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Science and Religion" Part I james Gilbert, author of RQdeel72il7g Cultzlre: A172erical7 Religion in an

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Week of july 27-August 2 (Program #410) "Redeemlng Culture: A Conversation about

Science and Religion" Part II james Gilbert, author of Redeel72il7g Culture. A177erical7 Religion in an

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In his work as a writer and editor, formerly here at the WQ and now as man-aging editor of the Atlantic Monthly, Cullen Murphy has made a fine art ofinterpreting and explaining, for a general lay readership, the often arcane

work of scholars and other specialists in fields ranging from archaeology toSoviet studies to medieval history. If he didn’t have so many other talents—including that of a gifted occasional essayist—an envious spirit might be temptedto dismiss him, as Gertrude Stein did Ezra Pound, as a village explainer—“fine ifyou’re a village,” Stein tartly added, “not if not.” Unlike Miss Stein, I am a vil-lage, and I suspect most Americans are as well. The hunger to understand whatis beyond us may be one of the distinctive American appetites; it is certainly oneto which Murphy has graciously catered.

The cover story of this issue, drawn from Murphy’s forthcoming book, TheWord According to Eve, focuses on a new and powerfully revisionary develop-ment within the many disciplines devoted to the study of the Bible. This turn ismarked not only by what is being studied—the place and standing of women inthe text and times of the Bible—but by who is doing the study—primarily (butnot exclusively) women. In the introduction to his book, Murphy brings up sev-eral questions that direct this new investigation, of which I quote only three:

“Do certain passages in the Bible, together with evidence of archaeology, pre-serve traces of what may have been a more egalitarian social regime than wemight have imagined?”

“Does the theology of the Creation stories really mean that woman must besubordinate to man, as centuries of interpretation would have us believe?”

“Can we ever know whether parts of the Hebrew Bible or New Testamentwere written by women?”

When Murphy asked a prominent Catholic theologian where he thoughtsuch questioning might lead, he got this straightforward answer: “The next intel-lectual revolution.” Murphy’s timely investigation of the investigators makesthat response seem altogether plausible.

2 WQ Summer 1998

EDITOR’S COMMENT

Editor: Jay TolsonDeputy Editor: Steven LagerfeldManaging Editor: James H. CarmanSenior Editor: Robert K. LandersLiterary Editor: Stephen BatesAssociate Editor: James M. MorrisPoetry Editors: Anthony Hecht, Edward HirschCopy Editor: Vincent ErcolanoContributing Editors: Martha Bayles, Linda Colley,Denis Donoghue, Max Holland, Jeffery Paine,Walter Reich, Alan Ryan, Edward Tenner,Charles Townshend, Alan Wolfe, Bertram Wyatt-BrownResearchers: Ami E. Albernaz, Sarah Hines,Lawson Rollins, Shalinee Sharma, Dillon TeachoutLibrarian: Zdenek V. DavidEditorial Advisers: K. Anthony Appiah,Robert Darnton, Nathan Glazer, Harry Harding,Elizabeth Johns, Michael Lacey, John R. Lampe,Jackson Lears, Robert Litwak Frank McConnell,Richard Rorty, Blair Ruble, Ann Sheffield,S. Frederick Starr, Joseph TulchinFounding Editor: Peter BraestrupPublishing Director: Warren B. SyerPublisher: Kathy ReadBusiness Manager: Suzanne NapperCirculation: Cary Zel, ProCirc, Miami, Fla.

The Wilson Quarterly (ISSN-0363-3276) is published inJanuary (Winter), April (Spring), July (Summer), andOctober (Autumn) by the Woodrow Wilson InternationalCenter for Scholars at 901 D Street S.W., Suite 704,Washington, D.C. 20024. Indexed biennially. Subscriptions:one year, $24; two years, $43. Air mail outside U.S.: one year,$39; two years, $73. Single copies mailed upon request: $7;outside U.S. and possessions, $8; selected back issues: $7,including postage and handling; outside U.S., $8. Periodicalpostage paid at Washington, D.C., and additional mailingoffices. All unsolicited manuscripts should be accompaniedby a self-addressed stamped envelope. Members: Sendchanges of address and all subscription correspondencewith Wilson Quarterly mailing label to Subscriber Service,The Wilson Quarterly, P.O. Box 420406, Palm Coast, FL32142–0406. (Subscriber hot line: 1-800-829-5108.)Postmaster: Send all address changes to The WilsonQuarterly, P.O. Box 420406, Palm Coast, FL 32142–0406.Microfilm copies are available from University MicrofilmsInternational, 300 North Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor, Michigan48106. U.S. newsstand distribution by Eastern News Distrib-utors, Inc., 2020 Superior Street, Sandusky, Ohio 44870 (forinformation, call 1-800-221-3148). Visit our World WideWeb site at http://wwics.si.edu/WQ. Direct advertising

inquiries to: Bob Rosen; Kalish, Quigley & Rosen, Inc.; 850Seventh Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10019 Tel: (212) 399-9500,Fax: (212) 265-0986

˘

SUMMER 1998

THE WILSON QUARTERLY Published by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for ScholarsWQ Online: http://wwics.si.edu/WQ

IS THE BIBLE BAD NEWS FOR WOMEN?by Cullen MurphyThe Bible of the Jews and Christians inspires uneasiness in many women today. Anew generation of mostly female scholars is finding good reasons why it should not.

TIME & WHAT WE MAKE OF ITAnthony Aveni • Steven LagerfeldWe order time, and time orders us. The authors trace the history of this ineluct-able process in the West—and tell why modern people too often feel like victimsof their own creation.

FIFTY YEARS OF THE LONELY CROWDby Wilfred M. McClayDavid Riesman’s classic portrait of American character, circa 1950, wasfrequently misunderstood during the decade of its greatest popularity. Odderyet, it may reveal more about us today than about Americans back then.

CITIZEN CANINEby Edward TennerThe making of man’s best friends into national mascots is no shaggy dog story.It is, in fact, a tale with a point.

WHO WILL SERVE?by Andrew J. BacevichA long debate—who should serve in the nation’s defense?—was brought to a tentativeconclusion 25 years ago when President Nixon replaced the draft with an all-volunteerforce. But a look back at the debate suggests that not all questions have been answered.

DEPARTMENTSEDITOR’S COMMENT CORRESPONDENCEFINDINGS

McWorld? • Streetcar Conspiracy • The Joy of Narrative

AT ISSUEA Time to Unwind

BOOKSFaust’s MetropolisMaking Sense of IllnessAchieving Our Country

POETRYAnthony Hecht on Eugenio Montale

PERIODICALSUnnecessary Surgery in Asia?The Perils of Europe’s Promised UnionThe End (of Cheap Oil) is Near

RESEARCH REPORTS

Design by Adrianne Onderdonk Dudden.

The views expressed herein are not necessarily those of the Woodrow WilsonInternational Center for Scholars.

USPS 346-670 Volume XXII Number 3 Printed in the U.S.A.

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4 WQ Summer 1998

The Rural ReboundRob Gurwitt’s profile of the economic

growth and social changes in Garden City,Kansas [“The Revival of Rural America,” WQ,Spring ’98] is an important example of howrural America has become far less remote andmore ethnically diverse in recent years. I havelong argued that rural areas beyond the metro-politan fringe need to be attractive places tolive and work in order to relieve some of thegrowth pressures in congested yet sprawlingmetropolitan America.

After the so-called Rural Renaissance of the1970s and the harsh reality of the 1980s FarmCrisis, I am leery of the Rural Rebound her-alded by Kenneth Johnson and Calvin Beale.An important indicator will be the 2000 cen-sus. While many rural places are experiencingpopulation increases, my suspicion is that inabsolute numbers those rural counties adja-cent to metro counties are growing the most.The edge city phenomenon is turning ruralareas up to 60 miles away into suburbs. Peopleare moving farther out in search of cheaperhousing and open space amenities. They arewilling to undertake the long commute, andlow gasoline prices make that option possible.

Rural areas are accustomed to havingthings done to them, rather than taking chargeof their destiny. How can rural communitiesplan for growth to have economic prosperitytogether with environmental quality? Fred-erick Turner is correct in suggesting that thereis as yet no satisfying vision to replace theshort-sighted, sprawling, ex-urban commercialstrip and residential pod development. This isnot simply a matter of what the landscape willlook like, but how communities will functioneconomically and socially. While remote areaswill struggle for economic survival, the close-in rural places will be under equally severechallenges to retain their identity.

Tom DanielsDirector, Agricultural Preserve Board

Lancaster CountyLancaster, Pa.

“The Revival of Rural America” is a wel-come addition to the literature. It would be agreat mistake, however, for readers to believe

that the “revival” is occurring across the coun-try. There are still whole regions largelyuntouched by growth and change. These tendto be places still characterized by chronic out-migration, deep poverty, an aging populationbase, declining traditional employment sec-tors, the provision of only a modest array ofappropriate human services, and too fewopportunities. Some of them, too, are placeswith high concentrations of minorities wherethe legacies of racism and bigotry contributegreatly to underdevelopment. The other ruralAmerica is in atrophy and decline even whilesome areas are “booming.”

It is also important to reflect upon the posi-tive and necessary role that government hasplayed in those places which are part of the“revival.” Whether in the form of incentivesfor firm relocation, the construction of prisonsand other facilities, road, port, and airportdevelopment, transfer payments in the form ofSocial Security and Medicaid, favorable taxpolicies, environmental protection and publiclands acquisition, rural electrification, or floodcontrol, public policy has decisively influ-enced rural development. Literally everyplace which is witnessing some degree of suc-cess does so within a context which combinesindividual initiative with resilient communityleadership, a strong base of local social capital,wise public investments, and progressive pub-lic policy.

If we are to witness a rural revival across thedivides of race and ethnicity, age, class, gen-der, and region, then we will need to payattention both to those communities that aresucceeding, and to those that continue to atro-phy and decline.

Mark B. LappingCumberland Center, Maine

Rural America occupies more than 95 per-cent of the land area of the United States andprovides a home to nearly one-quarter of itsinhabitants. Yet, until recently, the scholarlyliterature has virtually ignored this part of oursociety. There are exceptions, of course. A rel-atively small number of scholars, mainly fromrural sociology, geography, and agricultural

CORRESPONDENCELetters may be mailed to 901 D Street S.W., Suite 704, Washington, D.C. 20024, or sent via facsimile,

at (202) 287-3772, or e-mail, at WWCEM166@SIVM.SI.EDU. The writer’s telephone number and postal 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.

Correspondence 5

economics, have made some excellent contri-butions concerning this vast and diverse part ofthe nation. There is no better example thanCalvin Beale, whose outstanding research haskept many of us anchored in reality. There issubstantial literature about agriculture,forestry, and mining, but much seems to as-sume either there is nothing else in ruralAmerica, or that other rural activities can beignored.

There are signs that this scholarly neglectmay now be coming to an end. It is encourag-ing that the Wilson Quarterly has provided uswith these three essays, each with a distinctvantage point.

Frederick Turner’s essay concerning thelandscape of disturbance illuminates futurepossibilities in rural places. Rob Gurwitt per-ceptively treats the capacity of the social insti-tutions in Southwest Kansas, and especially inGarden City, to adjust to major changes. Theaccommodation there of the exceedinglyrapid increase in population growth and socialdiversity that has occurred is indeed impres-sive. All rural areas may not possess suchresiliency, but Garden City provides a stan-dard against which other places may bejudged. It is at variance with the rural stereo-types of cultural and social isolation, igno-rance, and intolerance.

Of course, there is much about ruralAmerica that cannot be captured in threeshort essays. Despite improved conditions inmany areas, severe problems remain. Socialpathologies exist that are as bad as or worsethan those found in urban places, includingthe inner cities. Much rural poverty is exceed-ingly persistent. This provides still anotherexample of how difficult it is to generalizeabout rural America.

Emery N. CastleProfessor Emeritus

University Graduate Faculty of EconomicsOregon State University

The Corporatist ModelWith a few changes, John Hooper’s brilliant

(and jaundiced) portrait of Italy [“A NewItalian Renaissance?”, WQ, Spring ’98] couldeasily fit much of Europe. Americans andBritons frequently overlook the depth of thecultural divide between them and theContinent. It is the difference between theMagna Carta and the French Revolution(which soon turned totalitarian), betweenLocke and Hegel, Adam Smith and Jean-

Baptiste Colbert, Ronald Reagan and HelmutKohl.

In Britain, the liberal state was born in1215, when the barons told their king that hispowers were limited by the law. On theContinent, the liberal tradition is still weak.Both left and right reflexively opt for the pow-erful, munificent state which substitutes thepredictability of regulation and protection forthe hurly-burly of individualism and adversar-ial politics. The unwritten social contract saystwo things: there must be no change; if changeis unavoidable, losers must be compensated.

Hooper’s anecdotal account of what it takesto open a store in Italy captures it all. So doesthe famous quotation from Lampedusa’sLeopard. But he may be undercounting thechange that is afflicting Italy as well as the rest.That Italy would liberalize its retail laws andtransform its electoral system in Anglo wayswas strictly inconceivable a few years back.

The country has been doing so under thebrutal impact of political and economic fail-ure—much like Margaret Thatcher’s Britainin 1979. Today, Italy may well be marching inEurope’s avant-garde, demonstrating a muchlarger capacity to reform than Germany orFrance.

But there is an ironical add-on. Preciselybecause France, Germany, and other Conti-nental nations are so stuck in their statist ways,their societies are beginning to cope all’ital-iana. The shadow economy in Germany nowaccounts for 15 percent of gross domestic prod-uct. Business is learning to wiggle out fromunder the heavy hand of corporatism, movingabroad or striking individual deals with localunion stewards—never mind national head-quarters.

Marx, it turns out, was right: economics ismore important than politics. The molds arebeing cracked under the onslaught of moder-nity and globality. Italy showed the way in thepast, and it is doing so again now. Except thatit will take years before you can buy milk or faxpaper in Germany on a Sunday.

Josef JoffeSüddeutsche Zeitung

Munich, Germany

John Hooper argues that the government ofRomano Prodi is shifting Italy away from “col-laborative traditions toward the Anglo-SaxonModel.” As evidence he cites a proposedderegulation of retail trade, and argues thatany anti-corporatist renaissance must over-

6 WQ Summer 1998

come many cultural hurdles. In fact, however,Italy’s corporatism is of political rather thancultural origin, and the current government ismaking things worse.

The article hints that a prime minister whoheaded the biggest state industrial holdingcompany, and a government including the oldCommunist party as well as the remains of theChristian Democratic left, may not be alto-gether sincere about leveling the economicplaying field. That is a huge understatement.But they act for reasons of power and privilege,not ideology.

Hooper treats as passé “the old system” inwhich parties gave “jobs in the mail service topoor but politically loyal southern voters” andin which “[t]hose who were able to get a shareof power raised funds by levying unofficialcommissions at every level of society.” In fact,the Prodi government has revived with avengeance the system of pervasive politicalpatronage that was briefly submerged by theinvestigations and reforms of 1992–94. Theeconomy is being choked by higher taxes andpolitically motivated administration. Privatiza-tions are being carried out on the post-Communist model of crony capitalism.

Italy’s political system is less responsive thanever to popular pressure. The government’scampaign reform banned political advertisingfor two months prior to the 1996 elections,thereby crippling the opposition. Hooper notesthat Italy’s North has the highest per capita grossdomestic product in the European Union. It isalso the region where claims of vote count fraudand political tax audits abound. The revoltagainst corporatism now brewing in NorthernItaly is political.

Angelo CodevillaBoston, Mass.

Blair Ruble’s portrait of Russian urban gov-ernance [“The Rise of Moscow, Inc.,” WQ,Spring ’98] is accurate, but it doesn’t apply toall Russian cities. I believe that the Moscowmodel is both unique and ordinary.

Moscow’s reliance on public-privatepartnerships as a means of achieving policygoals is a standard practice. As Ruble notes, theblurring of “the line between public and pri-vate” characterizes Russian urban governancetoday. A recent survey conducted in nearly 70cities throughout Russia revealed that urbanofficials viewed the local business communityand the federal government as the most impor-tant groups influencing the identification of

WOODROW WILSONINTERNATIONAL CENTER

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Ex Officio Members: The Secretary of State, The Secretary of Health & Human Services,

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Linda Bryant Valentine, Herbert S. Winokur, Jr.

The Wilson Center has published the Quarterly since 1976. Italso publishes Wilson Center Press books, special reports, and aseries of “scholars’ guides” designed to help researchers find theirway through the vast archival riches of the nation’s capital. All thisis part of the Wilson Center’s special mission as the nation’s unusu-al “living memorial” to the 28th president of the United States.

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policy priorities. Over 70 percent of urban offi-cials identified the local business communityas the group with whom they most successful-ly collaborated on policy implementation. Thesurvey responses suggest that close collabora-tion between members of urban governmentinstitutions and the business community typi-fies governance in many Russian cities.

But no other Russian city can matchMoscow’s ability to mobilize its own substan-tial capital resources. As Ruble points out,Moscow has the resources to act. As a subjectof the federation—an administrative levelhigher than all other cities with the exceptionof St. Petersburg—and as the owner of vastcapital and land resources, the city govern-ment has fiscal powers and resources beyondthose of ordinary Russian cities. Moscow’smayor not only can identify a policy agendabut can implement policies to achieve itsgoals. In other Russian cities, the search forcapital resources often directs policymaking.

While public-private partnerships con-tribute to governance in most Russian cities,other cities rarely wield the power of a “seniorpartner” like Moscow.

Beth MitchneckTucson, Arizona.

The WQ is to be congratulated for callingattention to Moscow’s unusual and unex-pected thriving. But Blair Ruble is right tosound a note of caution, as he describes the“imperial urban corporatism that might wellundermine Russia’s transformation into atrue free-market democracy.” What deserveseven greater emphasis is that Yuri Luzhkov,Moscow’s mayor, is a likely president of post-Yeltsin Russia. He has been self-deprecatingand noncommittal about his presidentialambitions, but he appears to be positioninghimself for the job. People are not happywith liberals, but they do not want to backcommunists either. They are looking for athird option. “Moscow, Inc.” might be amodel for a more ambitious project, “Russia,Inc.”

Will Luzhkov’s tough, no-nonsense man-ner attract voters across the country and thenbring the same kind of results to the entirecountry? Will he be able to turn Russia into“a country that works?” And, most impor-tantly, will Moscow’s system of corporatisteconomy and autocratic leadership, whenapplied in the national arena, work forRussian citizens?

Correspondence 7

There is enough evidence to believe thatLuzhkov, the president, would be 1) autocrat-ic, though within the constitutional order; 2)nationalistic, though not militant; 3) pro-cap-italist, though non-liberal. All three postureshave had a lot of appeal in Russia. Peoplecompare Luzhkov’s corporatism not with anabstract ideal model of liberal democraticcompetitive capitalism, but with whatGrigory Yavlinsky called “Russia’s phony cap-italism.” Blair Ruble’s parallels betweenMoscow and St. Petersburg are very illumi-nating. The authorities of St. Petersburg,while more reform-minded and oriented toclassic models, have failed to renovate the cityor attract capital in the way “Moscow, Inc.”did. All domestic comparisons are inMoscow’s favor.

The major challenge to Luzhkov’s capi-talism came recently not from within butfrom outside of Russia. The Asian financialcrisis has not only changed the politicallandscape of South Korea, Thailand, andIndonesia, brought a new market-savvyprime minister in China, but seriouslyundermined the most basic, philosophicalpremises of the “Asian model,” which hashad much in common with the “Moscow,Inc.” model. Complicated internationalmarket forces and global economic shiftshave pushed aside development-orienteddictatorships, which are usually prone tocronyism, in favor of more transparent andcompetitive capitalism. It remains to be seenif Luzhkov has learned his “Asian lesson.”

Igor ZevelevWashington D.C.

First ImpressionsI have just finished reading my first copy

of your magazine. I have two comments tomake. In “Out of Bounds” [“At Issue,” WQ,Spring ’98], James Morris says, “The firsttime I saw the countryside I was six, and nau-seous . . .” He may or may not have been“nauseous” which means “sickening.” Morelikely, however, he was “nauseated”: hisstomach was upset.

In the “Rural Rebound” articles, I was sur-prised that no mention was made of theretired farmer. In the east north centralstates, Michigan, Wisconsin, Indiana, andOhio, with which I am familiar, he was thecore of the rural community.

Ralph NottinghamPompano Beach, Florida

8 WQ Summer 1998

Having sampled one issue of the WQ, Ifind myself upset at the lack of balance: thefirst 80-plus pages are entirely devoted toeconomics and greed, corporate and nation-alistic, with less than one-third of the issuededicated to the arts and literature.

To your credit, though, I thoroughlyenjoyed the re-introduction to Pablo Nerudaand his elegant folk poetry and a handful ofother items.

I will sign on for a year and hope to enjoyforthcoming issues, but I will continue tocount pages and, I hope, you will, too.

Al BuonoBaltimore, Md.

Debating Democratic IslamReading Daniel Pipes’s letter (WQ,

Spring ’98) on Dale F. Eickelman’s “Insidethe Islamic Reformation” (WQ, Winter ’98),I realized I must have misunderstood Eickel-man, since I could recognize so few of hisbright observations in Pipes’s dark warnings.Pipes dismisses Eickelman’s article with thecharge that it misrepresents the true natureof religious change in the Muslim world.The “turn to Islam,” Pipes insists, has pro-moted religious violence, intolerance, and,in general, an ideology that “thoroughlycontradicts” American values. There is noreligious reformation in the Muslim world,Pipes adds, because the Christian Reform-ation stressed “faith alone” over sacramentalworks, while the Islamic resurgence stressesformalistic law.

Whether in Islam or any other religion,violent fundamentalism is dangerous andantidemocratic and should be condemned.Missing from Pipes’s unmeasured observa-tions, however, was the central point ofEickelman’s article: that there is a strugglefor the hearts and minds of believers intoday’s Muslim world, related to the frag-mentation of religious authority and theexpansion of education and communica-tions technologies. Contrary to Pipes’s link-ing of the turn to Islam with “violent funda-mentalism,” Eickelman correctly points outthat, though some participants in this strug-gle are antidemocratic, others are not.Eickelman’s achievement is to have illumi-nated the social roots of the new democraticcurrents in the Muslim world.

Pipes dismisses Eickelman’s examples ofdemocratic Islam on the grounds that nosuch movement has “guided . . . govern-

Correspondence 9

ments or powerful opposition movements.”I beg to differ. In the largest majority-Muslim country in the world, Indonesia,civil-democratic Muslims such asNurcholish Madjid and AbdurrahmanWahid (leader of the 30 million-strongNahdlatul Ulama) were at the forefront ofthe opposition to the authoritarian rule offormer president Suharto. Though they arenot as well organized as their Indonesiancounterparts, there are also civil pluralistMuslims in Malaysia, India, Turkey, Syria,Iran, and Central Asia. The strugglebetween Muslim democrats and their rivalswill not be easy. As in the modern West,however, democracy will depend on eco-nomic progress, the growth of civic organi-zations, and the achievement of a counter-vailing balance of social power. Where

these circumstances develop, Muslimdemocrats may prevail.

Pipes would do well to revisit his Euro-pean history as well. The Protestant Reform-ation was not about “faith alone.” It was fol-lowed by fierce religious wars over the estab-lishment of religion in states. It took Euro-pean civilization three centuries to resolvethe challenge this dispute posed for the polit-ical order. We Americans should cherish thevalues bequeathed by this achievement. Butwe best honor these values by recognizingtheir possibility in other cultures, including,as Eickelman so rightly reminds us, Muslimones.

Robert W. HefnerDepartment of Anthropology

Boston UniversityBoston, Mass.

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10 WQ Summer 1998

FINDINGS

McWorld?Why is it called cultural diversity when

Americans embrace enchiladas andIslam, but cultural imperialism whenthey export things American overseas?That question is suggested by the work ofsix anthropologists who studied the localimpact of that fearsome cultural conquis-tador, McDonald’s.

The dread golden arches now cast theirshadow over more than 100 countries,and it’s true, according to the contributorsto Golden Arches East: McDonald’s inEast Asia (1998), thatthe company can force-feed American values.When its first Moscowbranch opened, anemployee with a bull-horn instructed waitingMuscovites: “Theemployees inside willsmile at you. This doesnot mean that they arelaughing at you. Wesmile because we are happy to serve you.”

More often than not, however, it isMcDonald’s that bends, serving mutton-based Maharaja Macs in beef-averse Indiaand champagne in Rio de Janeiro. Inmany places in Asia, notes volume editorJames L. Watson, “the meaning of ‘fast’[food] has been subverted,” as youngstershave converted the restaurants into“leisure centers and after-school clubs.” InAsia the chain is not so much creatingMcWorld, Watson suggests, as profitingfrom rapid social change, especially a“revolution in family values,” as extendedfamilies give way to nuclear families withvery few, and therefore very pampered,children—Little Emperors and Em-presses, as the Chinese call them, theirheart’s desire a Coke and an order of fries.

A Streetcar Named ConspiracyAmericans love a good conspiracy theo-

ry, the more unlikely the better: the grassyknoll, the Roswell Incident cover-up, theGreat Trolley Massacre. The massacretheory holds that devious auto, tire, and

oil companies snapped up electric trolleysystems in Los Angeles and other citiesafter World War II and purposely putthem out of business in order to promotecar-centered development. The notionsurfaced in Senate hearings in 1974 andhas since been repeated on 60 Minutes,in a recent PBS documentary, and evenin the 1988 movie Who Framed RogerRabbit? Robert C. Post, president of theSociety for the History of Technology,aims a stake at its heart in AmericanHeritage (May-June 1998), pointing out,

for example, that by the1920s chronic dissatis-faction with the trolleysalready had more thanhalf of Angelenos com-muting by car—and thatwhile the “conspirators”owned only about 60 ofthe roughly 600 transitsystems nationwide, vir-tually all of the systemssuffered the same fate.

(That fate was not abandonment, as“juicefans,” or electric trolley partisans,say, but conversion to buses.)

Thanks in part to “a past misremem-bered,” Post notes, Los Angeles has spentnearly $2 billion on new light-rail systemsand more on subways while neglectingthe bus system that carries more than 90percent of the city’s transit riders.

The Big TentReligion, which once divided liberals

and conservatives, is increasingly dividingconservatives themselves, who part waysover the conservative Christian socialagenda. (See the Periodical Observer,p. 119.) Gertrude Himmelfarb, a distin-guished historian of Victorian England,has served as an important intellectuallink between the two sides. She empha-sizes that the Victorian era was a time ofcultural renewal which saw drasticdeclines in crime and other social vices,and she leaves no room for doubting thata revival of religious feeling was essentialto the Victorians’ success.

In the Public Interest (Spring 1998),Himmelfarb ventures into the present,arguing that “the religious revival we arenow experiencing is not only—perhapsnot so much—a religious revival as amoral revival.” She holds out little hopefor cultural revival solely through politicalmeasures (such as welfare reform) oremphasis on civil society, but says she sees“the religious-cum-moral revival” keepingalive “an alternative ethos and culture” tothe mainstream.

Looking back on the Victorian experi-ence, Himmelfarb predicts that religiousgroups “will shed some of their sectarian-ism” as they begin to feel less belea-guered. (Only a third of born-again Chris-tians identify with the religious Right, shenotes.) Like the Methodists and Evangel-icals of Victorian England, today’s Chris-tian conservatives will be joined by others,“not least, a good body of secularists.”

The Joy of NarrativeIf American children are ignorant of

U.S. history, blame their textbooks. Com-posed by committee, dumbed down toeliminate difficulty, watered down to ap-pease activists on the left and right, theirgreatest sin may be bad writing—or eventhe absence of writing. In the New YorkReview of Books (June 11, 1998), historianAlexander Stille says that today’s textbooksdevote much less space to historical narra-tive, much more to timelines, pictures,and other diversions. America’s Story, aHarcourt Brace product, gives only aquarter of its 700-odd pages to historicaltext. Stille celebrates the achievement ofJoy Hakim, a former teacher and journalistwho wrote her own lively textbook, AHistory of US. He also cites an experimentin which writing instructors, linguists, andjournalists were recruited to rewrite text-book passages. Only one rewrite raised stu-dents’ reading comprehension (by 40 per-cent): that of the journalists, most skilled inthe arts of storytelling.

Loose EndsThe West’s historic victory in the Cold

War is never marked by anniversaryspeeches and parades. And no wonder:nobody knows when it ended.

Findings 11

What about December 25, 1991, whenthe Soviet Union officially ceased to exist?The Cold War was already long over, saysThomas Blanton, director of the NationalSecurity Archive, in the Wilson Center’sCold War International History ProjectBulletin (#10).

What about November 9, 1989, whengiddy Germans danced on the BerlinWall? The Soviets themselves had alreadytaken a few tentative dance steps on thegrave of communism, Blanton points out.In December 1988, Mikhail Gorbacheveffectively relinquished the SovietUnion’s claim to be a bearer of ultimatetruth. A year later, when Communistregimes in Eastern Europe were falling, aSoviet spokesman quipped that theBrezhnev Doctrine had given way to theFrank Sinatra Doctrine—an allusion tothat chairman’s line, “I did it my way.”

Blanton’s candidate has no such Holly-wood appeal and isn’t going to inspiremany parades. The Cold War reallyended, he argues, when official U.S.thinking changed, and that occurred onDecember 24, 1989, when then-secretaryof state James Baker allowed on TV thatWashington would not object if the So-viets came to the aid of the Romanianrevolutionaries who had just deposedcommunist dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu.Although the State Department publiclybackpedaled, Blanton says that docu-ments from Soviet archives show thatU.S. diplomats did feel out the Sovietsabout the extraordinary prospect of inter-vening in the communist bloc against acommunist leader.

So there you have it. The Cold Warended on Christmas Eve. In 1989. InRomania. Not with a bang, you might say,but with a feeler.

12 WQ Summer 1998

Iwas no big fan of the late, great FrankSinatra. I was of a later generation, and

found other vocalists to interpret the moodsof my time. Still, Sinatra was a voice of mychildhood, a voice from the Magnavox thatmy parents turned on at the end of the daywhen they “unwound” with their cocktails.So I thought of him mainly as a clue, albeitan important one, to the mystery of those rit-ual domestic moments.

Unwinding: what a strange notion thatseems now, when day’s end is a frantic tran-sition between the workaday life and the pro-liferating activities of a typical familyevening. Back in my wonder years—roughlycoincident with the 1950s—I came to thinkthat unwinding was an institution that wentautomatically with adult-hood, along with jobs or denmothering. I also learned notto intrude upon it withroughhousing or too-insis-tent requests about dinner.

As I recall of those times,my parents mostly talked,sometimes with friends who’d dropped by(another all-but-defunct custom), but usuallyjust to each other—or to us kids, when theyasked us to join in and treated us to our own“cocktails,” complete with maraschino cher-ries. While we sat there, mostly seen but notheard, they’d tell stories or go over the day’sevents or gossip about friends while half-lis-tening to Ella Fitzgerald or Sinatra or one ofthe old big bands and sipping what nowseem to me significant quantities of alcohol.The time of those times was elastic, stretch-ing out longer on spring or summerevenings, when they often took place out-doors, while darkness fell slowly around thevoices and the tinkling of ice and the swingof the music.

Thinking back on those times of unwind-ing—and, truly, their formal purity began tofade around 1960, with the increasing intru-siveness of the Tube, and other changes ofculture as well—I probably invest them withmore meaning than they had. In particular, Isee them—or more accurately, hear them—as moments of symbolic distillation, little

islands of time in which experiences andfeelings from my parents’ past seemed magi-cally to resonate in the present.

It was possible, for instance, sometimes tohear echoes from as far back as the 1920s, par-ticularly the live-for-the-moment gaiety andgregariousness, as well as the healthy contemptfor prim prohibitionists and other moralistswho say that you should not have fun.Certainly more audible, because closer, werethe emotional strains of the Great Depression,the anxieties and uncertainties offset by some-thing deeply sustaining: a real sense of fellow-feeling and community that grew out of theexperience of shared suffering. But what camethrough loudest and clearest of all were theechoes of the war years, the grit and determi-

nation and solidarity—tinged, allof them, with a melancholy thatcame from the loss of so muchlife, so many lives.

In the alcohol and the musicand the stories, as well as in a cer-tain timbre of conversation andlaughter, I heard resilience and

relief, a happiness at having come through,accompanied by the anxious knowledge thatall peace is temporary. There was also, under-standably, pride and satisfaction, and even anabiding nostalgia: for at the darkest times ofdepression and war, my parents’ generationhad grabbed hold of life and each other withan intensity they knew they would never againexperience. How could they help missingthose times? Yet I was amazed, too, andbecame even more so after living through theself-indulgent decades that followed, at howstoical they were about all that had happenedand all that had been lost.

The music, perhaps even more than thestories, seemed to conjure up the deeperemotional experiences. With the openingbar of a tune—often one by Ol’ Blue Eyes—someone would say, “Remember . . .” and nomore needed to be said, though there mightbe a complicitous wink or smile. (Didn’tGore Vidal recently say that more than halfof all baby boomers were conceived underFrank Sinatra’s influence? Fly me to themoon, indeed.) But with the romance there

AT ISSUE

A Time to Unwind

WQ

also came the swells of sadness.I am grateful for those times because they

allowed me to learn something about my par-ents and their generation that I might not oth-erwise have learned—something like theirinner histories. And this knowledge, inchoateas it was, proved to be a valuable corrective tomuch that I later read in the social commen-tary about them. The general point of suchcommentary, particularly that written duringthe first postwar decade, seemed to be thatmost members of my parents’ generation livedlives of outward conformity and inner empti-ness, if not desperation. From social scientistsand amateur observers came dozens of labelsfor this condition, including “organizationman” and “lonely crowd.”

There was, of course, some truth to thediagnosis, and many of my own gener-

ation made a big point, at least for a part oftheir lives, of doing everything in their powerto avoid the fate they thought had befallentheir parents—and so the various GreatRefusals of the ’60s. But fate usually works inironical ways. Looking back on the last halfof this century, I cannot help thinking (andhistorian Wilfred McClay supports this sus-picion in his essay on David Riesman,pp. 34–42) that even the best sociologicalwriting from the ’50s did not capture my par-ents’ generation so much as it anticipated anemerging type—a type to which my owngeneration would more closely conform. Webecame, ironically, the people we feared ourparents were, but really weren’t.

They weren’t because our parents enteredthe nascent suburban, corporate, high-techworld not only with rich pasts but with a pio-neer innocence and earnestness that largelyinsulated them from premature soul-death.The security, the conformity, the barbecuesin the backyard, the big-finned cars, theaccumulating gadgetry, the Levittown-styledevelopments—all of these aspects andtokens of Fiftyishness were not, for that gen-eration, symptoms of spiritual moribundity.They were, in a way, the rewards at the endof a long struggle—rewards that seemedmore to astonish than to deaden their recipi-ents.

Did they become rampant materialists, assome critics suggest? I don’t think so.Certainly in contrast with the wants oftoday’s consumers, their concern for materi-

al accumulation seems positively ascetic.And this is not simply because the meanswere not there. It had far more to do, Ibelieve, with the fact that they had otherthings to do with their time.

For that reason, too, they were not gener-ally workaholics. For all the talk of the ratrace, they were not trying to prove anythingat their jobs. And though they did those jobswell, with habits learned during leaner years,they did not live for their work the way somany of my own generation do.

What, then, did they live for? Manythings. But important among them was thenotion of living for each other. I might ideal-ize, but it seems to me they invested moretime in sustaining their friendships, in get-ting together and dropping by, in writing let-ters, in keeping in touch.

They also had more time for real neigh-borliness, beginning with the fact that theytried to know who their neighbors were.Such contacts did not always lead to fastfriendships, but they fostered an atmosphereof conviviality, security, even tolerance.Theirs were not simply the “dormitory com-munities” social critics complain abouttoday. Their neighborhoods were real placesof contact and connection.

Above all, though, that generation hadmore time for family life. But this was thecurious thing about such family time: it wasnot planned or scheduled as “quality time”with the kids. In fact, it centered less uponthe kids and what they were doing than uponthe parents simply taking the time to bethemselves, at ease, with each other. Thekids more or less moved about the periphery,sometimes drifting into the middle of theadult circle but more often simply observingfrom the edge—seeing the good as well asthe bad in their elders, and learning the hard-est lesson: that the good and the bad wereusually, and painfully, intermixed.

Because our parents took the time to bethemselves, to unwind before us, we chil-dren had the chance to find out who theywere and what had made them, and there-fore to understand a good part of what wasmaking us. It was, I learned, an invaluablelesson. How strange, then, that we whohave been so determined to provide ourchildren with every opportunity might bedepriving them of the one they can leastafford to miss.

At Issue 13

—Jay Tolson

Is the Bible BadNews for Women?The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is not the god in whom many womentoday find comfort. In response to New Age spiritualism or feminist need, suchwomen are inventing goddesses or reclaiming ancient deities to give direction totheir spiritual lives. Yet the rejection of the biblical God, and of the Bible itself,

might be overly hasty—or so suggests a new generation of biblical scholars.

by Cullen Murphy

The ruins of ancient Nineveh, the capital of theAssyrian Empire, lie across the Tigris Riverfrom what is today the Iraqi city of Mosul.When the Assyrian Empire was brought down,in the seventh century b.c., by invadingBabylonians, Scythians, and Medes, the con-querors destroyed the capital and carried offinto slavery the inhabitants they didn’t kill out-

right. The conquerors did not spare the great library of Ashurbanipal, withits record of Assyrian civilization stored in the form of cuneiform writingon some 20,000 clay tablets. They burned the library down.

In a way, explains Professor Tikva Frymer-Kensky, a scholar of the Meso-potamian world, it was the best thing the conquering armies could have done,from our point of view—an inadvertent exercise in what would now be knownas “cultural resources management.” Under ordinary circumstances the clay

tablets, each about the size of a bar of soap, would have turned todust in a few centuries, if not a few generations. But the conflagra-tion fired the tablets, turning them into durable ceramic.

Frymer-Kensky is talking, actually, about other things—therole of goddesses in polytheism; the revolutionary implications,for people in general and for women in particular, of monothe-ism; the emergence of such feminine biblical images as the fig-ure of Lady Wisdom—when the discussion veers off in the direc-tion of writing and historical serendipity. This turns out to be notquite the tangent it might seem.

Frymer-Kensky is an Assyriologist and a Sumerologist who hasfocused her interest in questions of gender in antiquity as much onthe Hebrew Bible as on the literature of the great Mesopotamiancivilizations. She was until 1996 the director of biblical studies forthe Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in Philadelphia, whereshe lives, and she has been and remains a professor of HebrewBible at the University of Chicago, to which she commutes. Sherecently began a sabbatical at the Center for Judaic Studies inPhiladelphia. Frymer-Kensky has won wide recognition for a cross-cultural study titled In the Wake of the Goddesses: Women,Culture, and the Biblical Transformation of Pagan Myth (1992), inwhich she attempts to take the goddesses of polytheism as serioustheological constructs and social reflections but at the same timedisdains the wish-fulfilling popularizations of “the Goddess,” aromantically conceived being who now seems to sustain vast terri-tories of certain bookstores and gift shops.

Frymer-Kensky understands why some women have turned tothe “earth-centered, immanent Goddess of contemporary neopa-ganism” as “a refuge from, and counterbalance to, what manyconsider the remote and punitive God of western religions.” Butdo these devotees and theorists understand that the societies that

Detail from a relief carved into the wall of the Orvieto Cathedral:God raises the unconscious Eve out of Adam’s side

16 WQ Summer 1998

actually possessed goddesses were deeply patriarchal and would havehad no patience for their New Age conceits? Do they appreciate thelarger ideological dynamic of monotheism and, in some respects, itspotentially positive implications? The presumption that we can speaksensibly about ancient goddesses on the basis of a heartfelt emotionaloutpouring rather than painstakingly acquired knowledge drivesFrymer-Kensky to exasperation.

Yet while forthright in her belief that some feminists’ depictions ofthe past “come right out of their own psyches,” she is also sensitive tothe demands of psychic want. She is the mother of two children andalso published Motherprayer (1996), a compilation of spiritual readingson pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood, some of them new but mostof them ancient prayers—translated from Sumerian, Akkadian, Hebrew,Aramaic, and Latin. The book grew out of her own need for such aresource, and the apparent lack of one, during her first pregnancy, anunusually dangerous and difficult experience, two decades ago.

In the course of a long conversation at the Center for JudaicStudies, Frymer-Kensky recalls how the circumstances of that preg-nancy deflected what had been the vector of her career. The

daughter of Polish Jewish émigrés who were actively leftist in their poli-tics and devoutly Conservative in their religion, she was drawn from anearly age to the physical sciences, for which she showed a strong apti-tude. Her early ambition was to become a chemical engineer, but shefound herself thwarted again and again by high school teachers—thiswas in the late 1950s—who deemed her scientific interests to be inap-propriate for a woman and turned her away from formative opportuni-ties. She was understandably embittered by this experience and in retro-spect derives an important personal insight from it: “It explains why,although I became and am a very strong feminist, I never had the rageagainst religion that many of my colleagues did, because I always suf-fered more out in the nonreligious world”—suffered more, that is to say,from the heirs of the Enlightenment, the modern men of science.

Frymer eventually abandoned any thought of a scientific career and,as an undergraduate studying jointly at City College of New York andthe Jewish Theological Seminary, took up instead the study of theancient world, the philosophy of religion, and the Talmud. (At the semi-nary, she became the first woman ever to be accepted into the programfor the teaching of the Talmud.) She went on to pursue graduate workat Yale University, acquiring a quiver of dead languages and undertak-ing a doctoral dissertation on certain legal issues in ancient Assyria.

During her years at Yale she encountered two women, Judith Plas-kow and Carol P. Christ, who played a significant early role in shapingthe field of feminist biblical studies, though their work had little direct

Cullen Murphy is the managing editor of the Atlantic Monthly and a former senior editor of the WilsonQuarterly. He is the author of Just Curious: Essays (1995) and, with William L. Rathje, of Rubbish! TheArchaeology of Garbage (1992). This article is drawn from his forthcoming book, The Word According to Eve: Women and the Bible in Ancient Times and Our Own. Copyright © 1998 by Houghton Mifflin, Inc.

>

Women and the Bible 17

relevance to Frymer’s at the time. Plaskow today is best known forStanding Again at Sinai (1990), an exploration of the possibility of afeminist Judaism, which has never been out of print. She teaches in theDepartment of Religion at Manhattan College, in New York. Carol P.Christ, the author of a book on goddesses and goddess rituals titled TheLaughter of Aphrodite (1987), hasabandoned academe altogether.She is today the director of anorganization called the AriadneInstitute for the Study of Mythand Ritual, and, among otherthings, conducts goddess-orientedtours to the Aegean.

Frymer completed her dis-sertation—“The JudicialOrdeal in the Ancient

Near East”—and was awarded adoctorate in 1977. By then shewas married, and she and herhusband, Allan Kensky, a rabbi,were planning a family. Whenunexpected problems arose in thelate stages of pregnancy and shehad to rush to the hospital for aCaesarean section, Frymer-Kensky grabbed some things toread: a few novels, a TV Guide,and a sheaf of Babylonian birthincantations that just happenedto be lying around, left over fromher dissertation. In the end, theBabylonian incantations occu-pied her attention: “Let the onewhich is sealed up be released.Let the being come out as anindependent being. Let it comeout quickly so that it may see thelight of the sun.”

Awaiting the birth of herdaughter, Meira, amid the anti-septic silence, Frymer-Kenskybecame perhaps the first womanin 3,000 years to speak those ancient Babylonian words in the contextfor which they had been composed.

Afterwards—“10 months later”—Frymer-Kensky began to wonder,with some asperity, why there was no literary material in the Jewish orChristian tradition comparable to what existed in the Babylonian tradi-tion. She continued to publish scholarly work in her original field

A statue of the fertility goddess Astarte datingfrom the mid-second century b.c.

18 WQ Summer 1998

(“The Tribulations of Marduk: The So-Called ‘Marduk Ordeal Text’ ” ;“Unusual Legal Procedures in Elam and Nuzi”) even as her attentionturned increasingly to the new question she had posed.

To begin with, Frymer-Kensky explains by way of an answer, theBible just isn’t that kind of book. It is a public document serv-ing a public purpose; it does not preserve very much in the

way of private writings, the outstanding exception being perhaps theSong of Songs. The Bible does not even preserve a wedding ceremony.To find birth incantations in the Bible would be like finding excerptsfrom a Lamaze pamphlet in the Congressional Record.

Second, most of the writings from ancient Israel have simply been lost.Wedding ceremonies did, of course, take place among the Israelites. In alllikelihood, chants and prayers existed for a difficult labor. But these thingshave not come down to us because the Israelites were, in a sense, tooadvanced. We have practically nothing in terms of texts, in effect, becausethe Israelites had an alphabet. “You wouldn’t wantto write with an alphabet on clay, unlessit was a cuneiform alphabet,”Frymer-Kensky says. “Cuneiform,those funny marks, are repre-sentations made by stickingthe wedge of a reed againstthe clay—you make the trian-gular head and the shaft withone quick tick. But once lin-ear script got developed, youcouldn’t write on clay—itwould take too long to drawthe wedge through it.” TheIsraelites wrote fluidly withtheir new alphabet on parch-ment and papyrus, materialsthat are easy to transport andeasy to store. Unfortunately,they also disintegrate withage. And they are not pre-served by fire.

So much writing surviveson clay tablets from theMesopotamian civiliza-tions—literature, tax records,legal codes, schoolchildren’scopybooks—that vastamounts of it still awaittranslation. And the corpusremains “open”: new tabletsturn up all the time. Indeed,the sanctions-hobbled gov-

Eve (1993–95), by Rimma Gerlovinaand Valeriy Gerlovin

Women and the Bible 19

ernment of Iraq, which controls most of the important Mesopotamianarchaeological sites, has in recent years quietly been selling off freshlyexhumed tablets to the West in exchange for hard currency.

By contrast, the corpus of Israelite literature is essentially “closed,”limited to the canonical books of the Bible and a few other texts thathave been passed along, copied and recopied, from age to age. TheBible makes reference to other major works that once existed but noware lost. For example, the Book of Numbers (21:14-15) refers to theBook of the Wars of Yahweh, but the few lines quoted are all that sur-vive. Missing too are the Chronicle of Solomon, the Chronicles of theKings of Israel, and the Chronicles of the Kings of Judah. A few ancillaryfragments of writing have survived, but only because they were writtenon pottery, or on potsherds, or on amulets.

If this had not been the case—if the surviving corpus were large anddiverse—would any significant amount of it have reflected a woman’svoice? What forms can that voice take? Can it come only from a woman?Each question begets others, and the answers lead off into the imponder-able. Theoretically, though, we can imagine a woman’s voice surviving inat least three ways. One is overt and direct: by means of passages actuallywritten by women. A second is indirect: by passages that preserve, throughexplicit or implicit quotation, the words of women in actual social con-texts. The third way is more ineffable but perhaps the most compelling ofall: the complex mechanisms of psychology and spirituality, which mayunder various guises both draw on and demand a feminine presence.

To take the first of these: a subject as basic as the extent of literacy inancient Israel and whether literacy was accessible to women can beapproached through only a handful of clues and is largely a matter ofspeculation. So little is known about so many aspects of literacy inancient times that scholars are still debating how prevalent the practiceof reading to oneself was—as opposed to reading aloud—or if it wasdone at all. But the acts of reading and writing do come up directly inthe Bible, and there are instances when women are involved.

They make an unlikely pair, Jezebel and Esther. Jezebel is theprincess of Tyre and worshiper of Baal who marries the Israeliteking Ahab, encourages him to build altars to the false

Phoenician gods, and in general, according to the first Book of Kings(16:30), induces him to do “evil in the sight of the Lord more than all thatwere before him.” In Hebrew, Jezebel’s name means “Where is theprince?” The reference is to Baal, but the name is also a pun, because theconsonants can be fleshed out with alternative vowels to acquire the mean-ing “dung.” Jezebel’s idolatry (from the Israelite point of view), her greed,and her scheming aggressiveness fatally complement parallel qualities inher husband and earn a curse from the prophet Elijah, who foresees thatJezebel’s corpse will be eaten by dogs. And so indeed it comes to pass,when Jezebel, after the defeat and death of Ahab, is thrown from a win-dow by her retainers: “But when they went to bury her they found nomore of her than the skull, and the feet, and the palms of her hands” (2Kings 9:35). Her name, of course, lives on in the eponymous word mean-

20 WQ Summer 1998

ing “a wicked, shameless woman.” Bette Davis won an Oscar for playingsuch a woman, a spiteful southern belle, in the 1938 film Jezebel.

Esther presents a contrast. She is the descendant of Jews whohave been carried off to the court of the Persian kings after thefall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the First Temple at the

beginning of the sixth century b.c. However, her identity as a Jew iskept hidden, and Esther is raised at court, where fortuitous events con-spire to make her the wife of King Ahasuerus. She becomes aware of aplot to destroy the Jews of Persia, which she foils, precipitating the exe-cution of its mastermind, the evil Haman, and the inauguration of afeast to commemorate the deliverance of the Jews from persecution.

A leaf from an 18th-century manuscript showing Queen Esther begging King Ahasuerusfor clemency for the Persian Jews. The text (in Persian but with Hebrew letters) was

intended to be read during the festival of Purim.

Women and the Bible 21

The Book of Esther is read every year at the festival of Purim, whichsupposedly has its origins in the events the book describes. (TheHebrew pur means “lot”; the day chosen by Haman for the destructionof the Jews was selected by lot.)

If we think of Jezebel and Esther as historical characters, they areseparated by some 300 years of actual history. The books in which theyappear were composed centuries apart. The characteristic the womenshare is a form of education: they are the only women in the HebrewBible who are depicted as able to read and write.

In its account of Jezebel’s lethal expropriation of Naboth’s vineyard, theBible has this to say: “So she wrote letters in Ahab’s name and sealed themwith his seal, and she sent them to the elders and the nobles who dweltwith Naboth in his city.” (One of Jezebel’s royal seals was, in fact, recentlydiscovered by archaeologists.) The story of Esther ends with her promulga-tion of a directive to the Jews of Persia: “Queen Esther, the daughter ofAbihail, and Mordecai the Jew, gave full written authority, confirming thissecond letter about Purim. Letters were sent to all the Jews.”

Should it be surprising that of all the women mentioned in theBible, only two should be depicted as literate? Should it be surprising,rather, that there are this many? Was literacy common, or at least notout of the ordinary, among women of royal rank, as Jezebel and Estherwere? Did it ever extend to the lower classes? These are all questionswithout reliable answers for the period covered by the Hebrew Bible—without reliable answers when the subject is literacy among men, letalone among women. “I do think that Jezebel could probably read andwrite,” Frymer-Kensky says, “but Jezebel was raised a king’s daughter.And we really don’t know. The Bible says that Jezebel writes a letter. Ofcourse, documents say that Charlemagne also wrote, but what Charle-magne actually did was dictate.”

Apicture of literacy even in postbiblical times and other Med-iterranean cultures, about which in general we know muchmore, remains difficult to retrieve. A recent exhibit at the Yale

University Art Galleries, titled I, Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome,included a number of wooden writing tablets, or tabulae, of the kind thatwomen are sometimes seen holding in Roman portraits—for instance, inthe well-known portrait from Pompeii of a husband and wife. But in theseinstances, it seems clear, literacy is being paraded as an exceptional virtuerather than a routine adornment. The earliest Latin document anywherethat is known to be in a female hand comes relatively late: it is a Romanletter from about a.d. 100, found near Hadrian’s Wall in Great Britain,inviting the recipient to a birthday party.

At one recent meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature, a membergave a paper on the subject of female scribes in the Roman Empire. Theauthor, Kim Haines-Eitzen, who now teaches at Cornell University, per-suasively made the case that female scribes, or librariae, were not uncom-mon in the service of affluent mistresses. The evidence is often indirect,embedded as a passing reference in something else. Juvenal, for example,remarks in the sixth of his Satires that if a husband spurns his wife’s sexual

22 WQ Summer 1998

overtures, the wife’s libraria will bear the brunt of the spurned woman’stemper. Libraria in this passage has usually been read and interpreted aslani pendia, meaning “wool-worker,” thereby disguising the fact that ascribe—a female scribe—is being referred to. The underlying reason forthe mistranslation in this case, as apparently in others, is a form of circu-lar reasoning: how could the word be libraria when we know that womenlacked the skills for that job?

In other instances, female literacy has been simply suppressed. A letterof Eusebius, for instance, reveals that women figured among the scribeshe supplied to the theologian Origen; but Jerome, quoting this letter at alater date, makes no mention of the female scribes. One significant manu-script from late antiquity—the fifth-century Codex Alexandrinus, whichcontains both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament—actually con-tained that great rarity, a scribe’s name, in this case that of a woman:Thecla. The possibility that a woman was responsible for the code wasnonetheless contested by scholars for centuries, with the notable exceptionof one 18th-century investigator who accepted the attribution on thegrounds that there were so many mistakes in the manuscript.

The issue of female literacy in antiquity, or indeed at any time,is of course of interest for its own sake—for what it revealsabout the social status and attainments of women and about

the structure and evolution of societies. And it is hardly surprising thatsome scholars have been picking over Scriptural texts, even if some oftheir colleagues find the endeavor faintly amusing. (At the lecture on

Creation of Eve (1989), by Martin Maddox

Women and the Bible 23

female scribes in the Roman Empire, the first question during the dis-cussion afterward came from one of the few men in attendance, whoasked, “So did women have better handwriting than men?”)

But another, and by far the more prominent, motivation for investiga-tions of literacy has to do with the question of authorship. This is a nag-ging question that hangs over the Bible generally, issues of gender aside.As the biblical scholar Richard Elliott Friedman has written, the Bible

is at the heart of Christianity and Judaism. Ministers, priests, and rabbis preachit. Scholars spend their lives studying and teaching it in universities and semi-naries. People read it, study it, admire it, disdain it, write about it, and love it.People have lived by it and died for it. And we do not know who wrote it.

Could parts of the Bible have been written by a woman, or by anumber of women? Even if they were not literally penned by women,in the sense that women composed a full narrative, and applied an ink-laden quill to papyrus or parchment, can any texts or passages be said toreflect women’s authentic voices, relatively unmediated by a male edito-rial hand? There can be no conclusive answer. There has, however,been a great deal of circumstantial speculation.

The speculation that has received the most widespread attention, aswell as a great deal of criticism from academic specialists, is the proposi-tion put forward by the Yale literary critic Harold Bloom, in The Book ofJ (1990), that one of the chief strands of text in the first five books of theBible, which scholars have given the name J, was the work of a woman.Newsweek gave its report about Bloom’s suggestion the headline “TheWoman Who Invented God.” Time magazine, pithier, ran its accountunder the headline “Ms. Moses.” Bloom contends not only that J was awoman but that she was a descendant of King David, that she lived atthe court of King Solomon’s son, Rehoboam, and that she in fact hadlittle or no religious motivation at all.

To understand the basis of Bloom’s contention is to accept thegeneral outline that biblical scholars have crafted over the yearsto describe how the Bible was compiled. This outline would not

be accepted by the most orthodox of Jews or by the most fundamentalistof Christians, whose interpretation of a belief in the Bible’s divine originextends to particulars of composition. (Orthodox Jews, for instance,believe that the first five books of the Bible, the so-called Five Books ofMoses, are the actual product of Moses’ hand.) Biblical scholars of amore humanistic bent see the books of the Hebrew Scriptures as encom-passing a vast diversity of materials—historical tales, poems, law codes,liturgical invocations, war songs, chronicles, festive chants—whose originsin some cases stretch back to oral traditions rooted in Israel’s prehistoryand in other cases are as recent as the second century b.c.

The task of molding literary material into the preliminary forms ofthe first five books of the Bible was begun during the First Temple peri-od, but the most intensive era of biblical formation, according to thescholarly consensus, occurred just afterward, during the half-century of

24 WQ Summer 1998

the Babylonian exile, beginning in 587 b.c., when the Jewish elite andmuch of the Israelite population endured transplantation to the enemycapital. During this time these five books took final shape, as did theseven books that constitute the so-called Deuteronomistic history. Muchof the rest of the Hebrew Bible’s content was fashioned after the Jewsreturned to Jerusalem, during what has come to be called the SecondTemple period. Final agreement on what would constitute the canon,the officially sanctioned corpus of the Hebrew Bible, was reached latein the first century or early in the second century a.d.

Back to J: whatever the ultimate sources of its content—Canaanitemyth, Israelite folk tradition, divine inspiration—the Book of Genesis has

long been seen byscholars as embodyinga number of distinctliterary threads. Asearly as the 17th cen-tury, a French cleric,Richard Simon, sug-gested that Genesiswas the product ofinterwoven sources. Inthe 18th century, anumber of investiga-tors looking into thephenomenon of dou-blets—the fact that keystories, such as theaccounts of the

Creation, the Flood, and so on, are typically told twice, in differing ver-sions—noticed a distinctive pattern. In one group of doublets, the designa-tion used for God is the Hebrew word El, and in the other the word usedis the Hebrew tetragrammaton YHWH. Scholars gave the name E to thefirst source and J to the second source; as scholarship has become morerefined, Genesis has also acquired a P (for priestly) source and an R (forredactor, or editor) source. Depending on what paths we follow we mayencounter further refinements, such as J1, J2, and J3.

Harold Bloom’s focus is on J, the Yahwistic writer, the author of whatwould seem to be the oldest strand of Genesis. The J he discerns is a wom-an who was writing primarily for women and who conceived of Yahweh asessentially a literary character rather than as a god to be worshiped andprayed to. Bloom surmises further that J was a close friend of the so-calledCourt Historian, the author of most of the second book of Samuel, and heemphasizes the particular attention J paid to women. About six times moretext is devoted to Eve than to Adam, and whereas J’s treatment of majormale figures (Abraham, Jacob, Moses) is mixed, the treatment of femalecharacters (Sarah, Rachel) is on the whole sympathetic. “I think it accu-rate to observe that J had no heroes, only heroines,” Bloom writes.

Bloom contends, more than a little disingenuously, that “in propos-ing that J was a woman, at least I will not be furthering the interests of

Abram’s Counsel to Sarah (c. 1896), by James Tissot

Women and the Bible 25

any religious or ideological group.” In truth, his proposition about thegender of J (which he came to regret having mentioned at all, accord-ing to one interview, because it distracted from his larger contemplationof the meaning and significance of J’s work, whoever J happened to be)predictably found favor in certain religious and ideological camps evenas it elicited widespread skepticism (or, at best, deep agnosticism)among most biblical scholars.

Besides pointing out what they saw as inadequacies in the translationBloom was working with, the skeptics questioned many of his guidingassumptions, including the idea that a characteristically “female” form ofwriting that is objectively discernible exists. “It must be said,” the eminentbiblical scholar Robert Alter observed, the year after Bloom’s bookappeared, “that the evidence offered for J’s female identity is rather tenu-ous. We are repeatedly told, often with engaging wit, that J in Genesisexercises an extraordinary degree of imaginative sympathy for the plight ofwomen and the viewpoint of female characters. But this is also true of theauthors of Judges and Samuel—note the instance of the rape of Tamar—not to speak of later books like Ruth and Esther.” By the same reasoning,Alter added, “one could easily conclude that Anna Karenina, with itssplendidly realized if doomed heroine and its large gallery of repulsive,feckless, or clumsy men, must have been written by a woman.”

As a writer and as a critic, Bloom is a commanding presence, anda playfully seductive one, whose works always merit attention and usually give pleasure. If his speculations about J’s

gender garner objections, it is for reasons other than inherent implausibili-ty. Richard Elliott Friedman has noted that whereas it is virtually impossi-ble to imagine the source E coming from a female hand, partly because,among other reasons, E is so closely connected with the priestly class,which historically was exclusively male, J does in fact present more inter-esting possibilities, partly because of its origin in Judean court circles,where women might have enjoyed unprecedented opportunities.Friedman concludes: “The weight of evidence is still that the scribal pro-fession in ancient Israel was male, true, but that does not exclude the pos-sibility that a woman might have composed a work that came to be lovedand valued in Israel.”

It may be that The Book of J does a disservice in a number of ways. Thegleeful outrageousness of its tone makes sense only if the idea of women’shigh cultural achievement in ancient Israel is in fact nearly preposterous.But as Carol L. Meyers, an archaeologist and religion scholar at DukeUniversity, has noted, “It is an open question as to whether women weredeemed inferior, secondary, and otherwise incapable of high art inIsraelite antiquity. Most likely such stances are largely post-biblical.”Moreover, by emphasizing one authorial possibility, Bloom sweeps off intothe shadows many points that might be pertinent to the issue of biblicalsources and gender. Even if we discount entirely the notion that womenhad any kind of hand in the Bible’s textual formation, there remains abody of material that may ultimately have originated among women—forinstance, various utterances that come from the lips of female prophets,

26 WQ Summer 1998

such as the Song of Deborah and the Song of Miriam. Beyond texts suchas these, whose female origin is not only plausible but in the view of someeven likely, are texts of more indeterminate status, which can be spoken ofas female not in authorship but in genre.

One of the more dramatic episodes of Israel’s modern history is theseries of airlifts that began soon after the country came into existence in1948 and brought Jews from neighboring Islamic regions to the newJewish homeland. Among those coming to Israel were rural Jews fromYemen, who, at one point in late 1948, under the program known asOperation Magic Carpet, arrived at the rate of a thousand a week, airliftedto Tel Aviv aboard DC-4 Skymasters. Most of the Yemeni immigrants werepeasants from small villages. Their way of life had been unchanged forcenturies and preserved social patterns of presumably great antiquity.

In all, some 45,000 Yemeni Jews were brought to Israel in the course oflittle more than a year. Not surprisingly, they attracted the attention ofscholars of various kinds, in particular of S. D. Goitein, the Hebraic andArabic scholar, who undertook a close ethnographic study of the MagicCarpet immigrants soon after their arrival. Among the issues he exploredwere the social and religious roles of men and women, which he found tobe sharply distinguished. But certain features of Yemeni Jewish societymade a deep impression on him. In an article published in Israel in 1957but not translated into English until several decades later, he wrote:

The detail which made the greatest impression on the present writer, turn-ing his attention to women’s poetry in the Bible and giving him great insightinto it, was this: the Yemenite woman, despite her lowly and limited socialposition, expressed in her poetry public opinion on the events of the day.Her simple verses filled the function which the editorial in a daily newspa-per fills in a modern society. Verses of this sort were devoted to great politi-cal events—such as the murder of the Imam Yahya in the spring of 1948and the suppression of the subsequent revolt, or the bombing of Yemenitevillages by British planes—as well as to people and happenings in the neigh-boring Muslim villages and also, of course, to the Jewish community.

It is not hard to see why Goitein discerned strong parallels betweenmodern-day Yemenite women and many of the women in the Bible,whose taunts and laments, warnings and advice, prayers and prophecies,likewise serve as a gloss on the great events in the lives of the Israelites andtheir neighbors. Women did not necessarily write the biblical stories inwhich these words and commentaries appear—indeed, they almost cer-tainly did not—but is it far-fetched to see such stories as transmitting amemory of women’s voices or women’s authority? Goitein used the imageof feminine “remnants” in oral literature that leave “a recognizable impres-sion” in the stories as they come down to us. He also used the image ofthese remnants being poured over time “from one vessel to another.”

Scholars sympathetic to this idea focus not on identifying or specu-lating about male and female authors but on identifying male andfemale genres. In their book On Gendering Texts (1993), the

Hebrew Bible scholars Athalya Brenner and the late Fokkelien van Dijk-

Women and the Bible 27

Hemmes designate these genres “M” and “F,” hoping that the very abstrac-tion of such minimalist terminology will shift thoughts away from the gen-der of scribes bent over their work and toward the idea of “textualizedwomen’s traditions.”

One genre to look at is that of the so-called naming speech—the for-mal bestowal of a name upon a newborn child, typically embedded withina larger explanation of the meaning of that name. The birth of each of thechildren of Leah, the unloved wife of Jacob, is followed by a namingspeech in which the child’s name is derived from a Hebrew pun. Forinstance: “And Leah conceived and bore a son, and she called his nameReuben, for she said, ‘Because the Lord has looked upon my affliction;surely now my husband will love me’” (Genesis 29:32), the name Reubenmeaning not only “Behold, a son” but also mimicking the Hebrew wordsmeaning “looked upon misery.” Jacob will never love her, but Leah willcontinue bearing sons. Upon the birth of her fifth, she says, “This time Iwill praise YHWH, therefore she called his name Judah” (Genesis 29:35),the name Judah embodying the expression of thanks to the Lord.

In the Hebrew Bible as a whole there are 41 instances in which chil-dren are formally named in the context of a naming speech, and intwo-thirds of these cases the person doing the naming is a woman. In

a number of other cases—notably, that of the birth of Esau and Jacob toRebekah—the use of the passive voice conceals the identity of the name-giver, although we can assume that it must be a woman, since the namingoccurs immediately after childbirth, when only women would have beenpresent. “The act of naming is significant,” the commentator SavinaTeubal has written, “because it places the name-giver in authority over thename-bearer.” She goes on to observe, “In biblical times, it seems, childrenwere named the moment they were born—by mothers and midwives whochose names appropriate to the conditions, or their perceptions of thebirth itself.” (Of course, one of the more prominent instances of namegiv-ing does not involve a newborn child at all but rather the new creature,woman, to whom Adam gives the name Eve, meaning “mother of all liv-ing.” As you might imagine, a considerable number of feminist scholarshave examined this episode in every conceivable light.)

Other genres of F texts, as Brenner and Hemmes classify them, includebirth songs, such as the Song of Hannah (1 Samuel 2:1-10), with its strongecho in the “Magnificat” of the New Testament, and the famous songs ofvictory, including Deborah’s and Miriam’s, and those of the namelesswomen who come forward dancing with tambourines after success in battle.

Biblical passages give evidence, even when not quoting women direct-ly, of occasions when women’s speech of a formal and public kind was anaccepted aspect of social drama. From the mouths of women must havecome words of ritual goading, taunting, and mockery, and also words ofsoothsaying and of prophecy. Four women are explicitly given the title“prophet”—Miriam, Huldah, Noadiah, and the wife of Isaiah; the unre-markable manner in which the Bible mentions the status of these womensuggests that the role of prophet was an established one.

Although the words women customarily used are not preserved,

28 WQ Summer 1998

many references, such as the following one from Jeremiah (9:17), indi-cate that women were central to expressions of mourning and lamenta-tion: “Call for the mourning women to come; send for the skillful

women to come. Let them make haste andraise a wailing over us, that our eyes may run

down with tears.” In the Book ofLamentations, which records the

final destruction of the Israelitekingdom and the beginnings ofexile, the fallen city ofJerusalem is depicted as awoman mourner, a dirgesinger, and her words (1:16)

perhaps capture some of thelanguage that such a singer

might have employed on an ordi-nary occasion in ordinary times:

“For these things I weep; my eyesflow with tears; for a comforter is far

from me who might revive my spirit,one to revive my courage.”

Imagine many of these functionsbound up in one person, and whatemerges is a tentative sketch of the “wise

woman” who appears from time to time inthe Bible—a woman whose familiarity and

prominence in the ordinary life of the people,a number of scholars suggest, may have helped

give rise to one of the more powerfully attractivefeminine images in the Bible, the figure of Wisdom.Goitein wrote about the wise women he encoun-

tered among the Yemeni immigrants, offering a composite portrait:

This is a woman who keeps a watchful eye on her fellow villagers from theday of their coming forth into the light of the world until their death. It isshe who helps during childbirth; she who knows the remedies and othertreatments. . . required in case of illness; she who assists in matchmakingand, when necessary, who makes peace between husband and wife. Heradvice is sought not just by her family but by her whole village. It is she whois most proficient at whatever craft is practiced in the district, and she, too,who is the poet who “declaims” before the women at weddings and otherfestive occasions and in mourning as well.

A wise woman from Tekoah (2 Samuel 14) speaks eloquently beforeKing David, urging him to make peace with his son Absalom. A wisewoman from Abel-Beth-Maacah (2 Samuel 20) negotiates on behalf of hercity and saves it from destruction. The idea of “wisdom”—hokma, a word offeminine gender—in the Hebrew Bible, as Carol Meyers has pointed out,cannot be neatly encapsulated; it can apply to a mother’s nurturing, to theteaching of household and cultural tasks, to a knowledge of folkways, to the

Late Bronze Agependant depicting afertility goddess

Women and the Bible 29

skilled wielding of technology, to the astute perception of what constitutes arighteous path. In the Book of Proverbs, wisdom is personified not only as awoman but as a divine consort: “The Lord created me the first of his workslong ago, before all else that he made. . . . Then I was at his side each day,his darling and delight” (Proverbs 8:22-30).

Lurking within this exalted figure of Wisdom, conceived of specificallyas a woman, is surely the wise woman of ordinary communal life. Theseorganic origins aside, some scholars also point to the psychological signifi-cance of Wisdom’s full emergence only in the writings of the postexilicperiod, when the public focus provided by the Davidic monarchy was for-ever gone. And as still other scholars suggest, it is important to see LadyWisdom in the context of monotheism itself—to see her as a powerfulexpression not only of the divine feminine, an obvious role, but even moresignificantly as a means of intercession. As Frymer-Kensky (among others)has pointed out, in the transition from polytheism to monotheism it is ofcourse significant that God is now only male, but the greater significance issimply that God is singular: “In the absence of other divine beings, God’saudience, partners, foils, and competitors are all human beings, and it is ontheir interaction with God that the world depends.”

�

The place known in Arabic as Kuntillet Ajrud, “Solitary Hill ofthe Wells,” can be found in the northeastern region of theSinai Peninsula, at a place where important caravan routes

once intersected, including the north-south route from Gaza, on theMediterranean coast, to Elat, on the Gulf of Aqaba. Beginning in 1975,a team of archaeologists from Tel Aviv University undertook excavationsat this site, unearthing the foundations of structures dating back to theninth century b.c., when this territory would have been under Israelitecontrol. Among the discoveries were two pithoi, or standing stonemonoliths, and on one of them had been drawn some images of menand women and also words in Hebrew that some interpreters venturedto read as: “by Yahweh, our guardian, and his Asherah.”

For two decades, the finds at Kuntillet Ajrud have been a source ofdebate. To begin with, is the translation correct? If so, is “Asherah”meant to designate the Canaanite goddess of fertility, the consort of thechief male god, El? Are we to suppose, then, that Yahweh too had aconsort, and that the monotheistic Israelites made room for a goddess,“his Asherah”? Was Kuntillet Ajrud their shrine? Or was it just a cara-vansary, abounding in the graffiti of travelers? And might “Asherah”refer not to the Canaanite goddess specifically but merely to theIsraelite cult-image of the same name, a sacred tree or symbolic woodenpole planted near stone altars?

These are questions that elicit both narrow academic inquiry and,among some feminists with an interest in religion, a broader emotionalresonance. The Israelite worldview, which offered a revolutionary vision

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centered on a single deity, came into being amid a cultural context ofpolytheism. All of the Israelites’ powerful neighbors—the Canaanites, theAssyrians, the Egyptians—had sophisticated religious systems that featuredpantheons of goddesses as well as gods, with the functional responsibilitiesof cosmic governance and earthly development apportioned among them.The Israelites, not surprisingly, were hardly immune to the attractions ofthese systems. Atavistic references to them appear in many places in theHebrew Bible. And, of course, the explicit embrace of foreign gods by theIsraelites causes frequent breaches in the covenant with Yahweh. The fallof Jerusalem to the Babylonians is precipitated in part by King Manasseh’sinstallation of a shrine to Asherah in the Temple. The Lord vows (2 Kings21:13) in response: “I will wipe Jerusalem as one wipes a dish, wiping itand turning it upside down.”

The broader emotional response occurs on a different plane. It is onlynatural to wonder if women must inevitably suffer disadvantages in a reli-gious system that lacks powerful goddesses, or indeed goddesses of anykind—one in which goddesses may in fact have been suppressed. And it isonly natural to wonder about the theological and psychological conse-quences of a system in which the one god there is comes across as a male.

Tikva Frymer-Kensky understands such complaints. At the sametime, she sees polytheism and monotheism in a considerablydifferent light from the one that is typically trained on either

subject. She writes in In the Wake of the Goddesses (1992): “If you coulddiscover all you needed to know about the Goddess from inside your souland your mind, why should anyone study Sumerian and Akkadian?”

Superficially, elements of polytheism undeniably hold a certainappeal. In a culture such as ours, with all its talk about affirmativeaction and minority set-asides, and all the public invocation of theimportance of role models, the presence of women in an ancientpantheon can strike a reassuring note of progress. In the pantheonsof Mesopotamia, vital natural and social functions such as the grow-ing of grain, the brewing of beer, the making of pottery, and theturning of wool into cloth are associated with women who enjoydivine status. In the Sumerian pantheon, the goddess Nisaba watch-es over the storage rooms, among other duties, storage rooms per-haps being a cultural analogue of the womb. Nisaba is responsiblealso for yet another form of storage: writing, the warehouse of mem-ory. And, of course, goddesses are generally associated with fertilityand sexual pleasure. But male gods fill most of the important roles.They control the earth and the skies and the elements—the powerstructure of the universe—and they dominate the female gods. Thereligions of ancient Mesopotamia do not by any means constitute“women’s religion.” Moreover, the whole system presupposes—andlegitimates—the division of heaven and earth, of thought and theol-ogy, along gender lines. In the end, the goddesses provide little inthe way of succor. Frymer-Kensky writes: “The existence and powerof a goddess, particularly of Ishtar, is no indication or guarantee of ahigh status for human women. In Assyria, where Ishtar was so promi-

Women and the Bible 31

nent, women were not. The textsrarely mention any individualwomen, and, according to theMiddle Assyrian laws, marriedwomen had to be veiled, had norights to their husband’s proper-ty, . . . and could be struck bytheir husbands at will.”

Monotheism, the chief char-acteristic of Western religion,represents a revolutionary theo-logical departure. All the func-tions and characteristics of thosemale and female divinities mustnow be rolled into the being ofthe one God. “God plays all theroles,” Frymer-Kensky writes,“for God is creator and sustainer,provider and destroyer.” In theBible, God brings forth the rainand snow and sun, induces fertil-ity in woman and beast andfield, serves as midwife, heals thesick. The complex dynamic ofshifting power relationshipsamong the divinities themselvesand their mortal clients—thejealousies, the couplings, thewars—is replaced by a single, all-important relationship: thatbetween the one God and theapogee of God’s creation, humanbeings.

God in the Bible is notdevoid of gender. Godis described most often

with male imagery, a circum-stance that prompts a good deal ofliteral-mindedness even now.“O’Connor Rips RadicalFeminists: God Is a Man” was thefront-page headline on the NewYork Post when John CardinalO’Connor of New York used a1991 Father’s Day sermon to criti-cize feminist reconceptualizations of the divine. When the director ofthe York Mystery Plays in England announced in 1996 that the role ofGod was to be played by a woman at the next staging of the six-hun-

Bronze Age statue of Astarte

32 WQ Summer 1998

dred-year-old event, the archdeacon of York condemned the proposal astantamount to “paganism.” He observed, “We are made in God’s image,and not the other way around.”

Yet the God of Israel, unlike the gods of Israel’s neighbors, is not a sexu-al being, possesses no sexual organs, and is never depicted, as Frymer-Kensky memorably puts it, “below the waist.” The God of Israel creates theworld not by means of sexual reproduction but by an act of will.Depending on circumstance, feminine as well as masculine imagery maybe invoked in metaphor. “Now I will scream like a woman in labor, I willpant and I will gasp,” says God in Isaiah (42:14). Later in the same book(49:15), God speaks to Israel in this manner: “Can a woman forget hersucking child, that she should have no compassion on the son of herwomb? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you.”

Created in the image of the one God, human beings, male andfemale alike, partake of a single nature: “So God created man inhis image . . . male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:27).

As a result, humanity is elevated in status and competence. Whereas in thepolytheistic religions the gods bestow technology and skills on humanbeings, in the Bible human beings develop cultural skills on their own, after“stealing” from the Tree of Knowledge (on a woman’s initiative). The firstact of Adam and Eve after eating the forbidden fruit is one that inSumerian mythology would have been the gift of the goddess Uttu: theymake clothes for themselves. Soon human beings are tilling fields, forgingmetal, building cities, writing books, making music. Eventually they willeven be capable of biblical criticism. Civilization is in human hands.

The religious vision of what Frymer-Kensky calls “radical monotheism”represents an ideal—and the reality of biblical society did not conform to it.Women were subordinate to men in custom and in law, as they were every-where in the ancient world. Their property rights were limited. Their senseof purpose in life was often equated with reproductive success. And yet,unlike the sacred literature of other Near Eastern cultures, “the Bible pre-sents no characteristics of human behavior as ‘female’ or ‘male,’ no divisionof attributes between the poles of ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’. . . . As far asthe Bible presents humanity, gender is a matter of biology and social roles,it is not a question of basic nature or identity.” There is no battle of thesexes, no pursuit of “male” or “female” goals, no characteristically male orfemale behavior, no incipient gender-driven solidarity.

The emergence of monotheism can be traced in the texts of theBible, as intimations of a more populous divine sphere give way tothe monopoly of Yahweh. How and why does this process occur?

A recent New Yorker cartoon shows pagan gods assembled among theclouds, one of them saying angrily to the others, “It’s called monotheism,but it looks like downsizing to me”—an explanation that can take its placealongside various scholarly theories. “The Marxist in me asks, how does thishappen?” Frymer-Kensky says. “How does a social system where gender isimportant and where identity is an issue rise beyond that to a kind of uni-versalizing system? My upbringing would like to say, ‘Revelation!

Women and the Bible 33

Revelation!’ The counterquestion would be, how does Marxism arise in thecontext of the bourgeoisie? which is where it does arise. The answer is, Idon’t know how these things happen.”

By elevating human beings, monotheism also puts an enormousstrain on them, creating a profound psychological demand forintercessory figures. To whom do we entrust a dialogue with God?

There are, obviously, the prophets. But the voice of compassionate interces-sion is frequently the voice of a woman. The Bible invokes Rachel—“Mother Rachel,” wife of the patriarch Jacob, who died giving birth toBenjamin. Zion, the spirit of Jerusalem, is also invoked as a belovedwoman. Perhaps reflecting in part the precarious status of women in theirsociety, the fragile, beleaguered polity of the Israelites identifies itself as awoman in its supplications. Possibly the most memorable image is that ofLady Wisdom, who is sometimes depicted as a goddess. It is said in placesthat she already existed at the time of the Creation. She will go on tobecome the divine (and feminine) Sophia of Christian theology.

“It’s a convergence of the psychological, the historical, and the sociologi-cal,” says Frymer-Kensky. “Psychologically, the mother is an enormous pres-ence to the infant. The mother is the one who knows what to do when thechild is hurt, tired, or wet. This has a deep impact. The impact is rein-forced by the fact that women had responsibility for all kinds of technologi-cal wizardry that we now take for granted. The preparation of food. Turningsheep’s wool into cloth. Collecting herbs and making potions. The ‘wisewomen’ of the Bible may be older women who have done these things alltheir lives. Women are seen to have arcane knowledge. They are the child’sfirst teachers. There is also a sense of women as being in touch with thedivine agenda, which is partly, but only partly, because it is women whogive birth. Women gain perspective from being pushed off to the marginsof the public world, the margins of the political world. There is alwayssomething dangerous and also numinous about the margins.”

This experience may explain, Frymer-Kensky says, why there are somany stories in the Bible about women, period. If Wisdom shows womenexalted, many other stories appear to use women the way Dickens usedpoor children, as a kind of index of social pathology. Perhaps it is only opti-mism, but Frymer-Kensky sees a recurring tension in the Bible on the issueof gender. On the one hand, she says, the authors are conscious of genderand of the fact that the social position of women is inferior to that of men,and on the other hand, the authors recognize that women and men areinnately equal and that they are in exactly the same position with respect toGod. “When I’m reading with a hermeneutic of benevolence,” she says, “Icall the Bible gender-neutral. When I’m reading with a hermeneutic of sus-picion, I call it gender-blind.”

Fifty Years ofThe Lonely Crowd

Of the many books that seek to tell Americans about themselves, The Lonely Crowdstands among a small collection of classics. Yet the meaning of this modern classic

was largely misunderstood during the decade of its greatest popularity, and its analy-sis of American society may be more relevant to our time than it was to the 1950s.

by Wilfred M. McClay

34 WQ Summer 1998

The eminent American sociologistDavid Riesman, who celebrates his

89th birthday this September, has had acareer of many parts: as an attorney, lawprofessor, freewheeling intellectual, re-spected student of American higher edu-cation, fearlessly independent commenta-tor on diverse political controversies, elderstatesman of the American academy. Butthere is one accomplishment with whichhis name will forever be linked, above andbeyond everything else he has done: anamazingly durable book of social and cul-tural analysis, now nearly 50 years old andstill going strong, entitled The LonelyCrowd: A Study of the Changing AmericanCharacter.

As its subtitle suggests, The LonelyCrowd was not only an examination of thechanging structures and folkways ofAmerican society at midcentury but alsoan exploration of the changes taking placewithin the souls of individual Americans.In its various editions and translations, ithas sold many hundreds of thousands ofcopies and been read attentively the worldover. Along with such works as Alexis deTocqueville’s Democracy in America,James Bryce’s American Commonwealth,and D. H. Lawrence’s Studies in ClassicAmerican Literature, it has earned a place

on the small shelf of essential books aboutAmerican society and culture.

The book’s enormous popular successcame as something of a surprise to Ries-man and his then unknown co-authors,Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denney, whowere well aware of the many elements ofchance and serendipity in its gestation.Composed during the late 1940s in awhite heat of creativity, The Lonely Crowdstarted out as a relatively modest study ofthe sources of political apathy. But it grewlike topsy, through many drafts, into amuch more ambitious study of Americanlife. When the book was finally publishedin 1950, the professional sociological com-munity gave it a subdued reception, a mix-ture of lukewarm praise and mildly dismis-sive criticism. But, to Riesman’s surprise, itreceived a far more enthusiastic receptionfrom the general reading public.

In retrospect, it is not hard to see why.The very title of The Lonely Crowd—

although the phrase was dreamed up virtu-ally at the last moment by the publisher,and never appears in the book—seemed toregister the ambivalences of an entire gen-eration of middle-class Americans. Theoxymoron also captured many of the moretroubling features of the corporatized,

bureaucratized, suburbanized, and homo-genized white-collar America that hademerged in full flower in the years afterWorld War II.

In particular, the book expressed a worrythat, despite the postwar era’s exuberantprosperity, the traditional American ethos ofself-reliant independence was rapidly atro-phying, and, as a result, America was turn-ing into a nation of anxious, oversocialized,and glad-handing personality mongerers,

salesmen, trimmers, empty suits, and artfuldodgers. Hence the paradox captured in thetitle: a teeming throng whose individualmembers nevertheless feel themselves to beachingly alone, empty, devoid of purpose orindependent meaning.

The Lonely Crowd quickly became oneof the defining works of the 1950s—adecade that, contrary to its reputation forintellectual blandness and timidity, wasexceptionally rich in works of sharp and

The Lonely Crowd 35

Time’s seal of approval: September 27, 1954

enduring social criticism. In September1954, four years after the book’s appear-ance, Riesman appeared on the cover ofTime magazine, the first social scientistever to do so. His sober countenance wassurrounded by figures representing thecentral concepts drawn from the pages ofThe Lonely Crowd. Beneath this curiousand fanciful tableau was the identificationof “Social Scientist David Riesman” andthe pointed question: “What is the Ameri-can Character?”

That such a question was posed soearnestly, in such a place and manner,confirms The Lonely Crowd’s significanceas a popular icon of social-scientificinquiry. No single work provides us with amore valuable window onto America inthe 1950s. But The Lonely Crowd is muchmore than a period piece. The Cold Waris gone, tailfins are gone, the organizationman in the gray flannel suit is gone, thecult of conformity is gone, the suburbanideal is teetering—in short, many of theparticulars of the world we associate withThe Lonely Crowd are no longer with us.But the book itself, and the questions itposes—about the kind of people we are,and are becoming, and about the meaningof human freedom in an organized age—remain very much with us. Such stayingpower is an extraordinary achievement.Consider, by way of comparison, how hardit would be to imagine a work of socialanalysis published in 1900 that would havehad as much immediate interest for read-ers living in 1950 as The Lonely Crowd hasfor readers today. Indeed, it is not at allextravagant to claim, as the sociologistDennis Wrong has suggested, that TheLonely Crowd “rings even more true todaythan when it was written.”

Yet that statement calls for some qualifi-cation. Large and complex books peal indifferent tones for different readers, andThe Lonely Crowd is no exception. Its mar-velous title made prospective readers feelthat they could intuitively grasp what itsaid, even before they opened the book. As

a consequence, some never did open it—or at least, never kept it open long enoughto read it with care. Thus cuts the doubleedge of popular success. Such popularityalways caused Riesman trepidation, pre-cisely because he knew that the book wascomplicated, multilayered, and filled withinternal tensions—and feared that its read-ers might appropriate its arguments selec-tively, in ways that would, at times, betrayits larger vision.

The book’s subsequent history bore outmany of Riesman’s fears. Given its consid-erable historical influence, it is perhapsinevitable that the book’s “received” mean-ing is sometimes given more attentionthan its actual contents, a tendency thathas hindered a fuller appreciation of itsreal virtues. The time is right for a closer,more nuanced assessment.

�

The Lonely Crowd is above all else astudy in what Riesman, following his

mentor, Erich Fromm, called “social char-acter”: the dominant mode of psychologi-cal conformity that any cohesive societyinculcates in its members. As such, it is ofa piece with the works of numerous socialscientists of the era who sought to connect“culture and personality,” writers such asFromm, Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead,Karen Horney, Abram Kardiner, andGeoffrey Gorer. But The Lonely Crowdmade a distinctive contribution to this bur-geoning literature through its unforget-table taxonomy of personality types and itsexplanation of how these various typescame into being historically.

The heart of the book’s argument is itsclaim that the dominant social character ofAmericans had changed dramatically sincethe 19th century, in response to decliningrates of fertility and the emergence of a ser-vice- and consumption-based economy.The change, as Riesman expressed it, wasfrom “inner-directed” personality types—self-reliant and purposeful souls who navi-

36 WQ Summer 1998

Wilfred M. McClay, a Woodrow Wilson Center Fellow, is associate professor of history at Tulane University and theauthor of The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America (1994), which received the Merle Curti Award of theOrganization of American Historians. He is currently working on a biography of David Riesman. Copyright © 1998 by Wilfred M. McClay.

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gated through life relying upon the firmprinciples implanted in them by parents—to “other-directed” types, who were broughtup to rely upon the cues of others, particu-larly peer groups, coworkers, and the massmedia, in addition to parents, to find theirway in the world.

Riesman expressed this difference withan ingenious pair of metaphors, graphical-ly rendered on the Time cover. The inner-directed man (who resembles a staid, hard-driving Victorian businessman) is guidedby a gyroscope, a navigational devicedirected entirely by its own internal com-pass, without recourse to external refer-ents. The other-directed man (who resem-bles an overly friendly, glad-handing sales-man) is guided by a radar dish, entirely ori-ented to external referents, which bounceselectromagnetic pulses off “others” toascertain where the man is standing andwhere he should go next.

Both inner- and other-directionstood in sharp contrast to “tradition-direction,” the form of social charac-ter that had been generated by older,premodern, static, highly ascriptivesocial orders. Such unchanging ordersencountered little difficulty in transmittingthe correct patterns of thought and behav-ior to their members. The regime of tradi-tion-direction, however, was no match forthe dynamic capitalist world, whose socialforms are highly fluid and changeable, andwhose mechanisms of social and moral for-mation must therefore be designed toequip the individual with a dramaticallydifferent kind of social character—aportable and internalized equivalent of thepervasive checks and guideposts of tradi-tional society.

Hence the emergence of inner-direc-tion, which instilled in the souls of chil-dren a “rigid though highly individualizedcharacter,” a permanent moral “set” thatenabled them to weather the storms andstresses of an unstable and unpredictableworld. Inner-direction was the classicmodus operandi of the 19th-centuryWestern bourgeoisie, which is perhapswhy one can hear such clear echoes ofSigmund Freud’s superego and MaxWeber’s Protestant ethic in Riesman’s for-mulation of the concept. But the inner-

directed man can also be compared to anintrepid Victorian explorer or imperialconqueror, striding confidently throughstrange jungles and disordered circum-stances with his pith helmet in place andhis “civilized” values intact.

Inner-direction was highly appropriateto the era of imperial and industrial-capi-talist expansion, an era that had learned toturn all productive energies to the task ofconquering the “hardness” of the materialworld. But with the transformation from aproduction- and extraction-orientedeconomy to a service- and consumption-ori-ented one, dominated by large, bureaucrat-ic business corporations and governments,

inner-direction became outmoded. Anew kind of social character

was required for the emerg-ing social order.

Because the newforms of work generallyrevolved around effec-

tiveness in personal rela-tions, it was now lessimportant to concentrate

on the “hardness” of matterthan on the “softness”

and malleability of minds.Riesman anticipated that

there would be unprecedent-ed uses in the future for “men whose tool issymbolism and whose aim is some observ-able response from people”—advertisers,marketeers, communicators, therapists,educators, media personalities, intellectu-als.

This concept of a great transition frominner- to other-direction, then, was at

the very heart of The Lonely Crowd’svision, and the book ultimately stands orfalls on the usefulness of such a concept.But such a bare summation does not beginto explain the book’s popularity, because itfails to do justice to the unusual verve andwit with which the work was written.Riesman and his co-authors managed tovitalize their potentially inert formulasthrough vivid portraiture, and through aset of clever dualisms and phrases thatwere often as wry as they were informative.These are especially evident in many ofthe book’s titles and headings: “From

The Lonely Crowd 37

Morality to Morale”; “From Craft Skill toManipulative Skill”; “From Free Trade toFair Trade”; “From the Invisible Hand tothe Glad Hand.” In the age of other-direc-tion, the individual’s “struggle for socialacceptance” becomes “The Trial” by “AJury of Their Peers.” The manner by whichconsumer preferences become socialized(Ford is better than Chevy, Coke is betterthan Pepsi, etc.) was dubbed “The Talk ofthe Town.”

Obviously, the last allusion would havebeen especially meaningful to highbrowreaders of the old New Yorker. ButRiesman and his co-authors showed anequally discerning feel for the middlebrowtastes of the lady from Dubuque, and for awide range of popular culture as well.They were especially acute in their analy-sis of children’s literature. Other-directedparents, they noted, had stopped readingtheir children the inner-directed story TheLittle Engine That Could, and wereinstead reading them Tootle the Engine, a“cautionary tale” of a free-spirited younglocomotive that is unwilling to “stay on thetracks,” and ends up paying the price forhis reckless individualism.

Everywhere one looked in the culture,and particularly in the education of

children, one saw evidence of “an enor-mous ideological shift favoring submissionto the group,” a regime in which “the peer-group is the measure of all things” and“the individual has few defenses the groupcannot batter down.” Such a cultureappeared to value smooth socializationand “adjustment” far more than it didindependence or dissent.

Even within the family, the severe inter-nal discipline of inner-direction had evap-orated, since informed parents realizedthat the possession of an inner-directedpersonality would actually be a liability totheir children in a brave new other-direct-ed world. Popularity and “social skills”were more important than the pursuit ofexcellence or fidelity to inner standards ofbehavior. Such parents did not want theirchildren to be “different,” even if thatmeant discouraging them from solitaryplay, unstructured inquiry, and too muchreading. Besides, such parents sensed that

they were no longer in control of the situ-ation; in the new-order family, they wouldhave to accept a costarring role, at best, inthe formation of their children, takingtheir place alongside the power andauthority of mass media, peer groups,“experts,” and other interlopers. The fami-ly was simply too permeable now for inner-directed childrearing to be possible.

Riesman and Co. also carried theiranalysis into a consideration of politics.The other-directed type, they argued,approached political life with the attitudeof a consumer rather than a producer,which meant that he tended to be passive,disengaged, or indifferent. An all-too-famil-iar variation on this theme is a characterRiesman called “the inside-dopester,” asavvy figure who delights in knowing, andtalking about, the “inside story” of politicaldealmaking and horseracing, but who doesso strictly as an amoral observer, and onlyfor the social status that his “knowingness”confers upon him. Such a role wouldnever appeal to the inner-directed type,with his superego-driven sense of moralobligation.

In addition, Riesman found laughablethe assertion of social theorists such as C.Wright Mills that a “power elite” secretlycontrolled American politics. On the con-trary, he contended, American politics wasfundamentally polyvalent—chaotic, de-centered, populistic, and nearly unmanage-able. Indeed, in the age of other-direction,the dominant political force had becomenot the corporate chieftains and other high-ly networked elites but the increasinglypowerful “veto groups,” whose main pur-pose in life was negative: preventing unto-ward or undesirable things from happening,rather than initiating policy changes thattook a more generous or ambitious view ofthe aims of political society.

�

What, then, was one to make of thisnew regime of other-direction?

The Lonely Crowd provided an ambiguousanswer to that question, a fact that mayhave something to do with the tangledbackground of its principal author.Riesman was born in 1909 in Phila-

38 WQ Summer 1998

delphia, the son of prosperous and highlyassimilated German-Jewish parents wholived on Spruce Street, just off Ritten-house Square. They were formidable peo-ple, whose lives were cast in the classiclate-Victorian mold. His father, alsonamed David Riesman, was an eminentphysician and professor of clinical medi-cine at the University of Pennsylvania, andthe author of numerous books on the his-tory of medicine. His mother, Eleanor, wasa graduate of Bryn Mawr College and awoman of considerable intelligence andcultivation. She was also an acerbic criticof modern life, a somewhat snobbish aes-thete who admired Spengler and Proustand looked down on people who did theday-to-day work of the world, including herown husband. In the domestic sphere, thehypercritical mother’s imposing figureinevitably loomed larger in the mind ofthe young David than that of the busy,somewhat remote, often absent father. Butboth parents were united in setting veryhigh standards for their son. Coming intothe world under the auspices of such par-ents would prove an immense psychologi-cal burden for Riesman, since their expec-tations were impossibly high. He couldeither try to meet those expectations orfind a way to free himself from them.

As most of us would in such a situation,he did a little of each, with the result thathe had great difficulty settling upon a voca-tion. When he graduated from Harvard in1931 with a major in biochemical sci-ences, it might have seemed that he wasgoing to follow in his father’s footsteps. Butthere was never the slightest chance ofthat. Instead he decided, for lack of any-thing better to do, to enter Harvard LawSchool, from which he graduated in 1934.Although he excelled in his legal studiesand attracted the patronage of Felix Frank-furter, he would always find himself rest-less in the law, unable to still his growinginterest in the larger world of ideas.

After a year as a research fellow at thelaw school, a clerkship with SupremeCourt justice Louis D. Brandeis, and ayear in private practice in Boston, Riesmanmade a rather abrupt change and took aposition as a professor of law at theUniversity of Buffalo Law School, which

he held from 1937 to 1941. He then cameto New York for a year on leave, as aresearch fellow at Columbia Law School,hoping to use the time in part to sort outwhat to do next. Then, with the UnitedStates’ entry into World War II, Riesmanmade another series of abrupt changes,first going to work in the district attorney’soffice in New York, and then joining theSperry Gyroscope Company, where hewas first assistant to the treasurer and thenwar contract termination manager.

In retrospect, we can see that Riesmanwas building up a remarkable fund of

experiences in white-collar culture, idealbackground for the writing of The LonelyCrowd. But that was by no means clear atthe time. As the end of the war ap-proached, Riesman experienced the mostprofound sense of personal crisis yet as towhat he would do next—a crisis height-ened by the fact that he was now almost36, and had a wife and four young chil-dren to provide for. He had been infor-mally offered the presidency of SarahLawrence College but had refused it, con-vinced that he had no talent for adminis-tration. He had all but decided that, ifnothing else came along, he would takeshelter at Yale Law School, in a position hedid not really want. Then, virtually out ofthe blue, Edward Shils of the University ofChicago contacted Riesman and invitedhim to come to Chicago to teach socialscience to undergraduates. Riesman ac-cepted the visiting assistant professorshipand went to Chicago in 1946. By the timehe left, in 1958, he was moving to anendowed chair of social science atHarvard.

Taken as a whole, the story suggests boththe breadth of Riesman’s interests and therestlessness with which he pursued them.Indeed, there was a daring, driven, almostreckless side to the younger Riesman, aquality consistent with his keen desire tobreak out of the psychological imprison-ment of his upbringing—and suggestive ofthe compulsive need for self-validationhidden away in the hearts of so manyachievement-oriented individuals whooften spend their entire lives laboringunder the weight of others’ expectations.

The Lonely Crowd 39

In that sense, the struggle at the center ofThe Lonely Crowd was more than merecultural analysis. Riesman understood inhis bones something that many of the read-ers of The Lonely Crowd did not: that 19th-century individualism was not real free-dom, and that there was a world of differ-ence between the driven, impersonal,workaholic obsessiveness of his father’sinner-directed ideal and the more gen-uinely liberatory ideal of a truly autono-mous person.

There was no way, then, that he wouldpublish a tract that explicitly advocated areturn to inner-direction. He knew all too

well, from hisown observa-tion and expe-rience, about

its obsessive andinflexible aspects. Per-

haps for that very reason, herejected the cultural prior-

ity still given to the workethic, arguing instead thatplay was the only sphere

of modern life “in whichthere is still room left for thewould-be autonomous man

to reclaim his individualcharacter from the pervasive demands of hissocial character.”

Even a casual reading should make itclear that The Lonely Crowd was not meantas a simple call for the restoration of oldervirtues. Instead, the authors argued, theywere trying to “develop a view of humansociety which accepts rather than rejects newpotentialities for leisure, human sympathy,and abundance.” Far from being a critique ofconsumer culture, The Lonely Crowd was acelebration of the possibilities presented byconsumption unfettered by the constraints ofmoralism or scarcity. That Riesman himselfwas among the most compulsively work ori-ented of men only went to show how muchhe was still his father’s son, a fact that perhapsmade him all the more disinclined to affirminner-direction as a virtue. In many placesThe Lonely Crowd argues that other-direc-tion, for all its faults, represented a vast andhumanizing improvement over the soul-deadening constraints of inner-direction.

But that is certainly not the way the pub-

lic read the book at the time. Nor, in fairnessto the readers of the 1950s, is it invariably theway the book reads to us today, considered asa whole. The authors may well have intend-ed to write a neutral description and analysis,one that affirmed the positive possibilitiesinherent in the changes it describes. But thepublic embraced The Lonely Crowd becausethey found it a great secular jeremiad againstother-direction. This detailed and extendedsermon on our national failings seemedespecially credible because it came deliveredby a sage dressed, not in the black robes ofthe Protestant minister, but in the more re-spectable business suit of social science. Ashistorian H. Stuart Hughes observed, thebook “both reflected and stimulated a moodof national soul-searching,” leading middle-class Americans to comb its pages in searchof explanations for their dissatisfactions anddoubts about their neighbors, their col-leagues, their spouses, their children, andthemselves. There was little chance thatsuch readers would ever see anything ad-mirable in the other-directed man’s desper-ate yearning for acceptance, even if—espe-cially if—they were vulnerable to suchyearnings in their own lives. Even so respect-ful a commentator as Lionel Trilling, whoseexcited reading of The Lonely Crowd led himto wonder if sociology was “taking over fromliterature one of literature’s characteristicfunctions,” nevertheless shared the generalreaction, finding inner-direction to be the“more attractive” and “more fully human”option.

But if there was no going back toinner-direction and no satisfaction to

be had in other-direction, then what was aperplexed member of the lonely crowdsupposed to do?

On this point, the book was less satisfacto-ry. Riesman argued that within each of thethree basic character types, tradition-, inner-,and other-direction, there are individualswho either conform happily to the charac-terological standard (adjustment), fail to con-form to that standard (anomie), or transcendthe standard (autonomy). Clearly the pre-ferred goal is autonomy, which allows one toenjoy freedom from the compulsions anddistortions caused by excessive adjustment(or maladjustment). The autonomous man

40 WQ Summer 1998

still has a social character, but he enjoys acertain distance from it. He can, as it were,turn off his social character at will, ratherthan be subjected to it at all times. In dealingwith social conventions, he is captive neitherto the need to conform nor the need to rebel,but instead looks upon such conventionswith a mature and rational detachment.

An attractive prospect, in many ways. Butthere also were problems with it. In the firstplace, the public that embraced The LonelyCrowd never quite grasped that there was adifference between autonomy and inner-direction. This meant that much of Ries-man’s point about the untoward effects ofinner-direction, and the real but limitedvirtues of other-direction, was lost in the shuf-fle. In the end, the most influential feature ofThe Lonely Crowd was its critique of other-direction, because that was the part of thebook the public was primed to hear. TheLonely Crowd’s influence therefore playedinto a more general ’50s-era nostalgia for thelost American virtues of self-reliance and rug-ged individualism, a nostalgia that was visi-ble not only in conservative attacks on“creeping socialism” and in the anticollec-tivist romances of Ayn Rand but in the chal-lenging social criticism of William Whyteand Vance Packard, as well as the wild antin-omian impulses bubbling to the surface inthe movies of James Dean and the poems ofAllen Ginsberg. Needless to say, such an out-come was not at all what Riesman—whowas, like Trilling, a critic of liberalism fromwithin—had envisioned, and he would latercome to regret some of the uses to which thebook was put, particularly in the anarchic1960s and narcissistic ‘70s. But such useswere not without sources of support in thebook itself.

In addition, there is a second, more pro-found problem. By asserting that individualsmight have the power to don or remove theirsocial character at will, Riesman was, ineffect, making light of the most fundamentalpremise of sociology—the belief thatbeneath all appearances of individual auton-omy and rationality were the irrational bind-ing forces of society and the brute power ofthe master concepts—community, authority,kinship, status, class, religion—by whichhuman societies are constituted and sus-tained. Such forces molded the individual

into an inescapably social and “het-eronomous” creature who could no morestep out of these forces at will than he couldstep out of his own skin. Was Riesman then,in effect, writing an antisociological work ofsociology, by creating powerful typologies ofsocial character, and then exhorting thereader to cast them aside in the name ofsome unconstrained freedom? Or is it moreaccurate to see The Lonely Crowd as a bookmoving, like surf waters, in two differentdirections at once, with the incoming wavesof autonomy forever wrestling with the pow-erful undertow of social necessity?

The latter image perhaps comes clos-est to the mark. The Lonely Crowd

was in fact a valiant effort to conjoin twovery different sets of values: a social-scien-tific respect for the integrity of culture, anda classical-liberal respect for theautonomous individual. Nearly all impor-tant social science contains something ofthis tension between description and pre-scription. But Riesman’s relationship tothe social sciences was always limited andselective, and in the end, his greater loyal-ty was reserved for the liberal tradition, thetradition of John Stuart Mill, Ralph WaldoEmerson, and Alexis de Tocqueville—thinkers whose central writings revolvedaround the fate of individuality in a massage. The Lonely Crowd only appears to bea book of social analysis. It is really a bookabout human freedom, employing socialanalysis in order to transcend social deter-minism. Consider the words with which itconcludes:

While I have said many things in thisbook of which I am unsure, of onething I am sure: the enormous poten-tialities for diversity in nature’s bountyand men’s capacity to differentiate theirexperience can become valued by theindividual himself, so that he will notbe tempted and coerced into adjust-ment. . . .The idea that men are creat-ed free and equal is both true and mis-leading: men are created different; theylose their social freedom and their indi-vidual autonomy in seeking to becomelike each other.

The Lonely Crowd 41

It is refreshing to see diversity used notas a code word for an abstract pattern ofracial-ethnic-sexual demographics but asan affirmation of the individual person,considered free of confining labels.

The possibility of just such an affirma-tion of the individual person was, and is,the grounding premise of The LonelyCrowd. Riesman understood, and TheLonely Crowd argued, that while humanbeings cannot live outside of social ar-rangements, which determine much ofwhat we are, there is no conceivable set ofsocial arrangements that can make us free.The freedom to which we can reasonablyaspire is to be found neither in acts ofmindless conformity nor in acts of mind-less rebellion. Instead, it is to be found inan individual disposition that is able toaccept gracefully the social limits withinwhich it must operate—but is able toaccept such limits precisely because itdoes not feel itself to be psychologicallybound by them. It is, to use an older,nonsociological understanding of free-dom, the ability to operate in a social orderwithout being of it.

Such a disposition is very different fromthe anarchic or Nietzschean myth of the“unencumbered self” that so captivatesour popular imagination, and is so strong-ly, and rightly, condemned by our mostinfluential communitarian thinkers (aswell as by David Riesman himself). It is adisposition difficult to achieve even underthe best of circumstances—and, paradoxi-cally, times of material prosperity, such asthe United States has enjoyed during the1950s and 1990s, are not necessarily thebest circumstances for the flowering of thehuman spirit. To be sure, the battle cry of“freedom” is the most powerful and inspir-ing of slogans, particularly when it is gal-vanizing social and political struggleagainst tyrannical institutions. But free-dom in its deepest sense can never be theproper object of a social movement,because it is so irreducibly individual, and

therefore so diverse, in character.One wonders whether The Lonely

Crowd’s account of things assumes theexistence of some transcendent, or at leasttrans-social, frame of reference to whichthe self can repair and from which itobtains vital sustenance, apart from family,culture, and others. So it would seem. YetThe Lonely Crowd is silent on the potentialshape of any such frame. Such silencemarks some of the distance we have comesince the 1950s, because, in today’s cli-mate, the modernist notion of a freestand-ing, autonomous person no longer seemscredible or even desirable. Perhaps that isbecause the once-great binding power ofour social institutions has been so greatlydiminished, a development that has also,paradoxically, diminished our sense ofindividual possibility.

Our current concerns tend to revolvearound restoring the fabric of fami-

lies, communities, and civic life, ratherthan celebrating the existentialist act ofself-creation, an enterprise we are increas-ingly likely to regard with a skeptical eye.Yet The Lonely Crowd’s silences serve toremind us that the sources of genuine free-dom, that most human of human aspira-tions, are ultimately mysterious and indi-vidual, not to be captured in any social orideological recipe, or encoded in cleverpublic-policy formulas.

The Lonely Crowd did not solve the mys-tery of human freedom, but it challengesus to think more concretely about what itmight mean to be genuinely free, here andnow, in our own America. The book’sgreatest and most enduring strengths arecautionary ones. It warns us against thepeculiar forms of bondage to which ourera is especially prone. And in doing so, itdraws us into a deeper consideration ofwhat freedom might be, both now and inthe future. For that reason, it may wellendure for another 50 years. Or evenlonger.

42 WQ Summer 1998

TIME AND WHATWE MAKE OF ITTime is one of the more confounding products of civilization. While rootedin nature, it is measured, cut, and consumed in different ways in different

cultures—though rarely satisfactorily in modern ones. In the West, a tempo-ral system that began as a means of increasing our nearness to God has since

come to serve other masters. Now, more than ever, the struggle over timeinvolves essential questions that face us as individuals and as a society.

44 Anthony Aveni charts the rise of time consciousness 58 Steven Lagerfeld asks if there really is a “time famine” today

18th-century vertical glass dial

44 WQ Summer 1998

Time’s Empireby Anthony Aveni

“I do not think that they ever experience the same feeling of fightingagainst time or having to coordinate activities with an abstract pas-sage of time, because their points of reference are mainly the activi-ties themselves, which are generally of a leisurely character—therebeing no autonomous points of reference to which activities have toconform with precision.”

When the British anthropologist Edward Evans-Pritchardoffered this observation on the daily life of the semi-nomadic Nuer people of southern Sudan in the mid-

1930s, he seemed to be lamenting the dear price his own culture hadpaid for pulling time out of nature. I imagine that after writing hisconsidered opinion of Nuer time, based on years of experience inclose contact with these remote pastoral people, Evans-Pritchardmust have drawn a breath and sighed before penning his next sen-tence, in apparent envy: “Nuer are fortunate.” Those autonomous ref-erence points the anthropologist speaks of—the ones to which wemoderns believe we are required to march in lock step—emanatefrom an ingenious, unforgiving machine Western culture has strug-gled to master since the Middle Ages. I am speaking, of course, of themechanical clock and all the other myriad clocks within its eminentdomain.

“Time rules life” is the motto of the National Association ofWatch and Clock Collectors—a credo borne out in the formal timeunits that make up our calendar, as well as in the way everydayevents have become organized and packaged into quantifiable bun-dles. Like squares on a chessboard, our formal timekeeping units—from the second to the hour to the week to the month—define thefield on which we engage life’s momentous challenge. Athletic com-petition, the great modern metaphor for life, powerfully emphasizeshow much of modern existence is controlled by the clock. Hockeyhas its three 20-minute periods, football its four 15-minute quarters,and basketball (at the college level), a pair of precisely timed halves.

Time 45

We measure our records in individual sports to the nearest hun-dredth, sometimes thousandth of a second, and athletes aim to breaktime barriers: four minutes for the mile or 10 seconds for the 100-yard dash. In professional football and basketball, games often endwith one team “fighting the clock,” calling “time-outs” that literallybring time to a stop for the participant—though not for the unfortu-nate TV spectator, who is assaulted by a barrage of precisely timedcommercial messages.

Like the quarterback running out of time, the efficient worker,too, battles the clock—a situation memorably parodied inCharlie Chaplin’s 1936 film Modern Times (and again famous-

ly in an episode of I Love Lucy that found our heroine struggling comi-cally to apply a chocolate covering to morsels on an assembly line).

Harold Lloyd in Safety First (1923)

46 WQ Summer 1998

Introduced in the United States early in the 20th century, the assembly-line process of mass production reflects many of the properties of scien-tific timekeeping that have become embedded in the Western way oflife since the Industrial Revolution—sequentiality, consecutive change,and control—paralleling our concept of history, with its emphasis onpiecemeal linear progression.

But time is not a purely social creation, a Frankenstein monster wecobbled together that now turns on us. All timekeeping systems, includ-ing our own, are ecogenic; that is, they originate in tangible perceptsand rational concepts that emanate from the world around and withinus. For example, the 260-day sacred round in the ancient Maya calen-dar was derived from the subdivision of the gestation period of thehuman female (approximately 253 days) into a pair of splendid cyclesmade up of the number of fingers and toes on the human body (20)and the number of layers believed to exist in heaven (13). TheTrobriand Islanders of eastern Papua New Guinea begin their yearwhen a certain Pacific marine worm spawns (about mid-November inour calendar).

For the Nuer, the physical reference is the sun, the extended armthe hour hand of a human clock. They mark their daylight hours bypointing roughly to the position of the sun in the sky. Moreover, theirtime intervals are not numbered like our hours; rather, each is namedafter the activity that takes place at that time of day—milking time, eat-ing time, and so on. Late-afternoon intervals are compressed because,the Nuer say, this is the most important time of the day for doingchores. Longer intervals during the heat of the day reflect periods of rel-ative inactivity.

Time’s measure in Western culture has a long and sinuous his-tory. Imagine starting work when it becomes light enough torecognize the difference between heads and tails on a coin, or

learning to pay your rent before sunset on the day after the first crescentmoon. All of these were viable subjective time-making schemes in thenot-so-distant past of the West.

The simple act of shoving a stick into the ground and marking itsshadow signaled the first break from nature that would culminate in ourown uniform timekeeping system. But the desire for uniformity begetsproblems. The sunrise and sunset times that once designated the begin-ning and ending of the day vary drastically with the seasons, as do theproportions of daylight and nighttime hours. The partitioning of dayand night into 24 hours probably came with the division of the celestialzodiac into 12 equal segments or “houses,” each marked by a constella-tion through which the sun passed in the course of a single lunar cycle.

Because it takes the sun approximately 360 days to make a completeannual circuit among the stars, nature seems to have suggested an obvious

Anthony Aveni is Russell B. Colgate Professor of Anthropology and Astronomy at Colgate University.He is the author of 14 books, including Empires of Time: Calendars, Clocks, and Cultures (1989) andStairways to the Stars: Skywatching in Three Great Ancient Cultures (1997). Copyright © 1998 by Anthony Aveni.

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behavior today.The revolution that defined this era involved neither a

war nor an invasion, not even a new ideology. Itwas a revolution in mentalité. In a relativelybrief span of years around 1300 virtually everythingin the Western world became an essence to which anumber could be assigned—a sea change in the veryperception of reality. The “quantitative revolution,” touse historian Alfred Crosby’s term, saw the first por-tolano marine charts (which allowed navi-gators to lay compasscourses) and theinvention of perspec-tive painting to quanti-fy geometrical space on a canvas, double-entry bookkeeping to quantify the economy, andpolyphonic music to precisely mete out harmonioussound. Monetary standards, weights andmeasures, the hourly wage, all wereunleashed upon the urbanized peasantturned commercialized man seventurns of the century ago. From thatbeginning point, Crosby writes,“Western Europeans evolved a new way,more purely visual and quantitativethan the old, of perceiving time, space,and material environment.”

Time 47

system for partitioning seasonal time: use intervals divisible by 6 and 12.And so, sexagesimal notation came to be a part of time reckoning, with 60minutes to the hour (and, much later, 60 seconds to the minute), 12 hoursper day and night, and so on. This happened in Babylonia about the fifthcentury b.c. Spatially, the circle that represents the round of the sun on itszodiacal course was segmented into 360 degrees. By the Roman era, dayand night were joined to create a cycle that began and ended at mid-night—a more abstract but also more convenient point to make the diur-nal transition in the business world of the empire. And for a dozen cen-turies, the Romans managed it all with sundials.

To locate the first hint of modern time consciousness, one mustcrank the turn-of-the-century clock back seven rounds fromthe present to the period around 1298. This was the point in

history that brought the pendulum swing that vastly expanded time’sdominion. The flux of social change was truly enormous: there wereupheavals in religion, in urban development, and in the very basic busi-ness of doing business. (Business derives from busy [German: besich],which means “to be engaged in something requiring time,” in otherwords, the opposite of idle, or having no activity in time.) God, the city,and commerce—in all three of these spheres human needs wouldencourage the establishment of the standards of time that govern our

By regulatingmotion, the escape-ment made mechanicalclocks possible. In this vergeescapement, the toothed “crownwheel” alternately engaged the“pallets” (A & B) on the verge,which was driven by a pendulumor weights. An axle in the crownwheel powered the clock’s hands.

48 WQ Summer 1998

At that seminal turn of the century, out of economic necessity, thehour was snatched from nature and confined to the hidden gear workbehind the façade of a weight-driven machine. As far as historians candocument it, it happened between 1277 and 1340. There had beentimekeeping mechanisms of various kinds before—including bandedcandles, sand hourglasses, water clocks powered by dripping water—butall were too inaccurate or unwieldy for general use. Some unknown tin-kerers’ invention of the escapement, a device for regulating the descentof a weight, allowed Europeans to make relatively reliable mechanicalclocks—and led ultimately to their entrapment in time. London got itsfirst public mechanical clock in 1292, Paris in 1300, Padua in 1344.These public timepieces were not merely useful devices but symbols ofcivic status and progress. The Paduan clock, which included brass andbronze disks that pointed to the hours, the months of the year, and thesigns of the zodiac, was renowned throughout Europe. It took 16 yearsto build.

The historian and social critic Lewis Mumford called the mechani-cal clock the world’s single greatest invention. It was the machine thatwould objectively grind out a new temporal reality couched in a net-work of numbers. Mumford said that the clock “disassociated time fromhuman events and helped to create the belief in an independent worldof mathematically measured sequences: the special world of science.”

The earliest change in the common sense of time began neitherin the marketplace nor in the hallowed halls of science. Rather,it was the child of the sixth-century Christian monastery. Many

religions of the world call for regular times of prayer. Islam specifies five:sunrise, noon, sunset, evening twilight, and after dusk, while the Jewprays after day break, before sunset, and again after dark. Only in theChristian monastery were the times set by the hours—by the rule of anorganized clergy whose duty it became to codify the schedule for prayer.Around a.d. 530, the rule of Saint Benedict specified when to “recite thehours”: the Lauds, the prime, the terce, the sext, the none, the vespers,and the complin in the waking hours, and two more at night—the vigilsand the matins. If we all pray to God together, the better will He hear ourplea. The precise measurement of time thus became a major concern asChristianity spread throughout Europe after the fall of Rome. But whowould “stand watch” in the middle of the night to keep the observance ofdevotions intact? Who would keep the vigil? The clicking gear work ofthe verge-and-foliot escapement would become the sole sentry all suppli-cants could depend upon.

The first mechanical clocks were little more than gravity-drivenmechanical bells. They had no faces or hands. In fact, the word clockderives from the French word cloche, or bell, a device to which the ears,not the eyes, responded. Remember Frère Jacques, the delinquentmonk who slept through his matins? This eternally harassed figure in achildren’s song was one of the first people to feel the tyranny of theautomatic alarm.

The mechanical clock arrived just as another unrelated develop-

Time 49

ment was sharply focusing the European mind on the fleetingnature of time. The Black Plague quickly spread northward from itsintroduction in 1347 by flea-bearing rats entering from the Levant atthe port of Messina, Sicily. In three years, the pox decimated muchof Europe (the Scandinavian countries and parts of northeasternEurope were spared), wiping out more than a third of the popula-tion. “Be diligent in your prayer and in your daily acts,” came theword from the pulpit. “Watch the clock carefully: you could beexperiencing your last hour!” To avoid eternal death, one needed toprepare ever more diligently for salvation. Time flies! “He who idlesaway his time and does not measure it is more like an animal than ahuman being,” said a 14th-century preacher.

If the monastery was the midwife attending the birth of the mechani-cal clock, the city provided the ideal community for that robot childto grow to adolescence. By 1298, the population of Europe was

three times what it had been at the turn of the millennium. Venice,London, Basel, Paris: the city as we know it—a place where goods areassembled, processed, and traded—had been born. The new manufac-tured products and other goods moved from city to city and from city tocountry. Economic change bred more changes: new, widely circulatedcurrencies—Genoa and Florence minted the first genois and florin,

Clock time was initially the servant of the sacred, as in this circa 1450 miniature show-ing Sapientia (Divine Wisdom) regulating a clock as she instructed a disciple.

50 WQ Summer 1998

respectively, in 1252, and Venice the first ducat in 1284—and whatCrosby calls a “giant step into abstraction,” a universal system of monetaryexchange. Increasingly, everything now had its price, including time.

The city changed the rhythm of human activity. Workers migrat-ed en masse from the country to get jobs. There they couldbecome shoemakers, weavers, textile workers, or dyers—and

they could bring home a pretty good wage if they were well trained. Butthe urban workday was a far cry from the rural peasant’s former dailyschedule, which had consisted of a list of chores that began with feed-ing the chickens and ended with bringing in the cows—all accom-plished alone and more or less in sequence and timed by the approxi-mate rhythm of the sun in the sky, much like Nuer time.

Work in the city required collaboration and coordination among rel-atively large groups of people. The penalty for lost time was lost rev-enue. Piecework gave way to the hourly wage, as church bells migratedfirst to shops, where they became work bells, then to the belfry at thecenter of town, where all manner of pealings, differing in pitch andduration, would attempt to impose their discipline upon those forwhom the bells tolled, upon masons and carpenters, wine makers andlinen cutters. The well-to-do likewise subjected themselves to a new dis-cipline of time, egged on by Renaissance philosophers such as LeonBattista Alberti. “A man owns three things,” he wrote, “his fortune, hisbody and his time.”

Regardless of where the laborers performed their tasks—whether inthe vineyard or in the weaving loom, at the shipyard or the mine,whether in the home or at the bench in the shop—they came to resentthe bells and mistrust those who rang them—the employer class whichalso ran the town government. Time seemed no longer to belong toGod. It belonged to those who presided over this world.

For a variety of reasons, the revolution in time stirred concern in themedieval church. For example, take the practice of lending money atinterest, an increasingly common phenomenon with the rise of marketsin medieval Europe. The borrower essentially lives on borrowed time,paying a fee (interest) for the use of assets for a period of time. In theeyes of the medieval church, such crass secular capitalism constituted acriminal act called usury, the selling of time, a thing created by God.By putting money “to work” day and night, the usurer also posed a chal-lenge to the Christian regulation of time: “Every man stops working onholidays, but the oxen of usury work unceasingly and thus offend Godand all the saints,” wrote one 13th-century observer. Dante consignedusurers to the bottom of the seventh circle of the Inferno, lower thanblasphemers and sodomites.

But the struggle over time between medieval labor and manage-ment cut two ways. Clocks also gave workers the opportunityto master their own time, and they raised new and complex

issues for employers and workers alike. It is a relatively simple matter tomark the length of a workday that begins at sunup and ends at sun-

Time 51

down, but what of one that is measured in hours? Such questions abouttime’s essence, which had never been raised before the advent of clocktime, were bound to create conflict. There are many examples. In 1315,when they were required to handle fabric of a heavier weight, textileworkers in the northern French city of Arras demanded higher wages.To increase their earning power, they further entreated to be allowed toexceed the length of the workday announced by the bells—the firstovertime dispute! Management fought back: in the cloth trade, forexample, sheep shearers, fullers, and washers who failed to obey theclothiers’ bells were fined as follows: the equivalent of five Britishpounds for checking in after the morning bell, 60 for ringing it to callan assembly of fellow workers, the death penalty for ringing it to call fora revolt.

As the clock became a symbol of prestige and progress, owning a“watch” became a measure of status, even though for aristocrats, workinghalf a day at most, a “chamber clock” was hardly a necessity. In the horo-logical revolution that swept Europe, clocks became elaborate show-pieces. One estimate has it that by 1700 a single British clock maker hadproduced 50,000 watches for domestic use and exported twice as manyabroad. (Today, Americans alone purchase 50 million a year.)*

Naturally, when clocks were brought indoors from the tower to thechamber they got smaller. By the mid-15th century, you could carry yourown personal timepiece in your waistcoat pocket. (King Francis I ofFrance owned a watch so tiny it was said to fit into the hilt of his dagger.)Pull it out, open the lid, and push a button, and your “repeater” watchwould automatically chime out the hour and its quarter divisions—a greatconvenience in dark city alleys in the days before artificial lighting.

This miniaturization of timepieces was made possible by replacingthe falling weights that powered larger clocks with the spring balance, atightly wound metallic spiral whose slow release of tension was commu-nicated via a twisting shaft whose detents alternately engaged rows ofteeth on a round wheel connected to the dials. Credit for this technicalachievement probably belongs to Italian artisans of the early 15th cen-tury. The wristwatch, which fostered even more intimate contact withthe moment, dates from World War I, when military commanders,needing to coordinate everything from reveille to frontal assaults, soughtreadier access to their timepieces.

Renaissance Europe soon discovered that life in an interlockingmarket economy spanning an entire continent necessitates theinternational regulation of time standards. Consider the

tradespeople who journeyed with their wares between Venice, Munich,and Basel. Because each city kept its own separate system of hours, a setof conversion tables became an absolute necessity for business travelers.A visitor to Basel, for example, needed to know not only that the city’s

*Recently Tiffany’s in New York displayed a Patek Philipe Swiss watch said to be the most complicated inthe world. Weighing 2.4 pounds, held together by 332 screws, and exhibiting 24 hands, it performs morethan three dozen different tasks—among them calculation of Easter Sunday’s place in the calendar, thetimes of sunrise and sunset, and the orientation of the Milky Way in the night sky.

52 WQ Summer 1998

reckoning of the hours in a day began at noon but that it called thathour one o’clock, not 12.

The extension of bureaucratic control over time continued in the19th century with the imposition of a unified global scheme of timemeasurement, a change necessitated by the revolutions in industry andtransportation, and specifically the schedules and timetables of the rail-roads. In order to avoid massive inefficiency and spoilage, goods andpeople needed to arrive and depart at predictable times.

The technological burden was accompanied by a social one. Townsalong the line needed to agree on a system of standard hours. Beforethe advent of zone time in the United States in 1883, the wayfarer kepttwo kinds of travel time: standardized “railroad time” inside the train,and “local time” in the towns outside. The latter differed from town totown, for at a given time the angle of the sun from the meridian is thesame only at a given longitude. Step one pace east or west of that line,and the natural hour changes. Even noon and midnight change. Tokeep pace, travelers would need to change their watches about oneminute for every 14 miles traveled in an east-west direction. Clearly, tobe in step with the world, you needed to march to the same beat asyour neighbor. The federal Uniform Time Act of 1883 established anew standard: everyone situated within a fixed distance east or west ofthe nearest whole multiple of 15 degrees of longitude would keep timeby that parallel. (If the line of demarcation bisected a heavily populatedarea, the line would be shifted to avoid confusion.)

One year later, the International Meridian Conference applied thesame scheme to the entire globe, establishing Greenwich, England,long a favored reference point of navigators, as the point of zero longi-tude, and Greenwich Mean Time as the international time standard.(The French, however, clung to their own standard, Paris Mean Time,for nearly 20 years.) Thus, the continuous time differential experiencedin nature as we move long distances has, for the sake of convenience,become discontinuous and partitioned.

Like the tendency to socialize time, the penchant to bureaucra-tize it has its roots in the ancient world. Our own calendaremanates from Julius Caesar’s adviser Sosigenes, who invented

the leap year in 45 b.c. to keep time’s canon in tune with the seasons. Ifyou didn’t add a day to the 365-day count every four years, the feaststhat follow the seasonal cycle of 3651/4 days indicated by the sun’s move-ment would backslide by one day every four years. But the Julian calen-dar, modified several centuries later, did not entirely solve the problem.By the 16th century, the recession of nature’s year relative to the artifi-cial version of it had grown to 11 days. Concerned about where EasterSunday ought to be positioned relative to New Year’s Day, PopeGregory XIII appointed a commission to solve the calendar problem in1582. As was the case a millennium and a half before, two actions wereneeded to assure that the future festival date would arrive at its properlocation in the year of the seasons. First, the spring equinox (fromwhich the annual reckoning of days until Easter commenced) needed

Time 53

to be restored to its proper place in the year cycle; and second, the com-mission needed to devise a mechanism to hold it fixed.

After much debate about whether the lost time might be made up insmall parcels over a long interval, the first problem was solved, as inCaesar’s time, in a single bold stroke simply by dropping 11 days out ofthe calendar. To put the plan into effect, the pope decreed that the dayafter October 4 of that year would be October 15. The second step ofthe Gregorian reform consisted of changing the leap-year rule bydecreeing that among century years, only those divisible by 400 shall beleap years.*

As might be expected, the Gregorian reform was immediately adoptedby all Catholic countries but not so quickly by others. Great Britain didnot approve the new calendar until 1752, by which time it needed toerase even more days to make the transition. Russia did not accept theGregorian calendar until the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 (and thenunder Stalin experimented with five- and six-day weeks), and many non-Western societies at first paid little attention to calendar reform.**

We can scarcely fathom the toll such a theft of time would exactfrom us today, and it is safe to say it wreaked substantial havoc even

*Thus, 2000 will be a leap year but 2100 will not. This recipe had far-reaching consequences, for it drasti-cally reduced the shortfall inherent in the Julian leap-year system by cutting the length of the calendar year,averaged over long periods of time, below 365.25 days to 365.2425 days (which is closer to the real value of365.2422 days). So near perfect was the new rule that the man-made year cycle would now roll ahead of theseasons by only one day in 3,300 years.

**Minor reforms have taken place since the time of Pope Gregory. By agreeing to convert a.d. 4000, 8000,and 12,000 to common years, we reduced the difference to one day in 20,000 years. Finally, at an EasternOrthodox congress held in Constantinople in 1923, yet another rule was adopted. It stated that century yearsdivisible by 900 will be leap years only if the remainder is 200 or 600. The resulting calendar is accurate toone day in 44,000 years.

Prayer times throughout the Muslim world are noted at Sri Lanka’s Jami Al Alfar Mosque.

54 WQ Summer 1998

centuries ago. Immovable feasts were moved, critical saint’s days omit-ted, monetary deadlines shortened, and the calculation of bank interestinterrupted. Angry mobs assembled in the streets shouting against theauthorities from Frankfurt to London: “Give us back our days!” Thechange was less traumatic in Britain’s American colonies, largely ruraland therefore less strictly calibrated to the calendar. The ever-pragmaticBenjamin Franklin shrewdly advised readers that “expenses will belighter” in the transition month.

During the past two centuries, the calendar has more thanonce attracted the attention of secular reformers. All suchrevolutionary attempts to regulate long-interval time seem to

aim for pristine completion of the year cycle as well as the ability toarrive precisely at a solar date. The more fingers in the bureaucratic pie,the greater the concern to build up and tightly interlock larger and larg-er cycles, with a single aim: to gain a foothold on the future.

The calendar reform launched by anticlerical zealots of theFrench Revolution was one of the most thorough attempts to reforma traditional calendar system. On October 5, 1793, the NationalConvention’s “calendar of reason” abolished all units of time andreplaced them with new, more uniform ones. Months were made thesame (12 each of 30 days, with a five-day period tacked on at the endof the year). For the traditional names borrowed from oppressiveemperors and deities the revolutionaries substituted names with sea-sonal associations: Mist, Frost, Snow, Germination, Harvest. (Neverones to pass up an opportunity to ridicule their cross-channel rivals,English satirists promptly invented new and improved names, such aswheezy, sneezy, and freezy.) The days were divided decimally into 10hours each of 100 minutes, every minute containing 100 seconds.There were 10 days in a week instead of seven, which meant nineconsecutive days of toil instead of six before a day of rest—a movethat instantly made the new calendar very unpopular with the mass-es. The Republican Era replaced the Christian Era; 1792 becameyear 1.

The creation of such an ultimate time machine fit easily with theentrenched mechanical philosophy of the Enlightenment, and especial-ly the Cartesian view of the universe as, in effect, an immense clock-work that, once set in motion by God, would operate automatically andunfailingly, driven by its own self-evident principles. If today’s God is acomputer programmer, Descartes’ God was a watchmaker.

But French Revolutionary time ended as abruptly as it began. Onthe 11th of Snow in year 13, Napoleon brought the new era to anend, returning France to the Gregorian calendar and to the year1806. The revolution’s attempt to impose a new secular rhythmupon the people in the name of progress had run too much againstthe grain of religious tradition. While Enlightenment philosophyemphasized that science, reason, and the natural order were theprinciples humanity was designed to live by, the revolution’s newtime was forced and unnatural, too suddenly emplaced, too radical,

Time 55

too discontinuous with time systems outside France. The new calen-dar was too much a misguided social creation rather than a naturalone.

A second significant attempt to rationalize time came with the cam-paign for a so-called World Calendar after World War II. Imbued withthe same postwar attitude of universalism that animated the quest for acommon language (Esperanto), calendar reformers such as ElizabethAchelis of the World Calendar Association floated various propositionsfor “one World Calendar for One World.” Mahatma Gandhi declaredthat such a reform “will help to unify the peoples of the world.”

The 20th-century reformers often framed their rationale interms of a familiar conviction: “Time is money.” The existingcalendar, one business executive said, is a “smooth and subtle”

thief. Consider, for example, the time required to determine on whatday of the week the 10th of the next month will fall or whetherChristmas will occur on a weekend next year. One radio news com-mentator estimated that it cost the taxpayers of New York City$5,322,866.25 a year to reckon time—and that was in the 1930s. (Thisis a subject that hits home in the current wake of discussions of what itwill cost us when ’99 turns into ’00, which most computers think of as1900!) Vagaries in the Gregorian calendar produce variable quarters,variable overtime, variable time-payment periods—and endless opportu-nities for error. The advocates promised to erase these irrational, trou-

“Punching the clock,” an emblematic everyday act of the industrial era

56 WQ Summer 1998

blesome deviations, removing a large obstacle to the enhanced plan-ning, regulation, and precise recordkeeping demanded by an advancingworld.

The World Calendar was nothing less than a utopian house oftime. It advocated the radical proposition of withholding the365th day, thus making a normal year 364 days long. This

number has the distinct computational advantage that it is easily divisi-ble, into four equal quarters of 91 days apiece. (It was employed as wellfor similar reasons by ancient Mayan timekeepers more than a thousandyears ago.) According to the plan, these quarters would be segmentedinto identical month sequences of 31, 30, and 30 days.

But the supreme advantage of using the number 364 is that it over-comes the bugaboo of the wandering week, for it is divisible exactly by7. Thus, every year in the new calendar would have 52 whole weeks,and consequently every quarter would begin with a Sunday and endwith a Saturday. Every January 1 would be a Sunday; every February 1,a Wednesday; every March 1, a Saturday. Our birthdays would alwaysfall on the same day of the week.

Now, because the year timed by the seasons is actually closer to 365days (365.2422 days, to be precise), one needs to add an extra day toevery year and to intercalate yet another extra day according to the leap-year prescriptions described earlier. What could be more suitable,argued supporters, than to call that extra day “World Day”? This day,formally named “December W” though unnumbered in the usualsense, would follow the last day of December. It would be dedicated to

Time 57

universal harmony and unity, a day for bringing together all races andnations in fellowship. “Leap Year Day” would likewise be inserted intothe calendar every fourth year.

The World Calendar was embraced by the likes of H. G. Wells andJohn Dewey and praised as the temporal tonic for our time. One propo-nent heralded it as “a scientific system of time measurement withoutsectional, racial or sectarian influence.” Even the Vatican acceded thattime management was primarily a civic rather than a religious concern,proffering a conditional endorsement of the World Calendar in 1954.World calendar advocates confidently predicted that their system wouldbe instituted in 1961, a year they pegged as ripe because its January 1fell on a Sunday.

Of course, it never happened. There is no single reason why itdidn’t, but perhaps the World Calendar failed for the same reason themetric calendar of revolutionary France did not survive. Perhaps thereremains within the human heart a longing for the uncertain, the incal-culable, the chaotic—that tiny segment of the unknown we all struggleto preserve as the sacred, symbolic turf of time to which we mightescape, the ever shrinking domain we can still freely explore in a lifealready too rigidly controlled by the clock.

Human culture is the great processor of time. Like other crea-tures of the biological world, our ancestors began simply bysensing the rhythms of natural time—the beat of the tides,

the coming of the rains, the on-and-off stroboscopic flickering of the fullmoon’s light, the comings and goings of swallows, locusts, the red tide,and El Niño. But once we grabbed hold of the controls, we changedthe order. We manipulated time, developed and enhanced it, processed,compressed, and packaged it to conform to our perceived needs.

There will be no turning back to life in a participatory universe likethe one that Evans-Pritchard found among the Nuer. The struggle overtime has had the effect of removing us from any real involvement in therhythm of nature. We desperately want to take up an instrument to play,but our ambition to conduct the whole orchestra prevents us fromdoing so. At the end of his classic work, Evans-Pritchard describes Nuersociety as one possessing “neither haste nor an appetite for product andprofit, a modest society that accepts its lot and never tries to transformor exceed it.” Maybe Evans-Pritchard envied the Nuer because theyseemed content just to play along.

58 WQ Summer 1998

Who Knows WhereThe Time Goes?

by Steven Lagerfeld

The road to happiness and prosperity,” the philosopherBertrand Russell declared in 1932, “lies in an organizeddimunition of work.” Russell made a strong case for the

virtues of what he didn’t shrink from calling laziness, and his essay, “InPraise of Idleness,” is often quoted today by writers who bemoan theoverwork and paucity of free time endured by contemporaryAmericans. Seldom is much said about Russell’s particular vision of thepromised land of leisure. He thought that a reduction of the workday tono more than four hours would be enough to revolutionize humanexistence, freeing writers, painters, amateur scientists, and the civic-minded to pursue their true interests. “Above all,” Russell imagined,“there will be happiness and joy of life, instead of frayed nerves, weari-ness, and dyspepsia. . . . Since men will not be tired in their spare time,they will not demand only such amusements as are passive andvapid. . . . Ordinary men and women . . . will become more kindly andless persecuting and less inclined to view others with suspicion.”

Today we can see how far off the mark Russell was. While we arestill some distance from his promised land of the four-hour workday, we

Time 59

have drastically reduced the burden of work since his essay appeared.The average workweek, 50 to 60 hours in Russell’s day, is now down to40 or fewer. We have lopped Saturday off the workweek, cut the work-day to eight hours, and created for tens of millions of people an entirelynew sovereign state of extended idleness called retirement. Despitethese and other vast improvements in the lot of the average person,complaints about frayed nerves, weariness, and dyspepsia are louderthan ever. An amusement more passive and vapid than anything Russellcould have imagined—television—has become our national pastime.And most Americans would probably agree that we are less kindly andmore inclined to view others with suspicion than we were 70 years ago.

Yet the argument that overwork and an absence of free time are thesource of our discontents has recently reached a new crescendo. Thefocus now stays narrowly on the last 30 years or so, a period when thepace of life seemed to quicken and when the course of life itselfchanged for many Americans as vast numbers of women took jobs out-side the home. Those who began the latest time debate, however, wereless reformist advocates of “family friendly” work practices than critics of

Five Past Eleven (1989), by Edward Ruscha

60 WQ Summer 1998

capitalism. If capitalism has not impoverished the masses, as Karl Marxpredicted, then perhaps it has robbed them of time—a theme addressedyears ago by the eminent Marxist historian E. P. Thompson in an essaytitled, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism.” Time is,after all, the most precious resource. An economy can be thought of asan elaborate mechanism for converting time into money, for makingmy 10 minutes of labor easily convertible into a gallon of gasoline or ajar of mayonnaise or some other product of somebody else’s labor. Agroup of progressive businesspeople in Montpelier, Vermont, made thisconnection explicit recently when they launched a new alternative localcurrency they called Green Mountain Hours.

The modern time debate may have started with Time Wars(1987), by Jeremy Rifkin, a kind of New Age advance man onemerging issues such as biotechnology and “the end of work.”

Rifkin argued that the contemporary social order imposes an unnaturaland exploitative system of social time, and he predicted the emergenceof a “new time politics” that would “eschew the notion of exertingpower over time” and ultimately bring society into closer accord withthe temporal rhythms of nature. But Juliet B. Schor, an economist atHarvard University, created a stir by putting a number to the time stressso many Americans experience. By 1987, she claimed in The Over-worked American (1991), Americans were putting in much longer hoursat work than they had a generation earlier, in 1969. The average in-crease, she argues, amounted to an extra 163 hours per worker everyyear—the equivalent of an extra month of work. Desperate corpora-tions, reluctant to hire more workers, “have just demanded more fromtheir existing workforces. They have sped up the pace of work andlengthened time on the job.” Americans went along, Schor wrote, thevictims of a “consumerist treadmill and long hour jobs . . . an insidiouscycle of ‘work and spend.’ ”

In the new picture of time that has emerged from the debate begunby Rifkin and Schor, this argument about the creeping burden of workappears overstated and possibly altogether wrong about the direction ofchange. Yet it is also probably true that certain groups of Americans areworking harder than before. The United States over the past 50 yearshas experienced a massive and largely unrecognized redistribution oftime. There has been a vast increase in leisure, but it hasn’t fallen intothe right hands. The elderly have benefited enormously, while the verygroup with the greatest need for time, married couples with children,has benefited least, if at all. And many of these younger people havebeen drawn into demanding elite fields (law, engineering, manage-ment) that hardly qualify them as members of the oppressed masses butthat do demand longer hours of work. While even retirees complain oftoo little time, these middle-aged people are the most vocal and articu-late critics of the prevailing temporal order.

Psychologist Peter A. Mangan has shown in experiments that, just as

Steven Lagerfeld is the deputy editor of the Wilson Quarterly.>

Time 61

they often complain, people do perceive time to be moving faster as theyage. Mangan and others speculate that there is a physiological basis forthis alteration in perception, as changing levels of dopamine and otherneurotransmitters in the brain throw off the aging body’s internal clock.Mangan’s research dealt only with short intervals of time, but changingperceptions do have something to do with today’s rising anxiety abouttime. As those rushing 401(k) contributions behind the surging Dow sug-gest, clocks are suddenly ticking loudly in baby boomer heads. A genera-tion that rebelled against the economy of love (remember “free” love?)and the economy of money now finds itself confronting the far morepainfully exacting economy of time. Raised in affluence, the first genera-tion to be granted on a mass scale that four-year extension of childhoodthat is college, this generation luxuriated in time. Yet the university’s part-ing lesson was that in apostindustrial economywith products that arelargely ephemeral, suc-cess is measured as muchin terms of input (time)as output. (This explainswhy college students areconvinced that they arethe busiest people in theworld.) Its members arenow reaching the pointin their lives when con-flicting demands on their time are at a maximum—their careers (andthus their hours at work) are peaking, their children are young. They alsohave sophisticated palates for leisure, and they know a thing or two aboutmaking their views heard. Entering middle age, moreover, they are facingthe reality that time is not on their side; it is running out. There may notbe enough left to fulfill every hope for family, career, and for play andtravel and fun. No wonder time seems short.

Are Americans working longer hours and enjoying less leisure?It’s a simple question whose answer, like so many efforts tounderstand social and economic life, is obscured by a data

smog. Part of the problem is that the question really isn’t so simple.There is no single set of flawless data one can turn to for an answer, anda host of difficult methodological issues surround the information that isavailable. Schor, for example, relied on the federal government’s Cur-rent Population Survey (CPS), which regularly queries some 50,000Americans about everything from their marital status to the size of theirpaycheck. The investigators ask their subjects how many hours theyworked “last week,” and how many hours they usually work in a week.Which number do you use? And how do you calculate the number ofweeks per year people work? Because of such uncertainties, Schorfound her estimates challenged even by left-of-center sympathizersusing the same CPS data (but a different span of years). One pair of

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62 WQ Summer 1998

researchers, for example, trimmed the estimate of added hours of workper year by 40 percent, to 100 hours. Two other investigators, using dif-ferent data and endpoints, put the increase at 66 hours.

The controversy reached a new level of intensity last year whenJohn P. Robinson of the University of Maryland and Geoffrey Godbeyof Pennsylvania State University published Time for Life. Specialized“time researchers,” they came armed with numbers from studies explic-itly designed to determine how Americans mete out their hours. More-over, the studies were not surveys asking people to recall how muchthey had worked, but diaries that respondents were asked to keep forsingle days in three separate years: 1965, ’75, and ’85.

It wouldn’t be a controversy if Robinson and Godbey did not con-tradict Schor in a major way, and of course they did. Far fromworking harder than ever before, they asserted, Americans are cut-

ting back. This being a data smog, however, they didn’t produce num-bers that would allow a neat and direct comparison with Schor’s. (Thatwould have required them, among other things, to extrapolate a year’swork time from a single day of diary time.) Thus, we’re stuck with num-bers such as these: among employed men, hours of paid work per weekfell, from 46.5 in 1965 to 39.7 in 1985. That’s a 15 percent drop.Overall, Robinson and Godbey found that their subjects actually gainedabout five hours of free time per week between 1965 and ’85 (most of itin the first half of that period), reaching a total of 40—mainly because

Watch (1925) by Gerald Murphy

Time 63

they cut back on both paid work and housework. But virtually all of thenew free time was squandered on television—the “800-pound gorilla”that consumes 40 percent of Americans’ spare time.

One of the many other interesting things Robinson and Godbey didwas to ask their diarists to estimate how much time they had spent atwork the week before, just as CPS respondents do. Comparing thediaries and the estimates, the two researchers found that people signifi-cantly overestimate how much time they spend at work. In 1985, forexample, people who estimated they worked 50 to 54 hours that weekactually averaged 41.6 hours on the job. Even more interesting, the tworesearchers found that the more people worked, the more they overesti-mated how much they worked. These findings tend to undercut anyconclusions drawn on the basis of the federal government’s CPS data,which rely on just such estimates.

Of course, the Robinson-Godbey findings are a long way from flaw-less themselves. The people they recruited to keep diaries, for example,may not be representative of the entire population. Other studies?Other problems. But federal government data, generally based on theCPS, point toward this conclusion: working hours have stayed flat orincreased by perhaps an hour per week in recent decades. One suchstudy, a 1997 effort by government economists Philip L. Rones, RandyE. Ilg, and Jennifer M. Gardner, found an increase between 1976 and1993 of about 12 minutes in the workweek of men and an hour in theworkweek of women. They say the rise is not the result of a generalizedincrease in work but of the shift by a tiny fraction of the work force toworkweeks of 49 or more hours.

What are we to conclude? Probably that, on average, notmuch has really changed. The people most likely to beputting in longer hours on the job are not hard-pressed

blue-collar workers but a small minority of highly educated and highlypaid professionals who have chosen careers known to consume largequantities of time and now profess themselves shocked at the outcome.(Schor, while jousting with her critics and giving a little ground in apaper she presented last year, barely even nods to her argument aboutgrowing work time in her latest book, The Overspent American [1998], afurther critique of the vicious “cycle of work and spend” and a guide forthe “downshifters” who seek to escape it.) It’s difficult to square theassertion that everybody is working themselves to the bone with the ris-ing popularity of golf, gardening, and other leisure activities. “Gonefishing” may be the last words in leisure, and the U.S. Fish and WildlifeService’s latest recreational survey reveals that while the number ofanglers stayed about the same between 1991 and ’96, the number of“angler days” (translation: the time spent fishing) rose by 22 percent.

So are we all happy now?Of course not. For all the comfort such numbers offer, one might as

well say, “Take a statistic and call me in the morning.” Americans feelvery pressed for time. Evidence of this feeling appears even in Robinsonand Godbey’s study, which shows not only that Americans overestimate

64 WQ Summer 1998

their work time but that the size of these overestimates has grown signif-icantly over the years. It’s impossible to count the ways in which thepace of life has quickened. Science writer James Gleick reports that aunit of NBC called NBC 2000 has been at work excising the split-sec-ond “blacks” between a show’s fade from the screen and the appearanceof the first commercial. Total savings: 15 to 20 seconds per evening.More important, Gleick says, “is that the viewer is in a hurry, or soNBC 2000 has determined. That’s you cracking the whip.”

Of course, it is misleading to consider only how many hoursAmericans are working. It is also important to know who isamong the working. And on this question there is a great

deal of agreement. The last several decades have seen a massive redistri-bution of work and leisure time. Work has been shifted from the old tothe young and from men to women. Even unmarried people seem tohave reduced the time they give to work. In other words, the very peo-ple whom society would most want to endow with free time—people infamilies with children—are most likely to be working more.

The biggest beneficiaries of this shift have been older Americans—notjust the elderly but people over the age of 50. At the beginning of thecentury, retirement was a condition akin to a short-term membership in avery exclusive and stuffy club. Today, retirement is like a house party thatbegins early and, thanks to extended life spans, ends late. Men, govern-ment data show, start cutting back their weekly hours of work in theirfifties. Retirement now usually begins in the late fifties or early sixties.About 80 percent of retirees begin receiving Social Security by age 62,and they can expect to live roughly 20 more years. That’s a lot of golf.

What has happened to women’s time is by now familiar. Between1960 and ’97, for example, the proportion of married women with chil-dren under six who worked outside the home rose from 19 percent to65 percent. Most families have cut back the time devoted to housework,and men have picked up a somewhat larger share of the householdchores. The overwhelming majority of working women with youngschool-age children either choose part-time jobs or choose not to workoutside the home at all. But still, for many families a big chunk ofleisure and family time has vanished, and women disproportionatelybear the burden of what sociologist Arlie Hochschild called “the secondshift” in a 1989 book with that title.

These are the changes that have propelled the plight of working fam-ilies into the national political debate. Advocates have pushed a varietyof palliatives, from “family friendly” employer policies (e.g., “flextime”and generous family leave) to improved child care to revised tax policiesthat are designed to smooth the integration of work and family life.Other measures might simply reduce the amount of time people spendworking. Longer vacations are one possibility. Family allowances (as theLeft proposes) or tax breaks for families with children (as the Right pro-poses) would both make it easier for one spouse to stay home.

What if some of these incentives were offered and hardly anybodytook them? That troubling question is provoked by Hochschild’s most

Time 65

recent book, The Time Bind (1997). Hochschild, a sociologist at theUniversity of California, Berkeley, studied 130 people working forAmerco, her pseudonym for a Fortune 500 company ranked as one thenation’s 10 most “family friendly” by Working Mother magazine. Hoch-schild’s subjects were a mixed lot, though many were affluent middle-and upper-middle-class professionals, many in two-earner families thatcould have gotten by on one salary. Yet most turned down every oppor-tunity to cut back—part-time work, job sharing—or reorder—by doingsome work at home—their work time as company policy allowed themto. Many worked longer hours than they needed to, and Hochschildfound that very often her subjects found life at home more stressfulthan life on the job. “Although Denise Hampton counted herself a hun-dred percent behind family-friendly reforms,” Hochschild says of onewoman, “she wasn’t the least bit interested in shorter hours herself. . . .Her life [at home] was too laced with strain and her life at work toofilled with promise and—with the evil eye” of envious male managers.

Her husband, Daniel, who is said to be “more emotionally centeredat home,” thinks aloud about the family’s time bind with Hochschildand concludes that “family teamwork” is essential. “I’m still hoping wecan make our family a good production team,” he says.

Seeking in 1932 to explain why “there is far too much work donein the world,” Bertrand Russell declared that “immense harm iscaused by the belief that work is virtuous.” Americans have

largely abandoned that belief, but they have replaced it with the even

The American way of leisure

66 WQ Summer 1998

more problematic conviction that work is a form of self-actualization.Writing in the New York Review of Books recently, Mark Lilla of NewYork University argued that we live in an era that has wedded the valuesof the cultural revolution of the 1960s to those of the Reagan revolutionof the 1980s. Americans “work hard, probably too hard, though nolonger to amortize their divine debt or to secure an economic dynasty;they work for ephemeral pleasures and for status and esteem, under-stood as part of the ethos of democratic individualism.”

Whatever its defects, the old view of work, growing out of the fear thatSatan would find employment for idle hands, dignified work of all kinds.But if work is a way—perhaps the only way—of creating oneself, then it ismore difficult than ever for cooking, doing volunteer work, and takingcare of the kids to compete with writing software or selling cars.

Few subjects breed more guilt and hypocrisy than work. In fact,there is plenty of evidence that busy people—or at least someof them—are happy people. People who work more than 60

hours a week report having sex about 10 percent more often than othersdo, according to the University of Chicago’s General Social Survey. Orconsider the people who work more than one job. The usual view isthat these are people struggling to make ends meet, and there are plentyof “multiple jobholders,” to use the U.S. Department of Labor’s utilitari-an term, who meet this description. But the group most likely to workmore than one job consists of people with Ph.D.’s, 9.4 percent of whomhold more than one job, according to a Labor Department study. Only3.3 percent of workers without high school diplomas work more thanone job, and the proportion of multiple jobholders rises with education.It does not decline significantly as earnings rise. In other words, lots ofpeople who are working more than one job aren’t doing it for themoney—or to please oppressive capitalist overseers. The last time theDepartment of Labor asked them, in 1989, only 44 percent said theywere moonlighting for financial reasons.

Americans are good at work. It’s leisure they stink at. Arlie Hochschildfound that many of her busy subjects at Amerco developed an imaginary“potential self” who did in their mind’s eye all the delightful things theycouldn’t seem to find time to do in real life. This view of leisure as some-thing incomparably sweet yet unattainable is essentially sentimental. It isthe stuff of the Polo ads and Smith & Hawken catalogues that peddleimpossible dreams of idleness. And it is widespread.

Americans are in a strange way not very serious about leisure. In asociety that takes it seriously, leisure is the reward of the rich. BenjaminFranklin told us that time is money, and the minute he had enoughmoney he chose time, retiring from business to devote himself to publiclife and other gentlemanly leisure activities. Today, the rise of wealthytwo-income families in which both spouses earn significant sums yetcontinue to work has become a significant cause of growing incomeinequality. For all our protestations, we tend to think of downtime as adowner, as something boring, suburban, waiting to be filled. In subur-bia, the vogue is for townlike subdivisions designed by New Urbanist

Time 67

planners who promise to restore all the warmth and neighborliness ofthe 19th-century small town even as they champion “the 24-hour city”against the boredom and sterility of the standard suburb.

An organization called the Academy of Leisure Sciences—yes, thereis such a thing—recently declared that leisure is becoming the engineof the American economy. The academy is a loose association of 80-oddacademics, who issue leisure “white papers” (apparently with somesense of humor about what they are doing) and contribute to learnedjournals such as the Journal of Leisure Studies and the World Leisureand Recreation Association Journal. Leisure scientists parse such mattersas the theory of tourism, the sociology of the surfing subculture, and“visitor management” in parks. The academy reckons that Americansspend about $1 trillion annually in pursuit of leisure, more than theyspend on health care, or cars and trucks, or housing. The figureincludes not just outlays for tennis rackets and theater tickets but airtravel (60 percent of it undertaken by leisure travelers) and “fun foods.”

The academy and its findings point to an important and neglectedaspect of the contemporary time crisis. Americans in the late 20th cen-tury treat leisure much as they were once said to treat social problems:

they study it and they throw money at it. And they don’t get much satis-faction from it. The evidence suggests that they don’t have a lot of goodideas about what to do with it. They don’t enjoy it; they work at it orthey waste it watching television. Yet they constantly complain that theydon’t have enough of it.

Calendar (1962), by Roy Lichtenstein

68 WQ Summer 1998

It may be that the contemporary American time crisis has as muchto do with the structure of leisure as the structure of work time. InWaiting for the Weekend (1991), Witold Rybczynski of the University ofPennsylvania shows that it took centuries of effort and evolution to walloff two days from the week and reserve them for rest and recreation.Over the centuries, “Saint Monday,” the informal, sometime day off ofurban workers during the early Industrial Revolution, was replaced bythe formal Saturday day off. Time, Rybczynski emphasizes, is alwaysbeing structured and restructured. In the recent past, however, we havebusied ourselves breaking down the established borders of time. Theweek is more and more like a piece of postmodern art, full of pasticheand discontinuities. Many of the breaches in the old boundaries cut twoways. The cell phone, with its endlessly intrusive beeping and its bab-bling users, may be one of the more fiendish instruments ever inventedby humans for peaceful purposes. Yet pagers, laptops, and e-mail allowmillions of people to work at home, at least occasionally, or free themfrom waiting by the phone. (Of the five hours of weekly leisure thatRobinson and Godbey say Americans have gained, many come in shortbursts during the week.) A Washington Post reporter at baseball’s springtraining camps earlier this year found the stands filled with electronical-ly armed visitors from the North who swore they couldn’t have come ifnot for their digital companions. “My cell phone makes it possible torun a business from the ballpark,” one Yankees fan said, summing upthe situation. “It also makes it harder to play hooky.”

Even Robinson and Godbey, though arguing that the workweek hasshrunk, find that work increasingly intrudes upon the weekend. So doescommerce. Sunday, the day of rest, was once guarded by an imposingarray of blue laws that restricted or forbade various kinds of commercialactivity. All 50 states had such laws on the books as late as 1961; by1996, only 13 did. In addition to supporting Sunday’s traditional sacredfunction as a day outside normal time, blue laws spared salesclerks andothers a day of work, and, just as important, they helped keep everybodyelse at home for a day of enforced leisure and family time. Yet much aswe may now praise Sunday and recall it nostalgically, we buried it. Itwas too excruciatingly boring for too many people. Now, for most peo-ple in most places, Sunday is just another day at the mall.

If time really is the most precious resource, perhaps we should treatit that way. We now count leisure as something that’s left over afterwe’ve used all the hours and minutes necessary to work and to do

all the other things we “need” to do. This is strikingly similar to the wayclean water, open land, and other natural resources were once seen. Anumber of environmental scholars have suggested recently that we havereached the end of nature—or at least nature as the completely wildand untouched thing of our imagination. Indeed, they argue, this sort ofvirgin nature has never really existed in the human lifetime. Even themost primitive peoples reshaped the environment. It is best to put asideour romantic hopes and illusions, these writers suggest, and movetoward actively managing nature and thus preserving it. Perhaps we

Time 69

have reached a similar moment in the natural history of time. It’s some-thing of a paradox that we may need to manage time more thoroughlyin order to create more unmanaged time. We may need to preservepieces of time much as we now preserve forests and stretches ofseashore.

How we manage our own time begins with how we teach ourchildren to manage theirs. Sunday was once a day for step-ping outside time, and in the 20th century Saturday morning

became a kind of secular twin for children, with its long, idle hourswatching TV in pajamas, ranging through the neighborhood, or joiningin whatever game was going on. But now children are hustled off to soc-cer games, to piano lessons, to play dates, to the mall. After-school playis even more thoroughly regimented. An exercise physiologist, PeteEgoscue, wrote recently in the New York Times that the narrow range ofchildren’s physical activities today is causing great harm, and may bepartly responsible for the rise of hyperactivity and other ills. His pre-scription is “playgrounds, open fields, and tall trees for climbing.”Playing at random is the best elixir, he suggests.

What Egoscue is describing is the old-fashioned neighborhood,which, whether urban, rural, or suburban, served as the ultimate play-ground for children. Many neighborhoods no longer have that quality,in part because there are so many fewer stay-at-home mothers to serveas anchors for their free-floating children. Other factors are also at work,not least a pattern of suburban sprawl that makes it increasingly difficultfor children to get around on their own. Then there are fears—somejustified, some surely exaggerated—about what could happen to chil-dren left at liberty, fears that gain more plausibility in neighborhoodsthat are largely depopulated by day. A self-perpetuating cycle has beenset in motion, as the withdrawal of children from neighborhoods intoorganized activities shrinks the ranks of playmates and encourages otherparents to arrange more of their children’s lives for them.

Into all of this there enters a sense of anxiety and worry about whatwe might ironically call “getting the most out of childhood.” It is a feel-ing familiar to virtually all modern parents, summed up for me oneSaturday morning last year as I stood watching my six-year-old daughterplay soccer. As the children flitted about the field in their brightly col-ored shirts, never seeming quite mindful enough of the directionsscreamed at them by adults on the sidelines, another father remarked tome enthusiastically that this was terrific fun, and great preparation forlife in the private sector too.

Leisure comes in several varieties, and those that are most likework—competitive sports, hobbies—have flourished. WitoldRybczynski observes that while such pursuits are refreshing,

they carry with them the implication that they are both the conse-quence of and a preparation for work. Another kind of leisure brings ustogether in groups—for worship, for sports, for volunteer and civic activ-ities. Robert Putnam, a Harvard political scientist, has argued that

70 WQ Summer 1998

Americans have increasingly retreated from these sorts of activities andwarns of dire consequences for American democracy. But, as G. K.Chesterton observed, the most rare and precious form of leisure is sim-ply the freedom to do nothing, and this is the most endangered speciesof leisure today. Those anglers who gave more time to their great escapein the 1990s also increased their spending on boats and other gear—byfive times as much. They made fishing more like a job. They probablycaught more fish, but their most important quarry only became moreelusive.

Chesterton, a famous workaholic, understood that the joy ofwork and the joy of leisure are not necessarily mutually exclu-sive, but do need to live apart. While most writing about the

contemporary “time bind” emphasizes the importance of better inte-grating work and family life, it may be more important in the long runto achieve a greater separation in the way we think about work andleisure. Otherwise, Americans may unthinkingly surrender one of theirmost precious freedoms, the freedom to do nothing.

A campaign for idleness would have to establish the home and theneighborhood as its capitals. Its expansionist energies might be engagedby the fact that people are most likely to enter into the more restful andrestorative varieties of leisure—reading, socializing, joining in commu-nity activities—when they have three-day weekends. The rise of casualFridays and the scattered practice of keeping reduced summer hours onthe last day of the workweek suggest a promising opening. Saint Friday?It’s something to work on.

Object to Be Destroyed (1959), by Man Ray

Citizen Canine 71

Citizen CanineIt is often said that people come to resemble their dogs, and dogs their masters. But

we humans do not stop at searching for reflections of our individual qualities inour canine companions, the author writes. We are also eager to find the representa-

tive virtues of entire nations and ethnic groups—and therein lies a tail.

by Edward Tenner

Often I walk or run around a half-milepath near my apartment, a simple

asphalt loop encircling soccer and baseballfields, playgrounds, and basketball courts.Morris Davison Park is the green of a glob-al village. Professional urbanists and cultur-al critics may deplore our landscape of gar-den apartment complexes (like mine),housing tracts, and shopping centers, butmy neighborhood travels show that familiesfrom all over the world love it. People withorigins throughout Europe, in East andSouth Asia, in the Middle East, in theCaribbean and Central America all happilygather to walk, talk, play, and rest here. Tosee their cosmopolitan soccer teams on aspring or summer afternoon is to witnessthe beginnings of a fresh transformation ofAmerican identity.

Bigotry and ethnic tensions are not dead,and Plainsboro, New Jersey, is no utopia,but the congenial scene at my local park isconfirmation of what modern genetics hasrevealed, the unity of the human species.The dogs that accompany my fellow citi-zens are also conscious that they form a sin-gle species. They vary far more in size,color, and temperament than we people do,but in their vivid and seemingly indiscrimi-nate interest in one another they betray noapparent breed consciousness. (Chihua-huas are said to prefer their own kind, but itis more likely that they are simply, and sen-sibly, most interested in other small dogs.)

Many of my foreign-born neighbors arealready Americans, and still others are wellon their way to Americanization. Already

the children speak to their parents andamong themselves in English. We say thatthese families are becoming “naturalized.”Their dogs are newcomers, too; indeed, soare all dogs with owners, even if the dogs’ancestors have been on American soil for acentury or more. The dogs, however, willnever be entirely naturalized. They are, ina sense, perpetual newcomers.

For all their emotional intimacy withowners and their families, dogs remainconditional citizens. Americans withoutcriminal records need not register with theauthorities, as Europeans often must, butin most places they do have to registertheir dogs. It would take a four-leggedFoucault to anatomize our elaborateregime of surveillance over dogs—thetaxes, the tags, the inoculations, and aboveall the human control of reproduction thathas made possible the profusion of caninephysical and mental traits.

The dog’s conditional legal status is onlythe beginning. Like any greenhorn, it mustlearn, often painfully, the ways of its hosts.It may be spared the need for table man-ners, but it must learn human conceptionsof appropriate behavior. It is expected tomodify its innate concepts of territorialityto suit the human propensity toward socia-bility, to refrain from jumping on dinnerguests, and to respect the otherness of thepostal carrier’s uniform instead of consid-ering it a provocation. When we pet someadorable puppy, we are also educating it.Reared in isolation, many dogs becomeaggressive or shy, or indeed both at once.

72 WQ Summer 1998

Edward Tenner, a former Wilson Center Fellow, is a visitor in the Department of Geosciences at Princeton University.He is the author of Tech Speak (1986) and Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Conse-quences (1996). Copyright © 1998 by Edward Tenner.

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The burden of learning does not, how-ever, fall only on the dog nation. Childrenequally learn the ways of an alien folk.Children must come not to fear dogs, yetthey also must learn rules of caution, suchas not approaching an unfamiliar dogwithout asking the owner. They must avoidrunning from a dog. When they are older,they may learn the disconcerting fact thatthe sight of a running child may trigger ahunting response in dogs, including somesmall, cute breeds. Of course, they mayalso learn how much cleaner a dog’smouth is than a human mouth. The worstbite is a human bite, my mother said.Science has proved her right, as usual.

Humanity, unlike dogdom, has notbeen satisfied with the distinctions

between the two conjoined species. In thelast hundred years or so, it has increasing-ly mapped its own political and ethnicidentities onto the nation of dog. Out ofthe variegated world of dog breeding andtraining, it has extracted symbols of historyand character.

A cultivated, telepathic dog might givean amusing interview. It might quoteDavid Starr Jordan, the ichthyologist whowas Stanford University’s first president:“When a dog barks at the moon, then it isreligion; but when he barks at strangers, itis patriotism!” But human politics, it mightremark, is, was, and will remain meaning-less to its kind: ubi bene ibi patria. Wheremy kibble is, there is my fatherland. Dogsindeed have special human loyalties, butthese precede the rise of nation-states byhundreds of years. They have been spe-cially bred by different kinds of groups—classes, occupations, and trades—for par-ticular uses: sight hounds, retrievers, herd-ing dogs, watchdogs, even draft animals,are attached respectively to nobles andhunters, sheep raisers, property owners,and small tradespeople. How can a dogtrace geographic affiliations, it might wellask, if human beings are so confused?

Scholarship and scientific research ondog origins remain in their infancy, with

years of archaeology, genetic analysis, anddocumentary research still needed.Specialists question many of the assertionsof breed histories, such as the close kinshipof the Tibetan Mastiff and the NeapolitanMastiff, or the Egyptian ancestry of allgreyhounds and other sight hounds.(Independent origins are more likely.) ThePeruvian Inca Orchid, a nearly bald varietysaid to have been kept in luxury and pro-tected from the sun by the rulers of theInca Empire, appears similar enough tothe Xolo, or Mexican Hairless, thatMexican fanciers do not recognize it as aseparate breed. Both in turn are closelyrelated to the Chinese Crested, but it isnot clear when and in which direction theancestors of these breeds were transported.

Some breeds are of more recent, andmore reliably known, origin. The

Teutonic Dachshund has Gallic BassetHound blood. The Australian Shepherdwas developed by Americans, possiblyfrom the stock of Basque herdsmen.(Ironically, the “native” dingo, which longago crossed to Australia from Eurasia, isreviled by European Australians as a live-stock pest, accused in one celebrated caseof stealing and killing an infant.)

Our canine informant might continuethat dogs are most comfortable when theyenjoy a close working bond with people in agiven terrain performing a certain job—patrolling and defending a territory, hunt-ing—or simply sitting in a human lap. Eachof the dozens of types of herding dogs in theworld is accustomed to a certain landscapeand specific sizes of sheep or cattle. Indus-trialization indirectly promoted still otherbreeds. Factory workers of the River Aire inYorkshire bred large terriers for chasing ratsand pursuing (often forbidden) game, creat-ing the ancestors of today’s gentrifiedAiredales. (English gamekeepers, in turn,crossed bulldogs with mastiffs to create anew breed, the bull mastiff, that could takedown a poacher and hold him withoutdevouring him.) The high spirits prized bytoday’s Airedale breeders and trainers reflect

Citizen Canine 73

the raffish culture of the dog’s original blue-collar enthusiasts.

When European settlers in the NewWorld and other outposts began creatingnew varieties around the 18th century, theywere not exercising their fancy but blendingthe structure and behavior of existingbreeds to suit new conditions: thus theNewfoundland and Chesapeake Bayretrievers and such distinctively British lega-cies as the Rhodesian Ridgeback and theNew Zealand Huntaway. Folk breederspaid no attention to borders. Mark Derr, aleading dog writer, speculates that theCatahoula Leopard Dog descends fromcolonists’ curs and indigenous dogs, withtraces of red wolf and Spanish Mastiffmixed in. But while it is found along theGulf of Mexico from Mexico into Florida,Louisiana has claimed it as its state dogsince 1979 and pointedly employs Cata-houlas as guard dogs on state property.

Today, even as the cult of national dogsflourishes, geography imposes fewer limitsthan ever on how far a breed may range.

The upper classes of Europe and NorthAmerica have been transporting dogs forcenturies—George Washington ordered aDalmatian from England—but few peoplecould afford to do so before efficient trans-portation by rail, road, and air was generallyavailable. Our cultivated guide dog mightconclude its remarks by reminding us thatthe same pathways helped make heartworma national rather than a southern problem.

Even the most learned poodle proba-bly could not analyze the subject fur-

ther. It is one thing to recognize that peo-ple have changed dogs and quite anotherto understand what these changes had todo with human self-consciousness. Andeven to people, the beginnings of nationaldogdom were gradual. The literary scholarHarriet Ritvo has studied how the abolitionof bullbaiting in the 1830s led fanciers tobegin the bulldog’s transformation tohouse pet and competitive show animal.The viselike jaws were turned into stylizedjowls, and polygenic traits such as large

“Venus” the bulldog was the ship’s mascot of a British destroyer during World War II.

74 WQ Summer 1998

heads and short legs were maintained gen-eration after generation. The early breed-ers were not trying to make a nationalstatement. Nevertheless, their kinder, gen-tler bruiser proved the perfect canine com-plement to England’s existing cartoonemblem, the beefy, foursquare yeomanJohn Bull. The bulldog was more a crea-ture of enthusiasts than a common com-panion, and it was never accorded any offi-cial status, yet it became an indeliblenational emblem of tenacity, applied todoughty Englishmen from Thomas HenryHuxley (“Darwin’s bulldog”) to the plain-clothes policemen of Oxford University.

National dogs seem to fall into twogroups: mascots and monuments.

The former is a natural greeter, a goodwillambassador; the latter is a stern standardbearer. (Whether mascot or monument, fewof these breeds enjoy official recognition asnational dogs.) A similar distinction betweenthe familiar and the distant applies among

the human celebrities who embody nation-al qualities—think of Benjamin Franklinand George Washington. But whereFranklin was a wise if eccentric uncle, mas-cots are metaphorical children, loved asmuch for their foibles and mild misbehavioras for the positive side of their character.

The distinction is not absolute. TheIrish Wolfhound, for example, despite theimposing size and aristocratic bearing thatmake it so much a classic monument dog,is part mascot. Centuries of breeding afterthe disappearance of wolves and otherlarge predators from Ireland have given itsuch a sweet temperament that it is nolonger fit to hunt wolves or defend sheep,just as few bulldogs would be eager tojump at the nose of an enraged longhorn.As a symbol of Irish culture the wolfhoundstill retains impeccable credentials;according to tradition, Saint Patrick him-self worked with wolfhounds during hisyouthful period of captivity among theIrish and thus was able to call them off in

Gaelic when he re-turned as a mission-ary many years later.Wolfhounds are fea-tures of Saint Pat-rick’s Day parades inthe United States,but it is unlikely thatan IRA cell wouldhave any use for one.

Conversely, a mas-cot is not held to ahigh performancestandard. Tony Blairswept Britain’s 1997general elections witha campaign ad featur-ing a bulldog rejuve-nated after years ofTory torpor by theprospect of NewLabor. (The spokes-dog, Fritz, was onlythree, so it was nogreat feat.) Thebreed’s alleged healthproblems and distantheritage of bloodsport could equallyhave made it the sym-

Hitler called his beloved shepherds “my only perfect friends.” As abreeder, he sought to emphasize the dog’s wolf-like qualities.

Citizen Canine 75

bol of all that Blair and his associatessought to purge from a “re-branded”Britain, but it had a nationalist subtext thatLabor’s official red rose could not match,even if some Scots thought the bulldogwas too English a breed.

The poodle, especially the miniaturepoodle, is an unofficial mascot dog of

France, even more childlike than the bull-dog. In the early 19th century, the standardpoodle was as much a German as a Frenchdog, fit to serve in Goethe’s Faust as anincarnation of Mephistopheles. As morepeople moved to Paris and provincial cities,the Pudel’s French cousin, a duck huntingdog, or caniche, was selected for compact-ness and trainability. It was not only afavorite performing dog, and the earliestdog of the hunter’s blind, but the signaturepet of bourgeois urban apartment dwellers.Yet the more beloved the poodle became,the less fearsome. Standard poodles arephysically and temperamentally excellentprotection dogs, yet are disqualified symbol-ically from such service. Much dog work ispure theater, and a poodle guarding anuclear missile site, no matter how intelli-gent and even fierce, is simply miscast.(Even among mascots, it has an awkwardposition: would you rather be a powerfulperson’s metaphoric bulldog, or that per-son’s poodle?)

The dachshund was the third classic mas-cot of the 19th century and, like the poodle,a citified hunter. The Teckel Society—Teckel and Dackel are the dog’s moregemütlich names—was founded in 1888 andis one of the oldest German dog organiza-tions. Some owners continued the breed’soriginal work of hunting badgers, but forfriend and foe of Germany alike the dachs-hund remained the “wiener dog,” endowedby its distorted anatomy with an eccentricdignity and musculoskeletal problems tomatch. Even more beloved than other mas-cot dogs, and often courageous and persis-tent, it has been sadly unable to defend selfor country. With the outbreak of World WarI, even native-born British dachshunds facedabuse and death in the early waves of Britishjingoism. The last dachshund in the interna-tional spotlight was the unfortunate Waldi,the emblem of the 1972 Munich Olympics,

who presided over yet another tragedy.Even before 1914, though, another type of

national dog was emerging: the monumentdog. Germany had an old monument dog,the Deutsche Dogge, another mastiff variantand a fearless protector. A dachshund on apedestal would be laughable, a DeutscheDogge plausible. But the Deutsche Doggeneeded a lot of room, indoors and out, hadan appetite that could challenge even theaverage Junker’s bank account, and livedonly about a decade. Perhaps even moredamning, many foreigners thought it wasoriginally Danish—it is called the GreatDane in the English-speaking world—evenif it seemed an unlikely product of such asmall, peaceable nation.

Nearly a hundred years ago, a groupof German fanciers made a fateful

innovation in the culture of national dogs.In 1899, only a year before the significanceof Gregor Mendel’s long-neglected paperson genetic inheritance burst into theawareness of scientists, these fanciersformed a German Shepherd Dog Society,the SV, to develop what they consideredthe outstanding qualities of one ofGermany’s native breeds. The cofounderof the SV, a retired Prussian cavalry cap-tain named Max von Stephanitz, was noJunker. He had grown up in a cosmopoli-tan, well-traveled Dresden household andwas familiar with the breeding customsand dog shows then part of the vogue forall things English among the Continentalupper class. Like other dog fanciers, vonStephanitz had noted the elegant lines ofthe Rough Collie, Queen Victoria’sfavorite and the outstanding internationalluxury dog of the day.

After observing the autonomous herdingskills of sheepdogs in western Germany,von Stephanitz (with another former offi-cer) resolved to bring a new spirit to elitedog breeding, emphasizing the folk breed-er’s cultivation of character, intelligence,and working ability over mere looks. Afierce nationalist, he promoted these pur-suits as a distinctively German alternativeto the frivolous and superficial ways of for-eign breeders. Realizing that fewer andfewer dogs would ever actually herd sheep,he still insisted on the field trial as the

76 WQ Summer 1998

ultimate test of a pedigreed dog andextolled the loyal and protective characterof the shepherd. The shepherd wouldretain the working virtues that Britain’seffete collie had lost. Von Stephanitz’s tire-less publicity, massive correspondence (upto 17,000 letters logged in a single year),and persuasiveness with police officialsbrought quick popular recognition,though no official status, for the new breedof German Shepherd Dog. During WorldWar I, the centrally organized SV was ableto mobilize so many shepherds for thearmy that the breed displaced the Airedaleterrier as favorite.

Von Stephanitz, a Saxon who hadserved Prussia and then moved to an estatein Bavaria to oversee his informal networkof breeders and fanciers, epitomizedGerman national fusion in his own right.And the breed standard that he and hisassociates developed merged what theyconsidered the best traits of a number ofregional varieties of sheepdog in CentralEurope, especially strains from Thuringiaand Württemberg. Express crate shipmentvia a national rail network let breederscombine varieties that could have re-mained distinct breeds; Belgium alone hasthree recognized sheepherding breeds.Indeed, it is not clear how many of thedogs originated on “German” soil: GlennRadde, a Minnesota geographer andanthropologist and pioneering student ofthe breed, believes that much of the foun-dation stock came from non-German-speaking Central Europe. Nevertheless, by1938 the leading German encyclopediaMeyers Lexikon was proclaiming the shep-herd’s “pure German descent and pureGerman breeding.”

Despite the use of masquerade namessuch as “Alsatian” and “police dog,”

Hollywood only helped confirm theGerman-ness of the breed during the firstdecades of the century, when its early caninestars Strongheart and Rin Tin Tin (both theproducts of German police or military ken-nels) paraded the shepherd’s athleticprowess before international film audiences.The innocent dachshund remained stigma-tized, but the shepherd became a token of avaliant foe, and a luxury import item akin to

optics and racing cars. Many Americanpolice departments still believe so stronglyin the original bloodlines and methods thatthey pay premiums of thousands of dollarsfor German-bred, German-trained shep-herds, hoping to find dogs that fulfill vonStephanitz’s policedog ideal: “joy in work,devotion to duty, loyalty for his master, mis-trust and sharpness against strangers andunusual things.”

Other peoples have followed theGermans in the manufacture of monu-ment dogs. Whether or not in consciousimitation, Japanese breeders of the early20th century began to purify the largest oftheir indigenous spitzlike strains, theAkita, to remove traces of the Europeandogs to which it had been bred during itsfighting days in the 19th century. Japanesebreeders, according to one history of theAkita, created a hierarchy of colored leash-es and honorific forms of address for themost accomplished dogs. Shepherds andothers could earn titles of Schutzhund(protection dog) I, II, and III, but Akitasthat progressed from Ara-inu (beginningdog) all the way to an exalted training titlesuch as O-hana Shi-inu (released dog)were honored with a red leather collar dec-orated in gold with a shogun’s crest. By1919 the Akita was a designated nationalmonument, and other breeds soonreceived the same distinction.

The German connection helped pro-duce at least one even more surpris-

ing monument dog. In his history of theshepherd breed, the fiercely anti-Semiticvon Stephanitz denied that Jews couldunderstand the “essence” of the shepherd,but he evidently recognized honoraryAryans. Among the contributors to themagazine of the SV was Dr. RudolfinaMenzel, chief consultant to the Viennapolice department and one of the leadingspecialists of the Shepherd world. Menzeland her husband emigrated to Palestine inthe 1930s, where they became dog breed-ers and trainers for the Haganah, theZionist military organization. And whenshepherds and other European breedswilted in the Middle Eastern heat, Menzelbegan to develop a new, desert-hardy dogfrom the fittest and most intelligent of the

Citizen Canine 77

pariahs that followedthe Bedouin camps.

Until comparativelyrecently, Jews sharedsome of Muslims’ cul-tural misgivings aboutdogs. In the EasternEuropean shtetl, dogswere suspect as theguardians of the gentry’sestates and as the fighting companions ofan often hostile peasantry. The Zionistdream of a Jewish state in Palestinechanged aversion into enthusiasm. Thelocal dogs of the Middle East, with whomthe Bedouin could be alternately affec-tionate and harsh, were the survivors of rig-orous natural selection, and close to theiruncorrupted, spitzlike ancestors. Despite

their nomadichistory, the dogsturned out to befiercely territorialas well as intelli-gent and self-reliant, able tosignal an out-sider’s approachwith two distinctbarking tones.Were these not

the dogs of ancient Israel, ready to emergefrom centuries of neglect and to defend aland of their own at last?

The Canaan Dog, like the shepherd,has no official status in its homeland,

yet it also is used widely by public authoritiesin Israel, and even as overseas celebritiesadopt the breed, locally and internationally itcontinues to represent national values.

Native residents and settlers are not theonly creators of national dogs. Peoples allover the world may be skillful practicalowners of regional varieties, but shaping abreed demands familiarity with the biolog-ical, legal, and social aspects of dogdom—a body of knowledge that arose little morethan a hundred years ago in Western Eur-ope and North America. Just as the systemof Scots clan tartans was elaborated byEnglish textile manufacturers, just asCaptain von Stephanitz appropriated thecraft skills of working shepherds, Western

sojourners have beenadopting and fosteringwhat they perceive as“native” breeds in vari-ous corners of theworld.

In Afghanistan, it wasBritish diplomats andmilitary officers servingunder the British pro-

tectorate that prevailed from 1839 to 1921who began to put together narratives of theAfghan Hound as a breed—this at a timewhen Afghanistan was still a tribal,nomadic society with no fixed politicalidentity. Mary Amps, the wife of anEnglish major stationed near Kabul afterWorld War I, bought valuable specimensof the dog from tribesmen. Her writingsand letters not only defined much of thebreed’s history but helped create a nation-al consciousness of the Tazi Hound, as it iscalled locally.

Some foreigners have gone a step further,promoting breeds that were not yet recog-nized locally. Anoth-er English overseascouple, the husbandin this case a diplo-mat on Malta, recog-nized in a large localrabbit-hunting dogthe descendant ofanimals painted onthe walls of thetombs of ancientEgypt. They chris-tened it the PharaohDog, worked withother breeders andfanciers in the Uni-ted Kingdom andthen in the United States, and ultimatelyhelped it achieve recognition by theAmerican Kennel Club in 1983. It is nowthe official hunting dog of Malta.

Yet another diplomat, an Americannamed David D. Nelson, and his wife,Judith, delighted their Turkish hosts in themid-1970s by recognizing among thediverse herding and guarding dogs of east-central Anatolia the Kangal dog, namedfor a leading family and town of its region.As the Nelsons note on their World Wide

The Kangal

The Akita

The Canaan Dog

78 WQ Summer 1998

Web site devoted to the dog, “the Turkishvillager has little concept of ‘breeds.’” Inthe absence of a Turkish national kennelclub, and despite the preference of urbanTurks for imported breeds, the Nelsonssucceeded in raising Turkish governmentconsciousness. Now there are two statekennels in the dog’s home province. Todaythe Kangal appears on a Turkish postagestamp and, like the Akita in Japan, is one

of a number of breeds prized as a nationalasset for a combination of beauty andcourage in the face of fierce predators.

Some academic biologists dispute theNelsons’ claims and are skeptical that

there are any real distinctions amongTurkish breeds, but, as interest in theKangal grows in Turkey and the West, thestandard is becoming a self-fulfilling phy-logeny. Turkish scientific opinion seems tosupport the Nelsons’ view that the Kangalis a long-established breed. Like othernewly recognized breeds, it will need care-ful management and selection to retainthe qualities that attracted owners to it inthe first place. (Only a rigorous new system

of breed wardens organized by vonStephanitz saved the shepherd from ruinthrough commercialization in the 1920s.)Yet narrow as the biological base may be, itstill supports a monument.

The creation of national animals by cos-mopolitan enthusiasts has not ended. TheInca Dog of Peru, for example, follows abreed standard developed by fanciers inBremen. The Fila Brasileiro, with the

build of a mastiff and the noseof a bloodhound, the unofficialmonument dog of Brazil, isprized by owners there for itsfierce territoriality and suspi-cion of strangers. But one of itschief promoters is a Brazilian-born breeder and writer namedClelia Kruel, who lives in Texas,where he manages a Fila Website. Urban Brazilians may pre-fer shepherds and Dobermans,but, according to the site, theBrazilian Center for JungleWarfare has judged the Fila“the best dog for jungle work.”“Faithful as a Fila” is a Brazilianproverb.

While the Chihuahua, unlikethe Xolo with its proud Aztecancestry, began as the darlingsouvenir of Anglo tourists, it hasproved surprisingly popularamong Hispanic Americans, tojudge from their favorable reac-tion to opinion polls on a contro-

versial Spanish-speaking dog in aTaco Bell commercial. Nor is this the onlywelcome addition of humor to the formerlyhard-bitten world of canine nationalism:Cobi, the mascot of the 1992 BarcelonaOlympics, was officially a Gos d’AturaCatala (Catalan Herding Dog) but existedmainly as an unrecognizably stylized car-toon figure by the local artist-designer JavierMariscal. No Catalan seemed to mind thatforeign journalists regularly misidentifiedthe breed as a Pyrenees.

As with most technologies, there are glaring paradoxes in dog breeding.

When a mascot or monument dog be-comes a global success, as the shepherddid, its country of origin may lose much of

Stubbie the pit bull, wounded while serving in World War Iand greeted as a hero by three U.S. presidents, made a

strong but unsuccessful bid for national dog status.

Citizen Canine 79

its control over selection and quality. (Thishas been a serious issue among Akitabreeders in Japan.) Though most peopledistinguish between individual animalsand the images associated with their breed,dogs are sometimes made to suffer foratrocities committed by totalitarian orracist police employing the breed.Residents of Kinshasa, Zaire, took violentoffense at the German Shepherd Dog thataccompanied George Foreman for his1974 world championship match withMohammed Ali; it recalled the dogs of thehated Belgian colonial police. And mili-tary mobilization, which initially promot-ed the shepherd in its homeland duringthe First World War, nearly wrecked it inthe second. Though Hitler was an SVmember who exalted the shepherd as aquasi-official national totem through the1930s, he also requisitioned thousands ofthe finest breeding dogs for war service,and many or most never returned. (Today,the overwhelming majority of Germanmilitary and police dogs are shepherds.)

The ultimate national-dog paradox maybe that Americans, so receptive to the mas-cot and monument breeds of othernations, have never had a pure-bred candi-date of their own. Just as we have a succes-sion of presidential libraries across theland supplementing our national archives,we have a trail of presidential dogs, fromWarren Harding’s Laddie Boy (an Aire-dale) to Bill Clinton’s chocolate Labradorretriever Buddy, and a diverse lineup ofmilitary and police dogs. Few tracesremain of our native American dogs, atleast outside Alaska. Enthusiasts have onlya slender basis for a truly autochthonousbreed on the Canaan Dog model. Onebiologist, I. Lehr Brisbin, has found andbred a wild strain near the Savannah River

nuclear plant that he has identified asdescended from the earliest native dogs,but these Carolina dogs, as he has calledthem, do not have American Kennel Clubrecognition yet, let alone a postage stamp.

Americans seem to reserve their affec-tion and enthusiasm for mixture

itself. In 1990, the chairman of Japan’sToyota Motor Company caused an inter-national uproar when he declared thatAmericans built inferior cars because theywere a “mongrel race.” Americans mayhave been embarrassed by the quality oftheir Fords and Chevies at the time, butthey never wavered in their commitmentto the glories of crossbreeding. Around thesame time, when Robert Dornan, then aRepublican congressman from California,used a talk show to propose a bill to desig-nate a national dog, the winner of theshow’s poll was the “great American mutt.”

My neighbors in the park don’t neces-sarily want to merge their cultures or theirgenes into a vast, old-style melting pot, butneither are they happy with ideologies ofpurity. The pluralism reflected in the muttcult has, at least for the time being, sus-pended the search for a national cultureand purpose that was so prominent in the1950s and ’60s. But there is an equallyunforeseen side of the pedigreed dogfancy. As sites on the World Wide Websuggest, the establishment and mainte-nance of “pure” bloodlines is a nationaland international sporting activity. Itbrings together people of the most diversebackgrounds in new communities, just asthe assorted dogs of Davison Park are giv-ing older and newer Americans occasionto meet each other. Animals are not onlygood to think with, as Claude Lévi-Strausswrote. They are good to link with.

Who Will Serve?Fraught with profound questions about the obligations

of citizenship, conscription has been a controversial issueat crucial moments in the American past. During the

Vietnam War, the draft was almost as much an object ofprotest as the conflict itself. Then, a quarter-century ago,

conscription ceased. Our author takes a look back.

by Andrew J. Bacevich

80 WQ Summer 1998

Twenty-five years ago, the draft—aninstitution that had turned white-hot

with controversy as it sucked Americans intoan unpopular war—came to an end.President Richard M. Nixon, citing Ameri-ca’s “continuing commitment to the maxi-mum freedom for the individual,” hadannounced in 1970 his intention to end it.Three years later, he made good on thatpromise: draft calls fell to zero, and stayedthere. Acting in the waning moments of awar that had bitterly divided the country, thepresident had seemingly bowed to the will ofthe people. He had even claimed that hisdecision to end conscription would “dem-onstrate to the world the responsiveness ofrepublican government.”

It did nothing of the kind. Matching thetemper of the times, the president’s motivesfor reverting to an all-volunteer militarywere devious and cynical. For Nixon, termi-nating the draft had little to do with nation-al security, still less with democratic politics.It was merely a matter of tactics. By liftingfrom student protesters the threat of beingcompelled to fight in a war they hated, hehoped to bring quiet to American campusesand thus gain more time to extricate theUnited States from Vietnam with a mod-icum of national dignity.

The results of the maneuver were mixed.The antiwar movement did collapse soonthereafter. “It was as if someone had flickeda light switch,” observed the acerbicChicago columnist Mike Royko. “Presto,the throbbing social conscience that hadspread across America went limp.” Withoutthe threat of involuntary military service,said Royko, “about 99.9 percent of thosewho had sobbed over napalm, Christmasbombings and man’s inhumanity to mansuddenly began looking for jobs on WallStreet.” Yet Nixon’s hopes for “peace withhonor” in Vietnam would go unfulfilled,foundering on the shoals of Watergate.

The more lasting impact of the end to thedraft, however, would be on the Americanmilitary. For the rest of the 1970s andthrough the 1980s, the all-volunteer forcestruggled to achieve maturity, finally suc-ceeding just as the Cold War reached itsconclusion and Saddam Hussein’s armoredcolumns rolled into Kuwait.

Saddam’s gamble set the stage for one ofhistory’s more lopsided military victories.The spectacular performance of Americanforces during Operation Desert Storm retro-actively transformed Nixon’s decision to jet-tison the draft from a calculating ploy into avisionary act of leadership. For the first time

in its history, the United States had fought amajor war with a thoroughly professionalmilitary establishment—and the stunningoutcome silenced the skeptics.

The Persian Gulf War convinced Ameri-cans that the United States henceforthshould rely principally on regular forces toimplement national security policy. Highlyskilled and disciplined, experienced profes-sionals appeared precisely suited to theneeds of the world’s only superpower, withinterests spanning the globe. Uncom-fortable memories of Vietnam remainedsufficiently fresh—in universities, editorialoffices, and, most notably, the ClintonWhite House—to suppress any inclinationto think otherwise.

So the United States has embraced themodern-day equivalent of what theFounding Fathers would have recognized asa “standing army.” The question of “whowill serve,” formerly a source of recurrentcontroversy, has now been answered to theapparent satisfaction of all.

That answer has endowed the UnitedStates with the most powerful armed forcesin the world. Yet past disputes over “who willserve” were never about military require-ments and capabilities alone. They werelinked inextricably to larger questions about

the meaning of democracy and the nature ofdemocratic citizenship. For that very reason,those passionate but now little-remembereddebates about conscription, the regulationof state militias, and the comparative effec-tiveness of regulars and citizen-soldiersdeserve to be pondered today.

I

In the turbulent period after the Revo-lution, American political leaders enun-

ciated with minimal controversy principlesthat would form a permanent basis for mili-tary policy. Consistent with well-establishedpractice from the colonial era, lessons drawnfrom the War of Independence, and a firmbelief that standing armies were antitheticalto liberty, the Founders decided that thepeople themselves—that is, a militia com-posed of all free male citizens—woulddefend the new nation. It was the “embat-tled farmers,” after all, who—according tothe mythology born in the Revolution—hadalmost single-handedly defeated the Britishand secured American independence.

Inevitably, the truth was a bit more com-plicated. “To place any reliance upon mili-

The Draft 81

These Boston-area men were among the first drafted in late 1940 under the new Selective Service program.

tia, is, assuredly, resting upon a broken staff,”an exasperated George Washington hadwarned the Continental Congress as early asSeptember 1776. Although his Continen-tals were few in number—at their peak notmore than 16,800—their contribution tofinal victory, secured not only in battles suchas Saratoga and Yorktown but by their verysurvival as the approximation of a regulararmy, was incalculable. Moreover, the spiritof volunteerism so much in evidence atLexington and Concord in 1775 soon beganto wane.

The next year, beginning with Massa-chusetts, states began resorting to compul-sion to replenish the diminished ranks oftheir militias. To fill congressionallyassigned quotas for recruits for the Con-tinental Army, most states employed a sys-tem of indirect conscription. Typically, localofficials would draft an affluent citizen whowould in turn hire a substitute. As a result,those who bore the brunt of the fighting inWashington’s beleaguered army were, in thewords of one historian, “the sons of margin-al farmers, laborers, drifters, and indenturedservants,” as well as recent immigrants.

Still, at war’s end, the myth of the min-uteman had prevailed, so that evenWashington himself paid it obeisance. “Itmust be laid down as a primary position andthe basis of our system,” he wrote in 1783,“that every Citizen who enjoys the protec-tion of a free Government, owes not only aportion of his property, but even of his per-sonal services to the defense of it.”Acknowledging that “a large standing Armyin time of peace hath ever been considereddangerous to the liberties of a Country,” hewould venture only that “a few Troops,under certain circumstances, are not onlysafe, but indispensably necessary.” But thegeneral had no illusion that a handful of reg-ulars would suffice to defend the republic.That burden belonged to the people.

The other Founders concurred: theimperatives of responsible citizenship and alively concern for the preservation of libertydemanded reliance on a citizens’ army. Thewillingness of citizens to accept the burdensof military service, said Secretary of War

Henry Knox in 1786, was a measure of themoral health of the republic. “When publicspirit is despised, and avarice, indolence,and effeminacy of manner predominate,” hemaintained, the temptation to entrust thesecurity of the nation to hirelings and mer-cenaries grows. In a republic of virtue, citi-zens rely upon themselves for collectivedefense.

Those were not mere words. The MilitiaAct of 1792, which formed the corner-

stone of American military policy for morethan a century, required “every free able-bod-ied white male citizen” between the ages of18 and 45 to enroll in the militia. It also spec-ified that the “rules of discipline” establishedby Congress would apply to the militaryestablishments of the several states, presum-ably ensuring that when called into federalservice, the militias would be prepared tofight. On paper at least, the legislation creat-ed a mighty host, well suited to the needs ofa small republic happily isolated from therivalries and strife of the Old World.

In practice, though, the result left muchto be desired. The new nation was neither aspeaceable nor as insulated from GreatPower politics as it imagined. The earlyrepublic’s small regular army sufficed forroutine functions, but it was not adequatefor even the slightest emergency. The hostof forces produced by the Militia Act of1792 was little more than a “phantom citi-zen army,” in historian T. Harry Williams’sphrase. Called into active service, militiaunits were notoriously undisciplined, illequipped, and poorly trained. The menbalked at lengthy campaigns far from home,and when assigned tasks not to their liking,responded halfheartedly or not at all.

Confronting military requirements forwhich the militias were ill-suited—as inboth the War of 1812 and the MexicanWar—the United States had to improvisearmies. The preferred method was to raiselarge numbers of volunteers who could behastily equipped and given a semblance oftraining before being dispatched into battle,where fervor and sheer numbers would pre-sumably offset lack of skill. But, of course, in

82 WQ Summer 1998

Andrew J. Bacevich is executive director of the Foreign Policy Institute at the Paul H. Nitze School of AdvancedInternational Studies in Washington, D.C. Copyright © 1998 by Andrew J. Bacevich.

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an unpopular or unsuccessful war, sufficientnumbers of volunteers might not be forth-coming, and the government would beforced to consider more coercive methods.

In late 1814, for example, near the end ofthe War of 1812, President James Madison,beguiled by the prospect of invadingCanada (an earlier attempt had failedabysmally), announced his intention to cre-ate a new expeditionary army. Its ranks,some 70,000 strong, would be filled, if nec-essary, through conscription. Justifying theproposed requirement of involuntary servicefor the sake of a dubious land grab,Secretary of War James Monroe assertedthat the “Commonwealth has a right to theservice of all its citizens.”

This attempt to convert civic obligationinto government prerogative provoked apowerful dissent from RepresentativeDaniel Webster of Massachusetts, a stateopposed to continuation of the war.Speaking in Congress on December 9,1814, Webster pointed out that while theConstitution empowers Congress to raisemilitary forces solely to “repel invasion, sup-press insurrection, or execute the laws,” theconscription bill would draft citizens “forthe general objects of war—for defendingourselves, or invading others, as may bethought expedient;—not for a sudden emer-gency, or for a short time, but for long statedperiods.” Is this arbitrary power “consistentwith the character of a free government?”Webster asked. “No, Sir,” he said, “indeed, itis not. . . . Who will show me any constitu-tional injunction, which makes it the duty ofthe American people to surrender everything valuable in life, and even life itself, notwhen the safety of their country and its lib-erties may demand the sacrifice, but when-ever the purposes of an ambitious and mis-chievous Government may require it? . . .[S]uch an abominable doctrine has no foun-dation in the Constitution of the country.”

Before Congress completed action onMadison’s proposal, the war ended, andAndrew Jackson’s victory at New Orleansrestored some luster to the reputation of thecitizen-volunteer. But the profound issuesWebster had raised—the relationshipbetween individual liberty and civic duty,and the government’s asserted but untestedauthority to compel citizens to bear arms for

purposes other than immediate defense—remained unresolved.

Nationalists rejected Webster’s thesis onpragmatic grounds. The country’s interestswere rapidly expanding, and the govern-ment needed to be able to protect andadvance them, not just repel invasions andput down insurrections. Nationalists alsoobjected to the radical individualism lurk-ing in Webster’s critique. For example,Representative John C. Calhoun of SouthCarolina, speaking in 1816, insisted thatfreedom “mainly stands on the faithful dis-charge of the two great duties which everycitizen of proper age owes the republic: awise and virtuous exercise of the right ofsuffrage; and a prompt and brave defenseof the country in the hour of danger. Thefirst symptom of decay has ever appearedin the backward and negligent discharge ofthe latter duty.” Citizens who left to othersthe defense of their country were them-selves unworthy of freedom.

II

During the Civil War, although by nomeans for the last time in American

history, opposition to conscription as an il-licit assertion of government power re-asserted itself with a vengeance. The CivilWar was a contest of massive amateur armiesled by a handful of professionals. With theattack on Fort Sumter, volunteers rushed toenlist in the newly forming Union andConfederate forces. On both sides, expecta-tions ran high that the war would be short,glorious, and successful. The gruesome andseemingly endless war of attrition thatensued obliged both sides to embark uponradical experiments in all-out mobilizationfor war.

The Confederacy, with a smaller popula-tion from which to draw, acted first. In April1862, the Confederate Congress passed theConscription Act. Allowing for an array ofexemptions and for the hiring of substitutes,this measure was designed less to raise newrecruits than to prevent the dissolution ofConfederate forces already in the field: itobliged Southern soldiers who in 1861 hadvolunteered for one year to remain in ser-vice indefinitely. Closing loopholes as the

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war progressed, the hard-pressed Southwould use the draft to squeeze out the last ofits manpower reserves. Of the one millionsoldiers who served in the armies of theSouth, 21 percent were draftees.

Though resisting the coercive power ofthe federal government was one motive fortheir rebellion, Southerners accommodatedthemselves to involuntary military servicewith remarkable ease. They had little alter-native. In the North, however, circum-stances were different. Fully 92 percent ofthe 2.1 million soldiers who fought to pre-serve the Union were volunteers. Yet eventhe North’s vast reserves of manpower andpatriotism were not inexhaustible. OnMarch 3, 1863, with little to show for twoyears of war but heartbreaking losses, Con-gress enacted the Enrollment Act, whichspecified that “all able-bodied male citi-zens . . . are hereby declared to constitutethe national forces.” This legislation laid thebasis for the first full-fledged national draft.

Seemingly oblivious to local preroga-tives still highly valued in American

society, the federal government went aboutimplementing the measure in a needlessly

84 WQ Summer 1998

heavy-handed way, assigning a uniformedprovost marshal to oversee conscription ineach congressional district. In the summerof 1863, efforts by these officials to registerprospective conscripts and to conduct lotter-ies to identify inductees triggered wide-spread riots. The most violent—possibly theworst civil disorder in American history—occurred over several days in July in NewYork City. Thousands of rioters, mostly poorIrish immigrants, rampaged throughManhattan, burned the draft headquarters,and ransacked the homes of governmentofficials and wealthy Republicans. Severalblacks were lynched. Estimates of thosekilled in the melee range from several dozento several hundred. New York was not theonly scene of violent unrest. In Boston, forexample, Union artillerymen employedcanister and grapeshot to disperse a mob ofprotesters who had laid siege to a localarmory. Here, as elsewhere, the cost ofrestoring order was heavy.

The workingmen and poor whites whotook to the streets were not concerned thatconscription represented, in Webster’swords, “an abominable doctrine.” Theirobjections were more basic: they wantedneither to forfeit their jobs (especially toblacks) nor to risk their lives for a cause nottheir own. For President Abraham Lincoln,the issue was also a practical one. “Therepublican institutions and territorialintegrity of our country cannot be main-tained without the further raising and sup-porting of armies,” he reasoned in a docu-ment drafted that September. “There can beno army without men. Men can be had onlyvoluntarily, or involuntarily. We have ceasedto obtain them voluntarily; and to obtainthem involuntarily, is the draft—the con-scription.”

The brutal suppression of rioting byUnion regiments—some of them justreturned from the Battle of Gettysburg—did not purchase acquiescence. Whilethe wealthy hired substitutes or paid a“commutation fee” to avoid service, theless favored found other ways to dodgethe draft. They ignored orders to report,changed their names, or simply moved.The net result was an ineffective system.Of 300,000 men called up in the sum-mer of 1863, only 10,000 ended up in

As this recruiting poster for the 7th IndianaCavalry suggests, the Civil War draft was notentirely a failure: it stimulated volunteering.

Mr. Lincoln’s army. Overall, four sepa-rate federal drafts produced a piddling46,000 conscripts and 118,000 substi-tutes for the Union Army. America’s firstreal encounter with conscription hadproven a major disappointment.

III

The military history of the Civil War isa chronicle of dogged gallantry—and

of stupefying waste and incompetence. Inthe end, volunteers fought and won the warfor the Union. But while the citizen-soldiertradition emerged seemingly intact, it sooncame under increasingly critical scrutiny.During the following decades, the officercorps of the minuscule regular army mount-ed a sustained intellectual assault on thepremises underpinning traditional Ameri-can military policy. Led by reformers suchas Brevet Major General Emory Upton,these regulars argued that the United Stateshad prevailed in war despite, rather thanbecause of, its reliance on militiamen andvolunteers. They argued, moreover, thatsuccess in the Civil War had come at anunnecessarily high cost, as “undisciplinedtroops commanded by generals and officersutterly ignorant of the military art” werebutchered to little purpose.

Upton’s call for American military profes-sionalization accorded well with develop-ments abroad. In the armies of theEuropean powers, innovations such as gen-eral staffs, war colleges, detailed mobiliza-tion plans, and improved training of reserveformations all pointed toward a more delib-erate approach to preparing for war. As the19th century drew to a close, this emphasison centralized planning, rational organiza-tion, and efficiency also meshed withadvanced thinking then coming into fashionin industrializing America.

In short, around 1900, civilian progres-sives and military reformers met, mingled,and discovered, to their mutual amazement,that they were made for one another. To sol-diers, the application of progressive princi-ples implied an approach to military affairsthat would elevate the prestige of regularofficers, place state militias under federal

supervision, and give the United States amilitary establishment that would put it on apar with the acknowledged Great Powers.

To progressives, those same principlessuggested that the armed forces could serveas a schoolhouse for building national unityand inculcating democratic values, as wellas provide an instrument for achieving theAmerican Mission. The concept that wouldenable both parties to achieve their aims wasuniversal military training, a system of briefcompulsory service for all young men thatwould create a vast national (rather thanstate-controlled) reserve, easily mobilized intime of emergency to fight under the com-mand of regular officers. This nationalreserve army would displace the militia asthe first line of defense. Universal militarytraining would reaffirm the citizen’s obliga-tion to serve—but shift his allegiance fromstate to nation.

With the outbreak of the Great War in1914, military reformers and civilian pro-gressives collaborated on the “preparednessmovement,” a grassroots campaign to gener-ate support for a peacetime army ofunprecedented size and capability. The wayto achieve this, argued the reformers, bothin and out of uniform, was to institute uni-versal military training. “Manhood suffragemeans manhood obligation for service inpeace and war,” wrote the influentialGeneral Leonard Wood in 1916. “This isthe basic principle upon which a truly rep-resentative government, or free democracy,rests and must rest.” Adherence to this prin-ciple would provide for the “moral organiza-tion of the people,” teaching them “to thinkin terms of the nation” rather than locality ornarrow self-interest. The influential progres-sive Charles W. Eliot, president emeritus ofHarvard University, agreed. Only universalmilitary training could create a force thatwas both strong and democratic. Yet thebenefits of such training would extend wellbeyond military affairs. For citizens “to bealways ready to defend and to maintainAmerican ideals of public justice and libertywould add to the self-respect of the people,”Eliot said, and teach them to think of theirnation “as a unified and exalted power forgood in the world—humane, unselfish, andaspiring.”

Such progressive sentiments shaped the

The Draft 85

manpower policies implemented once theUnited States actually entered the war inApril 1917. In contrast to the practice in pre-vious conflicts, America did not first sum-mon volunteers to the colors, then resort toconscription as an afterthought or act of des-peration. Instead, the federal governmentdetermined from the outset that it wouldchoose those who would fight. Conscriptionformed part of a larger effort to mobilize notjust an army but an entire people.Explaining the system of Selective Servicethat he had asked the Congress to imple-ment, President Woodrow Wilson in June1917 declared: “It is not an army that wemust shape and train for war; it is anation. . . . It is in no sense a conscription ofthe unwilling; it is, rather, selection from anation which has volunteered in mass.”

Selective Service was not universal mili-tary training, but it still accorded well

with progressive principles, creating a peo-ple’s army led by trained professionals.Consistent with the approved tenets of pro-

gressivism, it empowered “experts”—bur-eaucrats in the War Department and otherfederal agencies—to decide, on the basis ofthe nation’s overall interests, who wouldman the trenches and who, the shipyardsand munitions plants.

Not everyone agreed with this approach.To Senator Robert M. LaFollette of Wiscon-sin, the issue was clear: “The draft is thecorollary of militarism and militarism spellsdeath to democracy.” But his was a minorityview, soon swept aside by the surge ofspread-eagle nationalism that accompaniedAmerica’s entry into the war. That wave ofpatriotism and the fact that Wilson shrewdlyallowed local rather than federal officials toadminister the system made the draft of1917–18 a success. Some 2.8 million youngAmerican men were drafted, 72 percent ofthe doughboys who served during the war.Resistance to conscription was by no meansinconsequential: 338,000 of those receivingdraft notices failed to report and were classi-fied as deserters, while 57,000 others appliedfor conscientious objector status. But overall

86 WQ Summer 1998

In May 1917, little more than a month after the United States entered World War I, Congress enacted a draftlaw, after heated debate in both houses. Here, draftees en route to boot camp parade in New York City.

(and especially in comparison with the CivilWar experience), Selective Service worked.

Success, however, did not translate into ageneral willingness to continue conscriptionin peacetime. As soon as the Armistice wasdeclared, in November 1918, the great armyof citizen-soldiers dissolved. Though seniormilitary officers tried briefly to revive enthu-siasm for universal military training, theirarguments went unheeded. Throughout the1920s and well into the ’30s, U.S. militarypolicy reverted to 19th-century practice: avery modest professional army backed by amuch larger militia—now called theNational Guard—which continued to frus-trate demands that it adhere to training andreadiness standards mandated by regulars.The result did not inspire awe. But the pal-triness of the nation’s military did not worrymost Americans. Nor did ancient questionsabout civic duty. For most of the interwarperiod, the answer to the question “Whowill serve?” was “Who cares?”

The rise of Hitler and the threat of warin the Pacific changed that. Prodded

into action by veterans of the old prepared-ness movement and thoroughly frightenedby the collapse of France in the spring of1940, Congress that September enacted thefirst-ever peacetime draft. The SelectiveTraining and Service Act stated that “in afree society the obligations and privileges ofmilitary training and service should beshared generally.” The term of involuntaryservice was limited to 12 months, anddraftees were not to be deployed outside theWestern Hemisphere. Renewed on the eveof Pearl Harbor—and with restrictions ondeployment lifted—this legislation providedthe basis for the massive American force thatwaged global war. The requirements for mil-itary manpower in World War II were stag-gering. By 1942, the draft call reached500,000 per month. Of the 10.5 million sol-diers who served in the wartime army, 93percent were draftees. In a conflict that last-ed far longer than World War I and thatrequired a far more complete mobilizationof the nation’s human resources, draft resis-tance was negligible.

Yet again, the wartime system, howeverwell it worked, did not provide a basis forsustaining a peacetime military. The need

for preparedness and the experience of twoworld wars notwithstanding, influentialpolitical figures viewed the draft as an expe-dient justified only in dire emergency. “Mil-itary conscription is essentially totalitarian,”Senator Robert A. Taft of Ohio bluntlyasserted.

Even in the 1940s, old fears about theincompatibility of democracy and a stand-ing army survived, and American leadershad to take them into account, just asGeorge Washington had. Looking ahead tothe postwar world, General George C.Marshall, chief of staff of the U.S. Army, saidhe regarded “a large standing army as animpossibility . . . because of the repugnanceof our people toward a large standing force.”He saw no reason to abandon the traditionof maintaining only a small regular militaryestablishment, so long as it could “be rein-forced in time of emergency by organizedunits drawn from a citizen army reserve.”For Marshall, the preferred means of devel-oping this citizen army reserve was universalmilitary training.

President Harry S. Truman agreed. But inthe heady aftermath of V-J Day, with theboys eager to come home and an era ofpeace beckoning, public opinion—andhence, the Congress—did not. Even inwatered-down form, universal military train-ing never had a chance. The combat-hard-ened legions that the United States hadraised at such great effort and expense rapid-ly disappeared. In the spring of 1947, Selec-tive Service expired altogether. Though thenation was assuming new responsibilities forsecurity in the postwar world, the militarywas losing the manpower it needed to meetthem.

IV

Mounting Cold War tensions, how-ever, soon persuaded Americans

that the nation could ill afford its usual lack-adaisical approach to peacetime security.Even with the atom bomb and increasedreliance on airpower as the mainstay ofAmerican defense, the United States foundthat it still had need for a large conventionalforce. And just as in Lincoln’s day, therecould be “no army without men.” In June

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1948, Congress enacted, and PresidentTruman signed into law, a new SelectiveService measure. With modifications, it wasto provide the chief source of military man-power for the next quarter-century and twomajor wars.

But two years after the return to conscrip-tion, the draftee-sustained military stillneeded help to respond to the North Koreaninvasion of South Korea in June 1950. Con-sequently, Truman mobilized eight Na-tional Guard divisions and recalled tens ofthousands of reservists. However necessary,this action provoked an outcry of protest.Many of those recalled were veterans ofWorld War II who had won “their war” andwere now being asked to fight another.

In response, the Department of Defensein 1951 established a rotation policy basedon a one-year combat tour in Korea.

Replacements supplied by a massivelyexpanded draft—September 1951’splanned quota of 10,000 was revisedupward to 56,000 after the North Koreaninvasion—arrived to relieve the reservists.Meanwhile, the draftees themselves,rather than being called “for the duration,”likewise served only a one-year combattour and were released altogether after twoyears on active duty. Intended to distributethe risks of combat more broadly, thisarrangement was not conducive to militaryeffectiveness, but it did make more palat-able an unpopular war conducted withoutthe prospect of a decisive outcome. Andthe policies enacted during the KoreanWar established precedents that the mili-tary would revive for the Vietnam War.

The experience of the two world warsand Korea had seemingly establishedbeyond doubt the prerogative of the feder-al government to compel citizens toundertake military service. But after theKorean War, the “selective” approach to

conscription came to seem less and less“universal,” less and less a matter mainlyof citizenship. As draft calls shrank yearby year, the chief mission of SelectiveService became less the drafting of meninto the army than the “channeling” ofmen who were not drafted. This,

explained General Lewis B. Hershey, theSelective Service director, meant usingdeferments as an incentive to nudge youngmen “into occupations and professionsthat are said by those in charge of govern-ment to be the necessary ones.” The com-petition with the Soviet Union wasinvoked to justify this: channeling wouldprovide the United States with the engi-neers, scientists, and teachers it needed toprevail. With local draft boards using localstandards to award educational and occu-pational deferments, military service be-came increasingly the lot of the less edu-cated and less affluent. The answer to thequestion “Who will serve?” was changing.

For the rest of the Eisenhower era,with the prospect of American

involvement in a shooting war apparentlyremote, neither the draft nor the channel-ing seemed especially burdensome. Par-ents might be a little uneasy about certain

88 WQ Summer 1998

The Selective Service chief visible in this 1943Saturday Evening Post cartoon was not yet the

controversial figure of the Vietnam era.

new cultural influences, such as ElvisPresley and rock ‘n’ roll, but traditionalAmerican patriotism persisted. Those whowere drafted did their duty. The summonsthat in 1958 sent Presley off in uniform toserve his country disrupted his career, buthe went without complaint, and most ofhis fans were pleased that he was doing theright thing.

It was too good to last, and it didn’t.President Lyndon B. Johnson’s escalationof U.S. involvement in the Vietnam Warsaw to that. With the buildup of Americancombat troops in South Vietnam thatbegan in the spring of 1965 came a hugeincrease in the number of Americans draft-ed. In February 1965, the monthly draftquota was a minuscule 3,600. By April1966, it had spiked to 42,200. But that wasstill only a fraction of the millions of draft-eligible men, their numbers starting to beswollen by the massive “baby boom” gen-eration.

Channeling increasingly came to seema life-and-death matter—and, along withthe draft, an arbitrary, inequitable practice.In 1969, about 1.75 million college stu-dents were deferred, more than 22 timesthe number in 1951, during the KoreanWar. During the Vietnam War, a highschool graduate was twice as likely to bedrafted and twice as likely to go toVietnam as a contemporary who had fin-ished college. Once in Vietnam, he wasmore likely to find himself in harm’s way.In 1969, draftees constituted only 16 per-cent of the entire armed forces but 88 per-cent of the infantrymen in Vietnam—andmore than half of the combat deaths.

Responding to criticism and protests,President Nixon’s administration sought toredress obvious inequities, notably by end-ing most deferments and instituting anational lottery. Despite those efforts, theperception persisted that the Vietnam draftwas fundamentally unfair. That percep-tion has not changed much since. In hisbest-selling memoir, My American Journey(1995), General Colin Powell, for in-stance, denounced the “raw class discrimi-nation” of a system that treated the “poor-er, less educated, less privileged” asexpendable, while pretending that “therest are too good to risk.”

In the eyes of the antiwar movement, thedraft and the war itself were inextricablylinked. Opposition to the war fueled opposi-tion to the draft. Inexorably, as the wardragged on, opposition to the draft intensi-fied into loathing of military service alto-gether. There ensued a radical campaign,winked at by some respectable organiza-tions, that aimed to suborn the soldiers fight-ing the war. The coffeehouses, undergroundnewspapers, and draft counseling centersthat sprouted up outside the gates of militaryinstallations across the United States existedless to save young Americans from theclutches of conscription than to underminethe government’s capacity to continue thewar effort. As one underground paperadvised: “Don’t desert. Go to Vietnam andkill your commanding officer.”

These efforts were not without effect.In 1971, in the unit in which I was

serving in the Central Highlands of SouthVietnam, a young enlisted soldier did infact gun down his company commander, acaptain barely three years out of WestPoint. That murder in broad daylight of awhite officer by a black soldier seemed tome an apt metaphor for the wretched con-dition then of the draftee army, a forcemade up largely of citizens compelled tofight a war that growing numbers of theirfellow citizens at home opposed—and aforce riven by race and political dissentand so much else.

That draftee army was in an advancedstate of disintegration. Incidents of “frag-ging”—furtive attacks by American soldiersintended to maim or kill their own lead-ers—had become commonplace. (Morethan 200 such incidents were reported in1970.) Drug abuse reached pandemic pro-portions. The racial climate was poisonous.Traditional measures of military discipline,such as AWOL (absent without leave) ratesand desertions, suggested a force on theverge of collapse. At home, the SelectiveService system itself was struggling to cope:in 1971, it turned out 153,000 draftees andtook in 121,000 applications for conscien-tious objector status.

The continuing protests against the waras ill conceived or immoral, the continu-ing turmoil on campuses and the nightly

The Draft 89

television news, prompted Nixon to con-vert dissatisfaction with the draft to his—and, he supposed, the nation’s—politicaladvantage.

The Pentagon’s senior leaders were byno means eager in the early 1970s toembark upon Nixon’s highly publicizedexperiment with an all-volunteer force.Who would enlist in a military that wasthen at an all-time low in public esteem?The answer seemed obvious: only thosewho could find nothing better to do—thedropouts, the untalented, the shiftless.This indeed proved to be the case, untilwell-conceived incentives, combined withthe changed political climate of the 1980sunder President Ronald Reagan, turnedthe situation around.

V

To the question “Who will serve?”the nation’s answer has now be-

come: “Those who want to serve.” At theend of the 1990s, this answer seems wellsuited to the requirements of nationalsecurity, as well as to the prevailingnational political climate. The century-long trend of machines displacing men as

the principal determinants of combatstrength in conventional warfare contin-ues to accelerate. In the modernAmerican way of war, technology trumpsmass. That renders the old idea of a citi-zen army obsolete.

Furthermore, in a society in which halfthe eligible voters did not even bother toshow up at the polls in the last presiden-tial election, the notion of an obligationto participate in the country’s defense hasbecome an apparent anachronism, anoddity from another time. To today’s typi-cal 18-year-old, compulsory military ser-vice is all but inconceivable.

The changed nature of warfare, as wellas the changed outlook of Americans,argues that Nixon’s instincts in ending thedraft were correct. It now makes sense tohire professionals to handle the demand-ing, highly specialized business of nation-al security—an enterprise that tends toinvolve not defending the country assuch, but protecting and advancing itsburgeoning interests around the world. Inthe corporate jargon of the day, Americandefense has been “outsourced.” The citi-zen simply foots the bill.

Yet ironically, even as the performanceto date of the all-volunteer military has put

90 WQ Summer 1998

In a decade of protest, burning draft cards was perhaps the most potent symbolic protest of all.

to rest earlier doubts about such a force,the new professionalism has given rise towhole new realms of controversy. Forthose who now regard military service asmerely a career, one like any other—aview bolstered by optimistic expectationsthat American soldiers will never have toface another Hamburger Hill or ChosinReservoir—the armed forces offer a choicearena in which to pursue the currentnational obsessions with gender and sexu-al orientation. In this environment,debates about gender-integrated basictraining, and about the “don’t ask, don’ttell” rule, assume far more prominencethan concerns about military effectiveness.Altogether lost from view are the concernsof earlier generations about the obligationsof citizenship and the imperative of infus-ing into American military institutions thegenius of the people.

As the end of the 20th century nears, Americans are inclined to shrug off

indications of a growing, and potentiallydangerous, cultural divide between sol-diers and civilians; to dismiss evidence thatthe officer corps may be abandoning itstradition of remaining studiously apoliti-cal; and naively to assume that advanced

technology and the so-called Revolutionin Military Affairs will provide the UnitedStates with an effective—and convenientlycasualty-free—response to future securitythreats. Perhaps worst of all, the generationof Americans now reaching maturity isbeing deprived of any awareness that citi-zenship ought to imply some larger sharedresponsibility for the common good.

In his remarkably prescient FarewellAddress of January 1961, President DwightD. Eisenhower reflected on the dilemmaof any democracy obliged to maintain alarge and powerful military establishment.“Only an alert and knowledgeable citizen-ry,” he warned, can provide the prudentand responsible direction of militaryaffairs, “so that security and liberty mayprosper together.”

Twenty-five years into its thus-far suc-cessful experiment with a standing militaryof professionals, the world’s sole remainingsuperpower would be ill advised to under-take—and the American people would beunlikely to tolerate—a return to the citi-zen-soldier tradition of an earlier era. ButAmerican citizens would be foolhardy inthe extreme if, in their newfound comfortwith a “standing army,” they took eithertheir security or their liberty for granted.

The Draft 91

Further ReadingIn To Raise an Army: The Draft Comes to Modern America (Free Press, 1987),

John Whiteclay Chambers II deals chiefly with the Selective Service system of1917–1918. George Q. Flynn provides a history of conscription from World War IIto the Vietnam War and its termination in The Draft, 1940–1973 (University Pressof Kansas, 1993). Eliot A. Cohen looks at Citizens and Soldiers: The Dilemmas ofMilitary Service (Cornell University Press, paper, 1990) from a comparative inter-national perspective.

Readers wanting additional detail can find it in two comprehensive collections ofdocuments: John O’Sullivan and Alan M. Meckler, eds., The Draft and Its Enemies(Univ. of Illinois Press, 1974), and John Whiteclay Chambers II, ed., Draftees orVolunteers (Garland Publishing Co., 1975).

92 WQ Summer 1998

CURRENT BOOKS

City of ForgettingFAUST’S METROPOLIS:

A History of BerlinBy Alexandra Richie. Carroll & Graf. 891 pp. $37.95

by Amy E. Schwartz

Visitors to what used to be West Berlinusually start at the Kaiser Wilhelm

Gedaechtniskirche, or Memorial Church,a neo-Gothic cathedral dedicated in 1895and reduced to a single towering fragmentby an Allied bombing raid in 1944. Insteadof either rebuilding it or letting it crumble,imaginative preservationists in 1961framed the ruined tower with a blocky,hypermodern structure of blue-green glass,offering the tourist’s camera a satisfyinglyjarring image of a city marked by wrench-ing changes from civilization to barbarismand from pride to disaster. Step closer,though, and you see that at least in this onespot, Berliners have been able to address,directly and honestly, this most dreadfulaspect of their history. A plaque at the footof the ruined tower gives the circum-stances of its dedication and destruction,then adds that the fragment is preserved asa memorial to that destruction “and to thejudgment of God upon this people.”

Early in the introduction to her gigantichistory of Berlin, Faust’s Metropolis,Alexandra Richie lays out the city’s claimto attention in sweeping and grandioseterms: “No other city on earth has hadsuch a turbulent history; no other capitalhas repeatedly become so powerful andthen fallen so low.” Even the most heartilyBerlin-obsessed reader is likely to goggleslightly at this. Not Rome, Jerusalem,Babylon?

As it turns out, though, Richie’s narra-tive does not depend on these claims; nordoes she seem fully to believe them her-self. In describing pre-Bismarck Berlin,from the centuries of its Slavic prehistoryup through the depredations of the ThirtyYears’ War and the repeatedly dashed pre-tensions of the Hohenzollerns, she notes

again and again that the city was a provin-cial backwater with nothing to compare toParis or London. Only in the last centuryand a half does “imperial Berlin” embarkon the series of wild gyrations that marks itoff from other cities, from the abortive rev-olution of March 1848 to its collapse, fromthe burst of growth and wealth brought onby industrialization and German unifica-tion under Bismarck to the breakdown thatfollowed World War I, from the “GoldenTwenties” of Weimar to the madness ofNazism and the city’s subsequent quickreincarnations as defeated rubble heap,Cold War flashpoint, divided symbol of adivided Europe, and, finally, reunifiedcapital and city of the future.

In rehearsing this familiar tale, Richiepursues a narrower and more telling

point: that in no other city have the inhab-itants gone so blithely and with such badpolitical judgment from upswing toupswing. Her argument, emerging gradu-ally (not to say excruciatingly) over nearly900 pages, is that Berliners have flungthemselves into each of these new devel-opments with an extraordinary degree ofwilled amnesia; that Berlin remains “a cityof myth, of legend, and of the deliberatemanipulation of history”; and that thisquality makes it dangerously vulnerable tothe perpetual dream of a Stunde Null, or“zero hour”—the moment of fresh startand complete reinvention that will spareits inhabitants the pain of confronting thepast. In particular, the persistent “19th-century myth” of Berliner Unwille, or stub-born resistance to authority, has allowedthe city’s inhabitants to nurse a self-imageof resistance to the Nazis while dodgingthe fact that virtually all the atrocity, mur-

der, and madness of the Holocaust wasplanned and directed from Berlin, by peo-ple living in Berlin, under the noses ofmanifestly indifferent Berliners, and inBerliner-staffed offices.

Richie is essentially saying that Berlin isshort on sites of honest reckoning such asthe Gedaechtniskirche (whose structureshe mentions several times, but not itsplaque). Her indictment carries resonancefor anyone who has lived in Berlin andpondered the strange could-be-anywherequality of large stretches of the city and theoddly submerged quality of much of thehistory that remains.

In the wake of Allied bombing thatdestroyed the vast majority of the old hous-ing stock, postwar planners in West Berlinplunged into modern architecture as if toeradicate any hint that a pre-vious city had existed. Onthe eastern side, communistmakeovers of showplacessuch as the Alexanderplatzaccomplished more or lessthe same goal, though lackof resources kept the obliter-ation from being anywherenear as comprehensive. Thefall of the Wall and plans forthe renewed capital—to bemoved to Berlin from Bonnby the end of the century—have likewise set off atremendous frenzy of demo-lition and building on“Europe’s largest construction site,” withgrand plans promising to sweep away anyhint of the No Man’s Land scar and otherinconvenient geographical landmarks.Richie notes that city authorities in recentyears have urged destruction of such findsas Nazi bunkers, on the ground—shaky, ifyou think about it—that they mightbecome neo-Nazi shrines.

“The city changes identities like a snakesloughing its skin,” the author writes. “Thepolitical upheaval itself has been badenough, but more worrying is the way inwhich Berliners have responded to it, lead-ing outsiders to suspect that whateverBerliners are today, the status quo mightnot last for long. . . . It may seem unfair,but Berlin will have to work hard to prove

to the world that this ‘democratic phase’ isnot merely another passing trend.” This isa biting argument, all the more so comingfrom a writer who describes herself as alover of German culture and a frequentresident of Berlin, on both sides before theWall fell and also after, with family con-nections there going back to the 14th cen-tury.

Alas, it is an argument that comesinto focus only occasionally as

Richie struggles with a mass of informa-tion that seems beyond her control.Instead of primary material documentingor making vivid her assertions aboutBerliners’ behavior through the ages, weget baggy narratives of the horrors of theThirty Years’ War, medieval tortures, and

Napoleon’s Russian campaign; an excel-lent description of German Romanticismbut none, weirdly, of Wagner; and a 55-page, desperately repetitive chapter on thefall of Berlin to the Russians.

Even where Richie’s material is relevantto the argument, it is oddly deployed.Discussing, in her afterword, the moderncity’s plans for a Holocaust memorial, sheonce again asserts that Berliners bearundeniable responsibility for the horrors. Afootnote cites a lengthy translation of astomach-turning 1942 document, issuedfrom Berlin and unearthed by ClaudeLanzmann in his film Shoah, concerningthe details of a design for gas vans. It isindeed damning, famously so, with its dis-cussions of weight-and-balance limits and

Books 93

Defining DiseaseMAKING SENSE OF ILLNESS:

Science, Society, and Disease.By Robert A. Aronowitz, M.D.

Cambridge Univ. Press. 267 pp. $29.95

by Richard Restak

the tendency of the “load” to rush towardthe back of the vehicle once the “opera-tion” commences. For sheer evidentiaryfirepower, it may be the most powerfuldocument in the book. But if it is intendedas the keystone of Richie’s argument aboutmoral responsibility, what on earth is itdoing in the afterword, and in a footnote?

The author’s argument suffers too froma lack of comparison with other cities,even other German cities. Berliners willtell you that Berlin hated the Nazis,laughed at them as boors. But even inNuremberg, people will cite election fig-ures to show they never really supportedHitler—and Nuremberg has noGedaechtniskirche or Reichstag, but amedieval sector rebuilt so perfectly thatyou’d never know it had been bombed.Berliners may have had doubts aboutresuming their status as capital and gripedat the inconveniences of reunifying theircity, but the very action of being forced todo so has meant endless confrontationswith the historical ghosts Richie rightlywants to see given their due.

In her afterword, Richie suggests a morecautious and ultimately more workable

definition of the moral culpability of hercity, one drawn from Klaus Mann’sMephisto (1936), the story of a Berlin actorwho starts out in the leftist opposition tothe Nazis and is imperceptibly drawn intoa level of collaboration and guilt that henever saw coming. “The warning of

94 WQ Summer 1998

Amy Schwartz writes about cultural issues for the Washington Post.

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Mephisto,” Richie writes, “is that a personmakes his moral choice much earlier thanhe thinks.” This sidesteps the fairly impor-tant question of whether there are anymoral gradations between the writer of thememo about the gas vans and a Berlinerwho “merely” turned the other way as Jewswere marched onto trains. Still, it is a valu-able insight, one that condemns what ordi-nary Berliners did in the presence ofextreme evil, but in terms that make it pos-sible to connect that behavior to less spec-tacular failures, theirs and others’,throughout history.

The idea that an individual, and like-wise a nation, can fall into coresponsibilityfor ultimate evil merely by missing thechance to get off the bus is a persistent andchilling theme of this chilling century.Richie’s evocation of it calls to mind theclassic statement by the Polish poet andNobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz in his earlypostwar poem about the end of the world.On the day the world ends, a bee buzzessleepily in a flower, people go about theirbusiness, nothing much seems to havechanged—except that a prophet by theriverside

who is too busy to be a prophet mutters over and over again to his nets: “There will be no other end of the world, There will be no other end of the world.”

Asuccessful attorney suddenly beginsfeeling listless and exhausted.

Finding nothing amiss despite extensivetests, her doctors react with impatience,finally suggesting that she consult a psy-chiatrist. Eventually, and to her immense

relief, another internist assures her thatshe does indeed suffer from an illness,chronic fatigue syndrome. The first doc-tors concentrated singlemindedly on asearch for objective, testable criteria ofdisease; the last doctor heeded her sub-

Books 95

jective feelings of illness. As anotherchronic fatigue sufferer put it, “The dif-ference between a crazed neurotic and aseriously ill person is simply a test thatwould allow me to be ill.”

A great deal depends upon whethersociety grants or withholds “permission”to be ill. If the rundown attorney’s illnessis confirmed, she may be eligible formedical disability, enabling her to retirewith both economic security and socialsanction. Without such confirmation,she not only will be deprived of anyfinancial benefits but will likely be treat-ed as an oddball, even a pariah.

In Making Sense of Illness, Robert A.Aronowitz, a professor at Robert Wood

Johnson Medical School in New Jersey,argues that many shortcomings of ourhealth care system result from the domi-nance of an “ontological view” of medi-cine, in which diseases unfold in allpatients in characteristic and unvaryingways that can always be diagnosed by“abnormal” lab results. Under thismodel, doctors frequently tell patientswith “normal” results, such as the attor-ney, that they are physically healthy(though perhaps psychologicallyunwell). And for some patients who feeljust fine, doctors prescribe treatmentbecause of abnormal test results. In placeof the ontological method, the authoradvocates a holistic approach in whichdisease is understood—and treated—inthe context of social factors.

As Aronowitz shows, doctors prescribetreatment for some patients with nosymptoms whatsoever, owing to wide-spread confusion about testable risk fac-tors. Hypertension, for instance, raisesone’s risk of stroke, heart attack, andother complications. But how much riskdoes mild and symptomless hypertensionactually pose? And whatever the purport-ed risk, shouldn’t it be balanced againstthe risks associated with the medicationsthat reduce blood pressure? Aronowitzsensibly suggests that “the proper defini-tion of hypertension might be the thresh-old above which a particular individualhas greater benefit from treatment thanno treatment.” Instead, doctors consider

hypertension, no matter how mild, to bea disease in its own right. Buses and sub-ways are plastered with ads encouragingpeople to monitor their blood pressureon a regular basis and tell their doctor ofany deviation from “normal.” As a result,“patients may view themselves as sickwhen they previously felt healthy. Theymay attribute all kinds of emotionalstates, behaviors, and health conse-quences to a new disease that has noexperiential basis. They may makenumerous physician visits not for anyphysical complaint, but to lower their sta-tistical risk of disease.”

As an additional complication, neitherpatient nor physician can be certain thattoday’s accepted truths about risk factorswon’t turn out to be tomorrow’s mytholo-gy. A prime example is cholesterol. Manypeople are convinced that the lower theircholesterol, the healthier they are.Doctors routinely treat patients to bringtheir cholesterol down to “normal” lev-els. Yet recent findings link low choles-terol with a serious risk of its own: anincreased likelihood of suicide. It’s spec-ulated that cholesterol may represent asource of energy that, if depleted, con-tributes to depression, a major cause ofsuicide. So what, if anything, should adoctor do about a minimally elevatedcholesterol level?

Risk-factor revisionism also touchesless easily measurable variables such

as personality. In 1961, San Francisco car-diologists Meyer Friedman and Ray Ros-enman suggested that an increasinglystressful environment had given rise to theso-called Type A personality—marked bytime urgency, hostility, and a generallyhard-driving approach to life. Despitegreat initial enthusiasm for this concept (itremains firmly established in everyday par-lance as a description of character andbehavior), this pattern of behavioral traitshasn’t panned out as a predictor of disease.Several studies have even found out thatType A patients are at lower risk for heartattack than others. An additional challengeto the Type A hypothesis is that the rate ofheart attack has declined among all agegroups, social classes, and races, despite

the absence of any perceptible decrease inour collective stress levels.

Overall, then, risk factors are a mixedblessing. They provide, at best, loose guide-lines for healthy living. Aronowitz likensthem to a list of ingredients: “Risk factor for-mulas are like mathematical statements ofthe probability of ending up with a particu-lar bread as a function of different amountsof flour, water, yeast, eggs, and so on. Inother words, the list of ingredients masquer-ades as instructions. One cannot makebread without a recipe.”

In tracing the roots of our skewed defini-tions of sickness and health, Aronowitz castsa measure of blame on health maintenanceorganizations. Obsessed with objectivedata, they often define risk factors as dis-eases that require treatment, and they main-tain that no disease exists whenever testresults are within the normal range (whichrules out many psychiatric disorders, amongothers). Under this approach, a healthy-feeling patient with elevated blood pressureis sick; the attorney incapacitated by con-stant fatigue is not.

Just as strict standards determine who issick, they also increasingly determine

how sickness is treated. HMOs have bor-rowed a principle from industrial produc-tion: if two patients with the “same” dis-ease receive different treatments, one ofthem must be receiving inferior medicalcare. Doctors are forced to adhere to prac-tice guidelines (typically formulated, tothe joy of mathematicians, as algorithms)that must be applied in each medical “en-counter.” Deviations on the part of thedoctor from these guidelines can result inadmonitions, financial penalties, andsometimes expulsion from the “providernetwork.” Patient guidelines are no lessexacting. Failure to consult physicians onthe proper “panel” or in the proper se-quence, or to obtain approval for emer-gency care rendered by outside physicians,may result in a refusal of payment.

Aronowitz notes that “to the degree thatmedical care is thought of as the creation ofa specific and unique product, like themanufacture of an automobile on an assem-bly line, then the equation of variabilitywith poor quality holds some merit.” But

96 WQ Summer 1998

such an analogy fails to account for the indi-viduality of the patient. The “same disease,”the author argues, can never be “adequate-ly understood as a set of uniform and pre-dictable encounters between patients suf-fering specific ailments and physicians whoapply specific diagnostic and therapeutictechnology and practices.”

Part of Aronowitz’s message is thatmedicine is too important to be left

to doctors. Ironically, though, earlier“demedicalization” of the health care sys-tem has led to some of the very problemshe discusses, especially the loss of personalcontrol. Social, legal, and political forcesincreasingly constrain doctors and patientsalike. Doctors are forced to follow legalis-tic standards (“if it isn’t documented, itdidn’t happen”). As a consequence, med-ical records now consist of extended,tedious, and obfuscating enumerations ofnormal findings, serving only to obscurefrom all but the most doggedly determinedreader those key observations that furnishthe basis for correct diagnosis and effectivetreatment. And patients find their healthcare determined not by themselves andtheir doctors but by bureaucrats, entrepre-neurs, lawyers, and politicians.

The result is a widespread uneasinessabout health care, the sort of uneasiness thatwas once limited to the poor and socially dis-enfranchised (whose care grows evenworse). Among the middle class, the neces-sity of health insurance is forcing people toremain at jobs they detest. The wealthy arefaced with draconian insurance rules that,in the case of Medicare, interfere with theirwillingness and ability to pay doctors moremoney in exchange for additional time andattention. And none of this is likely toimprove in the near future. As Aronowitznotes, “demands for efficiency, uniformity,quality, and market discipline” are pushingmedical care harder than ever. This impor-tant book shows that the dictatorship ofquantifiable data will not soon give way.

Richard Restak, a neurologist and neuropsychiatrist,is Clinical Professor of Neurology at the George Washing-ton University School of Medicine and Health Sciencesand the author of numerous books about the brain, sci-ence, and society.

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Leftward, Ho!ACHIEVING OUR COUNTRY:

Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America.By Richard Rorty. Harvard Univ. Press. 159 pp. $18.95

by Jean Bethke Elshtain

Books 97

If the American Left could heal itself,then it might heal what ails the Ameri-

can nation. That, in short, is the belief thatdrives Richard Rorty’s appeal for a real pol-itics: a left-liberal politics that will helpachieve, at long last, the country dreamedof by Rorty’s heroes, John Dewey and WaltWhitman.

Rorty, clearly, is no glib detractor of hisnation. A professor of humanities at theUniversity of Virginia, he presents himselfas an American who lovesand celebrates his country,who cheers America’sachievements and lamentsits indecencies. “Nationalpride,” he asserts, “is tocountries what self-respectis to individuals: a necessarycondition for self-improve-ment.”

Rorty also skewers thoseelements of the culturalLeft that have abandonedthe terrain of democratichopes and fears in favor ofa hypertheorized aestheti-cism that turns citizensinto mere spectators and strips them ofeffective agency. He decries escape into“the most abstract and barren explana-tions imaginable” even if the matter athand is “something very concrete,” suchas transformations in work life or sexualrelationships. And he notes that a cultur-al politics of difference (racial, genderal,or even sexual) promotes the view thatthere is not and cannot be a political lan-guage of commonalities that might forgeand sustain coalitions cutting acrossracial and other lines.

None of this is new, of course. ToddGitlin, Michael Walzer, Arthur Schles-inger, Jr., and I, among other scholars,have advanced similar arguments. ButRorty’s ripostes carry special zing given his

status as one of the fathers of antifounda-tionalism, a position associated with thosepostmodern trends whose excesses hedecries.

Rorty’s political prescriptions also carrya whiff of nostalgia. Any viable left-liberalpolitics, he contends, must rebuild long-moribund coalitions. He would resurrectthe old alliance between intellectuals andlabor, though many sympathetic to hisgeneral perspective insist it lies beyond

repair because it presumeswhat no longer exists: acoherent labor move-ment and a unifiedgroup of left-wing intel-lectuals. (Rorty skirts partof the problem by defin-ing all intellectuals aspartisans of the Left.) Inthis respect, Rorty’s bookis a plea for restoration ofwhat held the New Dealtogether.

Unlike some on theleft, the author defendsthe nation-state againstits “cosmopolitan” de-

tractors as the only political entity current-ly capable of making decisions about socialjustice in response to global market forces.In his defense of patriotism, Rorty blaststhe telling of the American story as a longtrain of atrocities, not only because the pic-ture is false but because it promotes politi-cal apathy and cynicism. Rorty’s genuineaffection for America shines through sotellingly—the book’s autobiographicalfragment is instructive in this regard—thatit seems almost churlish to cavil. But cavilI must, on several points.

First, Rorty beats the drums againstobjectivity in a way that undermines thecommitment to politics and the Americanproject he aims to promote. If we can’teven “try to be objective when attempting

to decide what one’s country really is,” weare tossed to and fro between equally sub-jective, hence indefensible, alternatives.Why, if that is the case, should anyoneaccept Rorty’s defense of American possi-bilities against, for instance, Elijah Mu-hammad’s argument that America is a per-verse experiment conducted by “whitepeople [who] started out as homunculicreated by a diabolical scientist”? Surelythere are some facts that cannot be denied,some forms of public recognition and cog-nition that any person who cares abouttruth will acknowledge as the basis fromwhich political deliberation can arise.

Second, Rorty deploys “right” to meanstingy, selfish, unfair, and chauvinistic,and “left” to mean generous, compassion-ate, fair, and patriotic. This is politics assimplistic morality play. Rorty surelyknows that not all chicanery lurks on oneside of the spectrum and not all civilityresides on the other.

Third, Rorty repeatedly disparages reli-gious belief as the last refuge of intellectualweakness. In an ideological enterprise moreor less on a par with intolerant Marxism, hewould have Americans “think of themselvesas exceptional” but “drop any reference todivine favor or wrath.” If one goes this route,however, one cannot explain the life andwork of Abraham Lincoln, Rorty’s great, pro-totypical American, who believed that thenation was under divine judgment and thatthe Civil War was visited on it for the sin ofslavery. Nor can one explain the tasks under-taken by most abolitionists, the SouthernChristian Leadership Conference, large seg-ments of the anti-Vietnam War movement,or many of today’s activists opposing capitalpunishment.

Rorty wants us to stand in awe only ofourselves. He favors a “utopian America”that will “replace God as the uncondition-al object of desire.” But this prescriptionpaves the way for the ideological excess hedeplores, opening the doors to triumphal-ism and an idolatrous sacralization of nec-essarily finite, limited, and contingenthuman projects. One of Rorty’s heroes,Vaclav Havel, has decried the “arrogant

anthropocentrism” of modern human-kind, which, having closed the window totranscendence, feels free to run amuck, adangerous Titan and destroyer. Rortyneeds to tell us why his self-assured pro-nouncements will not lead down such apath. What framework of evaluationenables us to nurture our civic and politi-cal projects, and, when appropriate, tochasten them as well?

Rorty claims that those who take sinseriously are committed to the view

that the “commission of certain acts” is“incompatible with further self-respect.”One wonders where this misconceptioncomes from. The Christian understandingof sin is tied to a capacity for self-responsi-bility and agency of the sort Rorty extols.Sin doesn’t place one beyond the pale; itserves as a prelude to awareness of one’sfaults tethered to a call to fellowship andservice to one’s neighbor. And to associatea “belief in sin” with a “failure of nerve,” asRorty does, leaves one puzzled. Does hereally want to tell hopeful citizens—thosewho, every day in our cities, towns, and vil-lages, work to make the world less crueland more just—that they are weak-mindedand wrong-headed if their hope stems fromfaith? Should tens of thousands of citizensabandon the ground of their hope, repudi-ate the beliefs that make them agents andnot mere spectators?

Rorty poses some questionable philo-sophical points as well—one can reject acorrespondence theory of truth and classicfoundationalism without embracing full-fledged antirealism—but that is anotherdebate. He has given us a sprightly volumethat sees in what used to be called “theAmerican dream” a call to action worthyof free citizens. I regret that he treats soroughly those of his fellow citizens whopersist in beliefs he distorts and, having dis-torted, denounces.

98 WQ Summer 1998

Jean Bethke Elshtain is the Laura Spelman Rock-efeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics at the Uni-versity of Chicago and the author of Real Politics: At theCenter of Everyday Life (1998).

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Books 99

Contemporary AffairsCLOSING:The Life and Death ofan American Factory.By Bill Bamberger and Cathy N.Davidson. Center for DocumentaryStudies/Norton. 224 pp. $27.50

A Library of Congress subject heading onthe copyright page places this book in asadly familiar genre: “Downsizing—UnitedStates—Case Studies.” In 1993, a hundred-year-old plant, the White Furniture Com-pany of Mebane, North Carolina, went outof business, leaving many of more than 200employees jobless. For five years the pho-tographer Bill Bamberger had been docu-menting the life of the factory, and he con-tinued to follow the lives of the former work-ers. A text by the writer and literary scholarCathy N. Davidson rounds out a moving,unsettling view of a region in transition.

In 1985, a slim majority of the family-dominated shareholders approved the sale ofthe company to Hickory ManufacturingCorporation, a larger firm that was in turncontrolled by a holding company under aChicago venture capitalist named ClydeEngle. Steve White, the CEO who hadfought the deal, had to resign under itsterms. With no access to the books of theseclosely held companies, it is hard to proveeither the employees’ conviction that anabsentee speculator gutted a viable if notvibrant enterprise, or the managers’ avowalsthat years of underinvestment by the patriar-chal, conservative Whites had made theplant’s position untenable.

Whatever the case, White Furniture was amiddle-sized organization in a middle-sized

industry at a time when technological trendsfavor the big (with the resources for ever-costlier electronic enhancements) and thesmall (with the flexibility to find niches thatcomplement the big). It hurts to be locatedin between, whether making furniture, prac-ticing law, publishing books, or selling soft-ware.

It was this very size that gave WhiteFurniture, especially before its merger withHickory, a human scale. If the alienatedcubicle-dwellers of Scott Adams’s Dilbertform a dysfunctional clan, Bamberger andDavidson offer a counterimage of workplaceas family. The production line at White’s wascloser to artisanal teamwork than to regi-mented machine tending. Workers andsupervisors came from similar rural back-grounds, black as well as white. Steve Whitehunted ducks with men from the plant. And

the mirror frames and bedsteadsand dressers photographed byBamberger reflect not onlycraftsmanship but teamwork. Forthe employees interviewed, theindustrial family had made itpossible to raise their real fami-lies with dignity and modestcomfort. The plant’s closingappears as a chapter in thedestruction of an industrial yeo-manry.

Reading interview-based histo-ry critically is like working from akit of semifinished parts, not all

of which fit neatly together. Was Hickory-White’s an honest experiment in bringinglong-needed managerial controls and capitalinvestment into a declining paternalist enter-prise? Workers acknowledge that wages andequipment initially improved under the newregime, even if ancient perquisites werereduced. But the merger might have beendoomed from the outset by the folly of costcutting (practices such as using plastic bandsin lieu of veneer for concealed buffetshelves) in a demanding luxury market inwhich a dining room set had to sell for theprice of a midsized automobile. And howcould the last president agree to keep theplant’s final liquidation a secret for threemonths, knowing that line workers werecounting on continued employment?

100 WQ Summer 1998

Davidson’s prose, like Bamberger’s pho-tography, is forthright and lucid. The bookinsistently directs our attention to thehuman costs of the new economy, yet itnever conceals the problems of the old ways.The gentle natural light of the factory interi-or captures workers, products, and machin-ery in an elegiac yet unsentimental memori-al. This is documentary work of a high order,a corrective to triumphalist cybercratic boos-terism, and above all a reminder of the ambi-guities and ironies of family values.

—Edward Tenner

CARTELS OF THE MIND:Japan’s Intellectual Closed Shop.By Ivan Hall. Norton. 208 pp. $25

During the mid-1600s, Japan’s Tokugawashogunate took the fateful step of expellingalmost all Westerners from the nation andconfining the rest to a small artificial islandin Nagasaki harbor. In the era of sakoku(seclusion) that followed, the shogunsbanned overseas travel, monitored foreign-ers’ movements, and used a handful of most-ly Dutch traders as their conduit to Westernteaching and technology. Today, despiterecurrent tensions between Japan and itstrading partners, a visitor to Tokyo, with itsHermes boutiques and McDonald’s restau-rants, could be forgiven for thinking thatthose exclusionary days are over. Yet as Japanscholar Hall shows in this disturbing andimportant work, the xenophobic mindset ofthe Tokugawa era still holds powerful sway.

Unlike critics of Japanese economic poli-cies who have focused on cars, computerchips, and the keiretsu (corporate networks)that produce them, Hall sets his sights onwhat the political scientist ChalmersJohnson has called Japan’s “cartels of themind”: the formal and informal networksand rules that make it difficult, if not impos-sible, for foreign professionals to find work.

The restrictions that Hall painstakinglydetails would seem merely absurd if they didnot apply to the world’s second-largest econo-my. So stringent are the rules governing theactivities of foreign lawyers that a Japaneseattorney who goes to the United States andjoins a U.S. firm can no longer argue cases inhis home country. Foreign journalists mustwork extra hard: although their lot hasimproved since 1964, when Americanreporters were kept out of a police press con-ference on the stabbing of U.S. ambassador

Edwin Reischauer, they remain effectivelybarred from the cozy kisha (reporters) clubsthat monopolize news from most governmentministries, industrial associations, and privatecompanies. Those foreign professors luckyenough to be hired in Japan are deniedchances at tenure and generally endure a sec-ond-class status that Hall calls “academicapartheid.” In one of his book’s more power-ful chapters, the author draws on his years asa professor in Japan to show how and why for-eign scholars are generally treated like “tem-porary transmitters of knowledge, to be cele-brated, sucked dry, and sacked.”

Hall is by no means the first scholar toscrutinize Japan’s highly resistant strain ofcultural isolationism. As the Japanese socialcritic Takeo Kuwabara observed more than adecade ago, “Japanese respect the principleof cultural interchange . . . but in reality theytolerate one-way traffic only.” As more than afew Japanologists have learned, Japaneseoften react to a foreigner who speaks theirlanguage and knows their ways much as onemight respond to a talking dog: initiallycharmed but increasingly suspicious—espe-cially if the dog begins to criticize.

Perhaps understandably, Hall’s account iscolored a shade too purple by the slights andinjuries he has witnessed or experienced innearly three decades as a journalist, diplo-mat, and academic in Japan. His predictionthat Japan’s closed system will spread to itsneighbors seems misguided, especially giventhe push for democratization and greateropenness in many Asian countries sufferingfrom a regional financial crisis.

But the flaws in some of Hall’s conclu-sions do not detract from his valuable map-ping of Japan’s barriers to intellectualexchange. Cutting through the disingenuousblather of Japan’s intellectual establishmentabout its commitment to kokusaika (interna-tionalization), Hall shows that as technologyand trade turn much of the world into theequivalent of a global village, Japan willincreasingly stand out as one of its moreprovincial neighborhoods.

—James Gibney

ONE NATION AFTER ALL.By Alan Wolfe. Viking.384 pp. $24.95

Elites commonly declare that the Ameri-can public has become extremely con-tentious, even angry, about religious and

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political doctrines and behavior. Wolfe, byrefreshing contrast, sees a nation “dominatedby the ideas of the reasonable majority: peo-ple who believe themselves to be modest intheir appetites, quiet in their beliefs, andrestrained in their inclinations.” The BostonUniversity sociologist bases his conclusionson 200 in-depth interviews with “middle-class” Americans in eight suburban sites, andbuttresses that research with national pollsconducted by others.

Wolfe finds that most Americans reject anabsolutist sense of religious or political truth.They basically are centrists, holding reli-gious and political values but accepting theviews of those who disagree. By 167 to 19, forexample, Wolfe’s respondents believe that“there are many religious truths and weought to be tolerant of all of them.”

Although the respondents have little faithin government, Wolfe reports that they reject“the case for social and political decline thatpreoccupies social critics and social scientists.”The great majority believe that American soci-ety is basically fair. They dispute the notionthat “the country as a whole has lost its bear-ings.” Indeed, almost everyone interviewed(184 to 5) feels that “the United States is stillthe best place in the world to live.”

Much evidence documents that mostnonelite Americans share these Panglossianviews. Yet the data themselves reveal anxi-eties lurking beneath the optimism. A sub-stantial majority (133 to 49) agree that“compared to 20 years ago, Americans havebecome more selfish.” By a modest margin(110 to 92), most say that “the prospects fac-ing my own children are worse than theywere for me when I was a child.” A largemajority (177 to 16) feels that “it has becomemuch harder to raise children in our soci-ety.” And the in-depth interviews find manyparents worrying that affluence is corruptingthe moral fiber of their children. All is notright with middle-class America.

All is not entirely right with One Nation’sapproach, either. Most serious to a student ofstratification is the way Wolfe deals withsocial class. He reports that only 10 percent“classify themselves as either lower class orupper class,” with the rest saying middleclass. But this does not demonstrate that theUnited States is a middle-class country.People from Japan to Eastern Europe do thesame. To identify oneself with the upperclass is boastful; to identify oneself with the

lower class is invidious. So when presentedwith this three-class question, nearly every-one reports middle-class status.

Back in 1948, however, the social psy-chologist Richard Centers asked respon-dents if they were upper class, middle class,working class, or lower class. Given thefourth choice, a plurality of respondents—between 35 and 45 percent in the UnitedStates and elsewhere—placed themselves inthe working class, a noninvidious response.Published as The Psychology of Social Class(1949), Centers’s findings have been repli-cated in recent surveys. Middle class, as usedby Wolfe and others who identify the UnitedStates as a middle-class nation, seems toinclude everyone not living in dire povertyor great wealth. If so, it is not a useful ana-lytic concept.

Despite this flaw, One Nation is athoughtful, provocative, and data-rich book.It needs a sequel. Fortunately, Wolfe is in themiddle of research to provide it. One hopesthe next volume will explain why the con-servative and liberal literati so exaggerate thefailings of their nation.

—Seymour Martin Lipset

SPIN CYCLE:Inside the ClintonPropaganda Machine.By Howard Kurtz. Free Press.324 pp. $25

Hoping to discover the secret of PresidentClinton’s high approval ratings in the face ofscandal, Kurtz ventures backstage at theWhite House press office. A Washington Postreporter, the author finds press secretaryMichael McCurry and his staff doing, quitecompetently, what their recent predecessorshave done: leaking stories, awarding exclu-sives, staging symbolically rich announce-ments, peddling human interest tales, and,by shying away from learning certain infor-mation, maintaining credible deniability.No dazzling innovations here.

Though it’s not the author’s intendedmessage, Spin Cycle ends up teaching usthat the White House media manipulatorsare not all that influential. The news, com-mentary, and chatter chronicled in this aptlytitled book go around and around withouthaving much impact outside the circle ofofficials and correspondents. The bulk of theexplanation for Clinton’s enduring populari-ty must lie elsewhere—most likely in his

102 WQ Summer 1998

OUR BABIES, OURSELVES:Why We Raise OurChildren the Way We Do.By Meredith Small. Anchorbooks.320 pp. $24.95

Dr. Spock once astutely observed that“two women who in actual practice wouldhandle a child just about the same could stillargue till kingdom come about [child-rear-ing] theory”—and probably would inAmerica. The converse also holds true. Twowomen (or two men) who agree about child-rearing theory could easily proceed to treat achild quite differently. Ask them how the dif-ferences might affect the growth of a childinto a citizen, and the honest answer will bean uneasy “Who knows?”

Small, a professor of anthropology atCornell University, seeks new clarity for themessy business of child rearing through apioneering science called “ethnopedi-atrics”—“a mix of cultural anthropology anddevelopmental psychology, with a soupçonof evolutionary biology thrown in.” The goalof the group of pediatricians, child develop-ment researchers, and anthropologists whogave the field its name is twofold: to high-light the culturally relative functions servedby “parenting styles,” and to explore theeffects those styles might have on the biolog-ically fixed needs of infants. Put in the moreprescriptive terms that Small often uses inher lucidly accessible book, “These scientistswant to uncover whether mismatches mightexist between the biology of the baby and thecultural styles of the parents, with an eyetoward realigning parents and babies into asmoother, better-adjusted biological and psy-chological relationship.”

The ethnopediatricians do discover mis-matches, particularly in advanced Westerncultures such as America’s, where child-rear-

ing theories and methods have changed sooften. Babies, according to the evolutionaryview that underpins the field, are equippedwith “Pleistocene biology” that has changedvery little since the hunter-gatherer “era ofevolutionary adaptedness” in which ourgenus, Homo, emerged. Faced with thedilemmas of maturation posed by big-brained bipeds, the process of natural selec-tion produced infants designed to developwithin a closely entwined relationship with acaretaker.

Proof, or at least illustration (in this nec-essarily speculative endeavor, the twoblend), lies in contemporary cross-culturalevidence that babies who are carried all thetime, cuddled through the night, and fedconstantly, as their ancestors presumablywere—and as infants in some non-Westerncultures still are—cry very little. Babies obvi-ously can cope with less intensive bonding,but their developing neurological and bio-chemical systems will be in greater disequi-

Science & Technology

own actions, and in the perceptions of thoseactions out beyond the spinners, in the con-centric orbits of partisan politics, govern-ment policies, and public opinion.

A siege atmosphere pervades Spin Cycle,suggesting that the scandals will bring downeither the president or the media. But bignews stories have a perverse way of ending

small. Having promised a stark climax, theO. J. Simpson saga closed with two contraryverdicts and a truckload of memoirs. Thestand-off that Kurtz details may simply dragon until the president’s term expires. Bythen, most of the media will have moved onto the next presidential show.

—Michael Cornfield

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librium. Hence the colicky, cranky tenden-cies so commonly displayed among infantssubjected to the more detached nurturingfavored in urban-industrial societies, wherebabies sleep alone, breast-feed on a sched-ule, if at all, and can’t expect their cries toelicit prompt human contact.

Ethnopediatricians are not preaching areturn to hunter-gatherer habits, though theybelieve such a style is better for babies. Theyappreciate the cultural pressures that havegiven rise to a great variety of “caretakingpackages,” which represent “trade-offs inwhich parents weigh the needs of infantsagainst the constraints of daily life.” But itwould help, this new breed of scientist wise-ly feels, if we scrutinized those trade-offsmore carefully. Instead, we tend to blurthem in “parenting ethnotheories” that gen-erally purport to prove that whatever meth-ods suit adults in a particular social contextare also best for molding children to fit theculture.

Small believes Americans would do well togive babies at least a little more say. Then wemight appreciate the wisdom of fosteringattachment, rather than fixating on indepen-dence—“the chief, overriding goal ofAmerican culture, whether stated overtly ornot,” she believes. In fact, we and our expertsare already obsessed with bonding, as well aswith autonomy. The truly novel serviceethnopediatrics may provide is to expose howcontradictory, or complementary, our social-izing goals often are—and how difficult it canbe to judge whether specific child-rearingstyles, especially those used with babies, helpor hinder us in achieving them. As parentsand babies fuss in confusion, these scientistsat their unreductive best suggest where someof our child-rearing conflicts come from. Thetensions can be eased, ethnopediatricians pro-pose, but they avoid the foolish promise thatthey will ever disappear.

—Ann Hulbert

REMAKING THE WORLD:Adventures in Engineering.By Henry Petroski. Knopf. 239 pp. $24

Just after World War I, the irascible sociol-ogist Thorstein Veblen proposed a way tobring about a fair distribution of wealth andwell-being: let engineers run society.Veblen’s suggestion would appeal to few peo-ple today. Those who have remade our mate-rial world are rarely consulted on social

reform or economic development policy, oraccorded the kind of recognition lavished onleading scientists.

In these essays, Petroski, a professor of his-tory and engineering at Duke University,renews our esteem for the social and cultur-al accomplishments of engineers. In onepiece, he overturns the perverse symbolismof a famous photograph showing AlbertEinstein towering over the hunchbackedelectrical engineer Charles Steinmetz. Inanother, he recounts the history of how theprizes endowed by mechanical engineerAlfred Nobel came to be awarded to scien-tists but only rarely to engineers.

As a counterpoint to such hints of profes-sional defensiveness, the author’s essay onKuala Lumpur’s Petronas Towers—thetallest buildings in the world—lauds thegenius of the engineers who solved theextremely difficult and dramatic problemspresented by so vast an undertaking. In onesense, these towers are the latest in a longline of ambitious projects that Petroski exam-ines in other essays—the Eiffel Tower,Ferris’s Wheel, the Panama Canal, HooverDam—all of which required skill and imag-ination to solve a multitude of structural andconstruction challenges. But he also pointsout the political impacts of such projects.Gigantic business towers especially functionas status symbols, announcing the arrival ofa nation into the powerful club of industrial-izing societies. He ends the essay by recount-ing how the towers’ engineers transferredknowledge and know-how from their ownsocieties to other regions. By establishingnetworks of businesses, suppliers, technicalschools, workers, and communicationsmedia, they helped invent the organization-al systems that make such massive projectspossible.

In a few of the essays (most of whichappeared in the American Scientist), onewishes for less of Petroski’s reasoned descrip-tion and more of the conflict, indecision,ambition, and even humiliation that engi-neers experience when they juggle thegivens of the physical world with the unpre-dictabilities of social, political, and econom-ic interests. The author’s talent, however, is awriting style characterized by seeminglyeffortless serendipity, drawing the nonspe-cialist as well as the technical expert into histopics in pleasurable and unexpected ways.

—Miriam R. Levin

104 WQ Summer 1998

IMPROVISED EUROPEANS:American Literary Expatriatesand the Siege of London.By Alex Zwerdling. Basic.425 pp. $35

Europe barely registers on our culturalradar these days, but there was a time whenit would have filled the entire screen.Politically and culturally, the United Statesspent the 19th century in Europe’s shadow.To England especially, America was the bois-terous, untutored rebel, the offspring per-ceived as something of an embarrassment.But by the early 20th century, the upstarthad become mighty, a cultur-al achiever in its own right,and the imperial parent wastottering.

Zwerdling, a professor ofEnglish at Berkeley, portraysthis grand reversal throughthe personal encounterswith England and theContinent of four greatfigures in Americanliterary life—Henry Adams,Henry James, Ezra Pound,and T. S. Eliot. The four fallinto two roughly contempo-raneous pairs, and their col-lective lives extend from thefirst half of the 19th centuryto the second half of the20th. The concatenation isstriking: Adams and Jameswere friends; late in his life,James knew Pound; Pound was a friend andcreative adviser to the young Eliot.

Derived from a letter of Adams to James,the term “improvised Europeans” is used tocharacterize a particular type of mid-19th-century American, “molded by Boston,Harvard, and Unitarianism,” and “broughtup in irritable dislike of America.”Zwerdling employs the term in a moreexpansive sense for his literary expatriates,who felt compelled to come to terms withthemselves, their talents, and their ambitionsby moving to Europe. Adams was maturewhen he lived for a time in Paris andLondon, but the others were young whenthey went abroad and had their imaginationsfired by the Old World.

Arts & LettersWe forget how young. We remember

Pound as the remote and deranged old manwho had favored the Fascists, not as a prod-uct of Idaho and Hamilton College and theUniversity of Pennsylvania. James and Eliotlinger in our minds as they were in theirseniority, grave, oracular, marmoreal. But allthree were still in their twenties when theirwork began to win critical attention. Eliotpublished “The Love Song of J. AlfredPrufrock” at 27 and “The Waste Land” at 34,after it had been revised and shaped by thebarely older Pound. In his mid-thirties Jameswrote The American, The Europeans, and

Daisy Miller.They all aspired to separa-

tion from their American ori-gins and association with thesuperior European culture.They wanted to be placelesscosmopolites who couldmove with facility among theliteratures and traditions ofthe world, their work free ofmere national affiliation.“The birth of Anglo-American modernism as aself-conscious movement,”writes Zwerdling, “owes agreat deal to the overlap (andthe shared assumptions) ofthese displaced Americans.”

But they achieved their cos-mopolitanism at a price. Theyouthful genius released byimmersion in the foreign

yielded eventually to regret. The recovery oftheir origins and of what they had forgonebecame for them “a necessary act of self-pos-session.” What Zwerdling says of James hintsat the common loss: “As he reflects on hisown life and those of artists who have madesimilar choices, he becomes aware that thedream of his youth—to write about, and for, acosmopolitan world in which the issue of hisnational identity is unproblematic—has notbeen realized. He has had to settle for less,much less.”

Zwerdling mixes social and cultural histo-ry, literary criticism, and biography in expertmeasure to construct an absorbing narrativeof these divided lives. He draws on the majorpublished works as well as on letters and

James M. Barrie (left) andHenry James in London, 1910

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journals and unpublished materials, and heis always agile in controlling the disparatesources. When he turns to the human con-sequences of his characters’ decisions tostand apart, the book even manages an effectrarely associated with academic criticismthese days: it becomes moving.

—James M. Morris

WILL THIS DO?:An Autobiography.By Auberon Waugh. Carroll &Graf. 288 pp. $24

Each week in London’s Spectator andSunday Telegraph, 59-year-old AuberonWaugh writes battle dispatches from the los-ing side of the class war, praising such van-ishing upper-class folkways as fox hunting,ethnic slurs, and drunk driving. The authorof five novels, he appears frequently as a tele-vision pundit, edits the monthly LiteraryReview, and writes regularly on wine. But hisown writing has not proved a vintage thattravels well. While Waugh is among thebest-known right-wing men of letters inBritain, foreigners know him, if at all, only asthe eldest son of novelist Evelyn Waugh(1903–1966).

“Being the son of Evelyn Waugh was aconsiderable advantage in life,” Waughnotes, with some overstatement. For all ofEvelyn’s friends who helped Auberon (JohnBetjeman, Graham Greene), there wereplenty of others who stood in his way(Anthony Powell, Cyril Connolly). Evelynhimself had little interest in family life, tak-ing meals alone in the library when hischildren were home from boarding school,and, “with undisguised glee,” holding lavishparties to celebrate their departures. Whenrationing was lifted just after World War II,the government promised every child inBritain a banana—a legendary treat.Neither Auberon nor his two sisters hadever eaten one. On the evening the threebananas arrived, his mother placed all ofthem before Evelyn, who wolfed themdown with cream and (heavily rationed)sugar. “From that moment,” Auberonwrites, “I never treated anything he had tosay on faith or morals very seriously.”

Other than the occasional adventure(serving with the Royal Horse Guards inCyprus, he mishandled a machine gun andshot himself six times), this autobiographylargely chronicles Waugh’s free-lance

assignments in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s. Itis sometimes enlivened by blow-by-blowaccounts of libel suits and literary feuds,and there are humorous moments. Invitedto Senegal to speak on breast-feeding,Waugh discovers after weeks of researchthat the invitation had been misheard; thesubject of his talk was to be not breast-feed-ing but press freedom. Because the speechwas to be in French, Waugh could not evendescribe the misunderstanding to his audi-ence, “since ‘la liberté de la Presse’ bears noresemblance to ‘le nourrisson naturel desbébés.’ ”

Slapped together out of the 1991 Englishedition, the book is full of anachronisms—not just dead people referred to in the pre-sent tense, but thematic anachronisms aswell. Here, as in his columns, the Britishclass system obsesses Waugh. Will This Do?catalogues, ad nauseam, his and his friends’houses and pedigrees, and laments theshiftiness of the working classes. The near-decade since the book first appeared hasseen the rise of televised politics and thecollapse of the Tory Party, changes thathave corroded the class system in ways noworkers’ party could ever have dreamed of.The world Waugh lovingly chronicles herenot only holds little appeal for theAmerican reader; it’s of waning relevancein Britain too.

—Christopher Caldwell

THE DREAMS OUR STUFF ISMADE OF: How Science FictionConquered the World.By Thomas M. Disch. Free Press.272 pp. $25

In the late 1960s, science fiction was divid-ed into two warring camps. The Old Wavewanted the genre to continue following thetraditions established by Isaac Asimov, RobertHeinlein, and Arthur C. Clarke, depicting sci-entific advances and their human conse-quences. The New Wave, by contrast, wantedSF (which they maintained stood for “specu-lative fiction”) to raise its standards and aspireto become avant-garde literature. The OldWave stressed science; the New Wave stressedfiction.

Thirty years later, it’s hard to tell whowon. The best writers—such as GregoryBenford, Kim Stanley Robinson, andStephen Baxter—produce high-quality fic-tion that’s scientifically accurate, satisfying

106 WQ Summer 1998

History

both factions’ criteria. The trouble is, theirwork has been overwhelmed by a tidal waveof trash: novels based on television shows orgames, “sharecropped” books expandedfrom outlines left by dead or retired giants ofthe field.

A novelist and literary critic who champi-oned the New Wave in the 1960s, Dischindicts today’s science fiction on a number ofcounts. It stimulates woolly-minded day-dreaming. It drives readers to promoteridiculous or pointless causes, such as theexistence of UFOs. As “lumpen-literature,” itencourages simplistic fantasies—everywoman a warrior queen, every man a star-ship trooper.

Much of Disch’s critique is accurate.Science fiction attracts its share of obsessivesand eccentrics, including some who turnantisocial (the creator of Japan’s AumShinrikyo cult apparently derived his mes-sianic ideas from Asimov’s Foundationseries). But most readers choose SF for itsentertaining stories and stimulating ideas—

FREE SPEECH IN ITSFORGOTTEN YEARS.By David M. Rabban. CambridgeUniv. Press. 393 pp. $34.95

In Schenck v. United States (1919), theSupreme Court ruled that a group of social-ists could be imprisoned, First Amendmentnotwithstanding, for dispensing antiwar cir-culars to men heading for military service.Writing for the Court, Oliver WendellHolmes explained that the utterances atissue “are used in such circumstances andare of such a nature as to create a clear andpresent danger that they will bring about thesubstantive evils that Congress has a right toprevent.” Holmes’s casual “clear and presentdanger” aside soon became the judiciary’stest for regulating speech; it remained theanalytical standard in sedition cases until the1950s. Rabban, a professor of law at theUniversity of Texas at Austin, traces the ori-gins of the test by placing Schenck and theother landmark World War I speech cases ina context of legal and intellectual history,creating a rich and textured view of FirstAmendment law from the 1870s to the1920s.

Harvard Law School professorZechariah Chafee, Jr., emerges as a cen-tral character in the story. His Freedom ofSpeech (1920) established the 20th-centu-ry framework for analyzing the FirstAmendment. Written in support of the“clear and present danger” standard, albeita somewhat more demanding version thanHolmes’s, Chafee’s book treated the WorldWar I speech restrictions as virtuallyunprecedented. Not since the Alien andSedition Acts of 1798, he claimed, hadcourts and the law been so unfriendly tofree speech. It was a persuasive legal brief,but it turns out to be flawed history:American law and courts were quite hos-tile to free speech throughout the 19thcentury.

To Chafee and liberal champions offree speech of the post–World War I era—including Herbert Croly, John Dewey, andRoger Baldwin—speech principally servedcommunal ends. In approaching the FirstAmendment, they “retained the progres-sive emphasis on social over individualrights,” Rabban explains, even as theyworked to avoid a recurrence of the

and they are just as skeptical of the genre’soccasional mystical nonsense as Disch. Theauthor’s understanding of current SF is spot-ty, too. His chapter on female writers con-centrates on Ursula Le Guin and JoannaRuss, neither of whom has written much sci-ence fiction for years, and he devotes a sin-gle dismissive line to Lois McMaster Bujold,who has won three Hugos for best novel inthe 1990s.

“As to the future of SF,” Disch writes,“apart from the fortified suburbs of tenuredteaching, the outlook is bleak.” He rightlyargues that many midlist writers, whosebooks generate respectable but not spectacu-lar sales, will have trouble getting new con-tracts (a situation that’s not limited to sciencefiction, by the way). But SF has survived pastpredictions of doom. In all likelihood, thegenre will continue to account for about 15percent of all fiction published, Disch’sentertaining but misleading rodomontadenotwithstanding.

—Martin Morse Wooster

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wartime suppressions that putatively hadoccurred in protection of the community.From these advocates’ perspective, speechmust be free in order to benefit society; inthose instances when speech demonstra-bly harms society, it can be abridged.“Clear and present danger” served as theirbenchmark for the level of harm that justi-fies suppression.

Rabban points out that First Amendmentjurisprudence could have taken a differentpath. Beginning in the late 19th century,libertarian radicals argued for a broad free-dom that would serve individual autonomyrather than the collective good. Under thisview, everyone would have the right tospeak regardless of viewpoint or impact onsociety. As Rabban observes, this approachmight have provided a sturdier foundationfor modern free speech than Chafee’s disin-genuous history and the Progressives’emphasis on community.

This important study ends by reflectingon the current challenges to free speechfrom the Left. Rabban urges that we recallthe lessons the Progressives learned duringWorld War I: democratic governments donot always act in the public interest, andfreedom of speech is an essential check onthem. It is a caution we ignore at our peril.

—Timothy Gleason

THE FOUNDINGMYTHS OF ISRAEL.By Ze’ev Sternhell. Translated byDavid Maisel. Princeton Univ.Press. 419 pp. $29.95

Did the founders of modern Israel setout to create a socialist society? This book,published to coincide with the nation’s50th anniversary, answers the question withan emphatic “no.” Sternhell, a political sci-entist at Hebrew University in Jerusalem,contends that the founders, facing the taskof creating a nation out of disparate bandsof immigrants, “had no patience for exper-

imentation” with socialism or any otherunproven philosophy. When forced tochoose between advancing socialist princi-ples and attracting capital, David Ben-Gurion, Berl Katznelson, and the otherfounders invariably picked the latter. Taxrates favored the wealthy, for example, andthe quality of schools varied according toneighborhood income. The leaders’ piousinvocations of socialist principles constitut-ed “a mobilizing myth,” the author asserts,“perhaps a convenient alibi that sometimespermitted the movement to avoid grap-pling with the contradiction betweensocialism and nationalism.”

Sternhell detects similar hypocrisy in

some Israeli leaders of the 1990s. During aprotest against the Oslo peace accords in1995, demonstrators waved signs depictingYitzhak Rabin as an SS officer. Accordingto the author, speakers at the rally—includ-ing Benjamin Netanyahu, now the primeminister—voiced no objections to thehyperbole. “For the Right,” Sternhellobserves, “Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Pereswere comparable to the worst enemy theJewish people ever had.” One month later,Rabin was assassinated. Israel became, inthe author’s dispiriting words, “the firstdemocratic state—and from the end of theSecond World War until now the onlyone—in which a political murder achievedits goal.”

—Ami E. Albernaz

Religion & PhilosophySTRIVING TOWARDS BEING:The Letters of ThomasMerton and Czeslaw Milosz.Edited by Robert Faggen. Farrar,Straus & Giroux. 178 pp. $21

What are friends for? The question is usu-ally posed as though the answer were self-evi-dent: friends offer help in time of need. Butliterary friendships are different. They leavea record, the quality of which depends on

108 WQ Summer 1998

the quality of the need—and of the help. Inthis remarkable 10-year correspondencebetween Merton, the American Trappistmonk best known for his spiritual autobiog-raphy The Seven Storey Mountain (1948),and Milosz, winner of the 1980 Nobel Prizein literature, the quality of both is highindeed.

In 1958, when Merton initiated the corre-spondence, Milosz was living in France, arecent exile from the Stalinist regime in hisnative Poland. Milosz’s poetry, now celebrat-ed in the West, was untranslated, and hisreputation did not extend beyond the bittercontroversy surrounding The Captive Mind(1952, trans. 1953). To the Polish exile com-munity, Milosz’s extraordinary dissection ofintellectual capitulation to communism wastainted by his having served the regime. ToFrench leftists, the book was a blot on thelegacy of Stalin. And to many Americans,The Captive Mind was just another anti-communist tract.

Faggen, a professor of literature atClaremont McKenna College, explains whyMerton’s reading of The Captive Mind wasso distinctive: he “recognized that the bookwas not simply a condemnation ofCommunism but an attempt to understandthe lure of Marxism in the wake of the ero-sion of the religious imagination.” Merton’sstance was clearly congenial to Milosz,whose wife and two sons had emigrated toAmerica but whose own visa was beingdelayed on suspicion that, as a former officialof the Polish government, he might be a spy.About his time in France, Milosz wrote, “Ilive in a little town near Paris and look at thatliterary turmoil with a dose of scorn—do notaccuse me of pride as this is not my individ-ual pride, I share it with young writers fromPoland who visit me here, perhaps we all aremore mature—at a price.” Throughout thecorrespondence, which ranges beyond poli-tics into fundamental questions of art, faith,and morality in a world darkened by war andgenocide, this tension between pride andmaturity is central.

Of the two writers, Milosz is the morerelentless self-examiner. He agrees withMerton that it is important to resist groupcauses and political labels, but he goes on tooffer a striking meditation on why such resis-tance should not be regarded as heroic:“Pride or ambition sometimes mislead uswhen we want to be individuals and not just

members of a group. But in general pride orambition by breaking etiquettes is a positiveforce—and exactly for this reason writing, asself-assertion, is for me something suspect.”

Faggen observes that while in the first let-ters “Milosz’s eager response to Mertonreveals his need for a spiritual father, . . .Milosz appears to take on that role himself asthe correspondence develops.” This is truein certain realms, notably the political. Yetsome of the most affecting passages are thosein which Merton counsels Milosz not toregard exile as a dead end: “What you writefor Poland will be read with interest every-where. You do not have to change your men-tal image of your audience. The audiencewill take care of itself.” Wise words, not onlyreassuring but prophetic—and, for one ofthe greatest poets of our troubled century,exactly the help most needed.

—Martha Bayles

MARTIN HEIDEGGER:Between Good and Evil.By Rudiger Safranski. Translatedby Ewald Osers. Harvard Univ.Press. 474 pp. $35

Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) poses adilemma for the intellectual biographer.He was one of the more original and influ-ential philosophers of the 20th century,and he was a supporter of the Third Reich.Situating his subject “between good andevil,” Safranski, the author of Schopen-hauer and the Wild Years of Philosophy(1991), addresses the perilous linksbetween Heidegger’s brilliant philosophyand his abominablepolitics.

Safranski’s focusis Heidegger’s qua-si-mystical explo-ration of “Being,”his attempt to findmeaning in lifethrough its intimateconnections withdeath and nothing-ness. Heidegger be-lieved that modernhumanity had losttouch with its ownessential nature because of the spiritualshallowness, materialism, and overall“inauthenticity” of contemporary life.Following the implications of his meta-

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physics, Heidegger embraced the NationalSocialist revolution as “a collective break-out from inauthenticity,” a chance to attainauthentic Being and create a “new intel-lectual and spiritual world for the Germannation.” In 1933, Heidegger accepted theNational Socialist Party’s invitation tobecome rector of Freiburg University, aprominent position in Hitler’s culturalpropaganda machine.

By the end of World War II, Nazism hadbecome for Heidegger yet another night-marish product of modernity: a conformistand manipulative regime. Inspired by hisown disastrous experience, he went on toexplore the insidious ways in which a mod-ern technological society can lead peopleastray. Safranski cites the philosopher’s“seducibility by power” as a partial expla-nation of his disastrous political misstep.Heidegger was neither the first nor the lastmandarin to conflate his own ideas with amonstrous ideology; a distressing numberof 20th-century intellectuals have served asshills for Nazism, Stalinism, and Maoism.Yet Heidegger’s life offers a particularlysobering lesson in the pitfalls of translatingphilosophical theory into practice.

—Lawson Rollins

GENUINE REALITY:A Life of William James.By Linda Simon. Harcourt Brace.480 pp. $35

William James (1842–1910) was a pio-neer in philosophy and psychology, a mus-cular public citizen, and a member of afamously complicated American family.Eldest child of Henry and Mary James,William was born a year before his literarybrother, Henry Jr. In time, their siblingswould include the neurasthenic Alice andtwo boys, Garth Wilkinson and Robertson.As patriarch of the brood, Henry Sr. wasself-absorbed, frustrated by a lack of recog-nition for his philosophical writings, opin-ionated, and quick to hurl himself in thepath of William’s ambitions. “Unmanly”was one of the father’s favorite epithets forthe boy, leaving him with a debilitatingsense of unworthiness.

In keeping with his father’s views—thesenior James’s failed career led him toinsist that all careers are ignoble becausework shrivels the soul—William reached30 before securing his first job, teaching

anatomy at Harvard University. He alsoinherited some of his father’s petulance,wanderlust, and intolerance of rivals, andshared some of his sister’s emotional fragili-ty, which subjected him to periodic break-downs. But marriage to Alice Gibbensenabled him to transcend the worst of thefamily afflictions. According to Simon, aprofessor of English at Skidmore College,life with Alice “enlarged his experience ofother people as well: students, colleagues,friends, and his own children, who provid-ed living examples of the wide range of per-sonalities functioning happily, healthily,and productively.”

As a thinker, James preferred possibilitiesto absolutes. “I am convinced that thedesire to formulate truths is a virulent dis-ease,” he wrote a friend. Fellow philosopherGeorge Santayana remembered that“James detested any system of the universethat professed to enclose everything; wemust never set up boundaries that excluderomantic surprises.” Unfortunately, the pro-fessional James proves elusive in GenuineReality. While Simon recreates some of thedebates among the Pragmatists—includingthose of James and his Harvard colleaguesJosiah Royce and Charles Peirce—she failsto convey a clear understanding of James’sphilosophy, his psychology, or the impact ofeither.

She is more successful in chronicling hiscareer as a public figure, a moral pronounc-er on the violence in Haymarket Square, theSpanish-American War, and other greatevents of his time. James championed citi-zen activism and “civic courage”—so long asthe elite held the reins and kept the bellicos-ity of “lower types” in check. A popularspeaker and writer, he ardently believed thatphilosophers should make their ideas plainto the masses so that they might lead morepurposeful lives.

Simon lets her story unfold on James’sterms, presenting him in all his complexitywith few authorial ahems. For the most partthe strategy succeeds, though at times onelongs to know the author’s reaction to hereccentric subject. In an era of “overpaged”(publishing-speak for “fat”) biographies, itis rare to finish reading a life and long formore. Simon is an engaging narrator, andGenuine Reality is an elegantly craftedbook—as far as it goes.

—Patricia O’Toole

110 WQ Summer 1998

THE CITY OF MAN.By Pierre Manent. Translated byMarc A. LePain. Princeton Univ.Press. 248 pp. $24.95

What does it mean to be modern? AsFrench political philosopher Manent showsin this important book, just asking the ques-tion reveals one to be in the grip of the mod-ern, to be aware that we are both human(implying a universal human nature) andmodern (implying a sharp awareness of his-torical contingency and the malleability ofhuman nature). Manent pursues the histori-cal source of this self-consciousness andmuses on its meaning and destination.

To be modern is to be free from the con-straints of nature and grace, to flee fromthe Western tradition’s two exemplary mod-els for ordering the soul: the magnanimousman of Athens, proud with his civic respon-sibilities, and the humble monk, dedicatedto God. The profound tension betweenmagnanimity and humility lies, inManent’s view, at the heart of the West’scultural and political dynamism. Butbecause both models understood virtuesubstantively as real—implying a range ofexcellences and goods that humans discov-ered rather than created—and viewedhuman nature as oriented toward the good,the two traditions could speak to oneanother, most powerfully in St. ThomasAquinas’s great effort at synthesizing Greekphilosophy and Christian revelation. Yetboth magnanimity and humility were worndown over time through their reciprocalcritique (each viewed the other’s good asillusory) and their internal contradictions(the political strife of the Greek cities andthe Christian wars of religion). And whateventually replaced them, starting in the18th century, is the “city of man” of liberaldemocratic modernity, an artificial con-struct—a human project—based on theindividual prior to any demand upon hisallegiance.

In the first half of The City of Man,

Manent explores three of the principaldimensions of modern understanding: histo-ry, sociology, and economics. The authorityof history relativizes the idea of permanenthuman ends; the sociological viewpointreplaces the perspective of the human actorsituated within the common human worldwith that of the detached observer, a “scien-tist” of human affairs; the idea of the eco-nomic system reduces human motivation tothe desire for acquisition, truncating the fullrange of human excellences. Manent care-fully reconstructs the emergence of thesenew authorities in the writings of Montes-quieu, Adam Smith, Rousseau, Nietzsche,and other great thinkers, noting that for allthe attention devoted to us by the human sci-ences, we moderns remain a bit of a cipher.

As Manent underscores in the second halfof his book, this fact has troubling conse-quences. From Montesquieu on, virtue,whether pagan or Christian, has been rein-terpreted as repressive. Moderns view the cit-izen’s obligations or the monk’s hairshirt asconstraining human nature rather than asadvancing it toward its full potential. Thelaw’s neutrality toward conceptions of thegood becomes an injunction: you must befree to choose your own “lifestyle,” free tojettison the past as so much baggage. Yetwhat is freedom for? The modern individual,Manent tells us, runs and runs without a des-tination. The cost of our liberty has been adeep inarticulateness about the ends of life.

Manent proposes no solutions. The City ofMan, beautifully translated from the Frenchedition published in 1994, seeks to mirrorthe world, not to transform it. But it carries alesson nonetheless: untethered from thepast, we slide into nihilism, and may nolonger be able even to sustain our modernliberties. Athens, Jerusalem, Rome—theroots of our civilization, rich with teachingson human nature and destiny—still call tous disenchanted moderns. But we find itmore and more difficult to listen.

—Brian C. Anderson

Poetry 111

Sometimes regarded as the greatest Italian poet since Leopardi(1798–1837), Eugenio Montale was born in Genoa in 1896, wasawarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1975, and died in Milan in

1981. He served in the infantry in World War I, and settled in Milan in 1948,where he became the chief literary critic for Italy’s foremost newspaper, theCorriere della Sera. He was also a music critic and a translator, and, for hiscourageous opposition to fascism, was made a lifetime member of the ItalianSenate in 1967.

Montale’s poetry is deeply personal, at times almost hermetic. Often it isaddressed to an unknown “you” who, not infrequently, is dead, or to certainwomen, presented under fictive names (in the manner of classical andRenaissance poets), who played important roles in his real and imaginativelives. They are called Esterina, Gerti, Liuba, Vixen, Dora Markus, Mosca, andClizia. Liuba, for example, was someone he glimpsed for only a few minutesin a railway station, where she was fleeing from Italy’s Fascist, anti-Jewish laws.Dora Markus was someone he never met; she was, he explained, “constructedfrom a photograph of a pair of legs” sent him by a friend. Nevertheless, as oneof his finest translators, William Arrowsmith, declares, “the poem devoted toher is no mere exercise in virtuoso evocation; it is the objectification of thepoet’s affinity for a personal truth, the existential meaning of a given fragment.‘The poet’s task,’ Montale observed, ‘is the quest for a particular, not general,truth.’ ” His poems almost always deal with fragmentary experience, the mean-ing of which is either obscure or, possibly, terrifyingly absent. As a poet, he hada preoccupation with images of limitation. This is manifested, Arrowsmithwrites, in the form of “walls, barriers, frontiers, prisons, any confining enclo-sure that makes escape into a larger self or a new community impossible.Hence too his intractable refusal to surrender to any ideology or sodality,whether Communist or Catholic.”

In 1927 Montale fell in love with a married woman, who left her husbandin 1939 and moved in with him. He called her, half-affectionately, half-mock-ingly, Mosca (or Fly), a name he might have borrowed from Ben Jonson’sVolpone. She was a plain woman with poor eyesight, but he remained devotedto her, and when her husband died in 1958, they entered into a marriage thatlasted until her death five years later.

Another woman who would figure prominently in Montale’s work was anAmerican scholar he met in 1932 named Irma Brandeis—later to become theauthor of a brilliant study of Dante’s Divine Comedy called The Ladder ofVision, an examination of segments of Dante’s great epic without recourse toany credence in its theology. In Montale’s poems she becomes his Beatrice, awoman of more-than-human gentleness and perfection. (In an interview,Montale said the women in his poems were “Dantesque, Dantesque,” bywhich he meant, suggests the poet/scholar Rosanna Warren, they were spiritu-alized, not fully individualized beings.) He gave this American, a figure of

POETRY

Eugenio MontaleSelected and introduced by Anthony Hecht

112 WQ Summer 1998

majestic spiritual importance to him, the name of Clizia (might this bederived from ecclesia?). Arrowsmith calls her “the absent center of the poet’slife. . . . Clizia’s sacrifice of physical love” allows her to become “her lover’sspiritual salvation,” and redeems “all those who, like Montale, were sufferingthe darkness of the Fascist years and human evil generally. She ‘redeems thetime,’ ” in a phrase borrowed from T. S. Eliot.

Montale was a learned autodidact and a highly allusive poet, a matter thatadds to the difficulties and puzzles of his poems. His literary influences, forexample, include Plato, the Bible, Dante and the dolcestilnovisti of his circle,Petrarch, Shakespeare and the English Metaphysical poets, Browning, HenryJames, Hopkins, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Jammes, and Valéry, as well as Eliot.

A word needs to be said about William Arrowsmith, Montale’s chief, andamong his best, translators. He was a classicist who has translated Euripides,Aristophanes, and Petronius, as well as Pavese, and, with Roger Shattuck, edit-ed The Craft and Context of Translation (1961). In addition, he has writtenpenetrating commentary on Eliot’s early poetry and on Ruskin. He observes:“Translation, like politics, is an art of the possible; if the translator has done hiswork the best he can expect is that his reader, believing that the text has beentranslated, not merely transcribed or transliterated, will feel something of thecontagion of the original.”

The poems that follow are selected from Montale’s Satura: 1962–1970, astranslated and annotated by William Arrowsmith, and edited by Rosanna Warren.

From Xenia I1

Dear little insectnicknamed Mosca, I don’t know why,this evening, when it was nearly dark,while I was reading Deutero-Isaiah,you reappeared at my side,but without your glassesyou couldn’t see me,and in the blur, without their glitter,I didn’t know who you were.

2

Minus glasses and antennae,poor insect, wingèdonly in imagination,a beaten-up Bible and nonetoo reliable either, black night,a flash of lightning, thunder, and thennot even the storm. Could it beyou left so soon, withouta word? But it’s crazy, my thinkingyou still had lips.

3

At the St. James in Paris I’ll have to ask fora room for one. (They don’t like single guests.) Dittoin the fake Byzantium of your Venetianhotel; and then, right off, hunting downthe girls at the switchboard,

Poetry 113

always your pals; and then leaving againthe minute my three minutes are up,and the wanting you back,if only in one gesture,one habit of yours.

4

We’d worked out a whistle for the worldbeyond, a token of recognition.Now I’m trying variations, hopingwe’re all dead already and don’t know it.

7

Self-pity, infinite pain and anguishof the man who worships this world here and now,who hopes and despairs of another. . .(who dares speak of another world?). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

“Strana pietà...” (Azucena, Act II)

8

Your speech so halting and tactlessis the only speech that consoles me.But the tone has changed, the color too.I’ll get used to hearing you, decoding youin the click-clack of the teletype,in the spirals of smoke coilingfrom my Brissago cigars.

9

Listening was your only way of seeing.The phone bill comes to almost nothing now.

10

“Did she pray?” “Yes to St. Anthonywho’s in charge of finding lostumbrellas and suchlike thingsin St. Hermes’ cloakroom.”“And that’s it?” “She prayed for her dead too,and for me.”

“Quite enough,” the priest replied.

12

Spring pokes out at a snail’s pace.Never again will I hear you talking of antibioticpoisoning, or the pin in your femur,or the patrimony plucked from youby that thousand-eyed[deleted],long daylights and unbearable hours.Never again will I hear you struggling with the backwashof time, or ghosts, or the logistical problemsof summer.

13

Your brother died young; that little girlwith tousled curls in the oval portrait,looking at me, was you.He wrote music, unpublished, unheard,

114 WQ Summer 1998

now buried away in some trunkor trashed. If what’s written is written,maybe someone, unawares, is rewriting it now.I loved him without ever knowing him.Except for you no one remembered him.I made no inquiries; it’s futile now.After you, I was the only one leftfor whom he ever existed.But we can love a shade, you know,being shades ourselves.

14

They say my poetry is one of nonbelonging.But if it was yours, it was someone’s:it was yours who are no longer form, but essence.They say that poetry at its peakglorifies the All in flight,they say the tortoiseis no swifter than lightning.You alone knewthat movement and stasis are one,that the void is fullness and the clear skycloud at its airiest. So your long journey,imprisoned by bandages and casts,makes better sense to me.Still, knowing we’re a single thing,whether one or two, gives me no peace.

The Death of GodAll religions of the one Godare only one, cooks and cooking vary.I was turning this thought overwhen you interrupted meby tumbling head-over-heelsdown the spiral staircase of the Périgourdineand at the bottom split your sides laughing.A delightful evening, marred only by a moment’sfright. Even the popein Israel said the same thingbut repented when informedthat the supreme Deposed, if he ever existed,had expired.

I Feel RemorseI feel remorse for squashing the mosquitoon the wall, the anton the sidewalk.I feel remorse, but here I am formally garbedfor the conference, the reception.I feel sorry for all, even for the slavewho proffers me advice on the stock market,sorrow for the beggar who gets no alms from me,sorrow for the madman who presidesat the Administrative Council.

Poetry 115

The Black AngelO great soot-blackangel, shelter meunder your wings,let me scrape pastthe bramble spikes, the oven’s shining jets,and fall to my kneeson the dead embers if perchancesome fringe of your feathersremains

o small dark angel,neither heavenly nor human,angel who shines through,changing colors, formlessand multiform, equaland unequal in the swift lightningof your incomprehensible fabulation

o black angel reveal yourselfbut may your splendor not consume me,leave unmelted the mist that haloes you,stamp yourself in my thought,since no eye resists your blazingscoal-black angel shelteringunder the chestnut peddler’s cape

great ebony angelangel duskyor whiteif, weary of my wandering,I clutched your wing and felt itcrunchI could not know you as now I do,in sleep, on waking, in the morningsince between true and false no needlecan stop biped or camel,and the charred residue, the grimeleft on the fingertipsis less than the dustof your last feather, great angelof ash and smoke, mini-angelchimney sweep.

From Two Venetian SequencesII

Farfarella, the gabby doorman, obeying orders,said he wasn’t allowed to disturb the manwho wrote about bullfights and safaris.I implore him to try, I’m a friend of Pound(a slight exaggeration) and deserve specialtreatment. Maybe . . . He picks up the phone,talks listens pleads and, lo, the great bearHemingway takes the hook.He’s still in bed, all that emergesfrom his hairy face are eyes and eczema.Two or three empty bottles of Merlot,

116 WQ Summer 1998

forerunners of the gallon to come.Down in the restaurant we’re all at table.We don’t talk about him but about our dear frienddear Adrienne Monnier, the Rue de L’Odéon,about Sylvia Beach, Larbaud, the roaring thirtiesand the braying fifties. Paris, pigsty London,New York, nauseating, deadly. No hunting in the marshes,no wild ducks, no girls, and notthe faintest thought of a book on such topics.We compile a list of mutual friends whose namesI don’t know. The world’s gone to rot,decaying. Almost in tears, he asks me not to send himpeople of my sort, especially if they’re intelligent.Then he gets up, wraps himself in a bathrobe,hugs me, and shows me to the door.He lived on a few more years, and, dying twice,had the time to read his own obituaries.

It’s RainingIt’s raining. A drizzlewithout backfiringmotorcycles or babiescrying.

It’s rainingfrom a sky withoutclouds.It’s rainingon the nothing we doin these hours of generalstrike.

It’s rainingon your grave at San Feliceat Emaand the earth isn’t shakingbecause there’s no earthquakeor war.

It’s rainingnot on the lovely taleof seasons past,but on the tax-collector’s

briefcase,it’s raining on cuttlefish bonesand bureaucrats.

It’s rainingon the Official Bulletinhere from the open balcony,it’s raining on Parliament,it’s raining on Via Solferino,

it’s raining without the wind’sruffling the cards.

It’s rainingin Hermione’s absenceGod willing,it’s raining because absenceis universaland if the earth isn’t quakingit’s because Arcetrididn’t command it.

It’s raining on the new epistemesof the biped primate,on deified man, on the humanizedheavens, on the snoutsof theologians in overalls

or tuxedos,it’s raining on the progressof the lawsuit,it’s rainingon work-in-regress,on the ailing cypressesin the cemetery, drizzlingon public opinion.

It’s raining but if you appearit’s not water, not atmosphere,it’s raining because when you’re not

here,it’s nothing but absenceand absence can drown.

Reprinted from Satura, Poems by Eugenio Montale. Copyright © 1971 by Arnoldo Mondadori Editore,SpA. English text copyright © 1998 by the William Arrowsmith Estate and Rosanna Warren. Originallypublished in Italian. With permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Co., Inc.

Periodicals 117

THE PERIODICAL OBSERVERReviews of articles from periodicals and specialized journals here and abroad

Politics & Government 119Foreign Policy & Defense 121

Economics, Labor & Business 123Society 126

Press & Media 128

130 Religion & Philosophy132 Science, Technology

& Environment136 Arts & Letters139 Other Nations

One after another, the economicallyailing countries of Asia have gone to

the International Monetary Fund (IMF),desperate for a massive infusion of money,and have reluctantly agreed to take the bittermedicine prescribed: fundamental econom-ic reform, along Western, market-orientedlines. All but forgotten is the Asian “miracle”that had dazzled the world for a quarter-cen-tury. Now, even the foremost champion of“Asian values,” Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew, isa bit on the defensive. “There are certainweaknesses in Confucianism,” he admits inTime (Mar. 16, 1998).

But “Asian values” are no more responsiblefor the region’s current distress than they werefor its stunning success, argues Francis Fuku-yama, a professor of public policy at GeorgeMason University, writing in Commentary(Feb. 1998). Before, credit was given to “acombination of the work ethic, respect forcommunity and authority, and a tradition ofpaternalistic government,” he notes, though,in fact, Confucian values had to be combinedwith values imported from the West. “Econ-omic growth was contingent on the rejectionby Asians of important elements of their owncultural heritage, including the Mandarin dis-dain for commerce and physical labor.” In thesame way, Fukuyama says, today blame isassigned to Asian values because they suppos-edly “led to nepotistic credit allocation, anoverly meddlesome state, and a disastrous lackof transparency in financial transactions.” Butin fact, he observes, “the causes of crisis varyfrom country to country.”

The currency crisis began in May 1997when speculators, sensing weakness in theThai economy, began selling off the baht.They then moved on to the Indonesian rupi-

ah, the Malaysian ringgit, the Philippine peso,and other currencies. Throughout SoutheastAsia, firms that had taken out loans denomi-nated in American dollars were suddenlyunable to earn enough in local currency topay off their debts. This threatened bankinginstitutions, which also had borrowed billionsof dollars. Thailand obtained a $17 billionbailout loan from the IMF, and Indonesia bor-rowed $40 billion. The crisis cost PresidentSuharto his presidency. Meanwhile, in SouthKorea, business and financial institutionsfound themselves with short-term foreigndebts, totaling some $110 billion byOctober—more than three times the country’sforeign exchange assets. Nervous investorsbegan selling Korean won and the IMFstepped in with a $57 billion loan, which, likethe others, had major conditions attached.

This was a big mistake, contendsHarvard University economist Martin

Feldstein, former chairman of PresidentRonald Reagan’s Council of EconomicAdvisers. The IMF, which is strongly influ-enced by the United States, is wrong to insistthat South Korea and other Asian countriesdrastically overhaul their economies, hemaintains in Foreign Affairs (Mar.-Apr.1998). In Southeast Asia, where the curren-cy collapses stemmed from overvalued andfixed exchange rates, the “proper remedy”would be “a variant of the traditional IMFmedicine tailored specifically to each coun-try—some combination of reduced govern-ment spending, higher taxes, and tightercredit.” But instead of relying on privatebanks and mainly just monitoring perfor-mance, the IMF “took the lead” itself in pro-viding credit to Thailand and Indonesia, and

Unnecessary Surgery in Asia?A Survey of Recent Articles

118 WQ Summer 1998

demanded wholesale change. In Indonesia,the fund enumerated “a long list of reforms,specifying in minute detail such things as theprice of gasoline and the manner of sellingplywood,” and told the regime to end thecountry’s widespread corruption and curtailthe special business privileges used to enrichSuharto’s family and political allies.Desirable as these reforms might be,Feldstein observes, they were not necessary todefuse the economic crisis.

The situation in South Korea, which hasthe 11th-largest economy in the world, is

more important and different, Feldstein says.The Korean economy was performing well. Itsforeign-debt problem “was clearly a case oftemporary illiquidity rather than fundamentalinsolvency,” he says. All that South Koreaneeded was “coordinated action by creditorbanks to restructure its short-term debts,lengthening their maturity and providing addi-tional temporary credits to help meet the inter-est obligations.” Instead, the IMF insisted thatSouth Korea go on a regimen of higher taxes,reduced spending, and high interest rates.Seoul was also forced to open its economywider to foreign investors, and to make othermajor changes. Again, the IMF overstepped itsauthority, Feldstein says. Many of the reforms“would probably improve the long-term per-formance of the Korean economy,” he con-cedes, but South Korea could return to theinternational capital markets without them.Indeed, by emphasizing the Korean economy’sstructural and institutional problems, he says,the IMF made the situation worse.

There is a terrible irony in forcing SouthKorea and other countries to open their capitalmarkets further, writes Columbia Universityeconomist Jagdish Bhagwati in Foreign Affairs(May-June 1998), because “short-term, capitalinflow played a principal role in their troublesin the first place.” A leading free-trade advocate,he nevertheless dissents from “the mainstreamview [that] a world of full capital mobility con-tinues to be inevitable and immensely desir-able.” Though Wall Street naturally takes thatview, free capital mobility, he maintains, is notthe same as “free trade in widgets and life insur-ance policies,” and is inherently crisis-prone.“The Asian crisis,” he says, “cannot be separat-ed from the excessive borrowings of foreignshort-term capital as Asian economies loosenedup their capital account controls and enabledtheir banks and firms to borrow abroad.”

Economic thinkers from very differentschools of thought have somehow managed tofind in the Asian agony evidence to confirmtheir particular faith, economist Paul Krugman,of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,wryly observes in the New York Times Magazine(May 3, 1998). He himself is one of the feweconomists credited—by persons other thanthemselves, that is—with having anticipatedthe Asian crisis. More than three years ago, inan article in Foreign Affairs (Nov.-Dec. 1994),he argued that efficiency gains, essential tolong-term growth, had played only a small partin the success of the East Asian “tigers.” Theirspectacular growth would slow, he suggested.Still, he notes now, if he predicted anything, “itwas a gradual slowdown—not the sudden cata-strophe that has overtaken the region.”

Even before that “catastrophe,” some of theregion’s leaders were thinking of Westernizingtheir economies, maintains Sebastian Mallaby,the Economist’s Washington bureau chief, writ-ing in the National Interest (Summer 1998).Though South Korea’s economy had been“performing splendidly,” at least until the mar-ket for semiconductors collapsed in 1996, mostKorean economists talked even then “about theneed to deregulate, to break up the conglomer-ates known as chaebol, to create a moreWestern style of corporate governance by fos-tering sophisticated banks and equity investors.”

Though the IMF reforms “will not beswallowed whole” anywhere, Mallaby

believes, their ultimate effect will be benefi-cial, making Asian economies “less state-directed, more transparent, and more open toforeigners; in short, more Western.” And hemarvels at the reluctance of Feldstein,Fukuyama, and other American conservatives“to celebrate the latest evidence from Asia forthe superiority of their Western system.”

In the long run, Fukuyama responds, mostof the reforms probably are desirable. “Butthere is something to be said for prudence,”he believes. Global competition would bringabout many of the changes anyway—withoutstirring up nationalistic resentment. Andcountries must be allowed to elaborate theeconomic implications of democracy andmarkets in accordance with their own cul-tures. It would be very strange, he says, toconclude “that the central Westernidea . . . must be equated” with whatever par-ticular policies are in favor at the momentwith the technocrats at the IMF.

Periodicals 119

POLITICS & GOVERNMENT

America’s Two Revolutions“A Tale of Two Reactions” by Mark Lilla, in The New York Review of Books (May 14, 1998), 1755

Broadway, 5th floor, New York, N.Y. 10019–3780; “The Southern Captivity of the GOP” by ChristopherCaldwell, in The Atlantic Monthly (June 1998), 77 N. Washington St., Boston, Mass. 02114.

Two cultural revolutions have occurred inrecent decades, and together they areredefining American politics—but neitherRight nor Left has been able to bring itself toaccept the fact. So argues Lilla, who teachespolitics at New York University.

The first revolution—call it “the ’60s”—delegitimized public authority, weakened thefamily, and undermined standards of privatemorality. Conservatives continually deplorethis decline but fail to explain its causes,pointing instead to such culprits as moralweakness, self-indulgence, and nihilism.“What they refuse to consider,” says Lilla, “isthe darker side of our own American creed”of individualism and egalitarianism.

The second cultural revolution, he con-tends, is “the shift in political and economicattitudes” in the 1980s. Thanks to the Reaganrevolution, “most Americans now believe(rightly or wrongly) that economic growthwill do more for them than economic redis-tribution, and that to grow rich is good. It istaken as axiomatic that the experiments of

the Great Society failed and that new experi-ments directed by Washington would be fool-hardy. Regulation is considered dépassé, andunions are seen as self-serving, corrupt orga-nizations that only retard economic growth.”Liberals of the Nation school deplore thisseismic shift in attitudes, Lilla observes, andusually blame it on a corrupt campaignfinance system that favors the wealthy. Nearlyeveryone is worse off because of the Reaganrevolution, according to the Left, but theysomehow have been fooled into thinkingthey’re better off.

In reality, Lilla writes, both cultural rev-olutions have been successful, are over—and are basically one revolution. The resultis “a morally lax yet economically success-ful capitalist society.” President BillClinton’s “ ’60s morals and ’80s politics donot seem particularly contradictory to themajority of the American public that sup-ports him,” Lilla points out. Indeed, anypolitical agenda that rejects one—but notthe other—of the two revolutions is

Washington’s GiftWriting in the Hudson Review (Spring 1998), essayist Joseph Epstein ponders the

life of one political leader who did not end his career, as so many do today, “happilypeddl[ing] their influence in large law firms.”

Although he understood power and knew how to use it, unlike the case with almostevery other political leader of his importance, there is no strong evidence that GeorgeWashington loved power, either for its own sake or for the perquisites that it broughthim. He was a thoughtful but not a speculative man, and neither is there any seriousevidence that he had a strong vision for America, a vision of stately grandeur or ofhuman happiness. Why, then, did he accept the most arduous service his nation offered,not once but over and over again?

Because, the only answer is, of a profound sense of duty that derived from his,Washington’s, moral character. [It] is the only way to account for the continual tests towhich Washington put himself, throughout his life, depriving himself of the leisure andcontentment of the private life for which he always longed. His retirement was short-lived, for he died in 1799, three years after he left office. He died, it is reported, stoically,in pain and with no last words of wisdom on his lips. If his life seems sacred, it isbecause it seems in the final analysis sacrificial, a donation to the state.

120 WQ Summer 1998

“doomed to failure.”Republicans seem determined to prove

that point, according to Caldwell, a seniorwriter for the conservative Weekly Standard.He argues that the GOP is increasingly inthrall to the South, and that its “tradition ofputting values—particularly Christian val-ues—at the center of politics” is alienatingeven conservative voters in other regions.“The Republicans would like to think thatAmericans are the dupes of a lecherousArkansas sleazeball, just as the Democratsin the 1980s saw voters as gulled by a senileB-movie warmonger. But Clinton’s success,like Reagan’s, has to do with American

beliefs and the extent to which he embodiesthem and his opponents do not.” On issuessuch as gay rights, the environment, andwomen in the workplace, Caldwell says,“the country has moved leftward.” TheGOP may cling to power, but it will not“rule from a place in Americans’ hearts”until it changes.

Clinton-style blending may be a goodshort-term solution, but in Lilla’s view,“healthy democratic politics” requires a “per-ceptible distinction between right and left.”This vital divide “will naturally reappear,” hebelieves, once the political system fullyassimilates the two revolutions.

The Proud History of Voter Apathy“Limits of Political Engagement in Antebellum America: A New Look at the Golden Age ofParticipatory Democracy” by Glenn C. Altschuler and Stuart M. Blumin, in The Journal of

American History (Dec. 1997), 1125 E. Atwater Ave., Bloomington, Ind. 47401–3701.

As clucks of disapproval aboutAmericans’ political apathy and low voterturnout have grown louder in recent years,many historians have looked back to thedecades before the Civil War as a timewhen Americans (at least the white maleseligible to vote) were enthusiasticallyengaged in politics. In that golden age, cit-izens immersed themselves in politics,understood “the issues,” flocked to meet-ings and rallies, and faithfully voted onelection days as if taking part in a solemnreligious rite. “More than in any subse-quent era,” one such historian has written,“political life formed the veryessence of the pre-Civil Wargeneration’s experience.”

Not quite, say Altschulerand Blumin, professors ofAmerican studies andAmerican history, respective-ly, at Cornell University.Closely examining politicallife during the 1840s and ’50sin 16 county seats and smallcities, they found that politi-cal apathy is hardly a strictlymodern phenomenon. In acomplaint characteristic ofthe period, the DubuqueDaily Times editorialized in1859 that the “better portion”of the electorate “retire in dis-gust from the heat and tur-

moil of political strife. They leave primarymeetings, and County, District and StateConventions to political gamblers and partyhacks.”

Altschuler and Blumin found that ante-bellum politics was much like our own: thatlawyers and businessmen predominatedamong the politically active; that local partycaucuses and conventions were often thinlyattended, even when there were close con-tests; that interest in campaigns slackenedin off-year elections; that “spontaneous”outpourings of support for candidates atmajor campaign rallies were nearly always

GOP “Wide-Awake” clubs march in Hartford for Lincoln in July1860. Popular enthusiasm displaced political apathy that year.

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pumped up by imported party workers; andthat the political parties did not rely on thecivic conscience of their supporters to getthem to the polls but rather used organizersand treats such as whiskey to make surethey voted.

In short, those people who were deeplycommitted to political affairs worked hardto influence those who were not,Altschuler and Blumin say. “The veryintensity of this ‘partisan imperative’ sug-

gests the magnitude of the task partyactivists perceived and set out to perform.”The big turnout at the polls during theperiod reflects their success in this effortmore than it does “the broad and deeppolitical conviction” of the electorate, asthe dewy-eyed historians would have it.Indeed, write the authors, “Americandemocracy found its greatest validation inthe peaceful and apolitical aftermath of thestrident political campaign.”

FOREIGN POLICY & DEFENSE

The Phony China Threat“On the Myth of Chinese Power Projection Capabilities” by Rick Reece, in Breakthroughs

(Spring 1998), Security Studies Program, Massachusetts Institute of Technology,292 Main St. (E38-603), Cambridge, Mass. 02139.

Is China building up its armed strength toexpand its presence in the South China Sea,intimidate its neighbors, and ultimatelyreplace the United States as the dominantpower in Asia? Some analysts claim that it is,with the immediate aim of gaining control ofthe sea-lanes through which Mideast oil istransported to the region. But Reece, amarine lieutenant colonel and 1997–98Marine Corps Fellow in the Security StudiesProgram at the Massachusetts Institute ofTechnology, contends that China hasnowhere near the military muscle it wouldneed to do that.

During the last 10 years, China has occu-pied islands, reefs, and islets throughout theSouth China Sea, skirmishing with rivalclaimants such as Vietnam and the Philip-pines. The resulting tensions in the strategi-cally important area have helped propel anEast Asian arms race. But the only place occu-pied by China that has any military signifi-cance is Woody Island, the largest of theParacel Islands, Reece says, and, at most, itprovides an airfield “for limited refuelings andemergency landings, not a forward base forstaging assaults in the South China Sea.”

China could airlift two divisions (25,000troops) to attack a foe beyond its territorialwaters, Reece observes, sending reinforce-ments once it seized a good port. However, itlacks ground-attack aircraft to support opera-tions more than about 300 miles from home.China also “does not practice large-scaleamphibious operations or naval gunfire sup-port of landing operations.” At least two years

of hard training would be needed to developan effective amphibious force, he says.

What about airpower? China has bought72 Russian SU-27 fighter jets in recentyears—the equivalent of one U.S. wing. Butwhile it has also acquired aerial-refuelingtechnology from Iran, the Chinese Air Forcecurrently lacks the skills to use it. So thefighters cannot fly into the southern reachesof the South China Sea. If they did, theywould confront “the air forces of Singapore,Malaysia and Indonesia, all of which possessadvanced American or British aircraft andwould be operating relatively close to friend-ly air bases.” Aircraft carriers? China hasnone. (The United States has 12.)

Beijing would need a “blue water” navy topursue any larger regional ambitions, Reecenotes. But a 1996 study indicates that Chinacould not build or buy a modern regionalnavy by 2010 “without major assistance,” hesays. “China does not possess the powerplant, avionics and metallurgy technologiesrequired to manufacture aircraft that canoperate from aircraft carriers in any weather.Chinese pilots have little experience flyingwithout ground control.” And Beijing doesn’thave a lot of money to spend. Its militarybudget is $32 billion; the U.S. defense bud-get is $264 billion.

Without a blue water navy, Reece says,China will be limited to minor excursionsand “showing the flag.” As for protection ofthe sea-lanes on which it depends for import-ed oil, China, Reece says, is likely to do whatJapan does: rely on the United States.

The Gift of Berlin“The Fall of Berlin and the Rise of a Myth” by Donald E. Shepardson, in The Journal ofMilitary History (Jan. 1998), Society for Military History, George C. Marshall Library,

Virginia Military Institute, Lexington, Va. 24450–1600.

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Almost as soon as Soviet troops hoisted theirflag over the Reichstag building in Berlin onApril 30, 1945, a myth arose that onlyAmerican naiveté (in contrast with Britishrealism) had prevented British and Americanforces from taking the German capital first.Former secretary of state Henry Kissinger

recently expressed this view in his 1994 bookDiplomacy. Shepardson, a historian at theUniversity of Northern Iowa, replies that,faced with hard choices amid the rush ofevents in the spring of 1945, General DwightD. Eisenhower and his superiors were morerealistic than their later critics.

Eisenhower finally decided on April 14,1945, to halt his forces at the Elbe River, 50miles west of Berlin. The United States,Shepardson notes, wanted to defeat Germanyquickly with minimum casualties, not only forhumane reasons but so that U.S. troops couldbe deployed to the Pacific, where the situationappeared grim. The invasion of Okinawa that

month had encountered fanatical Japaneseresistance, and the atom bomb’s effectivenesswas still unknown. Moreover, the Allied lead-ers were reluctant to alienate Joseph Stalin.They were counting on Soviet support in thewar against Japan. A confrontation over Berlinwould have shocked the American public,

which had come to look on theSoviet Union as a gallant ally. InBritain, it would have split PrimeMinister Winston Churchill’scoalition government, since hisLabor Party partners would neverhave supported it.

In a 17-day campaign thatbegan on April 16, the Red Armycaptured Berlin, paying a hugecost: 80,000 dead or missing,280,000 wounded, 2,000 artillerypieces destroyed, and more than900 aircraft lost. But Stalin alsofelt constrained by the need tomaintain a united front againstJapan, and thus did not chal-lenge his allies over the divisionof Berlin to which they hadagreed at Yalta in February. In

July, American, British, and French forcestook possession of their respective zones.“Here was a gift,” Shepardson says.

The gift—which bedeviled Stalin and hisheirs for the next 45 years—would not havebeen necessary if the Soviets had attackedBerlin before the Yalta Conference. By theend of January 1945, the Red Army wascamped less than 50 miles from Berlin. ButStalin decided to pause. In later years,Shepardson dryly notes, Soviet critics wouldfault Marshal Georgi Zhukov for not per-suading Stalin to press on. The two Sovietleaders, the critics said, should have beenmore realistic.

The Present Danger“Global Utopias and Clashing Civilizations: Misunderstanding the Present” by John Gray,

in International Affairs (Jan. 1998), Chatham House, 10 St. James’s Square,London SW1Y 4LE, England.

The end of the Cold War has trans-formed the world—but not in the ways por-

trayed by two prominent scholarly proph-ets, contends Gray, a professor of European

In 1945, as World War II drew to a close, war-weary Ameri-cans were in no mood to confront their Soviet ally over Berlin.

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ECONOMICS, LABOR & BUSINESS

The Perils of Europe’s Promised UnionA Survey of Recent Articles

European union—not just a commonmarket but a common currency, a

common defense, and a common diploma-cy—has been talked about for decades,”Ronald Steel, author of Walter Lippmannand the American Century (1980), notes inthe New Republic (June 1, 1998). “In fact,the talk lasted so long that union came toresemble the kingdom of heaven: somethingto be devoutly desired but deferred into theindefinitely receding future. Many, myselfincluded, doubted that European countrieswould ever scrap that essential attribute of

sovereignty—their currencies—as the priceof unity.” But now, 11 European nations aredoing just that.

Mere months from now, on January 1,1999, if all goes according to plan, France,Germany, and the other nine countries inthe European Monetary Union (EMU) willfreeze their exchange rates, establishing, ineffect, a single currency. People and compa-nies will be able to write checks, use creditcards, and keep bank accounts in euros.Responsibility for monetary policy will shiftfrom Germany’s Bundesbank and the other

thought at the London School ofEconomics. What is different—and dan-gerous—today, Gray maintains, is “the newweakness of states.”

Francis Fukuyama’s famous 1992 predic-tion that liberal democracies will eventual-ly prevail everywhere is unlikely ever tocome true, Gray argues. He offers one sim-ple reason: it is not whether a governmentis a liberal democracy that determines itslegitimacy, but whether it meets the mostfundamental needs of its citizens, namely,protection from “the worst evils: war andcivil disorder, criminal violence, and lackof the means of decent subsistence.”

And contrary to Samuel Huntington’s1993 “clash of civilizations” thesis, wars arestill “commonly waged between (and with-in) nationalities and ethnicities, notbetween different civilizations,” Grayobserves. “[The] old, familiar logic of terri-tories and alliances often impels membersof the same ‘civilization’ into enmity andmembers of different ‘civilizations’ intomaking common cause.” After armed con-flict broke out between Armenia and Azer-baijan in 1988, for instance, such logicdrove Iran to side with Christian Armenia,not Islamic Azerbaijan.

Fukuyama’s and Huntington’s “apoca-lyptic beliefs” only encourage the disablingillusion “that the difficult choices andunpleasant trade-offs that have always beennecessary in the relations of states willsomeday be redundant,” Gray says. But

they are unavoidable, he declares. “Ad-vancing democracy does not always fosterpolitical stability. Preserving peace doesnot always coincide with the promotion ofhuman rights.”

In a variety of ways, Gray argues, the endof the Cold War rivalry has dangerouslyundermined the legitimacy of states. Somestates, deprived of their strategic value,must make do without the outside supportthat previously sustained them. In othernations, such as Italy and Japan, the disap-pearance of Cold War imperatives has ledto the disintegration of long-establishedpolitical arrangements.

Economic globalization, encouraged bythe collapse of the Soviet Union, has madeit harder for governments of all kinds tolimit the economic risks to their citizensthat come with free markets, creating “anew politics of economic insecurity.”Thanks in part to the unregulated trade inarms in the global economy, Gray notes,many modern states are unable to main-tain a monopoly on organized violence.“Today wars are often not fought by agentsof sovereign states but waged by politicalorganizations, irregular armies, ethnic ortribal militias and other bodies.”

“We have inherited from the totalitarianera a reflex of suspicion of government,”Gray concludes. “Yet no political doctrinecould be less suited to the needs of ourtime than that which is embodied in thecult of the minimum state.”

124 WQ Summer 1998

national central banks to the new EuropeanCentral Bank. On January 1, 2002, euro-denominated notes and coins will be intro-duced, and six months later, the deutschemark, the franc, and the lira will be history.

While Washington is upbeat about all thisin public, Steel says it “fears that a Europemoving toward real economic integrationmay be a less reliable and less predictablepartner for the United States—or perhaps noteven a partner at all.”

After World War II, American liberal inter-nationalists were all for European unifica-tion. But now that the long-cherished dreamis moving dramatically closer to reality, it isnot just liberal neo-isolationists such as Steelwho are making gloomy prognostications.Harvard University economist MartinFeldstein, writing in Foreign Affairs(Nov.–Dec. 1997) and the Journal ofEconomic Perspectives(Fall 1997), warns thatmonetary union “willchange the political char-acter of Europe in waysthat could lead to con-flicts in Europe and con-frontations with theUnited States.”

The one-size-fits-allmonetary policy, Feldsteinargues, is likely to provokegreat discord among the Europeannations, especially when some ofthem experience severe unemployment andfind the new central bank unwilling to cutinterest rates. He predicts that the adverseeffects of a single currency on unemploymentand inflation will outweigh any gains that itwill produce by facilitating trade and the flowof capital among the EMU members.

Economist Milton Friedman, now withthe Hoover Institution, at Stanford Uni-

versity, agrees. In the United States, wherethere is a common language, a strong nationalgovernment, and free movement of goods, cap-ital, and people from one part of the country toanother, a common currency makes sense, hepoints out in New Perspectives Quarterly (Fall1997). But in Europe, where those conditionsdo not obtain to the same extent, it doesn’t, hecontends. There, flexible exchange rates haveprovided a better way for individual nations toadjust to the ups and downs of the businesscycle. “If one country is affected by negative

shocks that call for, say, lower wages relative toother countries, that can be achieved by achange in one price, the exchange rate, ratherthan by requiring changes in thousands onthousands of separate wage rates or the emigra-tion of labor.” Come January, however, that willno longer be possible for the 11 EMU nations.

The “real rationale” for monetary union isnot economic, Feldstein writes, but political:the formation of a political union, “aEuropean federal state with responsibility for aEurope-wide foreign and security policy aswell as for what are now domestic economicand social policies.” But once the countriesare in EMU, and unable to get out, he argues,

“conflicts over economic policiesand interference withnational sovereigntycould reinforce long-standing animositiesbased on history,nationality, and reli-gion.” Even anotherEuropean war is possi-ble, he maintains.“Germany’s assertionthat it needs to be con-tained in a largerEuropean politicalentity is itself a warn-

ing. Would such a structure containGermany, or tempt it to exercise hegemonicleadership?”

“Could Feldstein be right?” wondersIsabel Hilton, a columnist for the Guardianin London, writing in the New Yorker (Apr.27 & May 4, 1998). “Is it possible that theeuro could bring the whole edifice ofEurope—with its new grand buildings, itsthousands of bureaucrats, and its volumes oflaw—crashing down upon our heads? Theidea is one that some European voters—whohaven’t yet bought their leaders’ party line—seem to share. Most, in fact, have respondedto the idea of a single currency with suspi-cion.” Hilton visited finance ministers inFrance, Italy, and Britain (which has electedto stay out of the EMU for the time being),and she found that none of them “believed inFeldstein’s prophecy of doom, but each ofthem knew that monetary union was a leapinto the unknown.”

That is because Europe is reversing theusual process of creating a state, arguesMichael Portillo, who served in British primeminister John Major’s Conservative cabinet

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Taming the Corporation“The New Meaning of Corporate Social Responsibility” by Robert B. Reich, in

California Management Review (Winter 1998), Univ. of California,5549 Haas School of Business #1900, Berkeley, Calif. 94720–1900.

Back in the 1950s, it was a commonplaceto say that major corporations ought to treatemployees like family members and to func-tion as good citizens in their communities.But times have changed, notes Reich, a pro-fessor of economic and social policy atBrandeis University and former U.S. secre-tary of labor. Today, he argues, governmentneeds to step in and define corporations’social obligations.

The current conventional wisdom, Reichobserves, is that publicly held corporationshave only one responsibility: to maximize thevalue of investors’ shares. And if doing thatmeans laying off large numbers of workers, orgetting 13-year-olds in Latin America to work12-hour days for a pittance, so be it. After all,by helping to see that society’s productiveassets are arrayed most efficiently, corpora-tions not only benefit investors but promoteeconomic growth and the creation of jobs.True, says Reich, but society still may wantthe artificial creatures of law known as corpo-rations to take into account other considera-tions, such as the welfare of workers andcommunities.

Once, in the era after World War II, thetop executives of America’s major corpora-

tions envisioned management’s job, as FrankAbrams, then chairman of Standard Oil ofNew Jersey, did in a 1951 address: “to main-tain an equitable and working balanceamong the claims of the various directlyinterested groups . . . stockholders, employ-ees, customers, and the public at large.” Withinvestors quiescent and boards often docile,Reich writes, managers then could refrainfrom laying off employees, even though thatmight run counter to the best interest of theshareholders. But even in that era, he notes,corporations could take a minimalist view oftheir social responsibilities, as textile manu-facturers did, for instance, when they aban-doned the Northeast in search of cheap laborelsewhere.

Government does already “impose, by law,procedures by which stakeholders other thaninvestors can participate directly in corporatedecisions,” Reich observes. Collective bar-gaining, as spelled out in the National LaborRelations Act, is an example. But furtherexpanding participation in this way, he pointsout, would only “prolong and complicate”corporate decision making, and promoteinefficiency.

Reich believes that Washington must

during 1992–97. “Normally, a new stateestablishes its institutions of governmentfirst, and then goes on to create its policiesand its currency. In this case, the commonEuropean policies and the currency arebeing created first,” he observes in theNational Interest (Spring 1998).

What is missing, Portillo says, is “a sin-gle European people. . . . The peo-

ples of Europe are too different from oneanother, their histories, cultures, languages,and values are too diverse, for them to bebrought together into one state.” Forcingindividual nation-states, which are democra-tic, into the European Union, which in itselfis not, is a grave mistake, he believes. “Thetraditional danger in Europe has come fromextremist nationalism,” Portillo contends.“Political union seems likely to rekindle it, asnational interests are ignored by policymak-

ers who are both remote and irremovable.”The “forced march to unity” is endanger-

ing what has already been achieved in muchof western and southern Europe, namely, “anew model of liberal order,” argues TimothyGarton Ash, a Fellow at Oxford University,writing in Foreign Affairs (Mar.–Apr. 1998).“What we should be doing now is rather toconsolidate this liberal order and to spread itacross the continent. Liberal order, not unity,is the right strategic goal for European policyin our time.” In Europe, “enlargement” is thetheme of many critics of rapid unification.

But unity is the goal that most Europeannations are now pursuing. “It is difficult to seehow the European Monetary Union can suc-ceed,” writes former secretary of state HenryKissinger on the op-ed page of theWashington Post (May 12, 1998). “It is evenmore difficult to imagine that it will be per-mitted to fail.”

126 WQ Summer 1998

SOCIETY

Johnny’s Grades Aren’t So Bad“Are U.S. Students Behind?” by Gerald W. Bracey, in The American Prospect

(Mar.–Apr. 1998), P.O. Box 383080, Cambridge, Mass. 02238.

Ever since a federal government report15 years ago warned about a rising tide ofmediocrity in the nation’s public schools,

reformers have pointed with alarm to thepoor performance of American students ininternational comparisons of test scores.

Caution: Economists at Work“Reassessing Trends in U.S. Earnings Inequality” by Robert I. Lerman, in Monthly Labor Review

(Dec. 1997), Bureau of Labor Statistics, Washington, D.C. 20212.

That earnings inequality has been increas-ing in the United States is now conventionalwisdom. But just what is “earnings inequali-ty”? The answer is not as straightforward asone might think—and neither is the trend,argues Lerman, an economist at AmericanUniversity.

What data you measure, and how youmeasure them, goes a long way toward deter-mining what answers you get, he says.Economists often measure inequality as thedistribution of annual earnings among full-time, year-round workers, and even frequent-ly further limit their sample to men or toworkers within a certain age range. This maybe fine when trying to gauge progress towardsome ideal, Lerman says, but it is not the wayto assess how large forces such as trade andtechnological change are altering the overallU.S. wage distribution.

Lerman examined census data from theSurvey of Income and Program Participation,as well as the more commonly used CurrentPopulation Survey. Defining “earnings” ascompensation per hour for all hours worked byall workers in the economy, he got this result:wage inequality increased between 1980 and’86 (as other researchers have found), but then

stayed more or less the same through 1995.This finding is not necessarily at odds with

other, seemingly contradictory trends. Forexample, the earnings gap between the edu-cated and the less educated appears to havewidened since the mid-1980s. But it has beenoffset by the narrowing wage gaps betweenmen and women, and between blacks andwhites.

“Trends in inequality turn out to be highlysensitive to the definition of earnings and thesample of workers used,” Lerman points out.An Organization for Economic Cooperationand Development publication shows thatbetween 1979 and 1991, earnings inequalityin the United States grew among full-time,year-round workers by nearly 18 percent, butdecreased by one percent among all workers,and declined by 11 percent when measuredagainst the working-age population.

Lerman’s conclusion: “Earnings inequali-ty did increase for some groups of workers,”and certain forces, such as trade and tech-nology, may have had an impact on the over-all situation. But in the U.S. labor market asa whole, the net effect—contrary to the con-ventional wisdom—has not been higherwage inequality.

define corporate social responsibilities on“major questions”: should they contract with“sweatshops” in Asia and Latin America?Should profitable companies lay off unneed-ed employees or retrain them for new jobs?These are not only ethical questions, Reichmaintains, but issues of public policy, involv-ing the weighing of competing social costs.

But corporations must not be allowed tosubvert the process by political means—

through lobbying, campaign contributions,and advertising. “It is not possible to have itboth ways,” Reich maintains. “The moderncorporation cannot simultaneously claim, asa matter of public morality and public poli-cy, that its only legitimate societal mission isto maximize shareholder returns, while atthe same time actively seek to influencesocial policies intended to achieve all theother things a society may wish to do.”

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Did Blacks Fight for Dixie?Thousands of blacks served the Confederate Army in support roles, but how many

enlisted as combat soldiers? Some estimates run as high as 30,000, but in an interviewin Southern Cultures (1998: Vol. 4, No. 1), journalist Tony Horwitz, author ofConfederates in the Attic (1998), says that, like leading Civil War historians, hebelieves the actual total was far lower.

Apart from the lack of firm documentation, several things make me skeptical. If therewere already thousands of blacks fighting for the South, why did the ConfederateCongress engage in heated debate about enlisting them in 1865? And why, earlier inthe war, was [Confederate general] Pat Cleburne vilified for proposing that blacks serve?And where are the accounts by Confederates themselves? Almost all the evidence fromthe southern side is negative: “We don’t want black soldiers.” . . .

Now, I do think we have to remain open to the possibility that new evidence mightemerge. Talking to some academics, I sensed a knee-jerk reluctance to believe that anyblacks at all served the South, and this seems wrong-headed to me. I agree with ErvinJordan [author of Black Confederates and Afro-Yankees in Civil War Virginia (1995)]that it’s simplistic and demeaning to regard wartime blacks as a monolithic group whosomehow acted and thought in lock-step. We know there were black slaveholders. Whyshouldn’t there have been blacks who supported the Confederacy, out of personal loyaltyto white soldiers they grew up with, out of fear of northerners, or for other reasons?

But nothing I’ve read or heard so far convinces me that more than a handful actuallyfought. I don’t think we’ll ever know the precise number, but I’d guess that there weremaybe a few hundred who took up arms at one time or another as true soldiers for theConfederacy.

Bracey, author of Final Exam (1995), con-tends that the picture painted is far worsethan the general reality.

Take reading skills, for instance. In amajor 31-nation study in 1992, Americanstudents finished second. Only studentsfrom Finland, a small, homogeneous coun-try, did better. If only the top 10 percent ofstudents are compared, young Americanscome out the best in the world. Yet reform-ers are only interested in calling press con-ferences when there is bad news to report,Bracey notes.

What about math and science? A much-publicized finding from a 1992 study byUniversity of Michigan psychologist Har-old Stevenson and his colleagues is thatonly the top one percent of American stu-dents score as high in math as the averageJapanese student. But that study wasflawed, Bracey maintains: the sampleswere not representative. The American stu-dents, for instance, included a dispropor-tionately large number of children frompoor and non-English-speaking families.

There is a U.S.-Japan gap, Bracey says, “butStevenson’s data exaggerate” it.

Larger, more methodologically sophisti-cated multination studies have provided amore reliable picture, Bracey contends. Ina 1996 study, American eighth-graders got53 percent of the math questions right, justtwo percentage points under the interna-tional average among 41 nations. Theyanswered 58 percent of the science ques-tions correctly, scoring two points abovethe international average. At the fourth-grade level, American students ranked12th in math out of the 26 nations tested,and third in science. (It’s true that onlyabout 15 percent of American studentsscored as high on math as the averageJapanese student. The difference, Braceyspeculates, may be due to the extremepressure put on Japanese youngsters froman early age to get into the right highschool and college.)

“Aside from [Japan and three other]Asian nations at the top and a slightly larg-er number of developing countries at the

128 WQ Summer 1998

PRESS & MEDIA

Big Bad Bird?“Educational Television Is Not an Oxymoron” by Daniel R. Anderson, in

The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science(May 1998), 3937 Chestnut St., Philadelphia, Pa. 19104.

“The worst thing about Sesame Street isthat people believe it is educationally valu-able,” grumped Jane Healy about Big Birdand his friends in her 1990 jeremiad,Endangered Minds. She and other criticsclaim that the long-running, fast-paced

PBS television program mesmerizes young-sters, renders them intellectually passive,shortens their attention spans, and inter-feres with their language development.Extensive research cited by Anderson, apsychologist at the University of Massa-

Where the Black Family Foundered“Migration Experience and Family Patterns in the ‘Promised Land’ ” by Stewart E. Tolnay, in Journal

of Family History (Jan. 1998), Sage Publications, 2455 Teller Road, Thousand Oaks, Calif. 91320.

Did southern blacks who migrated northto Chicago and other cities earlier in thiscentury bring with them a dysfunctional fam-ily culture—a legacy of slavery—that thenplayed havoc with the urban black family?This thesis, popular in the 1950s and late ‘60sbut then seemingly discredited by censusstudies, has been revived in recent years,notably by Nicholas Lemann in his 1991bestseller, The Promised Land. Tolnay, a soci-ologist at the State University of New York atAlbany, contends that southern migrants, infact, “enjoyed greater family stability thannative northerners.” The longer they stayedin the North, however, the more that advan-tage diminished.

In 1940, according to census data, 77 per-cent of the migrants’ children were livingwith two parents, compared with 72 percentof northern-born blacks’ children. Threedecades later, the percentages had declinedbut the gap had widened: 69 percent of thefamilies that had migrated during the pre-

ceding five years were intact, compared with61 percent of their northern-born counter-parts. The migrant “advantage,” significantly,was smaller for southern-born blacks whosemigration had occurred earlier: 65 percent oftheir children were living with both parents.The next two decades saw a drastic decline inthe figures—to 48 percent among “recent”migrants in 1990, 44 percent among “past”migrants, and 37 percent among northern-born blacks. Even so, the migrant “advan-tage” remained.

It is true, Tolnay notes, that the migrants’edge is a bit exaggerated because migrantwomen whose marriages failed sometimesreturned to the South, and so escaped beingcounted in the North. But that was a rela-tively small group. Even if they are included,the pattern—the greater stability of southernblack migrant families—remains much thesame. But this, Tolnay notes, only deepensthe real mystery: what caused the erosion ofthat stability?

bottom,” Bracey points out, “the remainingroughly 30 countries (including all thedeveloped countries of the West) look verymuch alike in their [1996 study] mathe-matics scores.” The story is much the samewith the science grades.

In any event, Bracey argues, emphasizingaverage scores obscures the enormous differ-ences among American students. In the 1992international assessment, for instance, pupilsfrom the top third of American schools had

average scores as high as those of the top twocountries (Taiwan and South Korea), whilethe lowest third of U.S. schools did not evendo as well as the lowest-ranking nation(Jordan).

Educational reformers talk as if the typi-cal American school is in need of majorrepair, Bracey concludes, but the schoolsthat really need it are those with the leastresources and the worst social environ-ments.

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The Swedish Solution“Ombudsman to the Swedes” by Steven Price, in American Journalism Review (Apr. 1998),

8701 Adelphi Road, Adelphi, Md. 20783–1716.

Sweden has what a lot of Americans whoare fed up with news media “excesses” say theywant—a formal nonjudicial system for han-dling complaints against the press. But Price,a lawyer and Fulbright Scholar from NewZealand who is working at the Hot SpringsSentinel-Record in Arkansas, doubts that it pro-vides a good model for the United States.

Sweden’s press ombudsman, who investi-

gates about 450 complaints a year, is appoint-ed by a special committee with representa-tives from the press, the government, and theSwedish Bar Association. The office is fund-ed by the media, not the government. All thedaily newspapers have agreed to abide by acode of ethics concerning accuracy, privacy,and rights of reply. (Broadcasters sign thecode but are not under the ombudsman’s

chusetts at Amherst, shows that, to use a bitof Sesame Street argot, the criticism “justdoesn’t belong.”

Instead of being mesmerized, preschool-ers seem to engage in “selective looking,”he says. Put in a room with toys, the chil-dren looked at and away from the TVscreen relatively often—an average of 150looks an hour, some only brief glances,others lasting several minutes. Older kidstended to pay more attention.

“If, as Healy and others claim, attentionto Sesame Street is reflexively driven byvisual movement and shot changes,”Anderson points out, “then attentionshould be maintained even if the programbecomes difficult or impossible to under-stand.” But when he and his associatesmade the show’s dialogue less comprehen-sible (e.g., by putting it in Greek), the chil-dren paid much less attention. Thatshowed, Anderson says, that meaning mat-ters. Healy drew a different conclusion:that children easily give up on TV that ischallenging. But Anderson cites anotherstudy of educational TV which found thatmaking an announcement for childrensomewhat harder to understand but stillwithin their “developmental level” did notprompt young viewers to turn away.

The claim that Sesame Street’s short seg-ments and fast pace reduce the attentionspans of young viewers seems to havearisen from a 1975 report that attributedthe “hyperactive” behavior of two-year-oldsto watching the program. But the study hadno control group (i.e. a comparison groupthat did not watch the program). And whenAnderson and his colleagues made both anexceptionally fast-paced version of the pro-gram and a slow one, they found that

preschoolers’ postshow attention spans didnot change.

Despite the intellectual passivity rap,Anderson concludes that research indicatesthat young children “are about as cogni-tively active and engaged” with education-al TV programs as they are when they reador listen to stories.

In fact, he notes, several studies show that,even allowing for level of parent educationand other characteristics, children whowatch Sesame Street generally score betterthan others on tests of vocabulary and readi-ness for school. The payoff is apparentlylong-lasting, according to a major study pub-lished last year. It found that among 570 highschool students, those who had watched suchprograms as Sesame Street as five-year-oldsfrequently had higher high school grades inEnglish, math, and science. That resultshould give even Oscar the Grouch some-thing to smile about.

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RELIGION & PHILOSOPHY

Morality and the Modern UniversityA Survey of Recent Articles

The University of Chicago and other elitecolleges and universities are “fundamentallyamoral” institutions. Aside from issuing for-mal condemnations of cheating, plagiarism,and academic fraud, they make almost noeffort to give their students any moral guid-ance. Once it was different, of course. Butthe founding religious purpose of theUniversity of Chicago and many other insti-tutions was lost, and the effort by social sci-entists to develop an independent “scientific”morality proved a failure. “Today, elite uni-versities operate on the belief that there is aclear separation between intellectual andmoral purpose, and they pursue the formerwhile largely ignoring the latter.”

What sounds like a serious indictment ofthe University of Chicago in particular and ofacademe in general is, in fact, drawn from anunusually candid address on “The Aims ofEducation” that was given last year toChicago’s incoming freshmen by John J.Mearsheimer, a professor of political scienceat the university. Philosophy and Literature(Apr. 1998) reprinted the speech to kick off a

symposium including seven other scholars.The issue: whether institutions of higherlearning are, or should be, in Mearsheimer’swords, “largely mum on ethical issues.”

Universities, in his view, have insteadthree aims: to teach undergraduates “to thinkcritically . . . to broaden [their] intellectualhorizons [and] to promote self-awareness.” AUniversity of Chicago education also servesas “a meal ticket,” he observed. Though cost-ing more than $120,000 over four years, itenables those who possess it “to make lots ofmoney” and “achieve an upper-class life-style.” Not that moral questions are unimpor-tant, or that students should pay them littlemind, Mearsheimer said, but “for better orworse,” his university and other such institu-tions offer little help in finding answers. Fewclasses at Chicago, he said, even “discussethics or morality in any detail.”

Wayne C. Booth, an emeritus professor ofEnglish at the University of Chicago, saysthat Mearsheimer doesn’t seem to know whatis going on at their university. “Teachingabout morality and how to think about moral

purview.) The ombudsman reports to theSwedish Press Council, which includes jour-nalists and publishers but is dominated byrepresentatives of the public. If the councilrules against a publication, as it did 46 timeslast year, almost always on the recommenda-tion of ombudsman Per-Arne Jigenius, theoffending newspaper or magazine must pub-lish the council’s decision and is fined about$3,000.

More often, Jigenius is able, drawing onhis 20 years of experience as a newspaper edi-tor, to arrange a settlement, with the publi-cation providing an appropriate correctionand apology. He manages to resolve about 70cases a year in this fashion. The ombudsmanhandles only complaints alleging harm to anindividual from publicity (rather than beefsabout ideological bias and the like), and hedismisses the overwhelming majority of thecomplaints he receives.

Only two or three complaints out of the436 cases Jigenius handled in 1996 ultimate-

ly went to court. But that may be in partbecause libel laws are very weak in Sweden.

“Whatever its limitations,” Price says, “it isclear that in a significant number of cases the[ombudsman] system gives injured membersof the public what they want most—aprompt and inexpensive correction, whilehelping the media avoid what they mostfear—a long and expensive lawsuit.”

But the system may not work well else-where, Price says. It is “a product of a com-bination of factors that may be unique: apopulation that is accustomed to regulationand confident in bureaucracy as a solution tosocial ills; an industry that is prepared tocooperate—with remarkable unanimity—formutual advantage; a government that mayvery well legislate if the media become over-ly irresponsible; and a culture that prizesrationality and consensus, and loathes con-frontation and mudslinging.” That hardlysounds like the rambunctious United Statesof America.

Periodicals 131

The Nothingness of EvilIn Theology Today (Apr. 1998), Jean Bethke Elshtain, a professor of social and polit-

ical ethics at the University of Chicago, ponders the relevance today of Saint Augus-tine’s reflections on evil.

Augustine’s grappling with sin and the relation of sin to evil is the story of his strugglewith Manicheanism. Repudiating the view that evil is an active, polluting force beforewhich good is essentially passive, Augustine insists that evil is something each person has tocontend with because no external force, no devil makes one “do it.” Augustine comes to theconclusion that evil is nothing: It is the removal of good; it is a kind of wasteland of thehuman spirit. . . . He rejects the notion that God created evil as afull-fledged malignant principle. The human person, from free will,commits a sin and partakes of that dearth we name evil. . . .

For Augustine, evil cannot generate. It can only reproduce itselfthrough acts of debased mimesis. Only goodness has power andplenitude and generative force. Evil is a kind of noncreation, adraining away from that which is. “The loss of good has beengiven the name of ‘evil’,” Augustine writes in Book XI of The Cityof God. If evil were generative, one would have to hold that evil isembodied, that matter is the work of an evil demiurge, and thatevil has creative power. This, I believe, is a direction our culturenow tends. Much popular entertainment is awash in Gothic horror, with hauntings,slashings, and supernatural appearances of all kinds. We grant more power to evil thanto good. It is difficult to get out of this essentially dualistic way of thinking, a habit ofmind that, in our time, gives the edge (so to speak) to evil over good. Perhaps that isbecause it is much easier to blame either one’s own nature or some external force for evilthan to see oneself caught in a world in which enmity comports with self-pride and is,deep down, hatred of our own finitude, which, in turn, means animosity toward ourCreator. Augustine’s reflections on evil, in his own time and for ours, constitute a braveand brilliant attempt to strip evil of generative power.

issues goes on almost everywhere here—most obviously, of course, in the humanities,but also in the sciences.” How, he asks, couldanyone teach “Aristotle’s Ethics, the Gospelaccording to St. Matthew, the novels ofDostoievsky, Tolstoy, Jane Austen andMelville, the works of Plato, Kant, andWilliam James—to choose just a few fromthis year’s rich offerings—without engagingstudents in genuine inquiry about what ismoral or ethical behavior, and on what kindof persons they should try to become?”

In response, Mearsheimer concedes thatstudents have the opportunity to discussmoral issues in detail in a “few” classes atChicago, though even in them the teachersproperly leave the students “to figure outtheir own answers.”

To John D. Lyons, a professor of French atthe University of Virginia and former editorof Academe, however, the university

Mearsheimer describes “strikes me as a won-derful place, though very atypical ofAmerican higher education. . . . It looks tome as if the university, and particularly thefaculty, is today more involved, collectively,in providing moral guidance to students thanat any time in the last century.” Their guid-ance takes the form of speech codes, rules ofsexual conduct, and other attempts toenforce political correctness.

That elite institutions of higher educationhave strayed so far from the traditional idealof a liberal education as Mearsheimer’sdescription suggests “stunned” PatrickHenry, a professor of French at WhitmanCollege in Walla Walla, Washington, andcoeditor of Philosophy and Literature.“Mearsheimer’s educational project is strongon critical thinking and promoting self-awareness but, despite the talk of broadeningone’s horizons, it looks rather self-enclosed,

SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY & ENVIRONMENT

The End (of Cheap Oil) Is NearA Survey of Recent Articles

132 WQ Summer 1998

With gasoline as cheap (in constant dol-lars) as it was when the Cadillac was

still king, many Americans are happily toolingaround in gas-guzzling sport-utility behe-moths with all the insouciance of Alfred E.Neuman. They could be in for a big shock, ifsome oil industry specialists are correct.

“What, me worry?” may seem a reasonableattitude on the surface. After all, the Organ-ization of Petroleum Exporting Countries(OPEC) is no longer “a force to be reckonedwith,” observes Fadhil J. Chalabi, executivedirector of the Center for Global EnergyStudies in London and former acting secre-tary general of OPEC (1983–88). OPECshocked the world with two sudden and sub-stantial price increases, in 1973 (accompa-nied by an embargo on shipments to theUnited States), and in the winter of 1978–79during the Iranian Revolution. But thisproved to be OPEC’s “last hurrah,” Chalabiwrites in Foreign Policy (Winter 1997–98), ashigh prices encouraged conservation, explo-ration, and new production, as well as the useof other fuels.

But the cheap oil (about $15 per barrel lastspring) won’t be around forever. Colin J.Campbell argues in the National Interest(Spring 1998), and with Jean H. Laherrère in

Scientific American (Mar. 1998), that thenext oil crunch is just ahead, and it will notbe temporary. “Within the next decade, thesupply of conventional oil will be unable tokeep up with demand,” predict Campbelland Laherrère, both with long careers in theoil industry and both now associated withPetro-consultants in Geneva.

Their conclusion, they note, contradictsthe conventional wisdom in the indus-

try, which—based on unverified estimatesfrom companies and countries gathered bytrade journals—is that there are about onetrillion barrels of “proved” reserves world-wide. That suggests “that crude oil couldremain plentiful and cheap for 43 moreyears—probably longer, because officialcharts show reserves growing.”

The trouble with that comforting picture,say Campbell and Laherrère, is partly thatthe estimate of “reserves” (i.e. the amountthat companies can pump out of known oilfields before having to abandon them) isunrealistic—too high, by about 190 billionbarrels. More important, not all reserves arecreated equal. It is not true, they point out,“that the last bucket of oil can be pumpedfrom the ground just as quickly as the barrels

contains no social conscience, and lacks anethical dimension. Its so-called benefits areelitist, monetary, and egocentric.” Henryfavors “forcing students to do critical moralthinking and to come to terms with the con-cept of moral excellence and with whatmight constitute the attainment of the good.”

The elite universities “probably have tobe just what Mearsheimer says they are,”observes Eva T. H. Brann, dean emerita anda tutor at St. John’s College, in Annapolis,Maryland, a small liberal arts institutionwith a required “Great Books” curriculum.They are less communities than “disparatecollections of atomic individuals joining inshifting patterns to accomplish variousgoals, among which the education of theyoung is not the least, but not the first

either.” Moreover, the many “assertivelyequal and vigorously competing disciplines”within the universities inevitably result in amultiplicity of “intellectual and ethical stan-dards.”

The elite university will eventually disinte-grate, Brann predicts, as “its own polymor-phous and protean propensities drive it—aided by electronic substitutions—intoincreasing physical dispersion.” Meanwhile,she says, colleges and small universities canuphold the tradition of higher education.They can enforce certain standards of ethicalbehavior, and, at the same time, throughcommon reading and conversation, in classand out, encourage “critical reflection aboutmorality and virtue, about rules of action andways of being.”

of oil gushing from wells today. In fact, therate at which any well—or any country—canproduce oil always rises to a maximum andthen, when about half the oil is gone, beginsfalling gradually back to zero.”

Some of today’s larger oil producers,including Norway and the United

Kingdom, will, unless they cut backsharply, reach their production peaks inabout two years, according to Campbelland Laherrère. Then they will have toreduce output. By about 2002, the worldwill be dependent on Middle Easternnations—particularly, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait,Saudi Arabia, and the United ArabEmirates—to satisfy growing demand. Thatraises the specter of another 1970s-stylemassive price increase. That would curbdemand, leaving prices volatile. “But by2010 or so, many Middle Eastern nationswill themselves be past the midpoint.World production will then have to fall,”the two researchers predict. Unless demandfor oil shrinks, prices will rise.

“The world is not running out of oil—atleast not yet,” Campbell and Laherrèreexplain. “What our society does face, andsoon, is the end of the abundant and cheapoil on which all industrial nations depend.”

Can anything be done? Yes, say other spe-cialists writing in the same issue of ScientificAmerican. Recent technological advances—in tracking the flow of underground crudeoil, steering drills horizontally, pressurizing“dead” wells, and tapping oil fields that liedeep underwater—if deployed as planned onthe largest oil fields within three to five years,“could lift global oil production rates morethan 20 percent by 2010,” claims Roger N.Anderson, director of petroleum technologyresearch at Columbia University’s EnergyCenter.

Another, unconventional source of oil isbitumen, “a black, tarlike substance . . . in

the pore spaces between the grains of certainsands and shales (solidified muds),” notesRichard L. George, president and CEO ofSuncor Energy, a company involved in min-ing such resources. In Alberta, Canada,alone, he estimates, some 300 billion barrelscould be recovered from oil sands—morethan the reserves of conventional oil in SaudiArabia.

Oil is not the only source of energy, ofcourse. There’s nuclear fission, solar

energy, and wind power, to name a few.Safaa A. Fouda, of CANMET EnergyTechnology Center, a Canadian governmentlaboratory in Ontario, contends that naturalgas holds great promise. It is not only thecleanest of fossil fuels but also one of themost plentiful: analysts estimate that there isenough readily recoverable natural gas in theworld to produce 500 billion barrels of syn-thetic crude oil—more than twice theamount of conventional crude oil ever foundin the United States. The challenge, shenotes, is finding a cheap way to liquefy it, sothat it can be piped to market inexpensively.Even today, she says, natural gas can be con-verted into liquid fuels at prices that are onlyabout 10 percent higher per barrel than theprice of crude oil. With the right process, liq-uid natural gas could even power cars andtrucks that now run on gasoline.

Campbell and Laherrère also look tonatural gas as a promising substitute for oil.“With sufficient preparation . . . the transi-tion to the post-oil economy need not betraumatic,” they conclude. “If advancedmethods of producing liquid fuels fromnatural gas can be made profitable andscaled up quickly, gas could become thenext source of transportation fuel. Safernuclear power, cheaper renewable energy,and oil conservation programs could allhelp postpone the inevitable decline ofconventional oil.”

Periodicals 133

Bird Theory in Flight“The Origin of Birds and Their Flight” by Kevin Padian and Luis M. Chiappe, inScientific American (Feb. 1998), 415 Madison Ave., New York, N.Y. 10017–1111;

“The Big Flap” by Larry D. Martin, in The Sciences (Mar.–Apr. 1998),New York Academy of Sciences, 2 E. 63rd St., New York, N.Y. 10021.

Is that feathered creature outside yourwindow a dinosaur, or at least a descendantof one? Yes, beyond any “reasonable

doubt,” assert Padian, a professor of inte-grative biology and curator in the Museumof Paleontology at the University of

California, Berkeley, and Chiappe, aFellow at the American Museum ofNatural History in New York.

The long-running scientific debate overthe origin of birds is now over, they claim:paleontologists have determined “thatbirds descend from ground-dwelling,meat-eating dinosaurs of the group knownas theropods.” However, Martin, a paleo-ornithologist and curator for vertebratepaleontology at the University of KansasNatural History Museum, maintains notonly that the debate is not over but that thebird-dinosaur link has become increasinglydubious.

The controversy began in 1870, whenThomas Henry Huxley, “Darwin’s bull-

dog,” first suggested that theropods andbirds were closely related. A century later,Yale University paleontologist John H.Ostrom revived Huxley’s idea. After study-ing the bones of the 150-million-year-oldArchaeopteryx lithographica (unearthed inGermany in 1861 and considered the old-est known bird specimen), Ostrom explic-itly proposed that birds were direct descen-dants of theropods.

His conclusion has been “strongly vali-dated,” Padian and Chiappe say, by cladis-tics, a new method of analyzing the natureof relationships among organisms. Unliketraditional techniques, which mightexclude a species from a group solely

because it had a trait not shared by othersin the group, cladistics arranges organismson the basis of whether they have a set ofnewly emerged heritable traits in com-mon. Cladistic analysis, write Padian andChiappe, “shows that birds are not onlydescended from dinosaurs, they aredinosaurs (and reptiles)—just as humansare mammals, even though people are asdifferent from other mammals as birds arefrom other reptiles.”

The evidence is not confined to sharedskeletal features, Padian and Chiappeargue. Recent discoveries of nesting sitesin Mongolia and Montana suggest somesimilar reproductive behaviors. Skeletonsof the Cretaceous theropod Oviraptor

(“egg stealer”) recently found atop nestsof eggs, for example, indicate thatinstead of living up to their name, thedinosaurs were protecting the eggs invery birdlike fashion.

But Martin and other investigatorsare skeptical. “In spite of recent fossilfinds that might support a dinosaurianorigin for birds,” he says, “other new evi-dence contradicting that view is just asstrong, if not stronger.” Two studies pub-lished in Science last fall, he notes, onefocusing on lungs and the other onlimbs, both argued that dinosaurs areclearly distinct from birds.

Martin himself grew disenchantedwith the dinosaurs-to-birds theory aftercomparing some 85 anatomical featuresthe two vertebrates were said to share.“To my shock, virtually none of thecomparisons held up,” he writes. Theconfusion over anatomy is partly due,he believes, to gaps in the ornithological

literature about many aspects of the avianskeleton. Dinosaur specialists generallyleave avian anatomy to the ornithologists,who usually prefer to study birds’ songs,plumage, and behavior rather than theirbones and muscles. Existing anatomicalknowledge of both dinosaurs andArchaeopteryx, meanwhile, is “just blurryenough” to justify bird-dinosaur compar-isons of anatomical features that do notprecisely match. “When the burden of adhoc repairs became too heavy for me, I hadto abandon the theory altogether,” Martinwrites. “It was a disappointment. How won-derful it would have been if dinosaurs hadescaped extinction!”

134 WQ Summer 1998

An early depiction of a proto-avian descendedfrom reptiles, as imagined by a Danish paleontologist.

Periodicals 135

Blues for Deep Blue“Chess Is Too Easy” by Selmer Bringsjord, in Technology Review (Mar.–Apr., 1998),

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Bldg. W59, Cambridge, Mass. 02139.

When IBM’s Deep Blue bested worldchess champion Gary Kasparov last year,some scientists hailed the victory as a land-mark on the way to creation of a machinewith intelligence equal to the human sort.Bringsjord, who teaches logic and artificialintelligence (AI) at Rensselaer PolytechnicInstitute, argues that while computers mayregularly checkmate human grand mastersone day, they will never achieve intellectualparity with their creators.

Deep Blue’s triumph was a victory for pro-ponents of so-called strong AI, who believethat all human thought can be broken downinto a series of mathematical operations. Ifthat sounds impossible, so, until recently, didformidable chess-playing computers—atleast to some experts. In his 1992 book WhatComputers Still Can’t Do, Hubert Dreyfus, aphilosophy professor at the University ofCalifornia, Berkeley, said that such machineswould forever remain science fiction. Yetchess, Bringsjord points out, theoretically canbe reduced to a series of mathematical oper-ations. The true test of computer intelli-gence, he argues, lies in something far moreelusive: the ability to create.

A genuinely intelligent computer, forexample, would be able to write fiction that is

rich in language, plot, and characterization.For the last seven years, Bringsjord has beenworking to build “a formidable artificialauthor of short short stories.” The latestresult, he says, is a machine named Brutus.I,which can compose very short stories, pro-vided they “are based on the notion of betray-al (as well as self-deception, evil, and to someextent voyeurism).” This feat was made possi-ble because Bringsjord and a colleague wereable to devise a formal mathematical defini-tion of betrayal and implant it in themachine. But Brutus.I gets writer’s blockwhen it comes to other great literary themes,such as revenge and unrequited love.

Bringsjord’s 10-year quest to construct a“silicon Hemingway” has three years left, henotes, but it already “seems pretty clear thatcomputers will never best human storytellersin even a short short story competition.” Fora machine to tell a “truly compelling story,”he points out, it would have to understandthe characters’ “inner lives”—and that wouldrequire not just swift calculation à la DeepBlue but the ability “to think experientially,”mixing memory and perception as an artistdoes. The chess champs of the future mayhave reason to worry, but John Updike andhis successors do not.

The Spices of Life“Antimicrobial Functions of Spices: Why Some Like It Hot” by Jennifer Billing and

Paul W. Sherman, in The Quarterly Review of Biology (Mar. 1998), 110 Life Sciences Library,State Univ. of New York, Stony Brook, N.Y. 11794–5275.

Folk wisdom has it that people in hotclimes favor “hot” food because pungentspices mask the taste of food that’s past itsprime. In fact, the spices have a far moresophisticated function: killing or inhibitingbacteria and other microorganisms that canspoil food and threaten human health.

Billing and Sherman, a graduate studentand a professor, respectively, in CornellUniversity’s Section of Neurobiology andBehavior, believe that the taste for spices isan evolutionary adaptation. They looked athow often 43 spices were used in the meat-based cuisines of 36 countries. Ninety-three percent of the more than 4,500recipes they found called for at least one

spice, and the average recipe called forabout four. Onion (used in 65 percent ofthe recipes) and pepper (63 percent) werethe most frequently used flavor enhancers,followed by garlic (only 35 percent), cap-sicums, lemon and lime juice, parsley, gin-ger, and bay leaf.

In 10 countries—Ethiopia, Kenya,Greece, India, Indonesia, Iran, Malaysia,Morocco, Nigeria, and Thailand—everymeat-based recipe called for at least onespice. By contrast, in Finland and Norway,about one-third of the recipes called for nospices at all.

Not only did people living in hot climates,where the food is more likely to spoil, use

136 WQ Summer 1998

ARTS & LETTERS

The Last Modernist“The Forgotten Killer” by Vince Passaro, in Harper’s Magazine (Apr. 1998),

666 Broadway, New York, N.Y. 10012.

By the time William S. Burroughs diedlast year, at age 83, he “had been commer-cially morphed into the grand old man ofAmerican freakdom,” a neatly dressed Beaticon, and “a ‘cool’ face in a Nike ad,” writesPassaro, a contributing editor of Harper’sMagazine.

The “real” Burroughs was a heroin addict,a homosexual, a masterly writer of satire andmodern affect—and a killer. In 1951 inMexico City, attempting, on his own initia-tive, to shoot a glass off his wife’s head, hemissed and fatally shot her. Burroughs alsowas “a theoretician of crime and resistance,”notes Passaro, “someone who strove to forgethe unspeakable into an art form.” Unlike hisfriends, the Beat writers Allen Ginsberg andJack Kerouac, who belonged to “a tradition ofspiritual exuberance and preacherly opti-mism” that includes Emerson, Whitman,and Twain, Burroughs drew on darker influ-ences, such as Poe, Crane, and Kafka. Out of“the idioms of hard-boiled pulp and the lyricsof surrealism,” Passaro says, Burroughs “cre-ated a strangely effective hybrid of Europeansymbolism and American criminality.”

The universe that he created, in suchworks as Naked Lunch (1959) and the trilogythat followed in the early 1960s (The SoftMachine, The Ticket That Exploded, andNova Express), Passaro writes, was one of“shifting time, transmogrifying characters,and ambiguous geography in which forces ofevil—generally represented as heavily repeti-tive, viral forms of images and addictions—

are eternally and invisibly at war forControl.”

Queer, written in 1952 but not publisheduntil 1985, now seems most to defineBurroughs, says Passaro. In it, he found “histrue comic-psychotic voice and his time- andcharacter-shredding narrative style.” Of hisprotagonist, Bill Lee, Burroughs writes: “Thelimitations of his desires were like the bars ofa cage, like a chain and collar . . . and hiseyes looked out through the invisible bars,watchful, alert, waiting for the keeper to for-get the door, for the frayed collar, the loos-ened bar . . . suffering without despair andwithout consent.” In his portrayal of Lee’scaged desires, Burroughs captured not onlythe condition of the heroin addict and the sit-uation of the homosexual at odds with soci-ety, Passaro asserts, but the plight of “the indi-vidual in late modernity.”

A satirist in the great tradition of Swift,Sterne, and Gogol, Burroughs was also “aModernist with a capital M,” Passaro writes.Bill Lee’s “condition of endless, frustratedwant and the image of the caged animal pre-dict a general return to savagery thatBurroughs and other modernists identifiednot with the loss of civilization but with anelaboration of civilization so multiple, soattenuated, so fundamentally dishonest,hypermarketed, and lethal that it renders theindividual a stranger to his community and tohimself. This is absolutely the modern con-dition, and Burroughs was its last and one ofits best American representatives.”

many spices, and use them often, they alsoreached for the spices with the strongestantibacterial properties more frequently thanpeople in cooler areas did. According toinformation gathered by Billing and Sher-man, four spices—garlic, onion, allspice, andoregano—act against every bacterium onwhich they were tested.

Interestingly, lemon and lime juice andpepper, though among the most frequentlyused spices, are relatively ineffective againstbacteria. Why are those spices used? Becausethey enhance the antibacterial effects of

other spices, the researchers say.The folk wisdom that spices are used to

disguise the smell or taste of spoiled or con-taminated foods is “seriously flawed,” theauthors maintain. Thousands of people arekilled every year, and millions made ill, byingesting foodborne bacteria. Even under-nourished individuals would likely be betteroff passing up tainted meat. Using spices todisguise the danger would be evolutionaryfolly. Indeed, say Billing and Sherman, thatmay be precisely why humans are so sensitiveto the smells and tastes of decaying food.

Periodicals 137

Sister Wendy’s WisdomDave Hickey, a columnist for Art Issues (Mar.–Apr. 1998), watched Robert Hughes’s

eight-episode documentary on American art, American Visions, and Sister WendyBeckett’s 10-part Story of Painting, both on PBS, and made a surprising discovery.

And what did I learn? Well, I learned that an English nun, who lives a fully contem-plative existence under protection of a Carmelite monastery, is a more beguiling and reli-able guide to the worldly practice of Western art than the dean of American art critics,simply because this cloistered sister accepts the fact that works of art are always compen-satory objects made by fallible human beings for dubi-ous reasons in an inadequate world—objects to beknown as best we can know them and appreciatedaccording to our own fallibility and desire. In otherwords, for Sister Wendy, works of art lack cultural trans-parency, and by maintaining this view, she goes a littleway toward liberating the public perception of art fromthe prevailing cult of sociological legibility. . . .

This is Sister Wendy’s advantage. She cares about artin her own odd way. Robert Hughes does too, of course,but he does not care about America, which turns out to be the real subject of his documen-tary. He knows about America, or thinks he does. He has an “American Vision.” The coverof the book that accompanies his television series contends that American art can tell ussomething about the “American character.” On screen, Hughes reverses these propositionsand lectures us for four hours on the ways in which the “American character” tells ussomething about American art. The fact that Hughes’s idea of the “American character”—deformed by Puritanism, beguiled by charismatic religion, and besotted by nature—describes no one of anyone’s acquaintance does not deter him from using it as a templateto select and blithely misconstrue those works that he finds suitably “characteristic” and todisqualify those works he finds “uncharacteristic” (which is to say, un-American).

Restorers or Vandals?“Restoration Drama” by Daniel Zalewski, in Lingua Franca (Feb. 1998),

22 W. 38th St., New York, N.Y. 10018.

The cleaning of Michelangelo’s SistineChapel frescoes—a $4.5 million, 14-year pro-ject completed in 1994—has been hailed bymost Renaissance scholars as a revelation, notesZalewski, a senior editor of Lingua Franca.Stripped of dirt, wax, and glue deposited overfive centuries, the once somber-seeming fres-coes now look “positively vivacious.” Instead ofthe “sculptural” painter, more concerned withmodeling of figures than with coloring, that hewas long taken to be, Michelangelo nowappears to these scholars as “a vanguard col-orist” who boldly juxtaposed pure, flat pig-ments, in experiments that “laid the ground-work” for the Mannerists to come.

Nonsense, scoffs James Beck, a ColumbiaUniversity art historian. He maintains, reports

Zalewski, that this “new ManneristMichelangelo is less the product of carefulcleaning than of the 20th-century imagina-tion,” that “the restorers inadvertently stripped alayer of shadows from the Sistine frescoes—alayer that Michelangelo himself had added inorder to give his figures a chiaroscuro effect andunify and dampen the fresco tones.”

Though Beck failed in his effort to halt therestoration of the Sistine Chapel, six years agohe founded ArtWatch International, a watch-dog group that now has 600 members andchapters in New York, London, and Florence.The group’s aim, Beck says, is to “stop foolishattempts to improve masterpieces with unnec-essary, pseudoscientific cleanings.”

There is no doubt that restorers have done

damage in the past. During the 1960s and ’70s,a curator at New York’s Metropolitan Museumof Art told Zalewski, the Met applied a new syn-thetic varnish to several old-master works. “Theidea,” said the curator, who refused to identifythe works involved, “was that the synthetic var-nish wouldn’t yellow because it lacked organicmaterial. Well, it didn’t. It turned gray. Andwe’ve since discovered . . . that removal is, if notimpossible, extremely difficult.”

Great advances in cleaning and conserva-tion methods have been made in recentdecades, Zalewski notes. “The techniquesused today,” asserts an adviser to London’sNational Gallery, “are as microsurgery is tothe methods of the old barber-surgeons.”Beck remains, to say the least, unconvinced.Museums, in his view, are inclined to make“invasive cleanings, using newfangled sol-vents,” often on artworks that are “very wellpreserved.” Some of the conservation work,he claims, amounts to “vandalism, even ifwell intentioned.” Horrified by the recent

cleanings of Raphael’s Portrait of Pope Leo Xwith Cardinals Giulio de’ Medici and Luigide’ Rossi (1518–19) and Titian’s Venus ofUrbino (1538) at the Uffizi Gallery inFlorence, Beck and ArtWatch are currentlytrying to prevent the museum from restoringVerrocchio’s Baptism (circa 1474–75).

“Cleaning controversies are nearly as old asmuseums,” notes Zalewski. “The Louvre’s poli-cies were assailed on the day of its public open-ing, in 1793.” Later, French painter EdgarDegas successfully fought the Paris museum’sattempts to clean the Mona Lisa. Said Degas:“Pictures should not be restored. . . . Anybodywho touches one should be deported.”

Most restorations, Zalewski observes, “aren’tsalvage operations for crumbling canvases:Typically, the biggest problem with an old-mas-ter painting is dirt and a dulled varnish.” Insuch cases, Beck’s recommended solution is tolive with the dirt, “because a hands-off policy isthe safer route.” But in the art world today, thatis very much a minority view.

138 WQ Summer 1998

Free Salieri!“Did Salieri Kill Mozart?” by Agnes Selby, in Quadrant (Jan.–Feb. 1998),

46 George St., Fitzroy, Victoria 3065, Australia.

Popular history has not been kind to AntonioSalieri (1750–1825). A favorite of Holy RomanEmperor Joseph II and one of the leading com-posers of operas in late-18th-century Vienna, heis now remembered as the jealous musicalmediocrity who poisoned Wolfgang AmadeusMozart (1756–91).

Leaving aside the question of music, thenotion that Salieri murdered Mozart is a greatinjustice, according to Selby, a biographer ofMozart’s wife, Constanze. It is the product ofViennese Kaffeeklattsch society gossip that wasrepeated in an 1823 newspaper story and thentook wing with Pushkin’s 1830 play TheMurderer Salieri and a later opera. In the 20thcentury, playwright Peter Shaffer revived theSalieri-as-poisoner theme, and Amadeus, the1984 film made from his play, gave it world-wide currency.

Salieri himself emphatically denied the1823 story. In fact, Selby writes, he was “puz-zled by the accusation. He had resigned fromthe Viennese Opera in 1790, well beforeMozart’s death during the following year. Whatwould he have gained by Mozart’s death? At thetime Salieri’s fame as an opera composer wasfar more widely spread than Mozart’s, who was

not even appointed to the position Salieri hadvacated at the Viennese Opera.”

When the little-known Mozart arrived inVienna in 1781, Salieri was already touringEurope, conducting one of his own operas atthe opening of La Scala in Milan. He returnedwith the applause of the whole continent ring-ing in his ears. He had been a favorite of theemperor almost from the day he arrived inVienna as a teenager recognized for hisimmense talent. Salieri’s place was secure. Butas Mozart’s star rose—he was named courtcomposer in 1787—so did the level of gossipabout the “German outsider,” and Salieri hasbeen seen as a source. Some writers haveclaimed, for example, that he opposed the pre-miere of Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro in 1786.

Nonsense, says Selby. Salieri actually revivedFigaro in 1789 and frequently conductedMozart compositions. Although not friends, thetwo men had a cordial relationship, Selby says.In 1789, Salieri was Mozart’s guest at a perfor-mance of The Magic Flute, and a flatteredMozart reported to his wife that “Salieri listenedand watched most attentively and there was nota single number that did not call forth from hima ‘bravo’ or ‘bello.’ ” In 1822, a visiting journal-

Periodicals 139

OTHER NATIONS

A Democratic China?A Survey of Recent Articles

Ten years from now, will there still be astate that calls itself the People’s

Republic of China and that is governed bythe Chinese Communist Party?”

No, answers Arthur Waldron, one of 10specialists taking part in a Journal ofDemocracy (Jan. 1998) symposium on theprospects for democracy in China.

“China’s current system is simply inade-quate to the challenges it is creating foritself,” argues Waldron, a professor of inter-national relations at the University ofPennsylvania. “China’s prosperity alreadydepends on the workings of a free market,but without the rule of law such an econo-my cannot function beyond a very low level.The communist regime is already too weakto impose its will by force alone, but it hasno other tool to sway the people. . . . Chinarequires a new government, for reasons thatare not only moral but practical.” Heexpects change to come in fits and starts,first from above, then from below, with for-eign reaction tilting the process in a democ-ratic direction.

Though Yizi Chen, president of theCenter for Modern China in Princeton, NewJersey, agrees, foreseeing the likely “emer-gence of an electoral democracy in the nextdecade,” the other Journal of Democracy con-tributors, notes Andrew J. Nathan, a politicalscientist at Columbia University, “generallyacknowledge the staying power of what mostof them see as essentially the same regime.”Yet most also expect democracy to arrive—not soon, but eventually.

None deny that a good deal of liberal-ization has taken place since the

early 1980s, almost wholly under the leader-ship of Deng Xiaoping (1904–97). One spe-

cialist—Harry Harding, dean of the ElliotSchool of International Affairs at GeorgeWashington University, goes so far as toassert that China has been fundamentallytransformed and is no longer a totalitariancountry. “The role of both the party and offi-cial communist ideology within the politicalsystem has been substantially reduced,” hepoints out. “An increasing range of activityis outside the scope of central economicplanning, ideological constraint, or politicalcontrol.” In his view, China today can bestbe described as hard authoritarian.

Robert A. Scalapino, a political scientistat the University of California, Berk-

eley, notes that China has made impressiveeconomic gains in recent years—includingannual productivity increases of more than10 percent, low inflation, rising exports,and substantial new foreign investment—but that it also has some daunting econom-ic problems. “Banking and financial institu-tions are in serious disarray due to uncol-lectible loans,” he observes. “State-ownedenterprises account for two-fifths of China’sindustrial output, yet fully half of theseenterprises are operating at a loss.” There isa “huge misallocation of workers,” adds theEconomist (Feb. 14, 1998). “Perhaps 20million workers, out of some 110 milliononce employed by state firms, have beensacked or indefinitely sent home.” As aresult of the economic problems, foreigninvestors have been growing cool towardChina. “That matters,” the Economistobserves, “because it is the money providedby foreigners that is largely responsible forChina’s export success. And most recentgrowth in the economy appears to havecome from exports, which rose by over 20

ist found Salieri still enthusiastic about Mozart’swork. (Salieri also taught Mozart’s son, not tomention Beethoven, Schubert, and Liszt.)

Mozart’s untimely death at age 35 arousedsuspicions of foul play. But “in the light of con-temporary evidence, one can only be amazedthat Mozart survived as long as he did,” Selby

observes. He had suffered everything fromsmallpox to rheumatic fever, and colds with“repeated renal complications.” Indeed, mod-ern medical investigators believe it was kidneyfailure occasioned by Henoch-Schönlein pur-pura, not a dose of poison, that killed the greatcomposer.

percent last year.” Despite the problems,Scalapino expects the economic pluses tobe strong enough “to propel China into theranks of major powers” in the coming cen-tury.

“China currently enjoys more stabili-ty—with less coercion—than it has had inmost periods of its past,” he writes.“Today’s leaders are better educated, moretechnologically inclined, and more experi-enced as administrators than their prede-cessors. No single individual, however, hasthe kind of power that Mao and Deng hadat their respective zeniths.” Since Deng’sdeath in February 1997, President JiangZemin has functioned as first amongequals.

Jiang “is relatively weak in terms of per-sonal connections and credibility, has nocohesive social class or set of interestsbehind him, and enjoys only a rather lim-ited degree of power and legitimacy,”writes symposium contributor JuntaoWang, a graduate student at ColumbiaUniversity who spent five years in aChinese jail after the Tiananmen Squaremassacre in 1989. A return to a full-blowndictatorship, he believes, is possible but

not likely. “Twenty years of reform, corrup-tion, and power struggles have destroyedthe supremacy of communism as an ideol-ogy and weakened the party’s politicalmachine,” he notes, and China “is not theclosed society it once was.”

From “a totalitarian state seeking moral-ly to purify the inner lives of its citi-

zens,” observes Thomas A. Metzger, a SeniorFellow at the Hoover Institution in Stanford,California, China has been shifting to “akind of authoritarianism to which theChinese people have long been accustomed.It existed in Taiwan before the democratiza-tion of the last decade and in China duringmany centuries of the imperial era.”

However, a 1995 opinion survey inBeijing found most respondents in favor ofcompetitive elections, equal rights for allcitizens regardless of their political views,and freer and more independent newsmedia, report political scientists Jie Chen,of Old Dominion University, and YangZhong, of the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, writing in Problems of Post-Communism (Jan.–Feb. 1998). But thesefindings, they caution, may not be represen-

140 WQ Summer 1998

The Sour Taste of AffluenceVacationing in Moscow last summer, Russian-born novelist Vassily Aksyonov, who

has lived in the United States since 1980, found himself continually surprised by thecornucopia of Western goods available, and, he writes in the Washington Quarterly(Spring 1998), by the Russians’ reaction to their good fortune.

[It] is hard for Russians to recognize their newfound bliss and thank fate for suchstriking changes. The opinion is now widespread that the insidious West hauls intoRussia products of a lower quality. Even a friend of mine who many times traveledabroad was starting to believe it. Our gullible public, he said, takes everything in abright wrapping without question. Listen, I told him, the first priority for the bigWestern corporations is to keep their standards high; it rarely occurs to them to rely ondeception in their business. This logic, however, doesn’t get through, and the anti-Western nonsense about the “bad things in bright wrapping” keeps spreading around.

More than once I saw in the food stores some ladies putting on airs before the Frenchsour cream. How do you like that—we do not have our own Russian sour cream any-more, they exclaim. No doubt, these exclamations convey a certain patriotic message.Once I dared to take issue: It’s better to have a French sour cream than none, I said. Weused to have plenty of our own sour cream, a lady said haughtily who had alreadypacked her bag with “low quality” Western products. May I suggest, ma’am, I askedinnocently, that to make such a claim you must have had access to a distribution centernot available to the general public. She flared up with indignation: I bet you used to beafraid to poke out your nose, she cried, and now you sling mud at our past!

Periodicals 141

Israel’s Ebbing Martial Spirit“Israel’s Revolution in Security Affairs” by Eliot A. Cohen, Michael J. Eisenstadt, and

Andrew J. Bacevich, in Survival (Spring 1998), International Institute for Strategic Studies,23 Tavistock St., London WC2E 7NQ England.

Fifty years after its founding, Israel is moresecure than ever against conventional mili-tary attack. But the spread of ballistic missiletechnology in the Arab world and changingattitudes in Israeli society are underminingthe “nation in arms” approach to nationalsecurity that has defined the Jewish state’scharacter.

Egypt and Israel’s other immediate Arabneighbors may still be worrisome at times,but the gravest threat (besides terrorism),contend Cohen and Bacevich, both of theNitze School of Advanced InternationalStudies in Washington, and Eisenstadt, ofthe Washington Institute for Near EastPolicy, comes from Iran, Iraq, and Libya.They “do not share a border with Israelbut . . . appear bent on acquiring a capabil-ity to strike Israel directly,” the authorsobserve. “Cruise or ballistic missiles tippedwith chemical, biological or nuclear war-heads are the likely weapons of choice.” ForIsrael to maintain a technological edge willrequire a “small, élite, and professional”military establishment, not a costly, cum-bersome mass army. “Indeed, without anunlimited defense budget,” they write,“high technology and large numbers of peo-ple and equipment appear to be mutuallyexclusive.”

To opt openly for a “slimmer andsmarter” force would be to challenge thecherished Israeli belief that virtually everyyouth, male and female, should serve in thearmy. “Actual practice, however, has begunto differ from this ideal,” Cohen and his col-leagues observe. “Without fanfare—indeedwithout acknowledging that it is departingfrom past practice—the army is adopting asystem of de facto selective service,” raising

the mental and physical requirements foractive duty. Currently, some 17 percent ofeligible males are exempted from service,and an additional 15 percent get early dis-charges for various reasons. (The surplus inthe conscript pool is at least partly due tothe influx of Russian immigrants since1990.) The term of service for femaledraftees has been reduced from 24 monthsto 21, and even at that, only 50 percent ofeligible women serve.

With Israel’s economy booming (grossnational product has grown an average of sixpercent per year since 1990), and with thenation’s survival not appearing in immedi-ate jeopardy, many young Israelis, includingsome of the “brightest and best,” now havetheir eyes on private enterprise, not theIsrael Defense Forces, and on self-realiza-tion, not self-sacrifice. The authors discern“a growing tendency among draft-eligibleIsraelis to contrive physical or psychologicalexcuses to avoid military service.” Amongreservists, a 1996 report found absenteeismat 20 percent in some combat units andtwice that in some noncombat ones. In asurvey that same year, half of Israeli mensaid they would not do the demandingreserve duty (obligatory service until age 54,with active training typically amounting to amonth each year) if it were not compulsory.

Cohen and his colleagues do not expectIsrael to create an all-volunteer force or tocease relying on seasoned reservists. Butover time, they think, a system will emergethat provides different “tracks” for differentfolks. The average soldier, for instance,might undergo basic training followed byreserve duty, while volunteers (perhapsencouraged by monetary incentives) would

tative of China as a whole, which is 70 per-cent rural. The “vast majority” of Chinese,Metzger maintains, have no interest in freepolitical activity.

Stability, notes Scalapino, “has a strongappeal” to the many Chinese worried that achange in regime might bring chaos.“Chinese authorities will continue todefend their regime by insisting that the

most meaningful freedoms for their peoplelie in the economic and social realms—abetter livelihood, better education, andmore social services. This will not beacceptable to exponents of democracy, butit will have considerable appeal nonethe-less.” For China, he and many other schol-ars believe, democracy remains “a distantprospect.”

142 WQ Summer 1998

Miss Thailand’s Many Meanings“The Ideology of Miss Thailand in National, Consumerist, and Transnational Space” by

William A. Callahan, in Alternatives (Jan.–Mar. 1998), Lynne Rienner Publishers,1800 30th St., Ste. 314, Boulder, Colo. 80301–1026.

When the young women in a beauty con-test strut their stuff, high national politics isusually the furthest thing from anyone’smind, on stage or off. But the history of theMiss Thailand pageant tells a different story,suggests Callahan, a lecturer in East Asianpolitics at the University of Durham, inEngland.

The pageant got started in Siam (asThailand was then known)in 1934, after two years ofpolitical turmoil that leftSiam’s king in exile and anew democratic constitutionin place. The new govern-ment inaugurated the “MissSiam” beauty pageant as partof a “Constitution Festival,”in the hope, Callahan says,of promoting “modern,Western ideas—constitu-tion, progress, civilization,nation—against the ‘tradi-tional’ Thai absolute monar-chy.” The first Miss Siamwas awarded a crownengraved with an image ofthe constitution.

Starting in 1938, with theinvading Japanese at war inChina, the pageant’s govern-ment sponsors increasinglyemphasized nationalismrather than constitutional-ism. The Interior Ministry’spageant office vowed to pro-duce a “Miss Siam who is asbeautiful as the beautyqueens of other countries.”

Though interrupted byWorld War II, the MissThailand Pageant (as itbecame known after thecountry’s name change in1939) was revived in 1948

and held almost every year until 1957, whena military coup brought an end to the consti-tution, its festival, and what might be termedMiss Thailand’s governmental phase.

In 1961, however, the Los Angeles-basedproprietors of the Miss Universe Pageantcame looking for “Miss Thailand,” and per-suaded a local organization to convert itsannual beauty contest into a new national

pageant. It survived until amassive student uprising fordemocracy brought the cur-tain down on the shameful“meat market” in 1973.

But only for a time. “After12 years in mothballs,”Callahan writes, “Miss Thai-land was resurrected” in1984 as a wholly commer-cial venture, sponsored byColgate Palmolive and oth-ers. Not only is the contest aU.S. import, he observes,but so are some of the MissThailands! Miss Thailand1988 had earlier reigned asMiss Teen California; allgrumbling about that ceasedwhen she went on tobecome Miss Universe.

“Neither the Thai govern-ment nor the Thai publicseem to mind having U.S.-raised women representingthem in international com-petitions,” Callahan notes.To him, this suggests that“nationalism, like ‘beauty,’ isnot a natural category, butone constructed and recon-structed for various purpos-es—political, military, eco-nomic, and otherwise.”Nationalism, it seems, is inthe eye of the beholder.

stay on active duty for a period after basictraining. Career-oriented professionals,meanwhile, would have renewable, long-term contracts. The principle of nearly uni-

versal service would thus be retained, butthe mass citizen army—rendered unafford-able by expensive high-tech weapons sys-tems—would not.

Miss Thailand is crowned Miss Uni-verse 1988. She had come to Americaat age two and only returned toThailand for the pageant that year.

Research Reports 143

RESEARCH REPORTSReviews of new research at public agencies and private institutions

“Welfare Reform: A Race to the Bottom?”Papers presented at a conference on March 27, 1998, at the Woodrow Wilson International Center forScholars, Washington, D.C. The conference was cosponsored by Publius: The Journal of Federalism.

The fear that a community that is toogenerous to its own indigent will be

deluged by poor people drawn irresistiblyfrom neighboring communities has a longhistory in America. It has figured strongly inthe continuing debate over the landmarkwelfare reform of 1996, the PersonalResponsibility and Work OpportunityReconciliation Act, which turned welfareinto a program of fixed block grants andgave states much more discretion overspending decisions.

The law made it easier for states to treatnew residents seeking benefits differentlyfrom established residents—and by last sum-mer, 21 states, fearful of becoming “welfaremagnets,” had opted to do that. Criticsfeared that worse was to come: that stateswould join in a “race to the bottom,” withthe down-and-out needlessly made evenmore so. Research presented at this WilsonCenter conference suggests that the fears onboth sides may be unjustified.

Scott Allard and Sheldon Danziger, bothof the University of Michigan’s Poverty Re-search and Training Center, analyzed exten-sive data on the interstate migration of sin-gle-parent families between 1968 and 1992.They found that chasing welfare benefits wasrare: in a typical year, only 2.8 percent of allsingle-parent households—and only 2.3 per-cent of those on welfare—moved to anotherstate. Of the migrants, only four in 10 moth-ers who had been on welfare before got anybenefits during their first year in the newstate—and these benefits were usually lessthan what they had received before.

In a 1996 analysis of Aid to Families withDependent Children (AFDC) benefit levelsbetween 1976 and 1989, Paul E. Peterson andKenneth F. Scheve, Jr., both of HarvardUniversity, and Mark C. Rom, now ofGeorgetown University, concluded that in set-ting benefits, states were very strongly affectedby what neighboring states did, suggesting thata “race to the bottom” could be in the offing.However, in a paper delivered at the confer-ence, Rom says that there is little evidence thatsuch a race has begun. Moreover, the “bot-

tom” under the 1996 legislation, he points out,“is nowhere close to the absolute bottom.”Until 2002, states must spend at least 75 per-cent as much on the new TemporaryAssistance to Needy Families program eachyear as they did on AFDC in 1994.

A 1997 study by the American PublicWelfare Association found that most stateshave taken a “middle-of-the-road” approach,balancing “liberal” and “restrictive” reforms.Brown University political scientist RichardM. Francis found that the six New Englandstates went their own ways. Connecticut andMassachusetts, among the nation’s wealthi-est states, had the region’s most restrictivewelfare plans, while Rhode Island andMaine were the most generous.

By placing many recipients in paying jobs,the recent state-level reforms (some antedat-ing the 1996 law) have reduced welfare rolls,but benefits have not generally been cut,report Richard P. Nathan and Thomas L.Gais, both of the Nelson A. RockefellerInstitute of Government.

Many states, they were surprised to find,are “passing the buck” on key aspects of wel-fare reform. Fifteen states, including NewYork and California, have “state-supervised/county-administered” systems which leave itto local governments, as well as nonprofit andfor-profit organizations, to train, counsel, andfind jobs for welfare recipients and applicants.What’s going on locally in these statesremains somewhat mysterious, Nathan andGais complain: “Not very much can belearned about [local agencies’] activities fromthe data they are collecting, collating, andreporting.”

Some researchers remain pessimisticabout the overall impact of the reforms.“While evidence for welfare migration isscarce, states continue to fear it. And theynow have a welfare system that, like water,can seek its lowest level,” worry SanfordSchram of Bryn Mawr College and Joe Sossof American University. It is “highly likely,”they believe, “that the states will drift towardlower benefits, shorter time limits, andstricter work requirements.”

144 WQ Summer 1998

“Industrial Incentives: Competition among American States and Cities”W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, 300 S. Westnedge Ave.,

Kalamazoo, Mich. 49007–4686. 307 pp. $29; paper, $19Authors: Peter S. Fisher and Alan H. Peters

To lure a Mercedes-Benz assemblyplant to the town of Vance recently,

state and local governments in Alabamagranted automaker Daimler-Benz an esti-mated $173 million in tax and other incen-tives. It was a dramatic episode in an escalat-ing nationwide bidding war among statesand municipalities—a competition thatsome critics want to end with a federal banon such incentives.

Nobody knows the total cost of all the eco-nomic development incentives that state andlocal governments offer, note Fisher andPeters, both specialists in urban and regionalplanning at the University of Iowa, but it’sclearly substantial. By 1988, state economicdevelopment agencies were spending $1 bil-lion annually. But those outlays do notinclude all the tax breaks, loans, and otherweapons (such as infrastructure improve-ments) deployed. Moreover, scholarly effortsto gauge the effectiveness of these programshave produced contradictory results.

Fisher and Peters tried to conquer themeasurement problems by testing how agroup of hypothetical companies would fareunder the standard economic developmentincentives offered in 112 cities in 24 states.

Their findings divide in classic good

news/bad news fashion. The good news isthat incentives can indeed be effective,influencing corporate decisions about whereto locate plants and offices. The most attrac-tive city competing for a hypothetical drug-manufacturing plant offered a package ofstate and local incentives equivalent to areduction of $1.82 per hour from the laborcosts of the least competitive city. The badnews? The size of the incentives bears littlerelation to the unemployment or poverty lev-els of the cities involved. In other words, theincentives are moving jobs around, but notnecessarily to the areas that need them most.

Moreover, Fisher and Peters found, incen-tives are not very cost-effective: every dollar ofsubsidies is actually worth only 58 to 73 centsin benefits to the recipients. One reason:increased profits generated by incentives raiserecipients’ federal corporate income tax bills.(A study of the Daimler-Benz package con-cluded that the company derived only $86million in benefits from the $173 millionincentive package.)

Fisher and Peters doubt that Washingtoncan curtail the incentive war. The best hope,in their view, is to provide policymakers “abetter understanding” of the true costs andbenefits of the incentives.

Cover: She Decided to Return the Loathsome Gift (1992), by Holly Lane, courtesy Schmidt-Bingham Gallery, N.Y.; p. 10,Cartoonists & Writers Syndicate; p. 11, Photo by East News/Sipa Press; p. 14–15, Copyright © 1964, Time, Inc.; p. 17,Giraudon/Art Resource, N.Y.; p. 18, Eve (1993–95), by Rimma Gerlovina and Valeriy Gerlovin, Copyright © by the artists,Pomona, N.Y.; p. 20, Isaac Einhorn Collection, Tel Aviv, Israel, Copyright © Erich Lessing/Art Resource, N.Y.; p. 22, Creation ofEve (1989), by Martin Maddox, courtesy of Robert Kidd Gallery, Birmingham, Mich.; p. 24, Jewish Museum/Art Resource, N.Y.;p. 28, Israel Museum (IDAN), Jerusalem, Israel, Copyright © Erich Lessing/Art Resource, N.Y.; p. 31, Reuben and Edith HechtCollection, Haifa University, Haifa, Israel, Copyright © Erich Lessing/Art Resource, N.Y.; p. 35, Copyright © 1954, Time, Inc.;p. 43, British Museum; p. 45, Culver Pictures; p. 47, Library and Research Center at the National Watch and Clock Museum; p.49, Bibliothèque Royale Museum, Brussels; p. 53, Jeremy Horner/Corbis-Bettmann; pp. 55, 78, 81, 86, 107, UPI/Corbis-Bettmann; p. 58–59, Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution. Joseph H. Hirschhorn Purchase Fund,1989, photograph by Lee Stalsworth; p. 62, Copyright © Honoria Murphy Donnelly, The Dallas Museum of Art; p. 65, Copyright© Phil Schermeister/Corbis-Bettmann; p. 67, Calendar (1962, by Roy Lichtenstein, The Museum of Contemporary Art, LosAngeles: The Panza Collection. Photo by Squidds & Nunn; p. 70, Object to Be Destroyed (1959) by Man Ray. Copyright © ManRay Trust ARS/ADAGP 1998; p. 73, Reprinted by permission of the Trustees of the Imperial War Museum, London; p. 74, TheIllustrated London News Picture Library; p. 77 (top), Kangal Dog Club of America, Inc., Castleton, Vt.; (left), National PostalMuseum, Smithsonian Institution; (right), Inter-Governmental Philatelic Corporation, N.Y.; pp. 84, 104, 108, Corbis-Bettmann;p. 88, Reprinted with permission from The Saturday Evening Post, ©1943 The Curtis Publishing Company; p. 90, Reproducedfrom the Collections of the Library of Congress; p. 93, Photograph Copyright © Ullstein Bilderdienst; p. 97, Liberty, Mother ofPeace and Art, by Tsing-Fang Chen, Lucia Gallery, N.Y., SuperStock; p. 99, Photograph by Bill Bamberger; p. 102, LauraDwight/Corbis-Bettmann; p. 120, Cornell University Library; p. 122, Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis-Bettmann; p. 124,Reprinted by permission of the Office for Official Publications of the European Communities, Luxembourg; p. 129, Cartoonists& Writers Syndicate; p. 131, Archive Photos; p. 134, Illustration by Gerhard Heilmann, reproduced from The Origin of Birds(1972), Dover Publications, Inc.; p. 137, Justin Pumphrey, Copyright © BBC Worldwide; p. 142, AP/Wide World Photos, Inc.

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Heritage has burgeoned over the past quarter century from a small i~lite preoccupation into a major popular crusade. Everything from Elvis memorabilia to the Elgin Marbles bears the marks of the cult, of heritage. In this acclaimed book David Lowenthal explains the rise of this new obsession with the past and examines its power fol· both good and evil. 0-521-63562-4 Paperback 817.95

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