A Very Old Hedgehog

According to Christie's, which sold this back in 2011, this is a Syrian Copper Vessel of the Late Uruk Period, Circa 3000 B.C., which had been in a private collection in Switzerland since the 1920s. I guess somebody believed them, since it sold for $385,000.

I honestly don't know what to make of it. It doesn't look like anything else I've seen from 3,000 BC, and Syria is not very well known in that period. But I suppose it could be. And anyway, how wonderful.

Christopher Lasch on the Woes of Meritocracy

Intrigued by something I read about Christopher Lasch (1932-1994) in a post on America's current malaise, I started looking into him and his ideas. My public library has none of his books, so I ordered used paperback copies of three of them: The Culture of Narcissism (1979), The True and Only Heaven: Progress and its Critics (1991), and The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy (1994). I hope eventually to write an essay about his ideas and what they can or cannot contribute to our ongoing national conversation, but there is a lot to digest so that will be a while.

I just finished The Revolt of the Elites, the first to arrive, and the thing that struck me most about it was Lasch's assault on meritocracy. This is an important political point right now, because the economic program of the Republican party boils down to saying that inequality is ok, as long as it is not hereditary. If the route to riches is really open to everyone, regardless of class, race, and sex, then we should celebrate the hard-working people who make it to the top. Jeb Bush calls this the "Right to Rise" and has made it one of his main campaign themes.

Christopher Lasch dismissed all such talk. He hated the worship of "success" that has long been a major strain of American economic thought. As far as he was concerned, "Economic inequality is intrinsically undesirable, even when confined to its proper sphere." Lasch was a history professor with a Columbia Ph.D., and he knew a lot about American intellectual history. He studied especially the long line of American thinkers who attacked great wealth as "morally repugnant and incompatible with democratic ideals."

In the first half of the nineteenth century most people who gave any thought to the matter assumed that democracy had to rest on a broad distribution of property. They understood that extremes of wealth and poverty would be fatal to the democratic experiment. . . . Democratic habits, they thought – self-reliance, responsibility, initiative – were best acquired in the exercise of a trade or the management of a small holding of property. A “competence,” as they called it, referred both to property itself and to the intelligence and enterprise required by its management. It stood to reason, therefore, that democracy worked best when property was distributed as widely as possible among the citizens.

Lasch is thinking both of Jeffersonian Democrats and midwestern Whigs like Abraham Lincoln who pushed for the Homestead Act. To such people, the very existence of wealthy capitalists and impoverished workers was a great danger to the Republic, and everything possible had to be done to prevent the country from evolving in that direction. Of course the country did industrialize, and an emphasis on the right to rise was one of the results:

Historically the concept of social mobility was clearly articulated only when people could no longer deny the existence of a degraded class of wage earners tied to that condition for life – only when the possibility of a classless society, in other words, was decisively abandoned. 

Lasch held to what he considered the true American position, that inequality is bad no matter where the rich come from. Indeed, he thought, a meritocracy is in some ways worse than an aristocracy:

The notion that egalitarian purposes could be served by the “restoration” of upward mobility betrayed a fundamental misunderstanding. High rates of mobility are by no means inconsistent with a system of stratification that concentrates power and privilege in a ruling elite. Indeed, the circulation of elites strengthens the principle of hierarchy, furnishing elites with fresh talent and legitimating their ascendancy as a function of merit rather than birth.

As many others have noted, an elite composed of people who have risen by their own efforts may have less interest in helping the poor; I worked my way up, they reason, so why can't you?

An aristocracy of talent – superficially an attractive ideal, which appears to distinguish democracies from societies based on hereditary privilege – turns out to be a contradiction in terms: the talented retain many of the vices of aristocracy without its virtues. Their snobbery lacks any acknowledgment of reciprocal obligations between the favored few and the multitude. 

Furthermore, meritocracy "drains talent away from the lower classes and thus deprives them of effective leadership." This particular point has gotten a lot of attention in two contexts. Many people have noted that when successful blacks began to move out of traditionally all-black neighborhoods they left behind pockets of poverty and pathology. Kentucky farmer/poet Wendell Berry has made the same complaint about small towns, which have been "strip mined" of talent by the pull of big cities.

I was fascinated to learn that the debate we are having now about whether investment in education can reduce inequality and promote social mobility is an old one, going back to the nineteenth century. Lasch thought this was beside the point. People who think education should equip all student to get rich

ignore the real objections to meritocracy and content themselves with dubious argument to the effect that education does not live up to its promise of fostering social mobility. If it did, they seem to imply, no one would presumably have any reason to complain.

To Lasch, inequality in itself is both a moral disaster and a dire threat to democracy: "When money talks, everyone else is condemned to listen."

As I have written before, I am not sure what the alternative to meritocracy would be. But I think it is good to be reminded that all talk of a right to rise is a distraction from the real issue: what sort of society do we want? Most Americans say they want a middle class society, not one divided between rich and poor. Social mobility is in this context irrelevant; it is the class structure of society that matters, not how it got this way. I believe that the experiment in a rawer style of capitalism we have tried over the past 35 years has shown that this approach leads inexorably to ever greater class divisions. Trying to fiddle with the educational system so that we end up with an elite having the proper number of blacks, Hispanics and women will not get us to the world that I and most other Americans want. For that, we need a radically different economic approach.

Some Roman Heads

Images from Flickr's antiquities project; I believe most of these are in the National Museum in Naples. All are stone except for the last, which is ivory.

Maniacs and Guns

The Times has a very depressing feature on the ways recent mass murderers have obtained their guns, full of tragic bits of bureaucratic malfeasance like

Mr. Fryberg applied to buy the Beretta from a gun shop on the Indian reservation where he lived with Jaylen. A background check failed to come up with the protection order because it was never entered into the system.

But really the problem comes down to this: it is very, very hard to accurately diagnose serious mental illness, or to predict which people might become violent. So as long as we treat gun ownership as a right that can only be taken away for probable cause of danger, we will never be able to keep potentially dangerous people from owning guns. Most mass shooters buy their guns legally. To keep this sort of thing from happening, we would have to turn our attitude around and make gun ownership a privilege available only to those who can prove themselves fit. I think that in our democracy this would be impossible; too many law-abiding Americans passionately love their guns. Given that there are already a hundred million guns in America, and that buying one illegally is about as hard as buying pot, I doubt that would make much difference anyway.

Personally, I hate guns, and wish they were as rare here as they are in Britain. But count me as a skeptic that gun control will ever make any difference to crime in America.

Wonders of the Frozen Pazyryk Tombs

I spent hours this week perusing the web site of the Hermitage Museum, which is full of wonders. Among other things the famous treasures from the frozen tombs of the Altai are there, and now they have images up of many things I have never seen before. (Felt appliqué)

The Altai is a desolate mountain region where Kazakhstan, Mongolia and China come together. In those mountains are certain high meadows where the ground is permanently frozen. Those meadows were sacred to nomadic tribes who traveled the nearby steppes, and between about 550 and 250 BCE they buried their royal families in the frozen soil. (Wagon)

The tombs were all looted long ago and archaeologists found little gold in them. But the frozen soil preserved all manner of perishable items made of wood, leather, and cloth. Even some of the bodies were preserved, with their tattoos. So today I post more images of these wonders, emphasizing things I have not posted before.

From these precious items we can form wonderful images of life among the nomadic people who used them. Modern nomads live in tents lined with carpets, and they dress in many layers of clothing against the harsh winters. Without those textiles, our reconstruction of the world of ancient nomads is naked; with the carpets and blankets of the Altai Tombs, we can clothe them again. Here are details of two saddle blankets from the tombs; the top one is felt, made in central Asia, while the bottom one is from Iran.

The culture of these tombs is known as Pazyryk, after the first of these archaeological sites to be excavated. The Pzayryk were related to the Scythians of west Asia; the main difference is that while the Scythians were closely connected to Greek and Persian culture, the Pazyryk had trading ties with China. Wooden plaques from saddles and bridles.

Famous felt rider from a carpet made in central Asia.

A small shield (35 cm tall) made of wood and leather.

Antlered mask for a horse, and a reconstruction of what this horse's finery would have looked like.

More felt: a tiger with antlers, a swan, and a griffin.

More saddle blankets.

And the top of a staff. Here we see one of the great things about life in the modern age. Across the 2,000 years before archaeologists dug into these tombs, nobody on earth had seen these things, and their memory faded. But we can see them with the click of a mouse. For most of human history, most people experienced only a single cultural zone, or a handful. We have access to thousands, living and dead. For a curious person like me, it is a great reason to be alive now.

Ornament showing an eagle and prey. More here, here and here.

War is Expensive

In April this year, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, proudly announced that the British government had finally finished paying for the First World War.

--Ben Shepard, TLS, July 17 2015

In the Name of the Mesopotamian Gods

This magnificent object is a Kudurru, a carved stone used to mark a royal land grant. Old books call them "boundary stones", but they were kept in the palace or temple archives, not placed out on the borders of the grant. This one comes from Babylon, the Second Dynasty of Isin, 1157-1025 BC; I found it in an online exhibit at the California Museum of Ancient Art.

This stone is carved of black limestone, 16.5 inches tall (42 cm). The designs are full of significance. On the front:

the Mesopotamian pantheon is presented. The four great gods come first. Anu ("father of the gods" and god of heaven) and Enlil (god of wind, kingship and the earth), are shown as a multi-horned divine crown each on its own temple facade. Then Ea (god of water, magic and wisdom), is shown as a curved stick ending in a ram's head atop a temple facade pulled by the foreparts of a horned goat. Above the first two deities, a female headdress in the shape of an omega sign, symbolizes Ninhursag ("mother of the gods" and goddess of fertility).

Reverse:

The leading Babylonian god, Marduk, and his son Nabu, appear next. A triangular spade pointing up and a scribe's wedge-shaped stylus, respectively, each sits atop a temple facade pulled by the foreparts of a snake-dragon known as a Mushus. All five temple facades float on fresh, underground waters known as the Apsu or the Deep. Following these divinities, we find the mace, perhaps a local war god, the scepter with double lion heads of Ninurta (god of war), the arrow, a symbol of the star Sirius, and the two-pronged lightning bolt of Adad. This storm god is called by the similar name Haddad in the Levant. The running bird Papsukkal (minister of the gods, associated with the constellation Orion), is followed by the scorpion Ishara (goddess of oaths), the seated dog Gula (goddess of healing) and a bird on a perch, symbolizing both Shuqamuna and Shumalia (patron deities of the Kassite royal family).

Top:

The top of the kudurru, representing the heavens, is surrounded and enclosed by the body of a large snake. Nirah (the snake god) encompasses four astral deities the crescent moon of Sin (the moon god), a multi-rayed circular sun disc of Shamash (the sun god), a star inside a disc for Ishtar (the goddess of love -especially sexuality- and war) and the lamp of Nusku (the god of fire and light). Ishtar, considered the most important Mesopotamian female deity, is associated with the morning and evening star, the planet Venus.

Fascinating. More here.

College Enrollments Declining

Noah Smith is the latest pundit to claim that the glory days of American higher education are over:

After climbing for many decades, college enrollment has now fallen for three consecutive years. One of the longest-running and most important trends in American history has reversed itself. . . .

College is probably good for almost everyone. But just because it’s good for you doesn’t mean it’s worth the increasingly steep price tag.

One good outcome from all of this is that for profit colleges, which I regard as disgraceful scams, are losing students the fastest; the University of Phoenix saw new enrollments fall by 12% last year, and is closing half of its campuses. Smith:

It is increasingly looking like the college craze has overshot. Young people have cheaper ways to build their human capital.

Rising Tide No Longer Lifting Most Boats

From my entire lifetime a great debate has waged over one key question in political economy: are poor people helped more by government action or overall economic growth? Every time a liberal says we need to do more to help the poor (minimum wage laws, the Earned Income Tax Credit, welfare) some conservative says balderdash, that would only reduce overall economic growth, and what really helps poor people is economic growth. Over the whole period from 1750 to 1980, conservatives had a point; when the economy grew, wages generally rose across the board. If government anti-poverty measures did depress economic growth -- which is disputed, but anyway let's follow the argument -- then it really might have been true that poor people would be helped more by simply ramping up economic growth in whatever way we could.

But if this was ever true, it is no longer true. Now we know that we can have a long period of robust growth in the gross national product that has no impact whatsoever on the wages of poor people, or even on ordinary people. Since 1980, all of the gains in household income in the U.S. have accrued to people in the top 20%. Now even famously rigorous conservative economist Tyler Cowen agrees. As he said in his latest comments on the new employment data,

There is more and more evidence that we’ve shifted into a new regime where wage growth for most income classes simply doesn’t happen to any significant degree. This may not last forever, but it remains the status quo and too many people find it too hard to wrap their heads around that. That to me is the single biggest takeaway.

And there you have it. If we care about the incomes of poor and ordinary people, just working to create economic growth (the platform of ALL of the Republican presidential candidates) will not help.

Warlordism in Libya

The problem with waging wars for democracy -- one of many, but perhaps the worst -- is that civil war is not a good environment for democratic pluralism. On the contrary we often find that the political infighting typical of democracy impedes the organization of a unified war effort, so that wars tend to produce despots. This insight goes back at least to Thucydides, and perhaps much farther still.

Events in Libya seem to confirm it all over again:

In the crowded trauma room of a threadbare hospital, a procession of bedraggled soldiers files in, bearing a grim catalogue of wounds: shrapnel in the neck, gunshots to the chest, burned legs. Fierce fighting erupted here last week as a coalition of army, police, tribal militias and neighborhood volunteer forces launched a campaign dubbed “Operation Doom” to evict jihadist and Islamic State forces from their strongholds. . . .

At a rally I attended for two slain activists, the eastern government’s minister for culture and media struck a defiant note, lambasting the United States Navy for waiting offshore but doing nothing against the Islamic State, and accusing Israel of supplying weapons to the jihadists. The audience roared with applause when he mentioned the name of Operation Doom’s architect: Gen. Khalifa Hifter.

General Hifter is Libya’s most powerful and polarizing figure. A former confidante of Muammar el-Qaddafi and longtime army officer who defected in the 1980s, he launched “Operation Dignity” in 2014 — an unsanctioned military operation to drive Islamist militias from Benghazi and end a wave of violence and assassinations that had plagued the city.

But he didn’t stop there. General Hifter tried to bring the war to Tripoli and topple the government and its Islamist factions. It was a threat that contributed to the division of the country. Supporters questioned if he had gone too far by labeling more moderate militias as terrorists. When I met General Hifter last year, his contempt for political Islamists of all stripes was clear. “There are three options for them,” he said “in the ground, in prison, or out of the country.”

In other words, General Hifter is exactly the sort of figure so often thrown up by chaotic conflicts, an ambitious SOB with no respect for human rights who rises to power because no one else is doing anything decisive to bring the war to a close and restore some sort of normal life.

I wrote a few days ago about the completely different situation unfolding in Kurdish Syria, where a weak, pluralistic democracy is organizing a decent military effort. So the rise of strongmen is not inevitable. But if it is to be prevented -- if revolutions are to lead to a genuinely better state, and not just a different sort of tyranny -- then either people have to work very hard and selflessly for a long time to make it happen, or the fighting has to be led by a George Washington sort of figure who genuinely wants democracy to take hold. Both circumstances are unusual.

Salmon in the Duwamish

This is Seattle's Duwamish River, once one of the world's most polluted waterways and still a superfund site. But thanks to the Clean Water Act and other environmental measures, it is home once again to a thriving population of pink salmon; more than 600,000 ascended the river to spawn this year.

There is a Gold Light in Certain Old Paintings

1

There is a gold light in certain old paintings
That represents a diffusion of sunlight.
It is like happiness, when we are happy.
It comes from everywhere and from nowhere at once, this light,
And the poor soldiers sprawled at the foot of the cross
Share in its charity equally with the cross.

2

Orpheus hesitated beside the black river.
With so much to look forward to he looked back.
We think he sang then, but the song is lost.
At least he had seen once more the beloved back.
I say the song went this way: O prolong
Now the sorrow if that is all there is to prolong.

3

The world is very dusty, uncle. Let us work.
One day the sickness shall pass from the earth for good.
The orchard will bloom; someone will play the guitar.
Our work will be seen as strong and clean and good.
And all that we suffered through having existed
Shall be forgotten as though it had never existed.

--Donald Justice

Stas Bartnikas, Tree and Dune, Namibia

From National Geographic,

The Good News

Nicholas Kristof:

One survey found that two-thirds of Americans believed that the proportion of the world population living in extreme poverty has almost doubled over the last 20 years. Another 29 percent believed that the proportion had remained roughly the same.

That’s 95 percent of Americans — who are utterly wrong. In fact, the proportion of the world’s population living in extreme poverty hasn’t doubled or remained the same. It has fallen by more than half, from 35 percent in 1993 to 14 percent in 2011.

More numbers:

In 1990, more than 12 million children died before the age of 5; this toll has since dropped by more than half. . . . More kids than ever are becoming educated, especially girls. In the 1980s, only half of girls in developing countries completed elementary school; now, 80 percent do.

In my optimistic moods I believe that humanity is passing through a narrow valley of ecological ruin and social upheaval, soon to emerge into a new world of stable populations and ever increasing wealth.

Foreign Policy and Baboon Ethology

Here is a little essay that explains a lot about how certain conservatives see the world:

The sound you’d be hearing this morning if you live in the devastated city of Homs in Syria, would be Russian jets doing bombing runs against your neighbors rebelling against dictator Bashar al-Assad. And not just in Homs. The roar of those Russian jets is being heard around the world; it’s the sound of Vladimir Putin becoming the new alpha male and power broker of the Middle East.

Our president, meanwhile, is letting it all happen. If Vladimir Putin is the dominant alpha male in the new international pecking order, Barack Obama has emerged as his highly submissive partner. There are various reasons why we are being subjected to the humiliating spectacle of an American president, so-called leader of the free world, rolling over on the mat at Putin’s feet. . . .

Of course, there have been signs for years that Obama is prone to submitting to males who act dominantly in his presence. Who can forget his frozen performance with Mitt Romney in the first presidential debate in 2012....We’ve seen it in his interactions with China’s president Xi Jinping; his strange bowing and scraping with the Saudi king; and his various meetings with Putin, including the last at the United Nations on Monday where a tight-lipped Obama could barely bring himself to look at the Russian president while Putin looked cool and confident—as well as he should.

For every aggressive move Putin has made on the international stage, first in Crimea and Ukraine in Europe, and now in Syria, our president’s response has been largely verbal protestations followed by resolute inaction. Why should Putin not assume that when he orders the U.S. to stop its own air strikes against ISIS in Syria, and to leave the skies to the Russians, he won’t be obeyed?

The world view on display in this piece, and thousands like it, is the world view of an ambitious baboon. In the average baboon troop, the dominant animals are the ones who make the most noise and respond to any challenge with a display if fangs and, if necessary, a sharp bite or two. People like Arthur Herman, the author of the essay excerpted above, think human society should be just like that. They want the American president to be the loudest talker on the planet, and for him to respond to all provocations with a barrage of cruise missiles and, if necessary, an invasion. It galls them that anyone can insult or demean America and get away with it. What is the point of being the only great power if we let lesser powers mock us?

Our foreign policy is never belligerent enough for these people; we are never bombing enough, invading enough, talking enough smack. Their goal is to make everyone in the world "respect" us, by which they mean bow and scrape like low-ranking baboons confronted by an alpha male in a rage. They are constantly disappointed with all of our leaders, even Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, for not doing enough to assert our dominance on the planet.

But Obama drives them particularly crazy. Obama hates shouting and angry conflict, wants all international disputes to be settled by diplomacy and all domestic disputes to be worked out behind closed doors. He is so cool, so unruffled no matter what is thrown at him; and how dare he defeat the obviously so much more alpha John McCain and Mitt Romney? How dare he cut a deal with Iranian mullahs who delight in calling us the spawn of Satan?

I have always found it amusing when conservatives talk about how submissively Obama acted toward the Saudi king. This isn't even true and, it ignores that in matters of substance Obama has defied the Saudis time and again, most importantly in making the nuclear deal with Iran over their violent objections. Who was bowing and scraping to Saudi interests then?

I also find the contrast with Vladimir Putin telling, but in an opposite way. Yes, Putin is a better alpha baboon, very skilled at looking tough and impressing lesser baboons like Arthur Herman. But who is actually achieving his goals? Certainly not Putin, whose initiatives have failed left and right -- most of Ukraine is still dominated by his enemies, whose hold on power was only increased by Putin's clumsy intervention. His attempt to isolate Ukraine has only isolated Russia, and his attempt to wean himself of the need to trade with Europe by strengthening ties with China has come to very little. His little intervention in Syria only underscores how few planes he has, and how little impact he can afford to have on Middle Eastern events.

Obama's enemies don't just dislike him, they despise him. They think he is weak and foolish and too vain to know how weak he seems to others. Maybe it is true, as Arthur Herman and his ilk say, that Obama's passive demeanor encourages his enemies to set him at naught. But those enemies are wrong, as Obama has shown again and again.

Early Signs of Fall

Hmmmmm

I know it's too early to fret, but when I have a crew in the field I obsess about the weather, and this map from the National Hurricane Center doesn't bode very well for getting test units dug next week.

UPDATE

Looks to be headed far away from me now. So on the one hand I won't have to deal with flooding, but on the other my life remains ordinary.

Great Falls in the Rain

We had torrential rains last night, and it was still drizzling this morning. So the Potomac was high, and the falls were roaring.

High water on the river.

Views of the mouth of Difficult Run last week and today.

Falls on Difficult Run.

Spot the Frog

Head of a Young Bacchus

Likely 1 to 50 CE. In the Getty.

Democracy in Kurdish Syria

Interesting little account by Carne Ross about the Kurdish-ruled area of northern Syria (including Kobani), a place with very little government:

After the authority of the regime of President Bashar al-Assad collapsed at the start of the Syrian revolution in 2011, the Kurds took advantage of the vacuum to set up government without a state. There is no top-down authority, even within the military. One Y.P.G. commander gently corrected me when I addressed him as “general.”

“We have no ranks,” he said — and sure enough, his uniform bore no insignia of seniority. “We are a team.”

Alongside the men of the Y.P.G., fighters from the Women’s Protection Units, or Y.P.J., also fight at this front. Behind the lines, too, women are prominent in the forums in villages and towns that are part of Rojava’s democratic experiment.

Most of Syria has broken up along ethnic lines. But in Rojava, members of the Arab and Assyrian minorities are deliberately included. . . .

Self-government in Rojava means that, as much as possible, decisions are made at the local, communal level. In one village, women and men sat separately, reflecting local tradition. Like most political meetings, it was lengthy and sometimes boring, with the usual long-winded speeches (but not all from men). But anyone could speak, without distinction, and young and old alike stood up to debate jobs, medical services, even the menace of kids riding their bikes too fast around the village.

In the modern era democratic experiments have appeared before, mainly in times of civil war, most famously the Paris Commune. In a state of crisis that forces everyone to get along or die, they can work for a while. In peace, they tend to slide back into bureaucracy. Is that inevitable? I suspect so. For one thing, one of the biggest political groups in Syria, the supporters of sharia and an Islamic state, are mostly on the other side of the temporary border. If peace is ever made those people will have to be incorporated back into the state; presumably in any sort of democratic set-up they would have to be given a political party. It would be a lot harder for every one to get alone with a bunch of ex-al Qaeda men at the table.

But the regular appearance of such self-rule makes me optimistic about our species.

The European Court of Human Rights on Sharia Law

I took some grief for supporting Ben Carson's statement that he could not support a Muslim president. Sunday he issued a clarification:

I would have problems with somebody who [is] not willing to reject sharia and all the portions of it that are talked about in the Quran....You have to make a specific declaration and decision to reject the portions of it.

Specifically, he said, any Muslim candidate would have to reject what sharia says about the rights of women and non-Muslims. Which ought to be uncontroversial among liberals; as Kevin Drum pointed out, the European Court of Human Rights rejected Sharia law on the same grounds:

The Court considers that sharia, which faithfully reflects the dogmas and divine rules laid down by religion, is stable and invariable....It is difficult to declare one’s respect for democracy and human rights while at the same time supporting a regime based on sharia, which clearly diverges from Convention values, particularly with regard to its criminal law and criminal procedure, its rules on the legal status of women and the way it intervenes in all spheres of private and public life in accordance with religious precepts. .... The Court concurs that sharia is incompatible with the fundamental principles of democracy.

What I was trying to say in my previous post is that 1) I do not accept and will never accept the confounding of religious and secular law; 2) a major school of Islamic thought, perhaps the major school, insists that sharia is at the heart of Islam, and that no state using another legal system is really Islamic; and 3) whatever the situation used to be in the past, right now sharia is much more important politically than any other system of religious law. This creates major problems for Islamic democracies, for example in Turkey. I want to keep this conundrum far away from American politics. I do understand that it is ridiculous to worry that sharia is some kind of threat to Americans, but then it is probably also farfetched to speculate about a major Muslim candidate for president.

Listening to Dickens

My working life divides pretty neatly into two parts, office and field. When I am in the office I spend 90 minutes every day on the train, and I read. When I am in the field I spend at least that much time and sometimes hours more in my car, and I listen to recorded books. Some of the best time I have had commuting in my car has come from listening to Simon Vance read Charles Dickens.

I tried to read Dickens at several points in my life, but the only one of his books that I ever really enjoyed was The Pickwick Papers. I think the only ones I finished were that and Great Expectations.

But since I started listening to Dickens I have enjoyed and finished David Copperfield, Oliver Twist and Bleak House, and just now I an nearly finished The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby. I vastly prefer hearing these books to reading them. For one thing, some of the best parts are comic conversations, and everybody knows that the right intonation and timing can make or ruin a joke. For another, Dickens liked to write in dialect, which I hate reading. But with a reader who understands the accents and can bring them to life, these passages become verbal music.

The David Copperfield and Nicholas Nickleby I listened to were recorded by Simon Vance, one of the leading audio performers in the world. He is wonderful. He has thought as hard about how the characters should sound as Dickens did about their names, and I love the voices he gives to all the main players. His Mrs. Nickleby is one of the greatest comic characters I have ever encountered in a book. He can also read a thick Yorkshire accent in a way that is completely convincing but also perfectly understandable at 70 mph. If you can find his versions, get them.

Dickens is not one of my favorite writers. His plots are silly and moralistic, and his theory of the world seems to be that everyone is either good or bad, and all our problems arise from badness. He was remarkably ignorant about many parts of his own world, especially business and politics. (What, exactly, did Scrooge do? What was made in Gradgrind's factories? What fills the Cheerybles' warehouse?) As George Orwell complained, he seems to think that the only problem with capitalism is that capitalists are not nice enough, and his books are full of rich men like the Cheerybles, or Scrooge after his transformation, who trot around giving away money and patting sweet tykes on the head. Which is nice, but as a theory of social change it leaves a lot to be desired. His ideas about love and marriage (in his books, anyway) are solidly bourgeois and Victorian. What I enjoy about Dickens is the many comic scenes and brief descriptions of people, places, and events. This is why I liked The Pickwick Papers so much; it is really just a series of amusing episodes with no overarching plot at all. (The description of the duel may be my favorite comic scene ever, in any medium.) I also enjoy being reminded that in other times and places, people spoke and acted differently. And since the plot is of no real importance, it doesn't really matter if something on the road distracts you and you miss a few lines.

As I head back down to Virginia tomorrow, I will be listening to the melodrama of Nicholas Nickleby's family, and enjoying myself very much.