One of the joys of reading the New York intellectuals is the marking of time by an essayistic or literary clock. The metamorphosis of the revolutionary know-it-all into an curmudgeonly know-better can often be chronicled in a single, well-made anthology, as all the recent reviews of Irving Kristol’s posthumous collection seem to acknowledge. Though Kristol was a rare specimen in that he actually looked back fondly on his youthful indiscretions in the 20th-century even whilst finding intellectual and moral ballast in the 19th. For most of his cohort, by the time they ended up and fell out with one another, the only pasts that didn’t matter were their misremembered own.
This is why fiction is a surer guide to the evolution that heedless hope makes into hardened expectation. Novels are better landmarks than op-eds or disquisitions in arcane political journals because, if they’re any good, they’re written for posterity. When Saul Bellow was but a tyro fictionist trying — successfully, as luck would have it — to redefine American fiction, he was still calling himself a Trotskyist from Chicago and respiring with lungfulls of optimism about the dawning socialist future, when man would be farmer by day, poet by night, and philosopher-king at the weekend. So strong was this feeling in him that his young protagonist Augie March could go trawling through Mexico, spot an imperiled Bolshevik exile — Trotsky — and remark of the episode:
I was excited by this famous figure, and I believe what it was about him that stirred me up was the instant impression that he gave — no matter about the old heap he rode in or the peculiarity of his retinue — of navigation by the great stars, of the highest considerations, of being fit to speak the most important human words and universal terms. When you are as reduced to a different kind of navigation from this high starry kind as I was and are only sculling on the shallow bay, crawling from one clam-rake to the next, it’s stirring to have a glimpse of deep-water greatness.
Which was one way to start out in the forties. Three decades on, however, and Bellow was settling into a comfortable cultural conservatism and a maturer appreciation for the lighter side of disappointment (“deep-water greatness,” after all, didn’t last very long in Mexico). These were the decades of the Cold War, Korea, Vietnam. So he invented a new alter ego, Moses Herzog, a man on the precipice of a nervous breakdown who can’t cope with modernity and all its political compromises (“Dear General Eisenhower…”), ex-wives, and backstabbing, bowlegged best friends getting it on with the ex-wives. As if to update the aquatic metaphor of that quotable Trotsky vignette, Bellow has the down-at-heel Moses, waiting for a ferry at Woods Hole, observe and reflect:
he looked through the green darkness at the net of bright reflections on the bottom. He loved to think about the power of the sun, about light, about the ocean. The purity of the air moved him. There was no stain in the water, where schools of minnows swam. Herzog sighed and said to himself, “Praise God–praise God.” His breathing had become freer. His heart was greatly stirred by the open horizon; the deep colors; the faint iodine pungency of the Atlantic rising from weeds and mollusks; the white, fine, heavy sand; but principally by the green transparency as he looked down to the stony bottom webbed with golden lines. Never still. If his soul could cast a reflection so brilliant, and so intensely sweet, he might beg God to make such use of him. But that would be too simple. But that would be too childish. The actual sphere is not clear like this, but turbulent, angry. A vast human action is going on. Death watches. So if you have some happiness, conceal it. And when your heart is full, keep your mouth shut also.
In terms of anticlimaxes, this is great–funny and sober at the same time. Moses is Augie mugged by reality, done with amnesiac faddishness about History turning out differently this time around because the kids have got it figured out. Although Bellow described Herzog as a satire on academia, the reader came away thinking, “If only more academics were like this!” because a hard-won disposition that comes with age, study and knowledge — the uses of pessimism, as Roger Scruton has wisely termed it — is a necessary diagnostic for “the late failure of radical hopes.” Bellow’s friend Allen Bloom had this to spare. Today, too few critics and thinkers do, which is why people actually argue over the novels of Jonathan Franzen.
Leon Wieseltier, though, has got it and, bless his heart, he’s still holding out. Writing in the midst of so much bloggorhea, tweeting and status updating, The New Republic‘s literary editor takes comfort in making the most of the least of our times, with technocratic counterinuition ranking high on the list of utopian false fires:
I have been reading a document of the new thinking. It is called How to Run the World and it is by the “brilliant, eloquent, well-connected, and charismatic” (so his publisher says) Parag Khanna, who sits at the New America Foundation, a hive of the new thinking that sometimes seems devoted to proving that really the best Beatle was Ringo. Khanna’s book is a parody of the newness binge. Diplomacy is over, it proclaims. “We just need to load new operating software onto our emerging global network.” That software he calls “mega-diplomacy,” which consists of “action-oriented networks.” This is “Generation Y geopolitics.” “Generation Y will own mega-diplomacy,” not least because “it subscribes to postmaterial values such as equality and ecology.” Mega-diplomacy, which “forces us to cast aside ideologies,” consists essentially in non-governmental individual and collective action abetted by the Internet and other technologies of linkage: best practices plus social media. In this way we will achieve “universal liberation through exponentially expanding and voluntary interconnections.” For “mobile phones and Internet are closing the gap between activism and uprising,” as Twitter did in Iran in 2009. (Really, he says this.) And “eventually, the Chinese authorities may respect and even follow Google’s unofficial motto: ‘Don’t Be Evil.’” (Really, he says this, too.) As an historical actor, the state is over. “Is statehood itself the problem?” Maybe “hybrid statehood” is the answer. No, the answer is “networks of resilient systems.” In any event, “everyone has a role in running the world.” And corporations, too, have a role in the “diplomatic-industrial complex.” For a tribune of the people, Khanna has an unattractive infatuation with elites. “Celebrities possess one of the core ingredients of diplomatic success: prestige.” That is how “Madonna has helped put Malawi on the map.” “Madonna cites her resilience and tirelessness as the reasons why she remains at the top of her game. Regular diplomats should learn from her staying power.” At the World Economic Forum in Davos, too, “everyone at the table is at the top of their game.” And the Clinton Global Initiative “produces the same aura of great consequence.” Also, “the WEF also embodies our postmodern age because it allows people to maintain the multiple identities they carry today. Bill Gates has appeared at Davos as Microsoft CEO and as head of the Gates Foundation at the same time.” You will have noticed that the new thinking is not without platitudes of its own: this dizzy and self-adoring book is an anthology of them. It is cool, but it is not serious. Who, surveying the dangers and the failures and the horrors of our world, the temptations of tribe and race and church and empire, would give up the old internationalism, and the power of the democratically regulated state, for this? Every generation, I suppose, has a right to get it wrong.
True, although Marxism got it wrong more interestingly than a body of belief which suggests that Richard Holbrooke can learn from the Material Girl or that Natalie Portman’s micro-finance lectures will fill bellies in Bangladesh or that Facebook can cure veneareal disease in Thailand. How are our NGOs doing on Libya? Oh.
“Own the future,” says Barack Obama, sounding like a Nike commercial, which I suppose is fine for a president with a tough re-election campaign ahead of him and only a windblown phrase or two to get him out of trouble. But the good critics ought to be warier of the present, and on the lookout for the next big anticlimax.