The Amphibium, pt. 1
Hello, and welcome to Vol. 1 of the Amphibium. Let's get started.
Fifty Shades
I’m in the current issue of the New York Review of Books talking about John Gray’s Seven Types of Atheism:
Over the past two decades, at the end of a long career as an academic political philosopher, John Gray has written a series of short, studiously unacademic books with suggestive titles like Straw Dogs, The Silence of Animals, and The Soul of the Marionette. These books tend toward the aphoristic and are more apt to quote Jorge Luis Borges or Wallace Stevens than Friedrich Hayek or John Maynard Keynes. Though they vary in emphasis and point of attack, all advance the same essential argument—that our ostensibly secular post-Enlightenment age has failed to face up to the full implications of its materialist worldview, that we remain haunted by the ghosts of Western Christianity, chief among them the belief in moral progress, universal values, and human exceptionalism. “Unbelief today,” Gray has written, “should begin by questioning not religion but secular faith.” The latest book in this series, Seven Types of Atheism, is a sustained effort to do just that.
My review discusses Gray’s own views on “moral progress, universal values, and human exceptionalism,” as well as his critique of various secular faiths, but there's an important piece of Gray’s intellectual project that I didn’t really have space to explore, and I thought I might offer a kind of outtake to Amphibium readers.
Gray spent most of his academic career as a scholar of liberalism, in the classical, not the American sense, i.e., he wrote about people like Hayek, J.S. Mill, and Isaiah Berlin. In the Seventies, he was one of the few prominent British intellectuals to support Margaret Thatcher, and he became an informal advisor to the Iron Lady before publicly splitting with her. As Gray wrote in False Dawn, the first of his books pitched at a general audience, he had initially embraced Thatcherism as “a local response to a British problem,” that is, a necessary reform of the sclerotic British welfare state, but as Britain’s New Right increasingly aligned itself with the Reaganite mission of spreading free markets around the world, Gray abandoned ship. In Gray’s view, laissez-faire capitalism—the systematic unshackling of economic markets from social and political constraints—had been practiced in a handful of Anglo-Saxon countries for relatively brief periods, under very specific circumstances, and with varying degrees of success. The belief that this arrangement was the natural fate of mankind, destined to conquer the globe and bring liberal democracy in its wake, was a Utopian ideology every bit as foolish—and potentially as dangerous—as its Soviet rival. “Today’s regime of global laissez-faire will be briefer than even the belle époque of 1870 to 1914,” Gray predicted. (When False Dawn was published, in 1998, the “End of History” thesis still felt plausible to many political pundits, and Gray's prediction seemed laughably pessimistic. I will leave it to readers to judge how it looks today.)
I’m coming dangerously close to writing about politics right off the bat, but what’s interesting to me—and what makes Gray (with whom I disagree about a lot of things) an exemplary thinker in my view—is how he gets from this historical critique to the more broadly philosophical themes I write about in my review. The first step is quite simple: Gray takes his opponents' ideas seriously, and he assumes that people are motivated by the things that they say motivate them. This runs counter to the prevailing tendencies of our time. Most critics of free market evangelism will tell you that the chief motivating force behind the movement is a desire on the part of the rich and powerful to further consolidate their riches and their power, and that any intellectual justification they might give for their policies is a post-hoc rationalization of naked self-interest. (The same is true of right wing critics of the left, who assume that concern for climate change or gun violence are really pretexts for liberal state power grabs.) Perhaps because he spent some time in Thatcher’s brain trust, Gray takes seriously the neo-liberal desire to universalize a particular vision of human beings as autonomous rational actors, and he engages with this vision rather than with whatever baser motives he might plausibly take the vision to be concealing. This approach is not just more generous, it is usually more fruitful.
The second step emerges from the first: taking ideas seriously brings Gray further and further from the political sphere in the direction of fundamental philosophical questions: What is human nature? Are humans actually rational? Do all humans long for personal autonomy as it is understood by Western liberals? If not, can any human values really be said to be universal? Again, this runs entirely counter to the prevailing tendencies of the moment, which insist that all ideas—philosophical, spiritual, cultural—rest on unstated, and often unexamined, political foundations, that all roads lead, finally, back to politics. Without rejecting that idea entirely, I find it agreeable to have at least one thinker pushing in the other direction, considering what unstated, and often unexamined, philosophical, spiritual, and cultural ideas might be undergirding our politics. As for his treatment of those philosophical, spiritual, and cultural ideas themselves, you can read about them in my review.
Odds and Ends
My close friend and erstwhile roommate, Dane Huckelbridge, has a wonderful new book out, No Beast So Fierce, and you can read an excerpt of it on LitHub.
Haruki Murakami is probably the “major” global writer to whose charms I am most immune. I have attempted to read perhaps six or seven of his books, and I have not finished one. I like a lot of the things that he likes--baseball, jazz, spaghetti, surrealism. I can even deal with the cats. But somehow his particular combination of these things does nothing for me. Anyway, if he’s your thing, here he is being interviewed by the New Yorker, generating such insights as “I’m getting older day by day,” and “It’s not easy to be a gentleman and a novelist. It’s like a politician trying to be Obama and Trump.”
On the other hand, Patricia Lockwood and the Internet I can get behind entirely.
A propos of nothing
Yesterday I finished reading Mario Vargas Llosa’s very enjoyable but somewhat fluffy novel Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, which is based in part on Vargas Llosa's relationship with his own Aunt Julia--his uncle's wife's sister--whom he married when he was nineteen and she was twenty-nine. The book is set in 1950s Lima, and the protagonist, Marito (little Mario)--also sometimes called Varguitas (Little Vargas)--is studying law at university while writing news reports for the local radio station. His great dream is to become a writer, and he toils away on the side at various short stories drawn from life. His life is upended when the two titular characters arrive in Lima: first, Aunt Julia, recently divorced and moved from Bolivia; second, a famous writer of radio soap operas, also Bolivian, named Pedro Camacho. The book’s chapters alternate the somewhat melodramatic affair between Marito and Aunt Julia with episodes of Camacho's even more melodramatic serials, and the whole thing is a lot of fun.
(As an aside--and perhaps to continue the theme of the relationship between politics and culture--this is the second Vargas Llosa novel I’ve read in the past few weeks; the other was Conversation in the Cathedral, which turns much of the same autobiographical material--a law student turned newsman in 1950s Lima--into a big, modernist doorstop about the moral compromises made by Peruvians under the military dictatorship of Manuel Odria. Until the last few chapters, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter barely mentions Odria, except to note that the general is a fan of Camacho's broadcasts.)
I was a few chapters into Aunt Julia when I started to get a familiar sensation, and a little googling told me that the novel was the basis for a 1990 American movie called Tune in Tomorrow, which moves the story to New Orleans but otherwise represents the book rather faithfully. That won't mean much to most people, but this movie happened to play an important part in my childhood. My twin brother and I were ten or eleven when it came out, and an older cousin forced it on us relentlessly. At a certain time, we had much of the thing memorized. (In Vargas Llosa's novel, Camacho has an irrational hatred of Argentines; in the movie, this xenophobia is applied instead to Albanians, and there are a few epithets which I still know by heart.) The movie had a wide release and a good cast, including Keanu Reeves in the Marito part, Barbara Hershey as Aunt Julia, and Peter Falk as the Scriptwriter, but I have never met anyone outside my own family who has seen the thing, and I had come to think of it as an extremely esoteric cult object. I was rather amused to have it returned to me in this way. It certainly must be the goofiest movie ever based on the work of a Nobel Prize winner. The internet being the internet, you can watch the trailer here.
A further digression. (But digressing from what, exactly?)
The memory of Tune In Tomorrow brought another memory: While studying abroad in college, I went alone to a theater in Paris to see a movie called The Million Dollar Hotel. The movie was very strange and, frankly, not very good, but given the participants--directed by Wim Wenders, who was a considerable art house favorite at the time; starring Mel Gibson, maybe the biggest movie star in the world at that moment; story by Bono (!) with music composed by U2, probably the biggest band in the world then--I assumed that it had caused at least some stir back home. (We were still in the 20th century, when it was more difficult to know what was causing a stir with people.) When I brought up the movie to some friends a few months later, no one had even heard of it. I still don't think I've ever met another human being who has seen it. The ingredients (Mel Gibson? In a Wim Wenders movie? Written by Bono?) are so random, and the movie itself so strange (as I recall, Gibson's character has a third arm growing out of his back) that I actually convinced myself at a certain point that I had made the whole thing up. Of course, the internet being the internet, I now know that it was released into U.S. theaters, where it made less than sixty thousand dollars against an $8 million budget, that Gibson--who was just a run-of-the-mill jerk at the time, not an anti-Semitic lunatic--publicly disavowed it, and that it is notorious among at least some Wenders fans as the moment when he lost his touch. It has about 20,000 reviews on IMDB, and a few of those people loved it. If I had loved it myself, I might be grateful to know I was not alone; as it is, I’m somewhat disappointed that the movie is not a piece of rare oneirica but just a typical indie bomb. Maybe one of you has seen it?
Tune In Next Time
You are on this list because you responded favorably to the invitation I sent last week. Most people did, which I appreciate, but there were some dissenters. A writer-acquaintance of mine, whom I admire very much, wrote the following:
Personally I think you should very definitely not do an email newsletter, which won't solve the social media "paradox" of systematically failing to distinguish between friends and all those other people. You'll sit there writing an update for the five people you suspect care whether you live or die, tacitly aware that you're sending it to a bunch of professional contacts, and end up with a neither-fish-nor-flesh.
I told her that I suspect the opposite will be true: I would write with a general public in mind, but since I don’t have a general public, it would really just be read by the five people who care. If you’ve read this far and enjoyed the experience, you might help me avoid this fate by forwarding the email along to someone (ideally, unknown to me) whom you think might enjoy it. Anyone who is interested can subscribe (or unsubscribe) below.