Review - American Lion

I have to admit, I read American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House (2008) because I had seen so much of Jon Meacham (of Newsweek) during the presidential campaign. It's not that I'm not interested in Andrew Jackson, or in that period of American history, it's just that these things weren't particularly high on the priority list.

And this review may seem less than satisfactory, as I have little to say about the book, mainly because I don't have a huge basis for comparison. When Meacham asserts that Jackson created the modern American political party, I can't really agree or disagree. His take on events, for all I know, is exactly the correct one. I am left to take the matter of this book as a book, as a narrative, on how well it hangs together. And, for me, it came up somewhat short.

The book seems to be meticulously researched, as Meacham had access to a number of letters that have, apparently, never been drawn upon before. As well, Meacham is clear on what he is and is not writing. There is a relatively brief segment about Jackson's early life, too sketchy to be insightful, but the bulk of the text concerns Jackson's presidency.

It's hard to get a handle on exactly what this biography is; is it psychobiography, as we see Jackson surround himself with the family he never had? Is it a political biography, as we see the figures of Clay and Calhoun swirl about in repeated attempts to undermine Jackson? Is it a historical biography, as we are taken back into the world of the 1820s and '30s?

It's all of those things, I suppose, and has its virtues in all these departments. You will gain insight into the president, you will watch the various intrigues, you will get a sense of the times. There's nothing wrong with any of this, and I'm glad I read the book, but it really didn't fully coalesce for me. I had the feeling that much of it was useful only if I already had a good idea of this presidency in this time, and, if I did, there would be little reason to add this book to the list. In other words, it's not complete enough to serve as an introductory biography, and I didn't get the feeling that it added anything novel to what is already known about Jackson (I will grant that my lack of knowledge prevents me from fully evaluating this last point).

I was left wanting more, but I was not so fascinated by the man or his time in office that I charged to the nearest library or bookstore to find out. I may revisit Andrew Jackson in the future; unfortunately, American Lion, while good, does not compel me to do so.

George W. Bush - an appraisal

On this, his last full day in office, George W. Bush will be getting evaluated by pretty much everybody, as we all try to make sense of what the last eight years have brought to this nation. I don't have a whole lot to contribute in the way of finding new deeds that show what a disaster this administration has been, but I have provided some links at the bottom of this post that you can look at; taken as a whole, they will give you a real flavor for the very real problems that have were either caused or exacerbated by neglect. I do have a few thoughts:

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There are those who are trying to make a case for the departing president. Dennis Byrne, who frequently writes for the Chicago Tribune, wrote this in another forum:

Here is not the place to recount Bush’s many accomplishments, including two victorious wars, national education reform, Medicare drugs assistance for the elderly, help for millions of HIV-infected Africans and a nation free of terrorist attacks since 9-11.

I could criticize Byrne, but I will assume that he, like so many others, is simply incapable of seeing this man for what he has proven to be. That said, if someone is going to put together a laundry list of accomplishments, they had better actually be accomplishments.

Personally, I haven't seen any victorious wars, not the one we've been fighting for seven years, in which there has been a great amount of backsliding, nor the one that has existed for almost six years, which may be muddily grinding to a conclusion...at some point. NCLB (No Child Left Behind) is not an unqualified success, not at all, but the federal government hasn't really tried, as the funding has never been up to what was promised. It remains uncertain whether the drug assistance program was the most cost-effective way of accomplishing the objective. The African AIDS assistance program has been a real plus, but seems pretty modest as the cornerstone of achievement. And the attack-free seven years, cited by so many, requires the impossible proof of a negative.

This all seems like pretty thin gruel when juxtaposed against all the things that have and haven't happened. It's sad that, in a time of such challenges, this is the best list a supporter can come up with.

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What strikes me most about these eight years is the utter simplicity with which this team has approached governance. They would accept, I think, that getting elected is a major challenge, but there always seemed to be a casual disregard for the complexities of actually running the most powerful country in the world. Seemingly every major area has been treated as set-it-and-forget-it.

The economy has been the largest and most obvious victim of this point of view. Laissez-faire, which has in practice meant, let the CEOs do whatever they want to do, is actually the way we should (in my view) target the provision of consumer goods and services. But it has proven to be a poor way of managing an economy in which costs can be socialized (and, oh baby, how they've been socialized). And this philosophy, or lack thereof, may have an additional chaotic effect, as we now run the other way toward a government-infused economy (I can't call it government-managed, as it seems Washington has little to no idea what anyone is doing with the billions we're handing out).

Simplicity and do-nothing has ruled the other areas of policy as well. Even the fabled Bush Doctrine (essentially, we reserve the right to attack anyone who has ever had anyone inside their borders who has even thought bad thoughts about the U.S.) is easy; it doesn't require us to engage anyone in any real way, to figure out pros and cons, to ascertain national interest and work from there. No, you're either for us or against us, and, if we conclude you're in the against camp, look out, here comes another cruise missile.

You'd be hard-pressed to find any major area in which nuance is appreciated. NCLB is the ultimate in "toss out an objective, let others figure it out." Our energy policy is "Drill, baby, drill." And so forth.

I certainly don't believe in nano-level central planning, but, for those things we agree that government should do, I don't think it's wrong to believe that they should approach these matters with intelligence and hard work, and a real sense of commitment. And that's just what we haven't had in any of these areas.

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Finally, Bush has been explaining himself away by saying, "History will be my judge." Here's a thought experiment: Let's say that Bush hires someone to put cabinets in his new kitchen. The guy takes twice as long to do the job as promised, charges three times as much as the estimate, and the result looks awful. Then he turns to the irate Bushes and says, "History will be my judge." Would anyone find that acceptable?

Bush was hired to accomplish things for the people who live here today, not to throw ideas at the wall and hope something sticks. Is it possible that, 50 or 100 years down the road, historians will think more kindly of his administration? Seems unlikely (unless, as I have contended before, since history is essentially a luxury item, Chinese and Indian historians are doing the writing), but largely irrelevant.

I'm not a big believer that democracy will inevitably spread across the Middle East in a kind of domino theory redux, but, even if it does, I doubt that Bush will be hailed as a hero for it. That will likely pass to some local leader who brings together the people of that region, with Bush as a footnote (at best, he may be seen as a Lafayette, who, while valued by Americans, is not close to Washington in our esteem).

The only way that the absence of a terrorist attack since 9/11 will be seen as a major positive will be if we have a huge number of attacks in the future. While that might burnish the ol' Bush image, it hardly seems like something he wants to count on.

And that's really the point. For Bush's reputation to be revised in a big way, this country is going to have to go through seriously bad times. We would need to be convinced that, for example, the worldwide depression would have hit in 2005 without his careful stewardship, and I find it hard to see a path to that. If that's what he's counting on to make the last eight years look like good ones, then I pray that he is forever seen as the abject failure that most people think he is right now.

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Light reading:

A couple from Andrew Sullivan (here and here)
Kevin Drum
Three from Washington Monthly (here and here and here)
Cognition and Language Lab on the science crisis
David Seaton
And the Washington Post, detailing just how bad the economy's been

Coming up...Costas! Phelps! Mao!

I'll have more to say about NBC's coverage of the Olympics in a day or two, but I wanted to call out one thing in particular: for NBC to display the Tiananmen portrait of Mao Zedong right next to the head of Bob Costas was unconscionable, and perhaps their greatest violation of integrity while in China. (One wonders if perhaps it was a dig by the production team at big-dog Costas, but I can't prove that.)

Providing local color is one thing, but to have one of the major images of the Games be a huge rendering of one of the greatest mass murderers in the history of the world shows remarkably poor taste. I don't recall Jim McKay, during the Munich Games in 1972, sitting with his face perched next to a picture of the spritely Adolf Hitler.

Some will say that many of the Chinese people still hold Mao in awe, that he is admired, that at worst they call him a great leader who made a few mistakes. But you have to ask yourself, if the majority of the people decided they didn't want the picture there, would it come down? Surely our acceptance of China as a sunny happy place doesn't extend to the fantasy that democratic action would bring down that picture.

I think, though, there's something larger at work here than just the cravenness of the division of a large multinational shying away from casting aspersions on any aspect of the society of a major customer. It is, rather, a tendency to collapse history into a single, easily-digested, safe point of reference. We have taken the sadly large and messy history of "Evil in the 20th Century," and collapsed it down into the person of one badly-mustached Austrian. We've taken the most unambiguous exemplar of evil, Hitler, and turned him into the sole member of his class.

It certainly makes it easier to learn history. We don't have to make judgments on Mao or Stalin; oh, they made their mistakes, but Evil = Hitler - nice, neat, and tidy.

We, as exemplified by the too-often lazy media, do this time and again. Bill Gates (no, I'm not comparing him to Hitler) is seen as the creator of the PC, when of course he was no such thing. Vinton Cerf is called the father of the Internet, which omits the reality that the American taxpayer actually is responsible for it.

I can understand why we do this when history is remote or murky. We focus our attention on a small number of Founding Fathers, on Washington and Jefferson, when there were so many more who contributed (I've been amused by the reactions to McCullough's book on John Adams, then to the miniseries; it's stark surprise that anyone else was actually around and doing stuff - perhaps Madison will be "reborn" next). We look at only a small number of British kings as being significant. Attila's the only Hun who retains serious street cred.

But Gates and the many other people who were part of the amazing rise of the computer are still around, and we don't set the record straight. Mostly this is pretty benign; I actually find Gates-worship fairly amusing for the most part. Occasionally, though, this becomes harmful, as we expect Gates to have all of the answers for our labor problems, and we let him spew self-serving poppycock to a worshipful Congress.

And it's especially harmful when we use this tendency in order to rewrite history. You can put Mao on a T-shirt, or put his poster on your dorm wall, or use him as a backdrop for Olympics coverage, but that just shows your ignorance. He was a loathsome, horrendous killer, one of the worst in the history of this planet. That he may have been slightly less loathsome than Hitler, an arguable point, doesn't mean that we should happily participate in his rehabilitation. I really think NBC blew it here.

Place in history

[For personal reasons, a very short piece today...]

As the time grows nearer for the end of the Bush 43 years, I will probably have more to say about where I think history's judgment will weigh on these eight years. But there are people discussing this already, and Andrew Sullivan points us to a debate between Daniel Larison and Ross Douthat, and how the outcome of the war in Iraq will tell Bush's story as people of the future look back.

In brief, my feeling is this: Even if Iraq ends up a wild, exceeds-expectations success, Bush will get very little credit for it. Instead, the credit will go to some Iraqi who will be seen as the symbol of the new Iraq. It is typical, and probably appropriately so, that those from the outside who enabled a major change are not given their due.

de Klerk in South Africa, Johnson in the United States, and so forth generally stand behind the Mandelas and the Kings and the Gandhis. This is entirely logical and inevitable, but it doesn't bode well for Bush to become the symbol of a new democratic nation. It might ameliorate history's judgment, but it is unlikely to reverse it.

We? Stupid?

In my preceding post, I mentioned that I was on my way somewhere else when I came across Gil Troy's post. Where I was going was the blog by Rick Shenkman on History News Network. HNN is a site by a number of historians who plan to comment on politics (obviously I wasn't awestruck by Troy's post), but their goals are good:

To expose politicians who misrepresent history. To point out bogus analogies. To deflate beguiling myths. To remind Americans of the irony of history. To put events in context. To remind us all of the complexity of history.

So HNN is worth checking out, and I'll be taking a closer look in the near future. In particular, I'll be reading the "sub-blog" of Rick Shenkman, which is titled Just How Stupid Are We?, and is connected to his new book, Just How Stupid Are We? Facing the Truth About the American Voter. Since I often marvel at how decidedly ignorant Americans choose to be, I'll be seeing if Shenkman, an investigative reporter and history professor, offers new insight (I hope he can get names right in the future, as his current post misspells Gwen Ifill's name).

Different frames

On my way somewhere else, I ran across this blog post by McGill University history professor Gil Troy at History News Network. His premise is that historians should defend the recent comments by Hillary Clinton that referenced the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy:

Clinton was responding to a question from the Sioux Falls Argus Leader editorial board about calls for her to drop out of the race.

"My husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June, right? We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California. You know I just, I don't understand it," she said, dismissing the idea of dropping out.

[She subsequently "apologized":

"The Kennedys have been much on my mind in the last days because of Senator Kennedy, and I regret that if my referencing that moment of trauma for our entire nation and particularly for the Kennedy family was in any way offensive. I certainly had no intention of that whatsoever."

Mark Liberman at Language Log goes through the quality of her apology here.]

Troy contends that Clinton's original statement was "not only benign, it was precisely the kind of thing historians do all the time." He goes on:

Historians frequently refer to previous incidents to explain current behavior. To perceive hidden agendas in such analogizing is unreasonable. True, Robert Kennedy was tragically assassinated that June; but he also was running in a race that remained wide open that month too. Senator Clinton was in no way calling for an assassination or warning of one. Simply writing that previous statement emphasizes how absurd the charges are. Analogies by nature are selective. The analogizer has the right to pick or choose within reason, as Senator Clinton did in this case.

He does allow that there has been "a long list of Clinton curveballs, sleights-of-hand, manipulations and lies," but tells us that this current example doesn't qualify. As it turns out, the current comment, that she has made previously, is seriously misleading given the relative length of the campaigns.

More to the point, though, is the frame in which the statement was made. It may be defensible when made by a historian, but Hillary doesn't live in a world of historians. She's a politician, and her remarks will invariably be taken in a political context.

For Troy to say that "analogies...are selective," that "the analogizer has the right to pick," ignores the reality of the politics of a campaign. Analogies are chosen by the speaker, but are heard and evaluated by voters and reporters. That's the frame in which campaign statements are made, and all the historians in the world aren't going to change that.

Review - The Age of American Unreason

There are few things more mystifying to me than the anti-intellectualism that permeates American culture. We are a country that says it values education, so much so that our national program is called No Child Left Behind, yet we allow our most gifted children to pretty much fend for themselves, even though they're far more likely to find solutions for our problems.

So I was looking forward to reading Susan Jacoby's The Age of American Unreason, a book that attempts to chronicle the current level of anti-intellectual sentiment and the ways in which it has taken root in America. While it was well-written and persuasive, I came away somewhat unmoved. Perhaps it was more my problem than Jacoby's, maybe I have already been so steeped in the fundamental American mistrust of thinking that another book on the subject is incapable of stirring my emotions. Anyone picking up this book is probably already aware of how illiterate, innumerate, iggeographate, and ihhistorate we are, and how little anyone cares.

Having said that, there is a lot of good writing and thinking here, and I recommend this book (if you can stomach it). It falls very much into the tradition of Hofstadter's Anti-Intellectualism in American Life and Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death (both quoted, with Hofstadter a particular influence on Jacoby).

One problem is that there is no real explication of what an intellectual is; Jacoby does quote Hofstadter: an intellectual "in some sense lives for ideas - which means he has a sense of dedication to the life of the mind which is very much like a religious commitment." At other times, the definition seems to be anyone who thinks rationally, or works in certain jobs. This is not fatal to the basic thesis, but it is a bit off-putting. It would have been interesting for Jacoby to explore the implications of having intellectuals create output which is anti-intellectual.

I'm thinking here of video game developers. Game creators tend to push the envelope of what's possible with almost monastic dedication; they are the very epitome of people who have a near-religious commitment to the life of the mind, but they produce software that is seen by many as corrosive to fostering the same in our young people.

Much of the book is taken up with a history of anti-intellectualism. In an attempt to be comprehensive, Jacoby allows the energy of the book to grind to a near-halt. Some of this background about topics like the rise of social Darwinism or the insight of Emerson is interesting, but it requires a lot to stay with it, especially when no clear-cut conclusion is reached as to why, uniquely among developed countries, the U.S. is so hostile to anything that smacks of intellectual pretense. Taking even the least-restrictive definition of intellectual as a person who tries to think carefully about the world around him or her, it's remarkable how that process is discouraged even in so-called "knowledge jobs."

Even so, let me go through this book and make some observations; in so doing, I hope to convince you to read it despite my somewhat tepid comments so far. I'll start with some thoughts inspired by my reading, if not fully developed within.

Anyone who ponders the American attitude to thought will fairly soon come across the exaltation of common sense. Much of the mythos of America is built around that idea; for example, we recognize Franklin as a coiner of aphorisms that are grounded in common sense, rather than as the multi-faceted genius he really was. Common sense relies on generalizations and inertia, telling us, for instance, that we will continue to enjoy cheap oil, and there's no such thing as global warming.

As a result, we politicize knowledge, allowing science to fall under the domain of people who want to use it to promote an agenda. This is why, as I have discussed several times previously, economics is seen as scientific, rather than as a branch of politics. In actuality, knowledge transcends and exceeds politics.

The problem is, intellectualism is hard. It's difficult to parse someone's false argument, and to express it in a way that won't get you fired or earn funny looks at dinner parties. Specialization is also a factor, as every topic seems to be the domain of an expert, and we're all too willing to transfer one brand of expertise to an unrelated realm. (It is this confusion that allows Congress to be gullible when Bill Gates flogs visa programs. He's not an expert in labor, or economics, but our legislative leaders still genuflect, even when he spouts nonsense.)

And we're not a country that likes hard. Our raging infantilization gets in the way of serious engagement with serious topics. When success, for an adult, is measured in mastering level 13 on a video game, rather than trying to figure out how the candidates' health plans will affect them, intellectualism is no longer even in the ballgame. We've elevated emotional interests into core parts of our selves, to the point where we identify ourselves as, for example, Cubs fans in favor of other, more thoughtful roles.

Jacoby finds three essential sources of anti-intellectualism: the mass media, the rise of Christian fundamentalism, and the failure of public education. None of these criticisms is particularly novel, but she does present them skillfully. Anyone who has questioned whether a picture is really worth a thousand words will find much here: "With a perverted objectivity that gives credence to nonsense, mainstream news outlets have done more to undermine logic and reason that raptureready.com could ever do."

I think Jacoby fails to make enough out of the educationism that has infested our schools. While she acknowledges such abominations as the equal presentation of evolution and "intelligent" design, she mostly misses the self-esteem movement, which has elevated personal discovery over the presentation of truth. "Facts are whatever folks choose to believe" is an attitude that comes directly out of the idea that education consists of placing toddlers in a conceptual room full of "resources," letting them crawl around for 13 years, and intervening only to reward them for stumbling across something, no matter how much value it has. Once you have a couple of generations that has been "taught" in this way, you end up with a self-perpetuating system of ignorance.

Jacoby contends that the political roots of anti-intellectualism run deep, that, from the beginning of our nation, there has been a sense in which it was believed that education was opposed to democracy, that anything elevating one person over another was counter to "all men are created equal." This may explain why there is so much controversy about the term "elitism," in which three well-endowed, well-educated people try to make a case for how regular and down-to-earth they are.

One of the most interesting points in the book is the observation that our separation of church and state may have caused the rise of fundamentalism. In other countries where there was an official state church, it was impossible to maintain society based on "true believers" (most attempts to do so, such as the Inquisition, turned out poorly). Anyone who wasn't tended to embrace secularism and, ultimately, rationalism. On the other hand, our pluralism fostered religious thinking. As that became opposed to the rise of science, we ended up with a significant number of people opposed to paradigm-busting rational thought.

Jacoby touches on, too briefly in my view, the way in which credentialism has actually interfered with true intellectualism. Most advanced degree programs are as dogmatic as any American church; try questioning the free market in an MBA program, or multiculturalism in a PhD program in the humanities, and you'll see what I mean. Furthermore, these institutions of "learning" are contemptuous of the auto-didact, even if their ideas are sound, their thinking rational.

The book takes us through the 1930s to 50s, in which intellectuals embraced Marxism and communism, only to be discredited in the Red scare. I found this section laborious, because it didn't really explain why the entire intellectual class was hoodwinked into profoundly wrong thinking, something which likely provided more of the impetus to opposition than Jacoby credits.

Here, we move into a section of the book which is difficult due to the aforementioned lack of a definition for "intellectual." To argue that the Cold War and space race created a new respect for the intellectual life requires us to believe that the new scientists and engineers were seen in that light. In reality, common people made no connection between the soft-science fellow travelers of the '30s and the hard-science technical minds of the '60s and '70s, and neither did the academy. One does not have to spend much time on a campus to see that the science people have not been fully accepted into the "life of the mind" (despite the fact that they tend to be broader and deeper thinkers).

Another problem has been the rise of specialization, as increasing numbers of people in various disciplines have staked out their own patches of turf. As they have grown away from the large ideas, they have sunk into near-solipsism, so it is harder to find an old-style public intellectual.

One of the strongest parts of the book is the chronicle of the so-called middlebrow culture that came of age in the 1950s. Having lived through this time, Jacoby turns an observant eye on this time when even relatively modest families had aims on something better, through such means as the Book-of-the-Month Club and purchases of encyclopedias. I share her confusion as to why this didn't lead to much true intellectualism, though I grant the rise of television had a lot to do with it (though I think she downplays the hostility of the true intellectual class - once again, the dislike of the auto-didact).

It may occur to you when reading this section that we haven't eliminated the middlebrow, aspirational culture. It's just that we have diverted it from self-education to self-help. Oprah doesn't challenge her viewers to test their beliefs, she bathes them in the warm water of self-acceptance and self-love. We're not buying encyclopedias, we're buying books that tell us that wishing will make it so.

Though I liked this section, it fell down a bit in its lack of definition of highbrow as contrasted to middlebrow. If Faulkner and Fitzgerald were included in that ultimate symbol of middlebrow, the Book-of-the-Month Club, that's setting the bar fairly high. What would constitute elevation from that level that would allow someone to move to highbrow?

Jacoby does a good job of taking us through the upheavals of the 1960s and '70s, though I think she minimizes the effect of the mistrust of government that grew out of Vietnam and Watergate had on the desirability of government service as an outlet for intellectuals. I'm not sure we've really discerned what the true lessons of that tumultuous time were, so her contribution is welcome. Her explication of the loss of agreed-upon standards on evaluation of artistic quality is well-done (though she does not do quite enough to extend it to other domains).

The book moves now into a description of our current time; again, it's well-done without presenting anything essentially new. It's depressing to see how little we know, and downright mystifying to see how quickly we moved from hoping the president (Kennedy) was the intellectual he purported to be, to electing presidents who bent over backwards to show us how profoundly "real" they are (the Bush gentleman's C). We are urged to keep our business memos at grade four on the Flesch readability index, so as not to exclude the stupid, and market forces have driven us to offer university courses in TV appreciation (which doesn't seem to need too much training for the modern-day, media-steeped student).

At any rate, take this book for what it is. Do not read it for its proposed solutions; even Jacoby seems resigned to their unlikelihood. It is yet another text that will not be read by those who need it, but by those who already feel that there is something irreversible and frightening looming just under the waters of the American dream. You may see the monster better after reading the book, but that probably won't keep it from devouring you, your children, or your grandchildren.

From here to there

I don't want to turn this blog into a weekly tribute to James Howard Kunstler, he speaks well for himself. His most recent Monday post, an impassioned expression of concern about shaky suburban life, unhelpful financial bailouts, and possible gas shortages, is worth reading, but I want to pick up on something he writes early on:

One thing I've noticed is that in any given public meeting (or lecture hall) you can divide participants into two groups: those who believe we will 'high-tech' our way out of this predicament; and those who believe we'll organize our way out.
I don't subscribe to either point of view, strictly speaking. Both POV's assume that there will be an orderly transition between where we're at now and where we're headed. They're tainted by the kindergarten ethos of entitled happy endings and outcomes, which has been the chief operating system for the Baby Boomers, a therapeutic bias for placing 'good feelings' ahead of reality

I think this is an important point, and it's a misconception that has been perpetuated by our education system. When we learn history in school, it's presented as a sequence of peoples and ideas where the next inexorably follows from the last. The Greeks declined, the Romans rose. The British Empire stumbled, the American Empire came along to pick up the pieces.

Worse yet is the idea that things happen as they're supposed to, that this inevitable chain of events came about in perfect order. Many people discount counterfactual stories, those that propose an alternative line of history (what if the Nazis won WWII?), because they think such consideration is ridiculous. Of course America won, that's what we do.

And these ideas are applied to our current challenges. All we have to do is throw money at, say, the problem of oil dependence (I'm sorry, I forgot, government is inherently bad - I meant, provide proper free market-esque incentives) and in five years (OK, it may take six), we'll have a non-polluting inexpensive source of energy that will allow us to drive our current cars and is available at least as conveniently. Problem solved, let's move on.

Which is why we have to read history more closely. There are dark periods where humanity has made very little progress, where there has been no major power to pick up the responsibility of world leadership, where chaos was more the rule.

And technology does not always come along when we need it (ask Napoleon if he could have used tanks). Nothing is inevitable. We may not just find a new source of energy that is superior to petroleum-based products, we may have to go through a lengthy Kunstlerian period first. Or we may not be the ones to develop it, so we may have to go, hat in hand, and beg the Chinese or Indians to share it with us. (Again, it is ignorance of history that allows us to believe that the automobile was invented, and the next day we all took a vacation to the Grand Canyon - it took decades to put the infrastructure in place that allowed those easy family trips.)

I have the feeling that no issue provides any sense of urgency, not global warming (that's so yesterday), not peak oil, nothing. Yes, we developed the atomic bomb in a few years, we got to the moon in less than a decade, but it requires near-bovine complacency to believe that every problem will yield so simply, especially when we're dithering over trivia instead of working for solutions. It's pretty frightening.

Review - Day of Empire

One of the great aspects of "new" history is that, by reading history through another point of view, we see things differently or play up facts that wouldn't seem important. Looking at things that are commonly seen as one way through, for example, feminism can illuminate the familiar. So I'm pretty open to history from other perspectives.

It can be overdone, of course, usually for political reasons. Attempts to magnify the Native American contributions to mathematics often come out as ridiculous; there is no reason to try to justify a culture by claiming things that it just didn't do, cultures stand on their own. Eventually, history is what happened, and it is possible to create explanations or find themes that do not grasp at unreality, and the best histories do that.

Did you know that, immediately post-American Revolution, many European countries enacted laws making certain categories of people unable to emigrate to America? The United States was so desperate for skilled workers in a number of trades that it would send agents to entice them to move, and England, Italy, and Germany (among others) fought hard to retain them. I didn't know this before, and I don't know that I would if I hadn't read a history that attempts to explain the rise of the greatest empires through their desire for diversity.

I'm also a sucker for the broad sweeping theory. I admire an author who takes a chance by explaining complicated events with a new perspective, even though I find myself only rarely convinced that the theory is sufficient to explain as much as it's supposed to cover. For example, I truly enjoyed Kevin Phillips' American Theocracy, which, as part of its thesis, states that the last few world powers have come about because of their mastery of the newest source of energy (the Dutch, wind and water; the British, coal; the Americans, oil). I'm not convinced that energy is the sole determinant of a nation's status, but it certainly is a major factor, and Phillips expanded my concept of what to consider.

So I wanted to like Day of Empire: How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance - and Why They Fall [2007] (DOE) by Yale law professor Amy Chua. Chua offers a broad theory as to the rise and fall of what she terms "hyperpowers," namely, world-dominant powers. A hyperpower has three characteristics: 1) its power is more than any other rival; 2) its economic and military strength is at least as big as any other in the world; and 3) it extends its power over a vast portion of the world.

Chua's essential theory is: a nation rises (somehow), increases tolerance (problematically defined), becomes a hyperpower, then begins to decline, which is associated with growing intolerance (even Chua admits that cause and effect here are difficult to discern [p. xxiv]), then the nation ceases to be a hyperpower. The biggest problem is a lack of "glue," the inability of the hyperpower to bring the other societies (those of whom the hyperpower is tolerant) into a true sense of belonging.

We have a theory here with a lot of problems. The rise of the nation from country to empire can happen in any of a number of ways, then they embrace tolerance (which, as Chua admits, is a relative and selective tolerance), then the country starts to decline, then becomes intolerant (though the last two steps may happen in the other order, we just don't know), then stops being a hyperpower, probably no longer even a respectable empire. Chua applies this theory to seven different empires (Persia, Rome, Tang dynasty China, Mongol China, 17th century Holland, the British Empire, and modern-day America) and demonstrates, at least for the first six, how the theory holds up.

One personal quibble I'll toss in here. I love maps, I find any history improved by the addition of maps. There are no maps in this book, and it seems quite an omission for a general history like this one. To understand the extent of the Persian Empire without being able to see where we find, for one, Cappadocia is much more difficult. I own the out-of-print Anchor Atlas of World History, an excellent compact reference, so I can see how impressive the Persian Empire was in encompassing everything from Cappadocia to Gedrosia, but the average reader will be hard-pressed to reach this understanding.

Back to the book. Let me talk about the very real positives here, what make the book worth reading even if you don't accept the premise. This is a very entertaining book, with many interesting anecdotes about various eras in world history. It is the very definition of a readable general history, and flags only when the theory is shoehorned into the narrative. Obviously there are omissions, in particular anything that doesn't fit the thesis, and I certainly wouldn't rely on it as my primary source of knowledge about these periods, but it's a good book.

Now, the nits. Economics, which many of us would regard as a major force in history, is given very little attention in DOE. That tolerance may simply be a means to an economic end is pretty much brushed by. When Britain imports Jews from Holland (whose families had earlier emigrated from Spain), this is seen as tolerance (under Chua's liberal definition of the term) rather than an attempt to take advantage of the money they controlled.

Let's not ignore the definition of empire used here - there really isn't one. In the description of the Roman Empire,

Rather than pillaging or looting the cities of defeated foes, Rome offered them treaties of peace that were rarely refused....The conquered cities could continue to be ruled by their own leaders under their own laws, with two conditions. First, each could trade freely with Rome but not with each other; in this way, the smaller city-states quickly became economically dependent on Rome. Second, each was required to provide Rome with troops.

Does this really constitute an empire, or is it more a loose confederation? This question, arguable when applied to ancient Rome, is paramount when talking about the Mongol Empire, which barely comprised a single entity (the grandsons of Genghis Khan each took a piece, but didn't seem to rule in concert).

At least as important, did the subjugated peoples accept the empire because of the imperial "glue," or because there were real advantages, mainly economic, in joining the larger body? Perhaps this glue is nothing more than the easily-broken consent of the governed.

When DOE moves to the modern hyperpowers, in particular the British Empire and modern-day America, the slope becomes even more slippery. When earlier empires took advantage of (and you can read that statement either way) the diversity of its subjects, what Chua calls tolerance, that made sense, and I'll admit that any large power that was able to use the full range of talents at its disposal probably did better than any that suppressed them (and her use of Nazi Germany and imperial Japan is particularly apt).

But she undercuts her own argument by asking: "Is it possible for a world-dominant power to be genuinely tolerant in the modern, 'enlightened' sense?" [p. 194]. The answer is almost certainly no, as dominance and tolerance are diametrically opposed (it requires us to redefine tolerance as exploitation, which is dangerously close to Chua's argument for the earlier hyperpowers).

It becomes clear by the end of DOE that there is something of an agenda being presented here. It will not surprise the reader that Chua is arguing for fairly open immigration if America is to retain its identity as a hyperpower, that this country needs to continue to harness the talents of everyone within its sphere if it is to retain its stature. It would be just as reasonable to posit that a growing nation needs an infusion of skills from outside, but, perhaps, a mature nation does not.

As she discusses the contenders, China, the European Union, and India, and decides that none will show the tolerance necessary to become a hyperpower, she ignores the way in which technology allows exploitation without inclusion. China may not be very tolerant of foreigners in their midst, at least not in the sense of accepting them as full-fledged members of their society, but that doesn't mean they can't draw on their expertise (or their dollars) over the Internet. I'm not saying that China will become a new hyperpower, I'm just saying they don't need to grant citizenship to Ohioans to get there.

Chua does express some misgivings as to whether the United States should remain a hyperpower, or whether we should be content to become just one of a set of superpowers. She really doesn't make her case that we have a choice in the matter. Besides an open immigration policy, she defends multinational corporations and outsourcing as a way of spreading American "glue." Why, to cite her examples, Google India or Microsoft Ukraine should continue to generate ideas and dollars for the benefit of the U.S. is murky; at best, one can predict a kind of co-dependency, not a continuing feeding of the American hyperpower. (Her third piece of advice to the U.S., multilateralism, is neither clear enough to help her thesis nor detailed enough to make it more than a wish.)

The real lesson of DOE is that we have had six incredibly diverse hyperpowers, none of which followed the same arc as any other. Therefore, to infer from the decline of the others that we can somehow stave off our current decline, and to assume that the only way to do this is through greater tolerance, is a huge logical stretch.

So read this book for what it does offer, an interesting history of previous empires. Don't, however, blindly accept it as a guide to future policy - it doesn't hold up real well when measured in that sense.