It is Hard to Grow Up

In 1999 the French novelist and thinker Pascal Bruckner published a book-length essay entitled La tentation de l'innocence, in which he ponders the question of why in the West--the freest, most affluent society in the history of the world--so many people purport to be discontented, alienated, and oppressed. Ultimately, he arrives at the conclusion that many westerners, deprived of much in the way of spiritual education, satisfy themselves with a consumerist mentality, viewing themselves primarily as physical beings, whose endless desires are endlessly catered to by a capitalistic society that encourages consumerism so as to foster its own wealth. As a result, many in the West have lost touch with basic human values--particularly freedom, which allows individuals through rational choice and hard work to make meaningful and ultimately virtuous and happy lives.

Instead, says Bruckner, many in western society have adopted an attitude of passivity and often of infantilism, since doing so assures them that like the infants they aspire to be, their needs and desires will be met, not so much by their own parents but by the state, which in alarming ways acts ever more, as time goes on, in loco parentis. And acting like infants entails adopting the pose of the victim. Whoever is a victim, says Bruckner, is entitled to the sympathy of society, to the protection of the paternal state, to a life free from the possibility of catastrophe or failure. Indeed, Bruckner gives several examples of even radical Muslims who play the ultimate trump in the game of sympathy--identifying themselves with the Jews of the Holocaust. For whoever can claim to be currently in the position of European Jewry in the middle decades of the last century has it bad; no misfortune in history, as Timothy Snyder has shown again in his masterful Bloodlands, compares with that of the Jews subjected to the Holocaust.

Bruckner provides good evidence for his thesis--some shocking, some (as in the case of the woman who, after bathing her poodle and then attempting to dry it in her microwave, sued the manufacturer of the oven for not issuing a warning against using it to dry live animals) amusing (depending, of course, on how one feels about poodles)--and all of it adds up to a depressing assessment for those who subscribe to Edmund Burke's belief that free societies require a virtuous populace. More depressing still when one reflects that were he writing the book today Bruckner might find in the riots currently under weigh in England (to say nothing of the anti-austerity demonstrations in Greece, Spain, and Israel) more examples to hand than he could possibly use.

But it strikes me that Bruckner's analysis also goes far toward explaining our present discontents here in our fretful American summer of 2011. At a time that requires robust leadership we have in the highest office in the land a President who embodies the infantilization of culture lamented in Bruckner's book. Does Bruckner argue that we are plagued by people with no discernible values? One might ask what President Obama's core values are--besides his obvious thirst for reelection. As many have pointed out, "hope and change" is curiously devoid of any specific content, since the phrase can mean anything one wants it to. Indeed the mantra functions very like a mirror: the content it provides is only a view of whoever happens to look into it at the moment. If Bruckner writes about a populace in which everyone is convinced of his own uniqueness and therefore his own special right to privileges that do not extend to others, one is reminded of the sheer amount of money our President and his family have spent on junkets and self-serving indulgences afforded by the office he holds. And if in Bruckner's view many westerners behave like children because they wish not to hold responsibility and are therefore free from the need to act, one is reminded starkly of President Obama's incessant, ungracious habit of blaming others for our current problems. He is never responsible; Democrats--even when for two years they held the White House and large majorities in the Congress (including for a time a supermajority in the Senate)--are never to blame. His habit of never calling for and never proposing a budget (except for his feckless budget in the spring, which even every Democrat in the Senate voted against) demonstrates that he wishes to enjoy the office without ever taking the responsibility of holding a position, itself a perfect illustration of what Bruckner means when he writes of the citizen as child.

If Bruckner's book, however, helps us see that a little thoughtful cultural criticism can help us diagnose pressing difficulties, the book also yields melancholy reflections as well, such as the fear that if the problem was alarming enough in France and Europe to call for attention twenty years ago, might the malady have now crossed the Atlantic and come to our shores? Does the fact that we have in the Oval Office a leader who perfectly embodies the infantile behavior that Bruckner discusses mean that America is now very far down the yellow brick road to the puerile utopia of Oz, or is Barack Obama a cautionary tale, a warning that if we are not careful we could end up like Europe--i.e., at the mercy of the marauding yobs currently setting Britain aflame? It is difficult to know, but the next election should go far toward answering that question.

Whether or not Barack Obama represents American character, one thing is certain: his current lack of leadership should come as no surprise at all. He has spent the past three years complaining about the state of the Union, and with some justification, for we are in difficult circumstances. But a complaint is a dodge. It is an admission of powerlessness; it is an assertion that nothing is to be done but, as Shakespeare's very passive Richard II puts it when faced with the great crisis of his reign, "sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the deaths of kings." It is an admission by the passive man-boy that he is not up to the task, that the world is too much for him to handle. The habit of blame in itself tells us that our President has no real solutions. If he did, if he were confident in his principles, if, in short, he were a leader, blame would be irrelevant. He would welcome difficulty for the challenge that it is; he would remind this nation it is great because God has blessed our character with a spirit that rises to a challenge and delights in difficulty, and, as if to illustrate that very truth, he would square his shoulders and get to work. As it is, he blames. He points out tirelessly that he is not responsible. And in so doing he convinces more than any speech he could ever give that indeed he is not responsible--in any sense of the word.

One Cheer for Fareed

Last Thurday night, driving home from work, I thought I had reached a milestone--metaphorically speaking, of course, because there are no literal milestones in my neck of the woods, unlike, say, along the Appian Way in the imperial days of ancient Rome. No, this milestone was an intellectual milestone, a stone that stood as unshakeable testimony to such an intense intellectual life that it occasionally produced something original. I speak of Fareed Zakaria, the much vaunted journalist and intellectual that graces the pages of Time and appears at the center of his own show each week on CNN. He has all the makings of a star--an international background, heavy with experience in the newly-chic cultures of South and Central Asia, a fist-class education, the ability to hold his own in conversation with the best of them, and yet I must confess that over the years I have found him, well, just a bit thin. Be honest, gentle reader: have you ever actually learned anything from the man? Have you ever come away from his page in Time or his show on the tube and said to yourself, "Yes, I admire the strongly counterintuitive stand he's taking"? Or have you ever thought to yourself after reading his prose or listening to his admittedly musical voice, "Well, there's an idea I've never encountered before. What bold, fresh thinking"? I must confess that after seeing hime a number of times on the ABC show This Week, I came away with the feeling that Zakaria embodies what Alexander Pope once described as the great virtue of fine verse: he says "what oft was thought but ne'er so well expressed." I have heard him explaining that the war in Afghanistan is difficult, I have heard him say that the President's health-care bill faced a tough fight in Congress, I have even heard him go way out on a limb and opine that corruption is bad for countries. But I have never heard him utter an opinion that is bold, striking, and that in the gathering mists of time one will always associate with him.

It need not be thus. Public intellectuals can indeed--and often do--say striking things. Rightly or wrongly, Bernard-Henri Levy this spring strongly pushed Nicolas Sarkozy to intervene militarily in Libya. Francis Fukuyama boldy supported the invasion of Iraq, though it tarnishes his record as a reliable sage that when things there began to look bad, he decided that he had been wrong--just in time for the surge to work and President Bush to receive credit for salvaging an almost impossible situation. And then there is Bill Kristol, who in the darkest days of Iraq, when even so stalwart a Republican as Indiana Senator Dick Lugar was urging President Bush to abandon the mission in Iraq, used the editorial page of The Weekly Standard to argue that President Bush should stay the course and said that leadership often meant taking the hard, unpopular decisions, which with time may yield great victories when the overwhelming temptation is to take the easy way out. In those days, when seemingly everyone was opposed to continuing the war in Iraq, when scores, sometimes hundreds, were killed daily in the chronic Iraqi civil conflict, Kristol took a bold stand and said what might have gone a long way to discrediting him if things should have turned out differently--if things, in other words, had turned out precisely as almost everyone in those days was predicting it would.

Not so Fareed Zakaria, whom one is tempted to call Mr Bromide. His new book, which he is currently marketing, has as its thesis--I kid you not--that in our new multi-polar world, other countries will be as economically powerful as the United States and will come to challenge us militarily as well. Not exactly the fresh, innovative thinking of Pascal Bruckner's Tears of the White Man or Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man. Those books may be right (Bruckner's perhaps; the jury's still out on Fukuyama) or wrong, but at least they say something; they provoke thought and provide conversation. Zakaria, by contrast, almost never says anything that wasn't said--and often repeated--by other mouths among the media elite.

So imagine my delight when, driving down the road, as I said, the other night, I caught Zakaria on Terry Gross' Fresh Air flogging his new book and heard him make the argument that, yes, American power relative to that of other countries in the world will almost certainly decline as places like India and China begin to transform economic power to military. But, he said--and this for me was the kicker--that's not necessarily a bad thing. It will be unpleasant if we find ourselves less powerful vis-a-vis China, for instance, but if we think back over the course of American history, it has usually been thus. We have been a world power only since the end of WWII: for most of our history, we have not been a major player on the world stage, and we did just fine. In fact, the decades that we think of as contributing most to the establishment of the American character were not decades when we were the world's lone hyperpower. This insight struck me at the time as brilliant; in the course of thirty seconds I revised my entire opinion of Zakharia. Here at last was an insight both simple and powerful--something that seemed so self-evidently true and yet no one else of any stature was saying it. (Indeed, he went on to make the point the point that since patriotism and American exceptionalism play so well on the stump, politician were almost by definition not going to make it.)

But then came the crash--once again I speak metaphorically. I made it home, but I walked through the door in a fog, because a very quick analysis had shown me that Zakaria made only a seemingly telling point. His point would have been true a hundred years ago: we might easily have been fine as a second-rate power or as only one pole in a multi-polar world. But as things now stand, with the rapid advance of technology, when countries on the other side of globe might now just as well be just off-shore, such a seondary or tertiary role could well be disastrous for the United States. The main reason to be a hyperpower is to project power outward so that we do not have to face battles here at home. During the 1990s, when we were the lone superpower but did not behave as if we were, we invited the type of thinking that led to the attack of 9-11. After 9-11, President Bush once again acted with authority around the globe, and we have remained safe at home. But if, with current technology, we find the world being ordered by the Chinese, then things may become very grim indeed. For my money, I disagree for various reasons with those conservatives who see China as a great threat. But I am not certain that I'm right, and I certainly wouldn't bet the nation's security on it. I would feel much safer--and so would most people around the world--if America remained able to react decisively to any major geopolitical developments abroad.

So, here's to Fareed Zakaria for a good try. But he might do better. Perhaps because he has the privileged background that he does he feels safe by travelling along well-trod paths. Still, right or wrong, I prefer the bolder vision of Bill Kristol any day.