On Claude Lévi-Strauss

Claude Lévi-Strauss, who died last Saturday (Guardian), was a source of inspiration and intellectual energy for me. I remember in vivid detail the first time I read his classic travelogue, Tristes Tropiques, for my Introduction to Principles of Cultural Anthropology seminar. I was so taken by the sincerity of his prose and approach that I begged a fellow classmate who had been assigned to write on the book to let me write the first essay of the course instead. (The professor, needless to say, thought I was quite the abnormal obsessive)

Well, the other night I decided to remember him once again by going over my notes from his works and to glance at my essay on Tristes Tropiques again. Here’s how I ended my paper:

Given the overly-specialized nature of academic life and the almost ubiquitous desire for practical knowledge today, one could hardly be faulted for regarding at least some of Lévi-Strauss’ prescriptions as either no longer attainable or hopelessly utopian. While I acknowledge that his position can be seen as an idealist one, it is certainly a far distance away from being unattainable; for it is precisely against the background of such seemingly insurmountable pressures as increased standardization and greater emphasis on sterility that Lévi-Strauss set about his exilic pilgrimage in the first place. He has self-reflexively endeavored to draw our attention to problems of understanding and explanation, of representation, and of identity that bedevil the traveler and the anthropologist alike, and has done so with great ambivalence, creativity, and sense of irony. It is in this sense, therefore, that, as Walt Whitman so eloquently affirmed, he was large, he contained multitudes.

One-Term President?

nybooks:

Garry Wills

Barack Obama paying his respects as the bodies of eighteen American soldiers killed in Afghanistan were returned to the United States, Dover Air Force Base, October 29, 2009 (Doug Mills/The New York Times/Redux)

I am told by people I respect that Barack Obama cannot pull out of both Iraq and Afghanistan without becoming a one-term president. I think that may be true. The charges from various quarters would be toxic—that he was weak, unpatriotic, sacrificing the sacrifices that have been made, betraying our dead, throwing away all former investments in lives and treasure. All that would indeed be brought against him, and he could have little defense in the quarters where such charges would originate.

These are the arguments that have kept us in losing efforts before. They are the ones that made presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon pass on to their successors in the presidency the draining and self-lacerating Vietnam War. They are the arguments that made President George W. Bush pass on two wars to his successor.

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An Expert's Utopia

I just finished reading (well, skimming really) Vali Nasr’s new book, Forces of Fortune, which I purchased in a bundle along with the great Iranian poet, writer, and feminist, Simin Behbahani’s book of selected poems, A Cup of Sin. Behbahani’s book sits on my desk as a daily companion, consulted whenever I run out of inspiration or get frustrated. I must admit that I knew well ahead of actually receiving the bundle in the mail that I was only going to be pleased with one of these books; regardless, dissertation duty obliged me to mine for myself and see.

I suppose it’s a consequence of public fame for certain professionals to publish every droplet of speculative thought, be they actually thoughtful or not, while their star is still lit and their professional utility still very much in demand (how else could one explain the proliferation of mini-essays masquerading as books - font size 22 with 3 inch margins - on virtually every subject in the humanities and social sciences?). That’s where we find Nasr these days: having won notoriety and praise the world over after publishing the best-seller, The Shia Revival, he is now a much sought-after man, serving as senior adviser to Richard Holbrooke’s Af-Pak portfolio and serenading would-be government players at the Council on Foreign Relations. Some gig for a once obscure academic studying once obscure Pakistani extremists. But Nasr is a “renowned Middle East expert” (CFR) now and “expert” advice on the Middle East he must dispense. Ordinarily, I would have no problem with this designation, and I more often than I like seek out and read up on advice by Middle East experts whose obsessions with this-or-that aspect of Islamist ideology, civil society, demography, resources, etc. are sometimes very enlightening and thoughtful indeed. But I’m absolutely appalled when these same experts feel compelled to revert to dogmatism and ready-made formulas in attempting to “shed light” on an issue. The result more often than not is the familiar parade of “counter-intuitive” wishes disguised as facts.

Alas, such is the case with Nasr’s latest book, in which he sets out to reveal the hidden driver for change in the Muslim world: the “upwardly mobile middle class of entrepreneurs, investors, professionals, and avid consumers.” It’s the middle class, stupid! Oh yes, that familiar perversion of Max Weber’s thesis! To Nasr, “The road to human rights, social freedoms, and democracy runs through business growth and economic progress.” This is especially so in the case of Iran, where the “strong interests of the West are in seeing [it] line up with, not against, the logic of economic change; to yield to a rising business sector and a new middle class that would change politics and religion and then amplify the same trend in the Arab world.” If any of this sounds familiar it’s because it was “amplified” the world over by a fringe group of ex-CFRers in the early 90s after the fall of the Soviet Union: with the “end of history” mostly in sight, it’s time to let free markets do their magic, and then just kick back and hear freedom ring from Bucharest to Tashkent. We all know how that went and continues to go. So does Nasr, that once obscure yet brilliant scholar, really mean to tell us that the multiple, intersecting national, religious, ethnic, civil, ideological (one can go on) histories of Muslim societies will simply wither in the face of commercial and economic imperatives? From our (i.e. Western) perspective, yes: the real battle for the “soul” of the Muslim world is neither cultural nor ideological but commercial.

That this view is misbegotten for the way it betrays a sense of history or familiarity with the major trends in the region is obvious enough. But that it is articulated pontificated by a once respected scholar of the region for reasons having more to do with ingratiation and flattery than anything remotely resembling serious scholarship is downright shameful. The book begins with that devilish assumption (commonly and credulously accepted by most Western observers) that “Muslims” (Arabs, Iranians, Turks, Kurds, Afghans, Pakistanis, …) are a fundamentally troubled lot - they need to be liberated from themselves. But whereas the blunt orientalist of yesteryear used to ask “How shall I discipline and bring to submission this wretched Neanderthal?,” today’s compassionate expert wonders “How must we help them to help themselves?” Nasr is actually more blunt:

“Commerce, as David Hume and the other great minds of the Scottish Enlightenment liked to point out, softens manners and makes a politics based on reason and deliberation, rather than fighting and romanticism, far more imaginable.”

One wonders where Nasr (and his editors at Simon & Schuster) were during this past summer’s post-election drama (a saga that still continues, by the way) in Iran. Were/are the millions of opposition protesters pouring onto the streets actually a pack of once overly “romatic,” sentimental, or backward brutes who had been “softened” into “reason” through commerce? Or were/are they actually an amalgam of concerned citizens of different socioeconomic, cultural, religious, and educational backgrounds who were/are fed up with their unrepresentative government. They resolved to participate in the elections in the interest of “reason and deliberation,” and they were violently confronted by a military-industrial-religious complex headed by charlatan businessmen of Iran’s underground economy. The road to democracy, contrary to the neoliberal/neoconservative wet-dream of its so-called experts runs through power relations in society, not commerce. In a democracy it is the citizens who control the levers of power through their active participation in civil society. That someone like Nasr should be so clumsy with the history of ideas that lurk behind this much-contested ideal is perhaps a sign of how even a most distinguished, independent scholar can succumb to the forces of fame and fortune.

Contrast this sorry state of affairs in experts-world with the lifetime of authentic grace and proven independence of mind as exemplified by Simin Behbahani. There is much that I can and will write about her service to literature and the arts inside and outside of Iran, but for now, since this post is getting rather long, I thought I would relay her poem entitled “Inheritance”, which I think serves as a nice antidote to the kinds of wisdom emanating from Washington and New York City think tanks. The first three lines could have been written directly to someone like Nasr.

(1956)

Calm down, my child, calm down.

End this childish gaiety and boundless oblivion to pain.

Look at my body withering in pain.

Calm down, my child, calm down.

My heart is heavy. I am restless, bewildered, mad.

Mourning the death of true friends.*

…

O dear child, on such a day

the pages were ripped from the book of love

and thrown in a fire of hatred and rage.

O dear child, on such a day

so many blossoms of love and hope withered,

so many were carried by the wind to an unmarked grave.

On this sad, sad day

not even a cloud sheds a tear on their graves,

not even a breeze carries their fragrance.

You don’t know, dear child,

how hard it is to bear this pain:

it is killing me and I can’t moan.

My lips are sewn. What else can I do?

The hate you see in my eyes,

take it for safekeeping in your heart.

Of my worldly possessions this is your inheritance. Guard it well!

*The time the poem refers to is that of the execution of the first group of twelve officers after the 1953 coup.

Perhaps you ought to purchase the same bundle and decide for yourself which of these two Iranian minds explains more about the past, present and future of Iran. It’s a no contest for me, and I intend to “guard it well”.

LRB @ 30 Special Issue

CONTENTS:

In a major essay, Jacqueline Rose investigates the history and practice of ‘honour killing’ in its many contexts - religious, cultural, linguistic.

Hilary Mantel diagnoses nine types of hypochondria.

Julian Barnes goes sailing with Maupassant.

Troubled by the campaign for the release of Roman Polanski, Jenny Diski recalls being raped as a teenager.

Jeremy Harding looks into what will happen to the detainees when Guantánamo Bay is closed, and the real reasons they were put there in the first place.

Julian Bell reads Van Gogh’s letters.

Alan Bennett on writing and rehearsing his new play, The Habit of Art.

Colm Tóibín on John Cheever: his family, his sexuality, his hatred of the suburbs, his drinking - and his stories.

Thomas Nagel analyses the idea of the self.

John Lanchester exhumes Lehman Brothers.

Jonathan Raban remembers learning to read: first from his mother, later from Empson.

Andrew O’Hagan: ‘Please don’t tell my mum.’

Frank Kermode on the unacknowledged greatness of William Golding.

Daniel Soar points out some surprising similarities between the work of Sebastian Faulks and Paradise Lost.

Short Cuts: Thomas Jones on Bio Insecurity

At the Movies: Michael Wood on Agnès Varda

At the British Museum: Peter Campbell on Moctezuma

Poems by John Ashbery and Charles Simic