] Anscombe’s dictum. “Predictions of ‘what Wittgenstein would say’ about some question one thought of were never correct,” she insisted.
I was largely unimpressed by the thesis and arguments of Batja Mesquita’s Between Us, the work of a psychologist researching intercultural variations in emotion. The research itself is fascinating and asks (what could be) a very good question: do people from different cultures have the same emotions? But I found that the conclusions lapsed into tired clichés about east and west, and the arguments themselves were barely coherent. I had a go at disentangling some of the book’s confusions in my review:
Where does this leave the big civilizational contrast that Mesquita believes she has discovered? Her evidence doesn’t show that the West has a mistaken or an impoverished way of having emotions. It shows only that we are bad at theorizing them. But is anyone other than a theorist any good at theorizing anything? Indeed, how good are the theorists at it?
Finally, there was a book to which I gave a largely positive review – Andrea Wulf’s Magnificent Rebels, a history of the origins of German Romanticism in a circle of writers and thinkers in the small town of Jena in the 1790s. I had quarrels with a good deal of Wulf’s presentation of the philosophy, but it didn’t seem worth picking up those pedantic battles in a magazine article for non-specialists. I certainly admired her gift for assembling a coherent narrative out of many thousands of primary sources and shall be borrowing some of her techniques in future. But with a generous word limit to play with, the essay was a chance to do something more intellectually ambitious.
So, I took the opportunity to work through some of my own ambivalence about Romanticism – in part because I’ve been working for a while on a paper about the Romantic inheritance in twentieth-century philosophy (chiefly in the work of Bernard Williams on the value of authenticity). The lives of the early German Romantics helpfully brings out both what is attractive and unattractive about the most visible ways in which the Romantic lives out his Romanticism. I wrote in my review:
The Jena Romantics were . . . at their most appealing when they were at their busiest, and so led away from themselves: running journals, counting syllables, out in nature looking at the veins on a leaf. They were facing up to the challenges imposed on them by a reality that they could not pretend to control. The Jena Romantics were at their least appealing, in turn, when they were at their most “authentic,” given over to the unfiltered self-expression of their highly fallible Ichs. They had a seemingly infinite capacity for pettiness. They ended friendships over critical reviews, and changed from allies to adversaries in configurations even more complex than their affairs. The women were no sisterhood, denigrating one another in creative combinations and for reasons even Wulf’s sympathetic narrative does not help to distinguish from the purest snobbery. Is it any surprise that the commandments of Romanticism eventually curdled into cliché?