Sunday, 10. September 2006, 16:29:50
Book Review, Cultural Revolution
Book Review:
MAO'S LAST REVOLUTION
Roderick Macfarquhar and Michael Schoenhals
Belknap Press
The cultural revolution and how it shaped China
A new history of the tumultuous last decade of Mao's life and the impact it left on his countryBy Ben Arnoldy
Christian Science MonitorAugust 29, 2006
Many trends in today's China have their roots in the late 1970s - the period after the nation had its slate wiped clean by the Cultural Revolution. Those cataclysmic years (1966-1976) offer insight into what pushed China's pendulum toward capitalism and why democracy hasn't followed.
Or as the preface to a new history of that period, Mao's Last Revolution by China scholars Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals states: "To understand the 'why' of modern-day China, one must understand the 'what' of the Cultural Revolution."
The 462-page narrative (with nearly 200 pages of supplemental material) excels at detailing the how of the Cultural Revolution - how Chinese leader Mao Zedong purged opponents, upended the lives of millions, and established a cult of personality (while yet remaining vague about what it all meant).
Ostensibly, Mao launched the Cultural Revolution to restore the communist revolutionary spirit within China - after watching Russia's post-Stalin leaders make "revisionist" steps. The revolution began with a series of carefully orchestrated purges of leaders accused of taking the capitalist road. With the help of his wife, loyal propagandists, and cowering colleagues, Mao encouraged students to find and drive out "capitalist roaders."
Emboldened by slogans such as "To rebel is justified" and "Bombard the headquarters," Chinese students attacked teachers and officials as ideologically unsound. As the revolution progressed, workers and even soldiers were also nudged to rebel. Accusations flowed forth, often motivated by petty grievances or opportunism, sweeping up millions of Chinese over the course of 10 years.
Punishments ranged from public humiliation to manual labor to death by mob violence. "A middle school teacher ... was sentenced ... to nine years in prison for having, among other crimes, written in his private diary that a certain Mao-quote gave him 'boundless energy,' then changed that to 'very much energy,' " MacFarquhar and Schoenhals write.
However, the book does not tell the stories of ordinary citizens. Its focus is on top-level machinations, particularly those of the Chairman. The aging leader is portrayed as fearful of either being sidelined during life or consigned after death to the dustbin of history. Mao's "last revolution" was a crafty effort to stave off both threats.
"Only Mao himself could 'detect' revisionists, or, more accurately, decide who they were." But Mao kept his cards close to his chest, leaving his supporters "to intuit what he wanted and to fulfill what they believed to be his aims." If Mao decided to change direction, he would quietly wait for his acolytes to overstep - and then pounce.
What emerges from the exhaustive research in this book is an understanding of the Cultural Revolution less as a coherent ideological movement and more as divide-and-rule political tactics. "Recent Chinese histories attempt to impose a nonexistent coherent 'anti-leftist' pattern" on attacks that took place in 1967 when students targeted "just about every power-holder there was, save for Mao himself." But if there was any pattern, it was summed up best by the son of fallen leader Lin Baio: "Today [Mao] uses this force to attack that force; tomorrow he uses that force to attack this force."
As time wore on, the inconsistencies of the revolving purges and the absurdity of radicals denouncing each other for being "bourgeois reactionaries" took its psychological toll on the party faithful. In material terms, as well, the country suffered. The value of industrial production dropped by 13.8 percent in 1967, and another 5 percent in 1968. Striking workers and gang warfare hurt industry, as did ministries purged of experienced officials. Perversely, some officials feared they would be labeled "bourgeois" if their industries appeared profitable.
Faced with a mess and few left to fix it, Mao rehabilitated Deng Xiaoping, who had been discredited early in the Cultural Revolution. Deng proved enormously capable at restoring order and putting economic progress ahead of partisan fighting. Deng would lead China after Mao's death in 1976 and inaugurate the market reforms that have made China an economic power.
"Mao's Last Revolution" is a fascinating study of Mao's colossal, yet cunning, misadventure. But it may leave some readers fatigued, with too many faceless names and a narrative that is at times chronologically disjointed. The introduction and conclusion, however, offer context and much food for thought.
The book's final pages place the revolution within a century-long Chinese quest for modernization that does not compromise cultural integrity. "The chaos, killing, and, at the end, the stagnation of the Cultural Revolution ... led Deng to abandon this vain search. China had to jump on the bandwagon of successful Western-style modernization."
But the chaos of that era also taught Deng to prefer political stability and gradualism - a lesson he applied in crushing the Tiananmen Square democracy movement.
(Ben Arnoldy is the Monitor's Asia editor)
Sunday, 3. September 2006, 09:04:15
Book Review, China Watch
Book Review: An Investigation of the Chinese Peasantry (The Chinese Peasant Study)
By Joseph Kahn
Source:
New York TimesAugust 7, 2006
Like many Chinese intellectuals during the recent economic boom, Chen Guidi and Wu Chuntao, a husband-and-wife team of writers, mostly ignored their ancestral homes in the countryside. No one, they described themselves as thinking, wants to read about peasants in the era of skyscrapers and designer bags.
Happily for themselves and for China, they were wrong. Ms. Wu spent time in her family’s home village after she gave birth to her son in 2000. The stories she heard from neighbors there became the seedlings of the groundbreaking literary study “An Investigation of the Chinese Peasantry,” which she and Mr. Chen wrote in 2003.
Though almost immediately banned by China’s Propaganda Department, it sold an estimated seven million copies in pirated editions and stirred consciousness of how the country’s fantastic economic growth had left behind the roughly two-thirds of the Chinese people who are still tied, directly or indirectly, to the land.
Their book, written in part-novelistic, part-journalistic style popular among an elder generation of social critics in China, is now available in a faithful if infelicitous translation. Entitled “Will the Boat Sink the Water?,” it seems unlikely to provoke abroad the same mix of embarrassment, guilt, outrage and denial that it did at home. But it delves deeply into the rural conundrum that continues to bedevil China’s Communist Party leaders.
Mr. Chen and Ms. Wu describe the publication of their book as having been “compared to a clap of thunder.” The statement, like the book, is brassy. But they were prescient. China’s peasant problem has burst into the open with a surge of rural protests that have made the country look less politically stable than at any time since the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy uprising in 1989. Prime Minister Wen Jiabao’s top adviser on rural problems said in an interview in 2004 that he kept a copy by his bedside to remind himself of the task ahead.
The two spent three years traveling the countryside in Anhui province in central China. They were only a few hundred miles from Shanghai, the glittering commercial center on the coast, but experienced poverty and frustration that they argue grew worse throughout the 1990’s.
They collected a dozen anecdotes of operatic pungency. A village chief murders the man who tries to audit the village books. A township leader conspires to get rich by forcing peasants to plant mulberry trees, for which he sells the seeds. A mendacious county Communist Party boss concocts an excuse to send armed troops to crush a tax revolt.
But their greater contribution is the evidence they gather that the one-party political system itself is the real issue. Even in the 1990’s, which they describe as the worst of times for those depending on the land, Chinese leaders were always trying to do something about the rural problem. Ultimately, the authors argue, they will have to do something about themselves.
Rural government has grown much faster than agricultural output. In the Former Han Dynasty (206 B.C. to A.D. 8) China had 8,000 people working the land for every official living off the public purse. In 1987 the ratio was 67-1. In 1998 it was 40-1, according to statistics Ms. Wu and Mr. Chen collected.
Even as the bureaucracy has expanded, the benefits offered to peasants under China’s socialist welfare system, never very robust, dwindled to nothing. In the 90’s transition to a more market-based economy, peasants paid dearly for education and health care. And their taxes kept rising, reversing income gains that farmers enjoyed when agricultural collectives were broken up in the early 80’s.
Rising burdens and declining benefits produce peasant unrest, not surprisingly, and much hand-wringing in Beijing. But the policy response sometimes worsens the problem.
Consider the initiative to set up an “Office for the Relief of the Peasant Burden” in every local government branch. Jonathan Swift could not have thought of a better name, and the paradoxes are rich. The same cadres responsible for easing the peasant burden dream up new fees and taxes — “setting up a township Web site,” “stipend for the forest guard” — that have not yet been banned explicitly by the central government.
Mr. Chen and Ms. Wu found officials who told the truth to their superiors about the conditions in their villages. But those people failed to get promoted in a system that prizes forward progress, even if it is fake. “No lies, nothing accomplished” is the motto they say most officials follow.
The book makes for compelling reading in parts but has not been, or perhaps cannot be, smoothly translated into English. The Chinese text is full of idiomatic phrases that have been cumbersomely rendered into clichés like “calling a spade a spade” and “see the light at the end of the tunnel” that are not redolent of Chinese culture.
The book also predates the accession of President Hu Jintao and Prime Minister Wen, who have made rural problems a priority. The authors get some credit for that policy shift. But today the book’s focus on excessive taxes feels dated. Mr. Wen abolished the main agricultural tax, freeing peasants of formal taxation for the first time in two millenniums.
Taxes, however, were a symptom. No sooner had the tax burden eased than a new and arguably greater abuse has riled the countryside: rural land grabs by local officials eager to cash in on the real estate boom. Mr. Chen’s and Ms. Wu’s work will not be obsolete soon.
Saturday, 26. August 2006, 22:20:13
Book Review
Book Review: Review of Gordon Wood's Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different
by Edwin Yoder, Jr.
Source:
Weekly Standard (7-3-06)WHEN HISTORIANS WAX NOSTALGIC over golden ages it's often a sign that the present age is leaden. That may account for the attention that distinguished historians have recently lavished on the American founding generation, none more distinguished than the author of this study of "revolutionary characters."
The seven subjects of these gems of compression and fluency might once have been labeled "Founding Fathers." But patriarchal labels are gone with the wind, and Gordon S. Wood has chosen the double-edged term "characters": double-edged because the term connotes both integrity and eccentricity. All eight--Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Adams, Hamilton, Madison, Burr, and Thomas Paine--were uncommon men, although with the exception of Burr, the son (and grandson) of a president of Princeton, all were self-made, an aristocracy of merit, the first of their families to enjoy advanced education and national and international prominence.
Certainly, revolution was their lifelong preoccupation. The term acquired a grisly resonance when the French Jacobins bent it to their bloodier ends in the 1790s; but for Washington and Company, a quarter-century earlier, it was a sedate metaphor borrowed from astronomy: less an upheaval than a shifting of orbits and alignments. Edmund Burke may have been the first, as he was certainly the most eminent, to mark the crucial distinction.
There is a note of sadness here, for Wood seems to believe that our present political habits would appall his gentlemen revolutionists. In their view, if republicanism was to gain a foothold in a world hostile to it, the great danger was the tendency of a polity to gravitate toward the "fiscal/military state": a style familiar in that monarchical world. Such states made war to justify standing armies, maintained armies to excuse high taxation, and generated bloated public debts to attach influential creditors to them. Sound dangerously familiar?
This was certainly the Jeffersonian view, and of course, the important dissenter was Alexander Hamilton. Before he fell to Burr's bullet, Hamilton, a stickler for honor, had survived 10 challenges, written 51 of the influential Federalist Papers, and, as Washington's secretary of the Treasury and "prime minister," fashioned four "reports" that would become blueprints for the military-industrial state with its public debt and dependent retainers. Hamilton's prescience has exposed him to caricature as an apologist for greed and proto-Wall Streeter, even as pop history has caricatured Jefferson as a racist child molester prowling the servants' quarters. But Gordon Wood is a student of nuances and complexities who has no truck with the distortions that are so prevalent in public discourse today.
If, for the sake of argument, one takes the Jeffersonian outlook as the norm of what republicanism meant to the revolutionists of 1776, the seven companion figures fall into place. John Adams, for instance, was a genuine eccentric with a chronic sense of being unappreciated, "the political scientist par excellence" who, as he went about his public errands raising funds for the Revolution, rarely ceased theorizing about government. The ultimate result was his clotted treatise, A Defence of the Constitutions of . . . the United States of America, which, according to Wood, misapprehended the new American system.
Adams was stubbornly committed to the ideals of 18th-century British constitutionalism, the "mixed" system in which parliament balanced royal prerogative. The new U.S. Constitution seemed to him, to his delight, to mirror this mixed system. But he failed to grasp a vital difference: Sovereignty had shifted from king to people. Wood's conceit is that he was a study in both "relevance and irrelevance." Adams was very nearly as irrelevant as a constitutional theorist as he was relevant as a practical revolutionary.
Adams's foil was the venerable Dr. Benjamin Franklin ("master of masquerade," Wood calls him), mythologist, long before Horatio Alger, of the rags-to-riches story, already a world figure of science, honorary Oxonian, and stubborn fan of the British imperial system when the others profiled here were in knee pants. During their joint mission to France, Adams felt, with his usual sense of neglect, that he did the work while the old stager Franklin, tricked out in Quaker garb and coonskin hat, slept or flirted.
Perhaps Wood's most brilliant piece explores the so-called "Madison problem." How, it has recently been asked, does one reconcile James Madison, the constitutional architect of 1787-89, with the Madison who almost immediately followed: fierce critic of two Federalist administrations and collaborator in the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions?
WOOD DISMISSES the "problem" as an academic mirage, born of excessive attention to (and misinterpretation of) Madison's writings, especially his Federalist 10, and inattention to the "historical Madison," statesman and president. The clue is what Madison sought in his Virginia Plan for constitutional revision: a central power to veto mischievous state laws, which he viewed as a menace. Hence his proposed Council of Revision, a body empowered to weigh the constitutionality of state laws before they took effect.
The idea fell by the wayside in Philadelphia, despite his passionate pleading. Thereafter, Wood suggests, the great note-taker of the convention was vitally interested in little else.
No book of this sort would be complete without portraits of Washington and Jefferson. Wood's Washington is the pater patriae as self-invented man, obsessively attentive to his roles (theatrical metaphors permeate these essays), internalizing the standard maxims and manuals of gentlemanly good form that would bring him the eminence he sought--and deserved. And, incidentally, dressing the part.
He became the Cincinnatus redux of whom George III himself said that if the victorious Washington voluntarily laid down his sword, he would be "the greatest man in the world." He did; he was. Jefferson, meanwhile, is for Gordon Wood "a virtual Polyanna . . . the pure American innocent . . . a confused secular humanist in the midst of real moral majorities." The labels, out of their context, sound skewed and patronizing. In context he makes them fit.
The anomalies here are Aaron Burr, the well-born rascal, and Thomas Paine, the pamphleteer as rabble-rouser. Burr's career was, we know, insouciant--dedicated to disunion, if not treason. Paine's forte was the mediation of revolutionary sentiment to the masses, in America and then in France. To his credit, he opposed the execution of Louis XVI, and was imprisoned by the Parisian red-hots he had earlier idealized. He fled back to America to die in obscurity. William Cobbett, his spiritual heir, later carried his forgotten bones back to England.
Wood calls Paine our first "public intellectual," but others might say that his passionate pamphleteering was longer on tinseled phrases than sober reflection. One senses that Paine was more modern in temperament and talent than the other ghosts of this lost world: He would be right at home nowadays as a ranting head on the cable spectrum, spewing instant opinions on a scale of one to ten. Wood is right, however, to declare him the most neglected of his seven "revolutionary characters." He is rarely named among the Founders.
Gordon Wood certainly makes the case his subtitle promises: What made the Founders different. The corollary, however, is an elegiac tone, a bass note of regret, a fear that the degeneration these revolutionists feared has already set in; that we have forgotten, to our peril, that virtue, in all its post-Renaissance senses (including self-denial), is the foundation of a republic.
But Wood is too fine a historian to seek ideological reinforcement in the fine meshes of the past. If we can't turn back the clock, we can at least enjoy a master historian's refreshing reassessment of seven men whose legacies live on. The book may be a quilt sewn of many patches, but it never reads that way. It has the integrity and, yes, the eccentricity of the Founders it celebrates.
Wednesday, 16. August 2006, 00:14:36
Book Review, ABSURDIST, Cultural Revolution, China Watch
BOOK REVIEW: Le Complexe de Di
(Mr. Muo's Travelling Couch)
by James Roy
China Economic Review
August 2006Cultural Revolution-era sent-down youth literature had a good ride, but it's probably about time it hung up its paper shoes. It has been a subject of great fascination for Westerners, who find the circumstances of the time simply unfathomable, and for a generation of Chinese writers, who experienced the events up close as bourgeois intellectuals. There was a time when a Cannes jury could sit through - and lavish prizes on - movies about city kids planting crops in Yunnan or teaching children in Shaanxi until the water buffalo came home.
But while the sub-genre has reached a saturation point, its most representative writers may have trouble moving forward and writing about China's present. Most of them haven't lived in the country for at least a decade.
Dai Sijie (戴思杰), who was sent to live in rural Sichuan in the early 1970s and has been living and writing in France since the early 1980s, is a likely example.
His quasi-autobiographical first novel,
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress (which he later adapted into a film), was a delightfully light-hearted story of two lads who make the most of their time as manure porters by trying to use their knowledge of Western literature to woo the prettiest girl in their countryside village.
In his second novel, Mr Muo's Travelling Couch, first published in French in 2003 and in English two years later, Dai has stepped up and taken a stab at the more contemporary setting of China in 2000 - even if that pre-Olympic, pre-WTO year already seems more distant than it probably should. The book's 264 pages are a brisk and thoroughly entertaining read.Dai's protagonist and alter ego is Muo, a forty-something intellectual who claims to be "China's first psychoanalyst".
Muo returns to the motherland after a decade in Paris reading Freud and Lacan to rescue his college sweetheart, who is stuck in a Chengdu prison after (what else?) selling sensitive photos to the foreign press. Of course, the person in charge of her case is the venal, vitiated Judge Di. Sick of monetary bribes, Di's condition for letting the girl go is that Muo provide him with a virgin to deflower.
Determined to win his love's freedom (and apparently untroubled by the prospect of serving up an innocent girl to a repulsive official), Muo sets off on a quixotic quest around China to find the right girl, interpreting the dreams of people he meets as a way of investigating their personal lives. Ever the psychiatrist, Muo cannot get his mind off the carnal. A running joke in this section of the book is that Muo, so versed in the academic literature and symbolism of sex from his studies, is himself chaste while there doesn't seem to be a single virginal girl left in his home country.
Dai sends Muo careering into one Chinese political hot potato after another. Aside from the corrupt judge and the imprisoned photographer (she was taking pictures of the police torturing a suspect), Muo stumbles across an execution ground; a lonely woman whose gay husband was driven to suicide; Han-hating minorities; and a library full of banned literature where he picks up Dr Li Zhisui's biography of Mao and flips straight to a page detailing some of the Chairman's own deviant proclivities.
These might seem cheap shots from a writer who, critics would point out, has not been able to see some of the progress made in China over the last 20 years. Is Dai saying he, like some high and mighty head-shrinker, knows China better than it knows itself? Not really.
The insinuated complaints are only half-serious and usually remain in service of the plot, which is a corker. Quite unlike the placid Balzac, the new Mr Muo is full of twists and absurdist moments. Dai includes plenty of tasty Freudian subtext for readers to chew on and, like his other work, it goes down easy.
EXCERPTPsychoanalytic stand-up comedyDespite my modest fee, I took my psychoanalytic endeavors very seriously. Whenever my memory permitted, I paid tribute to my masters by quoting a passage from Freud, Lagan or Jung. It must be conceded that the language of psychoanalysis, with its specific terminology and phrasing, does not lend itself to translation. When I recited such passages, not in Mandarin but in the melodious dialect of Sichuan, the cabbalistic vocabulary took on a comic edge which provoked such uproarious laughter among the women crowding round to listen that you would have sworn I was engaging in stand-up comedy - a genre I normally despise.
My first client, a woman of fifty, had permed her hair and wore a fancy ring on her finger. She had dreamt of catching a fish. I asked her if the fish was large or small, but she could not recall. To convince her of the significance of this detail, I attempted to translate what Freud has to say on the subject: small fish stand for human sperm and big fish for children. As for the fishing rod in her dream, it obviously stood for the phallus. An indescribable pandemonium ensued, with all the women shouting and cheering at the tops of their voices. My client blushed and hid her face in her hands, while the crowd broke out in deafening applause. From one moment to the next the fear of unemployment vanished from their faces. I have the feeling they have adopted me and that Great Leap Forward Street has accepted me as a public entertainer.
Wikipedia - Dai Sijie
Sunday, 30. July 2006, 09:18:18
ABSURDIST, Book Review
First Chapter
‘The Bourgeois Virtues’
By Deirdre N. McClosky
Copyright © 2006 by University of Chicago Press.
If we had gained a better material world, two cars in the garage and Chicago-style, deep-dish, stuffed-spinach pizza on the table, but had thereby lost our souls, I personally would have no enthusiasm for the achievement. I urge you to adopt the same attitude. A good name is rather to be chosen than great riches. For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?
I do not want to rest the case for capitalism, as some of my fellow economists feel professionally obligated to do, on the material achievement alone. My apology attests to the bourgeois virtues. I want you to come to believe with me that they have been the causes and consequences of modern economic growth and of modern political freedom.
True, any well-wisher of humankind will count the relief of poverty over large parts of the world as desirable, at least if she could be sure that no excess corruption of souls was involved. No good person delights in the misery of others. Even many people skeptical of a Washington consensus of neoliberal capitalism agree that globalization has been desirable materially. It has, as one of the skeptics, Joseph Stiglitz, wrote in 2002, "helped hundreds of millions of people attain higher standards of living, beyond what they, or most economists, thought imaginable but a short while ago."
He means bringing the 1.3 billion people-70 percent of them women-now living on a dollar a day to two dollars, and then to four, and then to eight, not merely the further enrichment of the West, which neither he nor I regard as especially important. "The capitalist achievement," wrote Joseph Schumpeter in 1942, "does not typically consist in providing more silk stockings for queens." That can be achieved merely by redirecting aristocratic plundering to silk factories. The achievement consists "in bringing [silk stockings] within the reach of factory girls in return for steadily diminishing amounts of effort."
To halt such a good thing, as some of the Seattle-style opponents think they wish, would be according to Stiglitz "a tragedy for all of us, and especially for the billions who might otherwise have benefited." The economist Charles Calomiris, who supports globalization on egalitarian grounds, as I do, argues that "if well-intentioned protestors could be convinced that reversing globalization would harm the world's poorest residents (as it surely would) some (perhaps many) of the protestors would change their minds." One would hope so.
But fattening up the people, or providing them with inexpensive silk stockings, I will try to persuade you, is not the only virtue of our bourgeois life. The triple revolutions of the past two centuries in politics, population, and prosperity are connected. They have had a cause and a consequence, I claim, in ethically better people. I said "better." Capitalism has not corrupted our souls. It has improved them.
I realize that such optimism is not widely credited. It makes the clerisy uneasy to be told that they are better people for having the scope of a modern and bourgeois life. They quite understandably want to honor their poor ancestors in the Italy of old or their poor cousins in India now, and feel impelled to claim with anguish as they sip their caramel macchiato grande that their prosperity comes at a terrible ethical cost.
On the political left it has been commonplace for the past century and a half to charge that modern, industrial people, whether fat or lean, are alienated, rootless, angst-ridden, superficial, materialistic; and that it is precisely participation in markets which has made them so. Gradually, I have noted, the right and the middle have come to accept the charge. Some sociologists, both progressive and conservative, embrace it, lamenting the decline of organic solidarity. By the early twenty-first century some on the right have schooled themselves to reply to the charge with a sneering cynicism, "Yeah, sure. Markets have no morals. So what? Greed is good. Bring on the pizza."
The truth I claim is closer to the opposite. In his recent book on the intellectual history of modern capitalism Jerry Muller notes that "the market was most frequently attacked by those who viewed its intrinsic purposelessness as leading to an intrinsic purposelessness in human life as such, and who sought radical alternatives on the left and right." That is indeed what the left and right believed, and still believe. They believe in the cultural critique of capitalism, a critique which once justified the Arts and Crafts movement and socialist realism on the left and the architecture and poetry of fascism on the right, and justifies now sneering at red states by blue.
I say that the cultural critique is mistaken. Production and consumption, to be sure, are "intrinsically purposeless." Mere eating is not a "purpose" in the sense that people mean the word as a commendation. But this is true of any production and consumption, in any economy imaginable, in a medieval or pastoral utopia as much as in actually existing socialism or capitalism.
Humans make their consumption meaningful, as in the meal you share with a friend or the picture frame in which you put the snapshot of your beloved. It is not obvious that consuming in Midtown Manhattan is less purposeful than consuming in an anticapitalist North Korea or in an antibourgeois hippie commune. Isn't it more purposeful, speaking of the transcendent? The grim single-mindedness of getting and spending in a collectivist village is not obviously superior to the numberless levels, varieties, and capacities of Paris or Chicago. Vulgar devotion to consumption alone is more characteristic of pre- and anticapitalist than of late-capitalist societies.
I claim that actually existing capitalism, not the collectivisms of the left or of the right, has reached beyond mere consumption, producing the best art and the best people. People have purposes. A capitalist economy gives them scope to try them out. Go to an American Kennel Club show, or an antique show, or a square-dancing convention, or to a gathering of the many millions of American birdwatchers, and you'll find people of no social pretensions passionately engaged. Yes, some people watch more than four hours of TV a day. Yes, some people engage in corrupting purchases. But they are no worse than their ancestors, and on average better.
Their ancestors, like yours and mine, were wretchedly poor, engaged with getting a bare sufficiency. It does not have to be that old way. In 1807 Coleridge quoted an economist of the time, Patrick Colquhoun, asserting that "poverty is ... a most necessary ... ingredient in society, without which nations ... would not exist in a state of civilization.... Without poverty there would be no labor, and without labor no riches, no refinement." This was a standard argument against the relief of poverty, joining eight other ancient arguments against doing something about poverty-the eight are a recent count by the philosopher Samuel Fleischacker.
Coleridge sharply disagreed with Colquhoun's pessimism. A man is poor, he wrote, "whose bare wants cannot be supplied without such unceasing bodily labor from the hour of waking to that of sleeping, as precludes all improvement of mind-and makes the intellectual faculties to the majority of mankind as useless as pictures to the blind." Can such waste be necessary for a high civilization? Coleridge didn't think so.
In 1807 the debate was still unsettled. Is a class of exploited people necessary for high civilization, as Colquhoun, or Nietzsche, claimed? Or is the disappearance of such a class as a result of material progress exactly how we get a mass high civilization, as Coleridge, or Adam Smith, claimed?
The results are now in. Modern economic growth has led to more, not less, refinement, for hundreds of millions who would otherwise have been poor and ignorant-as were, for example, most of your ancestors and mine. Here are you and I, learnedly discussing the merits and demerits of capitalism. Which of your or my ancestors in 1800 would have had the leisure or education of a Colquhoun or a Coleridge to do that? As the economic historian Robert Fogel noted in 2004, "Today ordinary people have time to enjoy those amenities of life that only the rich could afford in abundance a century ago. These amenities broaden the mind, enrich the soul, and relieve the monotony of much earnwork [Fogel's term for paid employment].... Today people are increasingly concerned with the meaning of their lives." He points out that in 1880 the average American spent 80 percent of her income on food, housing, and clothing. Now she spends less than a third. That's a rise from a residual 20 percent of a very low income spendable on "improvements of mind" to about 70 percent of a much larger income. All right: a lot of it is spent on rap music rather than Mozart, alas; and on silly toys rather than economics courses, unfortunately. But also on book clubs and birdwatching.
Some noble savages have been ripped or enticed from admirable cultures by capitalism. But some ignoble savages, too, have learned a better life free of tribal patriarchy and family violence. You yourself probably have, for example, by comparison with your ancestors of, to put it conservatively, some dozens of generations ago. The cultural relativist claims that one cannot tell whether it is better to be a Tahitian as idealized by Paul Gauguin or a realtor of Zenith as satirized by Sinclair Lewis. I say that idealizations or satires aside, a soul choosing from behind a prenatal veil would opt for bourgeois life now over Tahitian agriculture in 1896. Their mothers and fathers surely would, for their children. Billions have voted this way with their feet.
And whether or not one honors such personal choice, hypothetical or actual, if you adopt an Aristotelian criterion, then most people after capitalism are more fulfilled as humans. They have more lives available. The anthropologist Grant McCracken has written of the "plenitude" that the modern world has brought. He half-seriously instances fifteen ways of being a teenager in North America in 1990: rocker, surfer-skater, b-girls, Goths, punk, hippies, student government, jocks, and on and on. By now the options are even wider. "In the 1950s," he notes, there were only two categories. "You could be mainstream or James Dean. That was it." I was there in the 1950s, and agree-though in places like California, richer and fresher than Ontario or Massachusetts in the 1950s, the options were richer, too. The plenitude has come from free people sifting through the cornucopia, making themselves in their music and their clothing.
As the economic historian Eric Jones put it, "There is a tendency to lament the loss of earlier values and practices, however inappropriate they may be for modern circumstances"-think of French village life in Lorraine in 1431 or headhunting Ilongot in the Philippines in 1968-"without allowing for the greater wealth of opportunities and novelties that is continually being created." Mario Vargas Llosa does not believe that globalization has impoverished the world culturally. On the contrary, Vargas Llosa writes,
globalization extends radically to all citizens of this planet the possibility to construct their individual cultural identities through voluntary action, according to their preferences and intimate motivations. Now, citizens are not always obligated, as in the past and in many places in the present, to respect an identity that traps them in a concentration camp from which there is no escape-the identity that is imposed on them through the language, nation, church, and customs of the place where they were born.
Participation in capitalist markets and bourgeois virtues has civilized the world. It has "civilized" the world in more than one of the word's root senses, that is, making it "citified," from the mere increase in a rich population. It has too, I claim, as many eighteenth-century European writers also claimed, made it courteous, that is, "civil." "The terrestrial paradise," said Voltaire, "is Paris."
Richer and more urban people, contrary to what the magazines of opinion sometimes suggest, are less materialistic, less violent, less superficial than poor and rural people. Because people in capitalist countries already possess the material, they are less attached to their possessions than people in poor countries. And because they have more to lose from a society of violence, they resist it.
You can choose to disbelieve if you wish some of the things said to go along with the capitalist revolution of the past two centuries, such as the emerging global village, the rise in literacy, the progress of science, the new rule of law, the fall of tyrannies, the growth of majority government, the opening of closed lives, the liberation of women and children, the spread of free institutions, the enrichment of world culture. But if only a few of these alleged consequences were justified, then capitalism itself would be justified. And not by bread alone.
The late Robert Nozick wrote that "what is desired is an organization of society optimal for people who are far less than ideal, optimal also for much better people, and which is such that living under such an organization itself tends to make people better and more ideal." Nozick and I say it's capitalism. We say that socialism works only for an impossibly ideal Socialist Man, or a Christian saint, and that socialism tends to make people worse, not better.
The ethical betterment is not achieved, I repeat, at the cost of the remaining poor people. That is a fact to be established. I do not expect you to agree with everything I am saying. If you do, you are not the antibourgeois, anticapitalist, or antiethical reader I am trying to persuade. I need to persuade you that capitalism and bourgeois virtues have been greater forces eliminating poverty than any labor union or welfare program or central plan. We have the eight-hour day mainly because we got rich, and therefore we won't tolerate eleven-hour days-unless we are yuppie attorneys in New York fresh from Yale Law School making well over $100,000 a year in exchange for a seventy-seven-hour work week. Some poor people now work long hours and can't make it. No one should deny that. But it was worse in 1900, and worse yet in 1800. Better working conditions have prevailed not because of union negotiations or governmental regulations, but because capitalism has worked.
I need to persuade you also that, contrary to Colquhoun, poverty is not a most necessary ingredient in society. I need to show you empirically, for example, and will try in volume 4, what most economists know: that if the allegedly exploitative trade of the first world with the third were halted tomorrow the first world would suffer a mere hiccup in its rate of growth. I need to show you empirically that if presently poor people in rich countries all became engineers and professors, the presently rich people would be better off, not worse off, though with fewer poor people to bus the tables and mind the children.
We will not have the heaven-on-earth of perfect equality, ever, and I lament this fact. But equality over the long term-despite an unhappy reversal in the trend in the United States in the 1980s-has been increased by capitalism, and in absolute terms the poor even in the 1980s and after got better and better off.
In asserting capitalism's innocence of causing poverty, understand, I am not simply disrespecting the poor, or elevating material abundance to trumps, or recommending a cold heart. I have emphasized that all our ancestors were poor, that everyone descends overwhelmingly from poor people, even from slaves, since almost all societies before the eighteenth century had lesser or smaller numbers of slaves and all such societies were by your standards and mine astoundingly poor. Try to imagine living on one dollar a day, with the prices of food and clothing and housing as they now are. Imagine, if you wish, an economy with very many such people, and so having commercial provision for mats to sleep hundreds abreast on the streets of Calcutta and for rice-by-the-bowl with pebbles and clay mixed in. It's still no picnic. Ninety-nine percent of our great-great-great-great grandparents lived on a dollar a day, and more than a billion people I said do still. . . .
Sunday, 30. July 2006, 09:06:00
ABSURDIST, Book Review
Book Review:
THE BOURGEOIS VIRTUES
Ethics for an Age of Commerce
By Deirdre N. McCloskey.
616 pp. University of Chicago Press
by JIM HOLT
Published: July 30, 2006
The New York Times
[Jim is a regular contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine. He is now working on a book about the puzzle of existence.]
The heft, the air and the title of this book all promise a big thesis. But what the devil could that thesis be? At no point during my reading of the 500-plus pages — an experience by turns piquant, maddening, edifying and wearying — was I altogether sure. Sometimes the author appeared to be arguing that capitalism makes us virtuous. Sometimes she seemed to be saying that virtue is the most important ethical idea we have. And sometimes she more or less announced that Love Is Bigger Than Economics. Each of these is a potentially interesting claim. But where, amid the luxurious orgy of quotations, epigrams, pop-cultural and poetic allusions, charts, lists, etymologies, asseverations, innuendoes, zingers and brickbats, was the meticulous reasoning that might establish their truth?
Perhaps, though, such a complaint misses the point. Deirdre McCloskey is a maverick, and in more ways than one. A classically trained economist — Harvard Ph.D., junior appointment to the star-studded University of Chicago economics department, résumé packed with rigorous quantitative research — McCloskey broke ranks in 1985 with “The Rhetoric of Economics,” which mocked the pretensions of economists to scientific objectivity. What the profession needed was less highfalutin mathematics and more emphasis on persuasion, stories, rhetoric: so she argued. Or he, I should say. For, at the time, Deirdre was still a man named Donald. In 1995 McCloskey broke ranks again by choosing to undergo a sex-change operation, the central event in her memoir, “Crossing” (1999). Currently a distinguished professor of economics, history, English and communication at the University of Illinois, Chicago, McCloskey is that rarest of things, a transexual, new-Christian, postmodern, minimal-government conservative. She is also, by her own avowal, “a tough urban girl who can take it as well as dish it out.”
And dish it out she does. Foremost among the many, many recipients of McCloskey’s abuse are those who (she thinks) misunderstand the nature of morality. How do we determine what is right and wrong? Modern moral philosophers have offered two sorts of answer. One focuses on consequences: according to the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham, for instance, the right action is the one that results in the greatest happiness for the greatest number. The other focuses on the acts themselves: for Immanuel Kant, the right action is the one that conforms to a certain idea of duty, regardless of consequences. (Thus, by Kant’s lights, it is always wrong to kill an innocent person on purpose, even to save the world.) McCloskey will have neither of these; each, she thinks, wants to reduce ethics to “a quick little formula, the pocket-sized card.”
In the last few decades, however, an alternative to utilitarian and Kantian ethics has emerged, one that harks back to the ancient philosophers. It centers neither on acts nor on their consequences, but on character. According to “virtue ethics,” morality cannot be captured in a universal code; the right thing to do in a particular situation is what a virtuous person would do. And how do we identify a virtuous person? Aristotle defined virtue as a quality of character that makes for a life well lived. Then he characterized the good life as a life lived in accordance with virtue. Circular? Today’s virtue ethicists obviously don’t think so, but they have nevertheless struggled to come up with an account of human nature that would give some definite content to the idea of virtue.
McCloskey likes virtue ethics for two reasons. First, it elevates stories over abstract rules. The guide to action becomes “What would X do?” where X is to be filled in by one’s moral exemplar of choice, who might be drawn from the Bible, say, or from a Jane Austen novel. Second, virtue ethics lends a womanly touch to moral theory, which has long been a “guy thing,” with masculine notions like justice and autonomy shutting out feminine notions like caring and love. Many of the movers behind virtue ethics, she notes with satisfaction, have been women, like Elizabeth Anscombe, Iris Murdoch and Martha Nussbaum. (On the other hand, some pretty important male philosophers — Alasdair MacIntyre, Bernard Williams, John McDowell — have also played a role. One man that McCloskey decidedly does not want on her team is William J. Bennett, who, she observes with some severity, pumped his royalties from “The Book of Virtues” into slot machines.)
In taking the question “What sort of person ought I to be?” as fundamental, virtue ethics entails a richer moral psychology than its rivals. Yet it is not very useful in resolving ethical dilemmas. Should I betray my friend or my country? Utilitarianism at least yields an answer (friend). Virtue ethics tells me to do what a virtuous person would do in the circumstances — scant guidance for anyone who lacks the virtuous person’s built-in ethical know-how. And the egoistic emphasis on cultivating one’s virtue can easily lead to a preening moral vanity, not to say self-infatuation. How much more likable the Kantian ideal of doing the irksome thing simply because it’s your duty, damn it.
McCloskey does not trouble to rebut such criticisms. Instead, she submerges them in a flood-tide of contrary quotations from other thinkers. (She has read the library, and won’t let you forget it.) Her real interest is in applying virtue ethics to capitalism, and to capitalism’s distinctive product, the bourgeoisie. In “The Rhetoric of Economics,” McCloskey mocked bourgeois man as a ludicrous character, “at once master and servant, inclined therefore to hypocrisy and doubletalk, ’umble and yet pompous.” But she appears to have had a change of heart. McCloskey now sees the bourgeoisie as a noble class, the chief repository of the virtues instilled by commercial life.
And what are these “bourgeois virtues”? Thrift? Punctuality? Respectability? Cleanliness? McCloskey has nothing so dismal in mind. Rather, she is talking about the four classical pagan virtues — courage, justice, temperance and prudence — plus the three Christian virtues of faith, hope and love. Especially love. Here is something her fellow economists are incapable of capturing in their arid quotations. “Modern capitalist life is love-saturated,” she declares, as “markets and even the much maligned corporations encourage friendships wider and deeper than the atomism of a full-blown socialist regime or the claustrophobic, murderous atmosphere of a ‘traditional’ village.” We already knew that markets make us rich. But McCloskey wants to convince us that markets are also good for the soul.
Here is where things ought to get interesting. Even fans of capitalism concede that it can have a corrosive effect on morals and community ties. Critics have argued that it fosters consumerism, greed, narcissism, Gesellschaft over Gemeinschaft, anomie, Enron. . . . The bourgeois is a beastly little creature — so say the German Romantics, D. H. Lawrence and, in a rather drier way, Francis Fukuyama. How might these people be proved wrong? The pro-bourgeois case would start with the historical observation that liberal values like tolerance and freedom have been a product of commercial life. It would proceed with the careful marshaling of evidence that capitalism can be ethically beneficient — that, for example, markets generate trust. And who better to construct such a case than a polymath econometric virtuosa like McCloskey?
But instead we get rhetoric. There is polemical hand-waving (“Who says?”; “I think not”; and, most logically decisive, “Point, schmoit”). There is sophomoric sarcasm: Stephen Weinberg, a Nobel laureate in physics, is mocked for his reasoned stand against religion, and the French philosopher André Comte-Sponville is dismissed with stale jokes about Gauloises and Jerry Lewis. Anecdotes masquerade as data: the evidence against the Marxist thesis that work is alienating under capitalism is the author’s perception that Chicago garbagemen seem to enjoy emptying trash bins. McCloskey is contemptuous of scientists like Steven Pinker for trying to explain the origins of virtue along Darwinian lines; yet her dogmatic counterclaim — “Every human is born in sin, and must seek redemption” — doesn’t greatly advance the argument.
And how strong, really, is the correlation between bourgeois virtue and laissez-faire capitalism? Like her friend Milton Friedman, McCloskey would like to see the role of the state much reduced. She says she dreams of “literally one-third to one-fifth of the government we now have.” Yet a social democracy like Sweden, where the state plays a far greater role in society, would seem to be the very soul of bourgeois virtue by many objective standards, with less violence and more solidarity and trust than the United States.
McCloskey probably won’t sway many readers who do not already share her convictions, but for all the book’s flaws one can’t help being impressed by her verve, erudition and fitful brilliance. When she argues that Vincent van Gogh was actually a good bourgeois, or that Jesus, notwithstanding the Sermon on the Mount, was pro-commerce, the rhetorical moves are as deft as the claims are surprising. And who would have imagined that the film “Groundhog Day,” in which the annoyingly smug Bill Murray character comes to see the point of humility and love, epitomizes the process by which virtue is inculcated? But it is a little dispiriting to hear McCloskey announce that this book is merely the first of four (!) projected volumes by her on the subject of virtue and capitalism. Somewhere within this loose, baggy monster there has to be a slim, cogently argued treatise struggling to get out.
WIDGETIZE