RENATA ADLER, "MUDDLED FEAR AND VULNERABILITY [YET] CLEARHEADED OUTRAGE AND SCORN" #

I was simply blown away by the writing and the reminders to history.

Renata Adler, After the Tall Timber: Collected Nonfiction (New York:New York Review Books, 2015) (From "Toward a Radical Middle: Introduction," July 1969:"No famous or privileged white revolutionaries have gone to jail for long just yet. But obscure and black radical have, in numbers--which raise questions, I think, not so much of politics as of fame, privilege and the inauthentic revolutionary." Id. at 1, 7. From "Searching for the Real Nixon Scandal" (reprinted from the The Atlantic Monthly, 1976): "No one suggested, in 1968, that the Vietnamese kickbacks though foreign banks, went into American politics." "As, of 1972, I think they clearly did. Turning away from detail, one is truck by the logic overall. It does not make sense, for example, that the President's fund-raisers would put by far the greatest pressure of any political campaign in our history on so many sources, individual and corporate, and reject a contribution from the most logical of them all: the administration of South Vietnam, which had the most to lose if the President's opponent (who had announced a willingness to go, it must be remembered, to Hanoi on his knees for peace) actually won. And although the President might have liked to announce the war's end before any ordinary election, by the time he sent Haig to undo Kissinger's late October accords, he knew he did not need, in 1972, any peace to win. At the same time, Nixon never seems to have felt any diminution of need for campaign contributions. In the fall of 1968, the South Vietnamese had only to dig in the heels and wait, while the war cost Humphrey the election. By the fall of 1972, if they want the support of the administration, I think they had to pay." Id. at 366, 403. "The impeachment inquiry did what it could, and the President was removed. But we were, I think, of legal and political necessity, at the tip of the wrong iceberg. The story that required the end of the Nixon presidency, I think, was not Watergate--or even 'other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.' It was Treason and Bribery. I don't know what follows from it. I think it is the bottom line, It has brought a disorientation beyond reckoning. People died for it, We are going to have to live, I think, with that." Id. at 406-407. Also, see Emily Witt, "Outspoken Indignation," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 5/17/2015.).

# From Michael Wolff's "Preface,"  to Adler, After the Tall Timber, at x.

Renata Adler, Pitch Dark, with an afterword by Muriel Spark (New York:New York Review Books, 1983, 2013).

Renata Adler, Speedboat, with an afterword by Guy Trebly (New York:New York Review Books, 1976, 2013).

THE RESPONSIBILITY OF THOSE CHOOSING NOT TO EMPATHIZE

"What is more, those who choose not to empathize enable real monsters. For without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude with it through our own apathy." J. K. Rowling, Very Good Lives: The Fringe Benefits of Failure and the Importance of Imagination (New York: Little, Brown, 2015), at 61).

HIGHER CONSCIOUSNESS

Saul Bellow, There Is Simply Too Much to Think About: Collected Nonfiction, edited by Benjamin Taylor (New York: Viking, 2015) (From "The Civilized Barbarian Reader" (1987): "I meant [Herzog] to show how little strength 'higher education' had to offer a troubled man. In the end he is aware that the has had no education in the conduct of life. [] Herzog's confusion is barbarous. [] But there is one point at which, assisted by his comic sense, he is able to hold fast  In the greatest confusion there is still an open channel to the soul. It may be difficult to find because by midlife it is overgrown, and some of the wildest thickets that surround it grow out of what we describe as our education. But the channel is always there and it is our business to keep it open, to have access to the deepest part of ourselves--to that part of us which is conscious of a higher consciousness by means of which we make final judgments and put everything together." "The independence of this consciousness, which has the strength to be immune to the noise of history and the destruction of our immediate surroundings, is what the life struggle is all about. The soul has to find and hold its ground against hostile forces, sometimes embodied in ideas that frequently deny its very existence and that indeed often seem to be trying to annul it altogether." Id. at 351, 355. Also, see Martin Amis, "Something to Remember Him By," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 5/3/2015.).

CURSES OF THE SUFFERERS OF INJUSTICE

Ken Follett, The Pillars of the Earth (New York: New American Library, 1989, 2002) ("The people shrank from her in fear: everyone knew that the curses of those who had suffered injustice were particularly effective, and they had all suspected that something was not quite right about this hanging. The small boys were terrified." Id. at 15.).

FOOD FOR THOUGHT ON THE FIRST DAY OF CLASSES

William Dalrymple, In Xanadu: A Quest, with a new introduction by the author (London: The Folio Society, 1990, 2015) ("'Of course,' he said, 'to be a lawyer is not the most interesting of careers.' 'Really?' I said. 'I know some lawyers who love their jobs.' 'Oh don't be absurd,' he replied. 'Everyone knows lawyers are the dullest people in the world. The only thing to be said for it is that it pays well'" Id. at 165.).

AMERICAN LITERACY GREATNESS

Harold Bloom, The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime (New York: Spiegal & Grau, 2015) ("This book is about the dozen creators of the American sublime... [T]hese writers represent our incessant effort to transcend the human without forsaking humanism." Id. at 3. Also, see Cynthia Ozick, 'Shared Visions," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 5/24/2015.).

PURSUING MY LIBERAL RE-EDUCATION BY WORKING THOUGH THE GREAT BOOKS

Mortimer J. Adler, editor in chief, Great Books of the Western World, 1: The Syntopicon: An Index to the Great Ideas, Volume I (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1990) (From Chapter 16, "Democracy": "The incompatibility of empire with democracy is on one side of the picture of the democratic state in external affairs. The other side is the tension between democratic institutions and military power or policy--in the form of standing armies and warlike maneuvers. The inefficacy traditionally attributed to democracy under peaceful conditions does not, from all evidences of history, seem to render democracy weak or pusillanimous in the face of aggression." "The deeper peril for democracy seems to lie in the effect of war upon its institutions and on the morality of its people. As Hamilton write in The Federalist: 'The violent destruction of life and property incident to war, the continual effort and alarm attendant on a state of continual danger, will compel nations the most attached to liberty to resort for repose and security to institutions which have a tendency to destroy their civil and political rights. To be more safe, they at length become willing to run the risk of being less free." Id. at 238, 246. From Chapter 20, "Education": "Whether these skills as well as other useful arts are part of liberal education in the broader sense depends [] on the end for which they are taught or learned. Even the arts which are traditionally called liberal, such as rhetoric or logic, can be degraded to servility if the sole motive for becoming skilled in them is wealth won by success in the law courts." Id. at 296, 300. From Chapter 34, "History": "[T]he great books of history belong with treatises on morals and politics and in the company of philosophical and theological speculations concerning the nature and destiny of man. Liberal education needs the particular as well as the universal narratives. Apart from their utility, they have the originality of conception, the poetic quality, the imaginative scope which rank them with the great creations of the human mind." Id. at 546, 554.).

Mortimer J. Adler, editor in chief, Great Books of the Western World, 2: The Syntopicon: An Index to the Great Ideas, Volume II (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1990) (From Chapter 73, "Prudence": "Of the qualities or virtues attributed to the intellect, prudence seems to be least concerned with knowledge and most concerned with action. When we call a man a scientist or an artist, or praise the clarity of his understanding, we imply only that he has a certain kind of knowledge. We admire his mind, but we do not necessarily admire him as a man. We may not even know what kind of man he is or what kind of life he leads. It is significant that our language does not contain a noun like 'sceintit' or 'artist' to describe the man who possesses prudence. We must use the adjective and speak of a prudent man, which seems to suggest that prudence belongs to the whole man, rather than just to his mind." "Prudence seems to be almost as much a moral as an intellectual quality. We would hardly call a man prudent without knowing his manner of life. Whether he behaved temperately would probably be more relevant to our judgment of his prudence than whether he had a cultivated mind. The extent of his education or the depth of his learning might not affect our judgment at all, but we probably would consider whether he was old enough to have learned anything from experience and whether he had actually profited from experience to become wise." Id. at 377, 377.).

YELLOWSTONE? WHAT DOES IT MEAN>

Justin Farrell, The Battle for Yellowstone: Morality and the Sacred Roots of Environmental Conflict (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2015) (From the book cover: "Justin Farrell argues that the battle for Yellowstone has deep moral, cultural, and spiritual roots that until now have been obscured by the supposedly rational and technical nature of the conflict. Tracing in unprecedented detail the moral cause and consequences of large-scale social change in the American West, he describes how a 'new-west' social order has emerged that has devalued traditional American beliefs about manifest destiny and rugged individualism, and how the morality and spirituality have influenced the most polarizing and techno-centric conflicts in Yellowstone's history.").

A MEDITATION ON RACE IN 21st-CENTURY AMERICA

Though I do not think it is on par with either W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, or James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time, Coates's essay, Between the World and Me, will speak to our times for those who know or wonder what it feels like to live a black life in America. Yes, race is a social construct, but it a powerful construct that helps explain why the lives lived and felt by blacks is radically different from (though intimately connected to) the lives lived and felt by whites in American. We can not get beyond it my ignoring it, or by thinking, believing, or pretending that it does not matter. That a thing should not matter has little to do with whether it does.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2015) ("Why, precisely, was I sitting in this classroom?" "The question was never answered. I was a curious boy, but the schools were not concerned with curiosity. They were concerned with compliance. I loved a few of my teachers. But I cannot say that I truly believed any of them. [] I sensed the schools were hiding something, drugging us with false morality so that we would not see, so that we did not ask: Why--for us and only us--is the other side of free will and free spirits an assault upon our bodies? When our elders presented school to us, they did not present it as a place of higher learning but as a means of escape from death and penal warehousing. Fully 60 percent of all young black men who drop out of high school will go to jail. This should disgrace the country. But it does not, and while I couldn't crunch the numbers or plumb the history back then, I sensed that the fear that marked West Baltimore could not be explained by the schools. Schools did not reveal truths, they concealed them. Perhaps they must be burned away so that the heart of this thing might known." Id. at 276-27.).

INTERNATIONAL TRADE 1250-1350 A.D.

Janet L. Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250-1350 (New York & Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 1989) (From the book cover: "In this important study, Janet Abu-Lughod presents a groundbreaking reinterpretation of global economic evolution, arguing that the modern world economy had its roots not in the 16th century economy, as is widely supposed, but in the 13th century economy--a system far different from the European world system which emerged from it. Further, she argues, it was the devolution of the preexisting system that facilitated Europe's hegemonic rise; there was no inherent historical necessity shifting the system in favor of the West or preventing eastern societies from becoming the progenitors of a modern world system. Rather, the comparative ease with which Europe established its hegemony is attributable to prior and systemic demographic and geopolitical shifts." From the text: "My work on the history of Cairo had convinced me that the Eurocentric view of the Dark Ages was ill-conceived. If the lights went out in Europe, they were actually certainly still shining brightly in the Middle East. Visiting and studying most of the other major cities in that region of the world reassured me that Cairo was only one apex in a highly developed system of urban civilization." Id. at ix-x. "In the face of [] reorganization of the geopolitics of the world, the United Stats has attempted to retain its earlier hegemony by two strategies: one has been militarily, either directly or through regional surrogates; the second has been through the globalization of capital, a phenomenon not unrelated to the arms trade." "Both strategies may be meeting with declining success. Direct force of arms has resulted in an unrelieved series of real defeats, whereas indirect military ventures have succeeded chiefly in miring region after region in local conflicts in which the goal seems to be the perpetuation rather than the resolution of conflict. Although this serves to reduce the number of players in the world system, it does not eliminate all contenders and competitors. The United States has sought to build coalitions with the remaining powers through international finance. This has led, however, to such a level of international indebtedness that constant and further expansion seems impossible." Id. at 370-371.).

GLOBALIZATION, NOT SO NEW!

Jurgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century, translated from the German by Patrick Camiller (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2014) (From "Introduction to the First German Edition" (2009): "All history inclines toward being world history." Id. at xv.).

Jurgen Osterhammel & Niels P. Petersson, Globalization: A Short History, translated from the German by Dona Geyer (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2003, 2005) (From the bookjacket: "'Globalization' has become a popular buzzword for explaining today's world. The expression achieved teminological stardom in the 1990s and was soon embraced by the general public and integrated into numerous languages." "But is this much-discussed phenomenon really an invention of modern times? In this work, Jurgen Osterhammel and Niels O. Peterson make the case that globalization is not so new, after all." "Arguing that the world did not turn 'global' overnight, the book traces the emergence of globalization over the past seven or eight centuries. In fact, the authors write, the phenomenon can be traced back to early modern large-scale trading, for example, the silk trade between China and the Mediterranean region, the shipping routes between the Arabian Peninsula and India, and the more frequently traveled caravan routes of the Near East and North Africa--all conduits for people, goods, coins, artwork, and ideas." "Osterhammel and Petersson argue that the period from 1750 to 1880--an era characterized by the development of free trade and the long-distance impact of the industrial revolution--represented an important phase in the globalization phenomenon. Moreover, they demonstrate how globalization in the mid-twentieth century open up the prospect of global destruction through nuclear war and ecological catastrophe. In the end, the authors write, today's globalization is part of a long-running transformation and has not ushered in a 'global age' radically different from anytime that came before." From the text: "If any consensus exists among authors of the various persuasions, then it is the assumption that globalization challenges the importance of the nation-state and alters the balance of power between states and markets in favor of the latter. It is argued that those profiting from its development and from steps taken by national governments to facilitate free trade are the multinationals corporations, which can pick the least expensive options for direct investment worldwide without being hampered by loyalty to their countries of origin. The ability of national governments to influence economic development and their access to resources, especially taxes, is said to be impaired. The provisions of the welfare state are also being dismantled, thereby diminishing the legitimacy of the state--a development that in the eyes of neoliberal globalization enthusiasts means a gain of personal freedom, whereas for globalization opponents it is the onset of anarchy, which benefits only the strong. Thus, one of the central themes of social science today is the erosion of the (nation) state's external sovereignty, its domestic monopoly of force, and its ability to govern." Id. at 6-7.).

MODERATION IS DEAD, GLOBAL DISRUPTION IS REALITY.

Richard Dobbs, James Manyika, & Jonathan Woetzel, No Ordinary Disruption: The Four Global Forces Breaking All the Trends (New York: PublicAffairs, 2015) ("We believe that the world is now roughly in the middle of a dramatic transition as a result of four fundamental disruptive trends. . . The first is the shifting locus of economic activity and dynamism--to emerging markets like China and to cities within these markets. The emerging markets are going through the simultaneous industrial and urban revolutions that began in the nineteenth century in the developed world. The balance of power of the world economy is shifting east and south at a speed never before witnessed. . . The second disruptive force is the acceleration in the scope, scale, and economic impact of technology. . . . The third force changing the world is demographics. Simply put, the human population is getting older. Fertility is falling, and the world's population is graying dramatically. . . The final disruptive force is the degree to which the world is much more connected through trade and through movements of capital, people and information . . ." Id. at 4-7.).

INDIA'S PARTITION

Nisid Hajarai, Midnight's Furies: The Deadly Legacy of India's Partition (Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015) ("What truly continues to haunt today's world are the furies that were unloosed in 1947--the fears and suspicions and hatreds forged in partition's searing crucible. In those few weeks, and the few months that followed, a dangerous psychological chasm would open up between India and Pakistan. Leaders on both sides would suspect their counterparts of winking at genocide. Their mutual mistrust and scheming for advantage quickly brought their infant nations to the brink of war, and then ignited shadow contests for control over the kingdoms of Hyderabad in the south and Kashmir in the north. In less than a year, the Indian and Pakistani armies would confront one another on the battlefield." Id. at xix. See generally, William Dalrymple, The Great Divide," The New Yorker, June 29, 2015; and Aatish Taseer, "State of Disintegration," NYT Book Review, Sunday, July 12, 2015.). 

SECULAR VERSUS ANTI-SECULAR

Michael Walzer, The Paradox of Liberation: Secular Revolutions and Religious Counterrevolutions (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2015) ("My project in this book is to describe a recurrent and, to my mind, disturbing pattern in the history of national liberation. I will discuss a small set of cases: the creation of the three independent states in the years after World War II--India and Israel in 1947-1948 and Algeria in 1962--and I will focus on the secular political movements that achieved statehood and the religious movements that challenged the achievement roughly a quarter century later." Id. at ix.  "I believe that my account, even in its simplest version, provides a useful beginning for a necessary inquiry: What happened to national liberation?" "Initially, at least, this is  success story: the three nations were indeed liberated for foreign rule. At the same time, however, the states that now exist are not the states envisioned by the original leaders and intellectuals of the national liberation movements, and the moral/political culture of these states, their inner life, so to speak, is not at all what their founders expected. One difference is central to my analysis . . .: all three movements were secular, committed, indeed, to an explicitly secular project, and yet in the states they they created a politics rooted in what we can loosely call fundamentalist religion is today very powerful. In three different countries, with three different religions, the timetable was remarkably similar: roughly twenty to thirty years after independence, the secular state was challenged by a militant religious movement. This unexpected outcome is a central feature of the paradox of national liberation." Id. at x-xii. "Readers who doubt that there has ever been a significant secular left in [America] should take a look at our earliest history. The first settlers and the political founders freed themselves or, better, began to free themselves, from the religious establishment of the Old World, and they set up what I think is the first secular state in world history. In a brief postscript, I will explain why the paradox that marks the twentieth-century cases is absent in eighteenth-century America. This is an argument for American exceptionalism, which I will make with one important qualification. However exceptional American were in the eighteenth century, we are less exception today." Id. at xiv.).

PHILIP II

Geoffrey Parker, Imprudent King: A New Life of Philip II (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2014).

SHADES OF GRAY

Josep Pia, The Gray Notebook, translated by Peter Bush (New York: New York Review Books, 2014) (Alan Riding, "Language Without a Country," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 4/20/2014).