Fireworks to conceal the sentiment

The other day, in Henry Green’s autobiography Pack My Bag, I came across this lovely and rather Homeric metaphor for what a liberal arts education is supposed to feel like. (If you’re not familiar with Green’s style, be forewarned that it has fewer commas than most and an awfully flexible syntax.)

The experience for those who have not had it can best be described by the picture of a traveller who has come some of the way and now finds himself bewildered, suspicious and rather tired because he has not found the sort of country he has been seeking, part of his difficulty being that he is not sure quite what climate or kind of scenery is necessary to his peace of mind. He comes to a place where the winding track he follows through nettles breaks into two and there above a great number of broken bottles are a profusion of signposts obviously false, giving details of the amenities offered by following the direction indicated. The day is hot, the way has been long, flies and wasps have been troublesome, and all the time there has been a persistent knelling in the distance to work up a feeling of foreboding. Also the sense is strong that it will soon be too late. At the intersection of this track however he comes upon a tall gaunt figure dressed neatly as if for London but with something untidy about him, perhaps in the uneasy protuberance of his eyes. He appears to be resting without discomfort just off one of these paths with nettles about but it is plain that in his case they do not sting because he outstings them and there are no flies on him. He speaks first, in time he will ask the traveller to sit down, but for the present he is content to describe exactly where you want to go and just why what you want is so necessary. One is suspicious at first that he will conclude with an overpowering argument or even with proof that one is a fool to look for whatever it may be but, when the time comes for his conclusion, one finds with delight that he is in complete agreement and what is more that he has far more cogent reasons in one’s favour than one has been able to produce. Nothing of what he says is put directly, a great deal of it is fireworks let off to conceal the trend of what in two years’ time you may suspect to be towards sentiment, it is all hedged about by the steam power of this trained mind and in a rain of words. As your suspicion evaporates you discover these to be tending towards your case and in the end justifying it perhaps with a sad but wonderful story of what befell someone who took the other road.

It is most comforting, so much so that when, as will certainly happen sooner rather than later, he is to be heard brilliantly advocating exactly the reverse because what did for the one case may not do for another there is no sense of disillusionment. . . .

Evolution and the arts

In the 27 November 2007 New York Times, Natalie Angier writes about attending a symposium on evolution and the arts at the University of Michigan, where she learns to dance the hora and interviews the independent scholar Ellen Dissanayake. For more on Dissanayake’s thinking and background, here’s a profile that I wrote about her, which was published in Lingua Franca in October 2001.

History’s bad physicians

While I was a tourist, a state of being that is already a dimming memory, I started to read Jacob Burckhardt’s The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, a book that alternates between charming anecdotes of condottiere-on-condottiere violence, enjoyable in and of themselves, and a presumption that the reader already knows the major episodes of fifteenth-century European history and is merely reading so as to remind himself of them, which is alas not necessarily the case.

Sometimes, though, the reader lucks out, and Burckhardt presents an idea as a commonplace but explains it anyway, as if only for the pleasure of the excursus. Such is the case with this piece of political philosophy, which might have come in useful in the formulation of America’s Iraq policy, or might yet in its Iran policy:

But to return to the despots of the Renaissance. A pure and simple mind, we might think, would perhaps have argued that, since all power is derived from God, these princes, if they were loyally and honestly supported by all their subjects, must in time themselves improve and lose all traces of their violent origin. But from characters and imaginations inflamed by passion and ambition, reasoning of this kind could not be expected. Like bad physicians, they thought to cure the disease by removing the symptoms, and fancied that if the tyrant were put to death, freedom would follow of itself. Or else, without reflecting even to this extent, they sought only to give a vent to the universal hatred, or to take vengeance for some family misfortune of personal affront.

Fear and knowing

Last night I attended “Fright Night,” a debate at the New York Public Library. The editors of n+1 invited contributor Alex Gourevitch to discuss his belief that environmentalism was becoming the lefty twin of the right’s war on terror—a fear-mongering technique designed to bully people into surrendering their right to healthy debate. Once the evening’s introductions were over, however, it transpired that the n+1 editors had invited Gourevitch in the belief that he shares with them the premise that climate change is a crisis in need of a political solution. In fact, he doesn’t. He believes that climate change is real, but that its dangers are wildly exaggerated, and that rather than try to lower carbon-dioxide emissions, concerned individuals should try to speed up the industrialization of the Third World, which will resist damage more stoutly as it becomes richer.

The ensuing debate was a bit chaotic, because no one but Gourevitch seemed prepared to engage the prior question that he raised. I blog about it only to add two footnotes. During the question-and-answer period, through a cold-virus-toxin-induced haze, I brought up an article I had recently read, though I couldn’t remember where, about two consultants who were advising the Democrats to drop environmental fear-mongering not because it was an emotionally coercive stifling of political debate but because it was hard to sell in the marketplace of ideas. Gourevitch graciously supplied the name of the article where the consultants first issued this hypothesis, “The Death of Environmentalism,” and I now see by inspection of my nightstand that I read about it in Gregg Easterbrook’s review in Democracy: A Journal of Ideas of the book that this article later became, Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility by Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger. In my memory of Easterbrook’s article (though not evidently in the article itself, so perhaps I read about the proposal elsewhere, too), the consultants had pointed to the Clean Air Act of 1970 as a resounding, unequivocal success and suggested that Democrats should be trumpeting the fact that air and water in America are much cleaner now than a generation ago thanks to governmental intervention, rather than looking forward to doomsday scenarios, which tend to cause voters to withdraw into their shells. My growing suspicion while listening to Gourevitch was that his concern about the potential of fear-mongering to stifle (small d) democratic problem-solving was notional, and perhaps just sheep’s clothing to disguise a libertarian wolf beneath. So I asked whether he could imagine any governmental intervention into the environment that was worth the burden it would place on industrial growth, and in particular I asked him to imagine it was 1970, and that he knew then what we know now, and to say whether his principles would allow him to support the Clean Air Act.

He answered that he didn’t know enough about the specifics of the Clean Air Act to answer. Since the Clean Air Act is one of the most widely heralded successes in environmental legislation of the last half-century, whose full benefits are still being researched (the latest suggestion is that by removing lead from paint and gasoline, the 1970 act and its 1980s updates improved children’s mental health so much that they preempted a crime wave), I took his nescio to be general, that is, to mean that Gourevitch would never feel that any centralized planner knew enough about the world to justify intervention in the environment, no matter how sure the plan’s benefits and no matter how limited the plan’s goal and costs, and that Gourevitch’s concern that fear might chill debate is, practically speaking, mere obstructionism. (To disprove me, of course, all he has to do is give an example of environmental legislation he supports.)

As an example of how counterproductive environmentalism could be, Gourevitch repeated several times last night that exaggerated concern over DDT had deprived Africans of a tool that could be useful to them in the fight against malaria. (I didn’t take notes, so I may be wrong about exactly what Gourevitch claimed here, but it was along these lines.) As it happens, I had in my knapsack an article about the topic that I had printed out earlier in the day but not yet read. As Aaron Swartz notes in “Rachel Carson, Mass Murderer?” there’s a new meme circulating in right-wing blogs and think tanks, to the effect that Rachel Carson’s campaign against DDT in her book Silent Spring is responsible for the deaths by malaria of millions of African children. The claim doesn’t hold up, as Swartz explains; for one thing, DDT use in Africa seems in fact to have declined not because of liberal woollymindedness but because mosquitoes became resistant to it, a danger that Carson herself warned of. The real goal of the pro-DDT campaign, Swartz suggests, isn’t to revive its use as a pesticide—it’s still legal in ten African nations—but to deprive environmentalism of one of its most charismatic successes.

UPDATE: The New York Times‘s Sewell Chan has a responsible and comprehensive account of the night’s debate.