The Patriotism We Need: Principled and Spirited

Editor’s note: For Independence day this year, please enjoy Carson Holloway’s timeless review of Steven F. Hayward’s Patriotism Is Not Enough: Harry Jaffa, Walter Berns, and the Arguments that Redefined American Conservatism, from our archives (originally publish July 5, 2017).

The presidency of Donald Trump raises the question of patriotism more forcefully than it has been raised for a long time in American politics. On the one hand, Trump and his followers think of their movement as a restoration of a proper patriotism, an effort to rescue a country and a people, the true interests of which have been shamefully neglected by an excessively cosmopolitan elite. On the other hand, Trump’s critics think that he appeals to a dangerously atavistic nationalism, an unenlightened and extreme love of country that neglects our duties to the world community. Thus the Trump movement and the controversy it has created force us to ask: what is a just and reasonable patriotism? More specifically, what kind of patriotism is appropriate to a country like America, which is founded on universal principles and not on any particular and exclusive ethnic or religious identity?

This question is especially relevant for American conservatives. In general, patriotism looms larger in the minds of conservatives than in the minds of their liberal counterparts. Conservatism is about preserving, as much as circumstances permit, the country we have inherited, and such an enterprise necessarily presupposes patriotism—a loving approval of that country’s way of life and a desire to see it safely extended into the future. This is not to say that American liberals are unpatriotic. It is just that their patriotism is rendered more complicated, and perhaps more qualified, by their commitment to progress—which necessarily entails a belief that the country is imperfect, and hence more in need of improvement than of preservation—and by their commitment to cosmopolitanism—which leads them to think in terms of political obligations aside from, and maybe in some cases more compelling than, those they owe to their country.

The present question of patriotism is also more compelling for American conservatives simply because the Trump phenomenon arose on their own political turf. Trump is not a conventional American conservative, but his movement is certainly of the right. He has, for the present at least, taken over the traditional political instrument of American conservatism, the Republican Party. His candidacy first swept aside his conservative opposition and then co-opted a good deal of it. These reasons, too, force conservatives to ask themselves whether they can support the kind of patriotism to which Trump has so successfully appealed.

In this context, American conservatives—and anyone interested in American politics—should welcome the publication of Steven F. Hayward’s Patriotism Is Not Enough: Harry Jaffa, Walter Berns, and the Arguments that Redefined American Conservatism. As his subtitle indicates, Hayward’s book offers in the first place an account of the intellectual journey of Jaffa and Berns, two students of Leo Strauss who became in their generation two of the leading scholars of American political thought and the American regime. Unlike their great teacher, however, Berns and Jaffa did not limit their intellectual activity to the realm of scholarly and philosophic inquiry. Strauss was primarily an interpreter of the great texts of the western philosophic canon, seeking to understand them on their own terms and to use them as a springboard for his own philosophizing. He rarely commented at length on any of the political questions of the day. In contrast, Jaffa and Berns chose to be both scholars and public intellectuals, offering commentary from roughly the right side of the political spectrum, Jaffa operating from the Claremont Institute and Berns from the American Enterprise Institute. Accordingly, the story of their thinking, of their agreements and disagreements, is to a considerable extent an account of many of the important issues with which conservative intellectuals have grappled over the last fifty years.

Although Hayward writes with a winning affection for Jaffa and Berns, both of whom he knew personally, his primary aim is not to provide a pair of intellectual biographies. Rather, his main interest lies with the key issues themselves, using Jaffa and Berns’s arguments to explicate them. The book is not and does not claim to be an academic study of Jaffa and Berns’s political thought. Indeed, for whoever wishes to take up the task, a scholarly book (perhaps beginning as a doctoral dissertation) remains to be written on Strauss’s first generation students who took up the study of the American regime, including not only Jaffa and Berns, but also Martin Diamond and Herbert Storing.

Hayward, however, writes here for a more popular audience of thoughtful citizens, offering them an accessible account of the questions that Jaffa and Berns pondered and that played an important role in conservative intellectual debate during their careers: Can modern political science be morally serious without being moralistic, avoiding the extremes of scientistic value neutrality, on the one hand, and ideological fanaticism, on the other? What is statesmanship, and how can it be guided by high principle while also accommodating the intractable imperfections inseparable from political life? To what extent can conservatives look upon Abraham Lincoln as a model of American statesmanship? What role, if any, should natural law and natural rights play in the exercise of the judicial power? Can equality be understood as an intelligible and limited political principle, or must it degenerate into an unreasoning and unquenchable passion?

All of the questions that Hayward explores are of perennial interest to students of American politics. Once again, however, none is of more immediate importance than the question of patriotism and its proper basis, which is a key theme of the book, as its title indicates. What does Hayward mean by asserting that “patriotism is not enough”? He seeks to remind us that, at least for a political community like the United States, a healthy politics requires more than just a sentimental attachment to the country and its interests. As he says, “American patriotism is based on ideas.” Unlike most countries, America was founded at a particular moment in time and, more importantly, on the basis of certain moral and philosophical principles to which its founders dedicated it. American patriotism, therefore, needs to be an enlightened patriotism, in the sense of being informed by knowledge of the founding principles and reflection on how to preserve them and apply them anew in each generation.

Put another way, America has a political identity much more distinct, and much more central to its being, than other nations, many of which have existed for a long time and maintained some kind of stable identity under a variety of regimes. At least until recently, a perfectly good Frenchman might be a republican, a monarchist, a socialist, or a communist. A good American, however, must be committed to a particular political creed: the natural rights doctrine of the Declaration of Independence and the republican self-government under law established by the Constitution. Accordingly, American patriotism, and American conservatism, is concerned with understanding and preserving this creed, the way of life to which it gives rise, and the institutions and mores that sustain it. This is the kind of patriotism and conservatism taught by both Harry Jaffa and Walter Berns, whatever disagreements they had on other questions.

Hayward’s book is so timely precisely because the kind of patriotism he discusses provides a useful corrective for Trump-style nationalism. The patriotism to which Trump appeals is almost entirely affective and hardly at all intellectual. As has been observed many times, he almost never refers to the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, or the founding more generally. Instead of meditating on the country’s highest ideals, Trump usually expresses patriotic solicitude for its most elementary needs. He wants America and its citizens to be safe and prosperous.

One can see this, for example, in the way Trump talks about how immigration should be regulated. A conservative in the mold of Jaffa, Berns, and Hayward would remind us that the immigrants we admit should understand, believe in, and have the habits necessary to preserve the doctrine of natural rights and constitutional self-government. Trump has never said anything like this, but has instead simply held that we need to make sure that the immigrants we let in “love our country and love our people.”

As Hayward’s book rightly reminds us, Trump’s emotive patriotism is “not enough.” As a candidate for the presidency, Trump was once asked in what sense he is a conservative. He replied that he wants to “conserve the country.” There is no reason to doubt his sincerity in this. Trump seems to be animated by a genuine protectiveness for America and its citizens. Nevertheless, one has to admit that the country cannot be conserved or preserved without going beyond sentimental patriotism and adding an intellectual appreciation for the founding principles and disciplined thought about how to carry them forward. An America that is safe and prosperous, but not committed to constitutional self-government and natural rights, would no longer be the same country.

This is not to say, however, that there is anything wrong with the kind of patriotism to which Trump appeals. That it is insufficient does not make it irrelevant. Feelings of love for the country one inhabits—irrespective of its regime or form of government—are a natural and just human impulse. Among American statesmen, there has been no greater teacher of philosophic, principled patriotism than Abraham Lincoln. Nevertheless, even Lincoln admitted the legitimacy of the more elementary patriotism to which Trump appeals. In his famous eulogy on Henry Clay, Lincoln noted with approval that Clay loved his country both because it was a “free country” but also in part because it was simply “his own country.”

Moreover, Trumpian patriotism is politically effective not only because it speaks directly to the simple and untutored love of country that any ordinary person feels, but also because it addresses the vital link between the nation’s well-being and the self-interest of individual citizens. Thus Trump denounces certain trade practices, for example, as not only bad for the country, but also as contrary to the economic interests of the working- and middle-class voters whose votes he sought and won. This is, to be sure, not the lofty, principled politics of, say, Lincoln’s effort to preserve respect for the equality of rights promised by the Declaration of Independence. But neither is there anything illegitimate about it by realistic political standards. On the contrary, the American founders themselves recognized and taught openly that most ordinary political activity is animated by self-interest. Thus, when Trump appeals so directly to the economic interests of those whose support he courts, he is only doing what the founders expected that politicians would do as a matter of course.

Accordingly, we can say not only that Hayward’s principled patriotism provides a useful corrective to Trump’s emotive and interest-based nationalism, but also that Trump’s nationalism provides a useful corrective to a patriotism based only on philosophic principle. They are mutually correcting and mutually supportive. On the one hand, a patriotism that is based only on the principles of the founding cannot succeed in winning elections, because voters rightly demand that any political movement that seeks their support have some plausible plan to address their ordinary interests. On the other hand, a patriotism that is based only on the untutored loves and interests of ordinary voters cannot preserve our precious inheritance of a regime based on natural rights, the rule of law, and self-government. A movement that acknowledges each of these concerns amounts to the kind of patriotism, and the kind of conservatism, that can both win elections and deserve to win them.

Diamine Sailor’s Warning Ink Review

Sailor's Delight was one of two ink formulations chosen by the /r/fountainpens community on Reddit earlier this year, continuing a wonderful trend by Diamine in working with many collaborators - big and small - to create inks. Given all of the recent changes with Reddit, will they continue this project? Who knows, but let me be the first to ask: Mastodon ink when?

If you are Mastodon curious, check out the wonderful community being built at Penfount, where you can find all the details you need. And if you are shimmer ink curious, well, Sailor’s Delight is one you will want to take a look at asap.

The most interesting thing I noticed out of the box with this ink is the underlying color. I thought it would be bright red, and there is plenty of that shade, but the base color underneath that red is peach. That took me by surprise, in a positive way. My 1.1 mm stub nib in the TWSBI 580ALR Prussian Blue pen I used for this review spreads the ink thin at the top of the line, with the ink pooling more towards the bottom of stroke. That’s how shading happens, and in this case, that’s how the peach shade pokes out from underneath the red.

But let’s be clear, you aren’t buying this ink for the peachy-red color - you are buying it for the peachy-red color with shimmer! Diamine says the shimmer is silver, but I see a faint light blue tone where the shimmer breaks through. I think that shade is a perfect match for this ink, giving the ink a purple tone in some areas.

When I bought Sailor’s Warning, I was interested in how it compared to another favorite shimmer ink of mine, Wearingeul Dracula. My guess was that they would be close enough to be interchangeable, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Dracula is very red in comparison, with a brighter blue shimmer. In the end, these two inks are very different.

If there is any downside to Sailor’s Warning it is that it seems dry, even from this 1.1 mm nib. I expected more ink flow, which shimmer inks need to show off their primary property. I want to give it a try in another pen and a different nib to see if I feel the same way, but I’ve tested several shimmer inks in this pen and flow has never been an issue.

At $22 for a 50 ml bottle, Diamine Sailor’s Warning is priced well. I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it, but I would make sure to use a wide, wet nib. That goes for all shimmer inks, so that should come as no surprise, but I find it to be especially true with this one.

That’s my Sailor’s Warning.

---

Enjoy reading The Pen Addict? Then consider becoming a member to receive additional weekly content, giveaways, and discounts in The Pen Addict shop. Plus, you support me and the site directly, for which I am very grateful.

Membership starts at just $5/month, with a discounted annual option available. To find out more about membership click here and join us!

The World is a Shitting Bird: A Conversation with Emilie Moorhouse

During her MFA, Francophone writer Emilie Moorhouse serendipitously discovered the works of a little-known Surrealist poet, Syrian-Egyptian-English Joyce Mansour, who chose to write exclusively in French. Mansour, a glamourous, married woman who came of age as an artist in 1950s Paris under the wing of André Breton, existed as a kind of glitch in the French literary scene—an upper-class, Arab, apolitical woman who refused to become a sex object while making unapologetically sexual work. Emerald Wounds (City Lights Books) is the result of Moorhouse’s deep dive into the fringes of Francophone literature, translating Mansour’s wide-ranging poetry and asserting her right to be known. In this career-spanning edition, Mansour exists as a writer’s writer, a reluctant feminist, an Arab Jew, and most blatantly as a kind of queer “uber-wife,” pissing in her husband’s drink while flying on the freeway between sex and death.

I recently spoke to Moorhouse on Zoom about the life and work of Joyce Mansour as her Wi-Fi was being changed—the warbling sound of a hole being drilled somewhere above.

***

The Rumpus: How, technically, did you find Joyce Mansour?

Emilie Moorhouse: I was taking a translation course—this was in 2017, and the #metoo movement had just exploded and I thought, “I need to translate a woman who is controversial, someone who the literary establishment doesn’t approve of” which, okay, many women have not had the approval of the literary establishment. But I think I was looking for raw emotion, for a woman who could express her sexuality and who could speak her truth whether it fit in with the times or not. So that was kind of the criteria that I set for myself. And I did find quite a few women like this in Francophone literature, but in the Surrealist tradition or practice, a lot of it is stream-of-consciousness writing. And so, what Mansour was writing was naturally uncensored.

Rumpus: Reading Mansour’s origin story as a writer, I found it obviously compelling but also kind of curious, because there’s this story of her being in a state of grief, both from her mother dying when she was fifteen and from her first husband dying when she was eighteen, and the story is that her grief forced her to write. It was either the madhouse or poetry. That’s obviously a very compelling story behind a first book, right? Especially with the title of Screams from a beautiful, foreign, young woman in 1953 arriving on the Parisian literary and art scene. I wonder if there’s anything problematic in this origin story in your opinion. Is it constructed? Or do you think, in an alternate timeline, Mansour could’ve just been a happy housewife with her rich, much older, French-speaking second husband?

Moorhouse: Well, I think she would have been involved in the arts. There is this really strong personality in Mansour. And as much as she was shaped by the events of her youth, she does have such a rich background as well. She was bilingual before she met her second husband, speaking fluent English and Arabic. So, she obviously had this very rich and interesting life, you know, in tandem with these early events. But at the same time, and I’ve never heard it mentioned in any of the interviews, or, in any research that I did, that she was writing poetry, prior to these events. I guess life is life.

Rumpus: So, in sticking a little bit with her biography before getting to the work, when reading about Mansour’s second husband—which sounded like a problematic relationship in that he had lots of affairs—I feel like in a way that Mansour had this despairing, mourning and grieving personality versus a kind of desiring personality, especially desiring of men who she couldn’t really possess. Do you feel that her second husband supported her, especially the notion of the confessional in her work? I wonder if he even read her work?

Moorhouse: Yeah, I also wondered about that. I know that her son read her work and he actually helped correct her grammar, her French mistakes. And I do know that she never discussed her first husband with her second husband but that her second husband sort of swept her off her feet. He kind of gave her life again after the death of her first husband. But her second husband was not someone who was initially very involved in the arts. Apparently, André Breton hated him! Breton did not consent to Mansour’s husband, basically. He came from a very different world than Breton.

Rumpus: I have a lot of questions about the relationship between Mansour and Breton. In Mansour’s poetry, there’s a lot of female rage against the husband or the lover, even as she is taking pleasure in them. It reminds me of the line in one of her poems: “Don’t tell your dreams to the one who doesn’t love you.” I wonder if there’s this irreconcilable split in Mansour’s life between her domestic life and her artistic life. I was thinking a lot about Breton and his mentorship of her in this way. I think it’s interesting in your intro that you state that they were definitely not lovers.

Moorhouse: I was never able to explicitly find any information that Mansour and Breton were sexually involved, and one of her biographies explicitly states they were never lovers. I think Mansour’s artistic side was really nourished through Breton. They went to the flea markets of Paris every afternoon together in search of artwork. And I do think that Mansour’s second husband, through Mansour, started to develop a greater appreciation of artwork. But it wasn’t something that he was involved in initially and so I really don’t know how present he was in her artistic practice.

Rumpus: You label Mansour’s poetry as erotic macabre. Can you break that term open a bit? I am thinking of her work’s relationship to 60s and 70s French feminism (like écriture feminine) but I’m also thinking of the somewhat contrasting pornographic strain in her work, akin to Georges Bataille.

Moorhouse: I do see it as both. I think she gets inspiration from both. Bataille was very erotic macabre, or maybe he’s a little bit more twisted than that even, but this whole idea of la petite morte (death is orgasm), I do see influences from that in her work. But I don’t think Mansour was loyal to any kind of movement. I mean, she was obviously very loyal to the Surrealists, but when she was asked to write for a feminist magazine, she bristled and said, “Feminism, what do you mean?” I think Mansour liked to remain independent and have her creativity be independent from these different movements. She was apolitical. And I think some of that comes from Mansour’s experience in Egypt, being exiled because she was part of this upper-class Egyptian society, her father was imprisoned and most of his property and assets were seized by the government and apparently, he refused to ever own a house again and lived the rest of his life in a hotel. Then you have the Surrealist movement, which Joyce Mansour was a part of, which was more aligned with anarchism. She was kind of caught between two worlds.

Rumpus: It’s interesting, this idea of Mansour being apolitical and having a sort of disconnect from feminism, because it seems to bring up things around the Surrealists having issues with women, with women being objectified or fetishized in their work, this idea of “mad love” trumping all, even abuse. And so, if we just, say, insert Mansour into our present-day politics—and this is a totally speculative question—how do you feel she would fit into our polarizing and gender-fluid times?

Moorhouse: Well, my impression of her work is that it is very gender-fluid, she plays around with gender in her writing quite a bit, so I feel like she absolutely would, in a way, fit into our now. In terms of the political, that’s a good question because, yeah, everything is very polarized and politicized today.  Also, I don’t know that she wasn’t necessarily political. I think she obviously sympathized with many progressive movements and that’s clear in her writing. That includes feminism. She was openly mocking articles that appeared in women’s magazines imposing unrealistic housewife-style standards. She mocked beauty standards and even the condescending tone they had when advising women on how to behave “nicely.” So she obviously did have certain strong leanings. But I think outside of her art, Mansour wasn’t necessarily willing to pronounce them. It was more like my art speaks for itself.

Rumpus: I think that’s probably still the best way of being an artist. And also, it’s not really a speculative question, because we will soon see how Mansour’s work is received with a younger, contemporary, potentially genderqueer readership, right?

Moorhouse: Yeah. I’m excited to see how her work will be received. I do feel that much of her writing is, in fact, very contemporary around gender. But she wasn’t intellectualizing it. It came out in her voice, which rejected any gender confines without having to announce that she was doing so.

Rumpus: Did you find as a translator that you had to make some harder choices around some of the more dated language, especially in terms of race? Terms that people don’t use anymore?

Moorhouse: There were certainly some words that gave me pause. The word oriental comes up a few times, and this is obviously a word that is dated, perhaps more so in English than in French. What is interesting for me though, is that when I read it in context, I think she is using that word in a way that acknowledges the history behind it, the colonialism, the fetishizing, the exoticizing. For example, Mansour speaks of “oriental suffering,” or of a “narrative with an Oriental woman.” I don’t think, even though she was writing in the 60s at this point, that she uses this word lightly. The way I read it, she uses it to evoke her own nostalgia, or longing for her life in Egypt. And to clarify, when Mansour uses oriental in French, it refers to the Near East. It refers to her own Syrian and Egyptian roots. She never returned to Egypt, so even though she did experience a lot of suffering there, she is still a woman living in exile. This is definitely a challenge of translating older work, especially with an artist who, I think, does not use these words lightly.

Rumpus: Interesting. Because what’s making headlines right now is this political urge to kind of clean up certain language that was used in literature in the past that is hurtful or flat out racist today. So, I still do wonder if there was this urge at all for you to clean up the language?

Moorhouse: I didn’t want the language to be offensive. I would hope that I’ve succeeded with that. I don’t want any dated language to draw attention to itself because that’s not what the poem is meant to do.

Rumpus: But the French is the same. You never changed anything in the French.

Moorhouse: No, I never changed anything in the French. I don’t think I’m allowed to do that. The French is word-for-word.

Rumpus: I think this speaks to its time. And it also—yet again!—points back to the Surrealist problems with women. I mean, sometimes Mansour’s work is so radical and standout, and there are also moments in it when it does feel a bit retrograde. I’m inserting her relationship with Breton in here again because I wonder if she was one of those women who lived as an artist aligning herself with powerful men?

Moorhouse: Well, I think that she would have definitely been outnumbered in those groups, right? I mean, women to men. I don’t know if she was loud, and what her personality was like surrounded by all those men. It’s hard to know. But she did smoke cigars!

Rumpus: Right. That is a very alluring look. Also, she was a mother. I think that’s kind of a big deal in a very male-centric artist’s space.

Moorhouse: Yes, and she was a very doting and overprotective mother. But, you know, even though Mansour may have aligned herself with Breton and other men, I don’t feel like she would have been one to just do things to appease them. And you can see that in her poetry, how she rejects the male gaze that objectifies her. So we can’t just put her in a box or in a category of militant feminist or someone who just goes with the old boys’ club, right?

Rumpus: Yeah, you’re right. She’s both an individual and of her time. In terms of her being a woman, what do you make of her disappearance in the canon? You talk about this in your introduction, her work being perceived as “too much.” Do you think this quality relates to the forgetting of Joyce Mansour?

Moorhouse: Being very familiar with the French culture, I would say yes. I use the word chauvinistic because I think that certain French literary elite have this very precise idea of what “French” literature is, and what “great” literature is. And mostly, it’s been men, White men, who write “great literature” and historically women were allowed to write for children. I think it’s a shame because there are so many Francophone voices that are just so rich, so different. And I think that some in the literary elite just don’t know what to make of these so-called different voices, so they kind of dismiss them. And it’s too bad, because these voices enrich the literary landscape. French literature has been very France-centric, right? Which, obviously, has its roots in colonialism. So even though Mansour was somewhat respected as a Surrealist, the wider French literary establishment very easily could have dismissed her. When I was working on getting some of the rights from one of her publishers—and it’s really hard to get through to them—when I finally had a conversation with them, even they dismissed her! This man said to me, “You know, Joyce Mansour would be nothing without Breton. Without André Breton, there would be no Joyce Mansour.” So even one of her publishers in this day and age still doesn’t take her seriously.

Rumpus: There is this suspicion that Breton created her?

Moorhouse: Yes, and that she’s only recognized to the limited degree that she is because of her affiliation with him.

Rumpus: It feels that this relationship with Breton is really at the crux of a lot for Mansour. I mean, he clearly was incredibly important to her, he was her mentor and she loved him, and I don’t know—these very close artistic relationships they can be difficult for others in the world to understand. Maybe it’s why #metoo resonates differently in France, to be honest. And now I’m thinking of Maïwenn and Luc Besson, which is totally different, but still. . . . When did André Breton die? Was it 1968?

Moorhouse: I think it was 1966. I’m not sure.

Rumpus: Because it’s interesting, I was thinking of Mansour’s 1960s publication White Squares and her last work from the 1980s, Black Holes. Her later work is really kind of dark. My favorite line from one of her late poems is: “The world is a shitting bird.” I mean, I don’t want to say that Breton had an unnatural or too strong of a hold on her or a shitty hold on her, but maybe he did. Maybe her work matured after Breton’s death. Maybe it got even wilder.

Moorhouse: Yeah, I mean, I definitely do see that difference between her earlier work and her later work. It’s not just that the poems in her earlier works are shorter. The later ones are more macabre and her identity is more explicit—both her Jewish identity and her Egyptian identity. Also, Mansour evokes disease and aging and the history of cancer in her family. She died of cancer, like her mother did, and I don’t know if her battle was a short one or drawn out. There is another collection of her poems—prose poems that we couldn’t publish because of copyright—but there’s one about the hospital, and it sounds like it’s her visiting someone in a hospital and it’s very much about the human body falling apart and this industrialized hospital where all bodies are falling apart together.

Rumpus: Her mixing of the sexual body and the dying body is so powerful. I love Mansour’s use of urine, actually. Sometimes, it is this incredibly liberatory thing, like, pissing in the street. And then it’s poisonous, or it’s hedonistic, she’s drinking it like honey. Piss is this ubiquitous substance and act in her work. I love that.

Moorhouse: It’s almost like the soul, your soul comes out in your urine. What else can I say about that?

Rumpus: Nothing. That’s perfect. Your soul is in your urine.

 

 

***

Author photo by Selena Phillips Boyle

The Religion of Democracy

Without much overstatement, one can describe the history of modern political philosophy as the search for a suitable replacement for Christianity. Progress replaces providence, humanitarianism replaces charity, and mind (or reason) replaces God himself. Into the void left behind by Christianity have rushed all sorts of ideologies—that is, comprehensive systems of belief that purport to explain the whole of human thought, action, and purpose.

Americans are well aware of this totalizing tendency among our least favorite ideologies, communism and fascism; however, democracy itself is likewise prone to become just such an ideology. Pepperdine University’s Emily Finley calls this the “ideology of democratism,” and her 2022 book by the same name aims to highlight some of the metaphysical and religious aspects of contemporary democracy. She contends that democracy, or democratism, has become “perhaps the dominant political belief system in modern Western society.” In other words, democracy has become more than a regime type; it has become a secular religion, complete with its own dogmas, practices, clerics, and eschatology.

 

Democracy vs. Democratism

The relationship between democracy and democratism can perhaps best be understood in parallel with the relationship between science and scientism—the former being a concrete and practical method whereas the latter is merely a comprehensive (and, one might add, dubious) belief system that goes well beyond the method. Similarly, whereas democracy is the political rule of the people, democratism is, as Finley puts it, “a hypothetical or ideal conception of democracy that is only tenuously connected to the actual, historical desires of real popular majorities.” According to Finley, the prominent characteristics of democratism are (1) the belief that true democracy lies above and beyond the actual wishes of actual people, (2) that an elite legislator or vanguard is necessary to call forth the idealized will of the people, (3) that coercion and propaganda are suitable means of instantiating the popular will, and (4) that all individuals, were they stripped of their historical and contingent particularities, would be little democrats. In short, whereas democracy is the process whereby one ascertains and implements the will of the majority, democratism is an abstract conception of what the people as a whole should ideally will for themselves.

Finley rightly identifies Rousseau as the original prophet of democratism. His notion of “the general will” is the necessary philosophical prerequisite for the present division between the actual wills of the people (plural) and an idealized will of the people (singular). Indeed, Rousseau develops something like a set of procedures for setting aside individual wills in order to comprehend the general will: for example, citizens should not communicate with one another to avoid bias, and they should be “sufficiently informed.” (The parallel between Rousseau’s procedures and John Rawls’s “veil of ignorance” is perhaps too obvious to mention.) If these procedures are followed, all laws will theoretically be simple, equal, generally applicable, and therefore just.

One need not be a skeptic to think this set of circumstances is unlikely to obtain under most conditions. Enter Rousseau’s deus ex machina—a quasi-divine legislator who can ensure the people choose rightly. Rousseau’s legislator will “persuade without convincing”—calling forth from the diverse interests of the people the true general will. Finley sees this divorce between actual and idealized wills as leading inevitably to a divorce between the people and their democratist leaders. Any version of this line of thinking, whether it be Rousseau’s or Rawls’s, will detach politics from individuals’ actual concerns and open space for powerful parties to cloak their own interests in the guise of something universal.

 

Christian Origins

In one of the most interesting sections of the book, Finley shows how the notion of the “general will” was historically associated with Christian theology and still assumes some of that original framework: after all, discerning a singular, all-encompassing will requires a “God’s eye” view. Whether such an idea still makes sense in the absence of that original framework is an open question. Finley says, “For Rousseau, . . . the general will retains its original theological connotation of wholeness and perfection, but instead of being attributed to an infinite and omniscient God, it becomes a rational and ahistorical ideal. Rousseau and others substitute for the will of God an abstract will of humanity universally accessible through reason.”

In other words, the general will used to be situated in the mind of God, and fully accessible only to him; however, we hubristic moderns seem to think we too are omniscient (perhaps by virtue of our sheer number and our chronological superiority—call it “democratic omniscience”). Rousseau’s general will is certainly a major break from a Christian framework, but it is not nearly so profound as Rousseau’s total redefinition of human nature—a revolution at which Finley only hints. Rousseau plainly admits that his whole system of thought rests atop one fundamental doctrine: the natural goodness of man. If this is true, then perhaps it is Rousseau’s faith in our innate goodness that is the true foundation not only of the general will and democratism, but of political modernity itself. We have yet to fully understand how many social and political revolutions owe their existence to this fundamental shift in anthropology. Even Tocqueville points us in this direction when he notes that “the perfectibility of man” is the deepest dogma of democratic ages.

Nevertheless, there is great value in looking at democracy as an ideology. In fact, Finley helps us understand one curious fact about contemporary politics—namely, the incessant refrain of elites who blame “the people” for subverting, or perverting, true democracy. It is now commonplace to hear our moral and political elites utter—with no sense of irony—that our democracy is threatened by the will of the people (or at least the will of a certain class of people they find morally and politically repugnant). Indeed, between the election of Donald Trump and Brexit, one need not strain too hard to find examples of elites who were positively apoplectic over the result of free democratic choice. Even more recently, American progressives bemoaned the fact that abortion, as a matter of public policy, was returned to the state level (which is to say, would be resolved democratically rather than by judicial fiat).

Time and time again, we hear that democracy (the procedure) threatens to undermine democracy itself (ideological democracy), with the added irony that this typically comes from the mouths of Democrats. These mental contortions are possible because we have imported many other notions into democracy, and we are unable to disambiguate democracy as a procedure from democracy the ideology or belief system. Moreover, in one of the great virtues of the book, Finley helps us realize that we import into democracy a full-blown eschatology—the expectation of a “new age of peace and equality.” Few books have such keen vision of the religious aspects of modern democracy.

 

Critiquing Democratists

The subsequent chapters of Finley’s book are a series of investigations into how democratism explains the actions and ideas of various influential thinkers, including Thomas Jefferson, Woodrow Wilson, Jacques Maritain, John Rawls, Jürgen Habermas, George W. Bush, and the neoconservatives in general. All of these people or groups believed, in some fashion or another, that true democracy was “just around the corner”—simply in need of a good shove. For all democratists, the success or failure of democracy rests on two factors—leadership and education—both of which should “refine” the will of the people and shape it into what it ought to be. Unlike the Founders, who contented themselves with the modest achievement of a system of compromises between interest groups, these various figures were bewitched by what Finley calls the “idyllic imagination”—a dream of a future utopia in which individual interest could be sublimated and transcended.

Some of the figures Finley critiques, such as Woodrow Wilson, won’t come as a surprise to most readers. In Finley’s poignant words, “Wilson believed that he was tasked with nothing less than completing Christ’s work on Calvary. If the world would but heed his counsel, he could help to bestow on humanity ‘the full right to live and realize the purposes that God had meant them to realize.’” While this sort of secularized theology, or civic religion, is not terribly surprising from Wilson, Finley sees the same sort of heresy on the part of Catholic political philosopher Jacques Maritain. Her chapter on Maritain makes it clear that democratism tempts individuals whether they happen to be secular or religious. Finley, who is herself a sincere Catholic, reserves some of her harshest criticisms for Maritain (as one is typically justified in criticizing most fervently those nearest to oneself).

According to Finley, Maritain’s “Christian” or “Personalist” democracy owes more to Rousseau than to the Apostle Paul, and his central social and political ideas—“the brotherhood of men,” “universal community,” “the whole human family,” etc.—emerge from a sentimental humanitarianism rather than genuine Christian charity. Harsh words, but probably justified. Moreover, while Maritain is remembered for his criticism of the atheistic and materialistic underpinnings of Marxism, Finley sees Maritain’s political philosophy as only superficially different from Marx. Here, Finley can speak for herself:

Maritain’s vision of earthly renewal founded in a new brotherhood of humanity resembles Marx’s broad outline of the same idea. Are the differences between the two visions of these major points substantive or merely rhetorical? Maritain articulates a vision of international brotherhood, freedom, and equality that is to be accomplished through major socioeconomic reorganization at the hands of a knowing vanguard, aided by what is nothing other than a secular political faith—the “democratic creed.” . . . Such a focus on the material and political . . . at times spiritualizes the political—a charge Maritain laid on Marxism. Under the auspices of Christian “democracy,” Maritain seems to be a major contributor to a new political ideology not so different from the one he repudiates.

These and similar denunciations can be found on nearly every page of Finley’s book, and they are in equal parts interesting and convincing. She reminds us that democracy, at least in its democratist form, shares many of the same assumptions as communism and fascism, lest we be too enamored of our own preferred political presuppositions. She is not the first to make these claims; they are a version of Eric Voegelin’s idea of political gnosticism. However, Finley’s contributions are still valuable: one cannot be told too often that even democracy is not immune to delusional utopianism.

On the topic of delusional utopianism, much more could be said about Finley’s other chapters on “deliberative democratism” (featuring Rawls and Habermas) and “war democratism” (featuring George W. Bush and neoconservatism), but some things are better left for the reader to explore themselves. Individuals of every political persuasion will be challenged by Finley’s account, and, best of all, one cannot level the charge of partisanship against Finley, for some of her harshest criticisms are reserved for Republicans, like President Bush, who took up the democratist mantle of Wilson. Democratism, whether right or left, represents a profound departure from the Founders.

If one is to criticize Finley’s book, one could begin by suggesting perhaps that it is not merely democracy, but progress, that is modernity’s reigning ideology. In truth, democracy worships at the altar of progress, which is why the democratists wait in expectation of a future blessed estate (rather than look backward to a rosy past). Perhaps not Rousseau, but Francis Bacon, is the principal founder of modernity. However, the truth is that modernity is probably a marriage of Bacon and Rousseau—a sentimental naturalism wedded to techno-utopianism. Maybe this nightmarish combination is what really constitutes Finley’s “democratism.”

 

Democracy, like many good things, is destroyed if it is elevated above all else. Democracy is valuable to the extent that it is placed in its proper position and context—bounded and balanced by other elements. As Edmund Burke wisely noted, one does not obtain liberty, equality, and self-government by merely letting go of the reins; these things require a complex system of incentives, punishments, and checks and balances that parallel the complexities of human nature. Our Founders understood this far better than do the democratists.

Finley’s book ultimately demonstrates how we have been bewitched by a simplistic and false notion of human nature that is prone to delusional optimism, and she makes a compelling case for returning to the wise foundations of our country. Overall, Finley’s critique of democratism is a service to our understanding of modern politics and a cautionary tale against making democracy into a comprehensive worldview. I recommend to you The Ideology of Democratism, even if I maintain that the book should have been called The Religion of Democracy because that better encapsulates the sacred, if not sacrosanct, nature of democracy in contemporary society. In the final analysis, Finley shows us that democracy is ineradicably religious; the question that remains is whether religion can bolster democracy without being swallowed up by it.

Reading about riding around the world

Two years ago I finished and reviewed This Road I Ride: My Incredible Journey from Novice to Fastest Woman to Cycle the Globe by Juliana Buhring. This year I read Coffee First, Then the World: One Woman’s Record Breaking Pedal Around the Planet by Jenny Graham. I was reading it at the same time as… Continue reading Reading about riding around the world

Scott Ellsworth on Bob Blauner’s *Black Lives, White Lives: Three Decades of Race Relations in America*

With a country as large and as diverse as the United States, writing a truly national history, of any kind, is a tall order indeed.  By necessity, shortcuts have to Read more

The post Scott Ellsworth on Bob Blauner’s *Black Lives, White Lives: Three Decades of Race Relations in America* first appeared on Society for US Intellectual History.

Russian Wonder and Certainty

With Ukraine’s spring counter-offensive now commencing, the backlash against Russian culture continues in the West, raising the question why one should read Russian literature. Gary Saul Morson, Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Northwestern University, offers a reason in his latest book, Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter. For Morson, to read Russian literature is to live between wonder and certainty—to sit somewhere between an attitude of humble awe and unyielding dogmatism before the world. This oscillation between wonder and certainty not only shaped Russian intellectual, literary, and political debates for the past two centuries but also asks us in the West who we are in our own tradition—whether we are open to wonderment and surprise or smugly satisfied with our knowledge. Simply put, to read Russian literature is to know ourselves.

Russian literature is known for wrestling with universal questions about the nature of good and evil, human freedom, moral responsibility, and political utopianism. This is because it was written under extreme conditions. Since the nineteenth century, Russian writers have responded to their country’s experiences that included the liberation of over twenty million serfs, terrorism and political assassinations, revolutions and civil war, famines and Gulags, world wars and the collapse of two empires. As Morson observes, such extremity does “not invite euphemisms.” It created a literary intensity that has perhaps been unmatched since the age of Greek tragedy. The direct confrontation of evil stripped the veneer of civilization, so that Russian writers starkly asked what the human condition was and why suffering occurred. The answers from Chernyshevsky, Dostoevsky, Solzhenitsyn, and others were equally severe and ranged from deep awe before the world to shutting oneself up in solipsistic certainty.

 

The Intelligentsia vs. The Literary Class

According to Morson, the best analogue to Russian literature is not French, English, or American literature but the Hebrew Bible, where the “artist communes with God.” Like the Bible, Russian literature came to be perceived “not as a series of separate books but as a single ongoing work composed over many generations.” It is a conversation with both the present and the past simultaneously. For example, Solzhenitsyn’s The Red Wheel is as much a critique of Lenin’s Marxism as of Tolstoy’s philosophy of history in War and Peace. Nothing is untouched in Russian literature, and therefore everything belongs to it. The aim of Russian literature is not just “to amuse and instruct,” but to search for something higher—to discover truth itself.

The emergence of the intelligentsia in nineteenth-century Russia marked the beginning of the “golden age” of Russian literature with Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Chekhov. Morson contrasts these writers with the intelligentsia: university-educated people whose cultural capital in schooling, education, and progressive ideas allowed them to assume moral leadership in Russian politics and public opinion. Belinsky, Dobrolyubov, Pisarev, Chernyshevsky, and others were members of this social class who were certain of their revolutionary ideas and committed to the radical transformation of Russian society.

These two traditions in Russia—the literary and the intelligentsia—had their own canons and their own truths, with the former favoring wonder in art, beauty, and religion, and the latter valuing materialism, utility, and revolution. While Russian thinkers and writers did not always neatly fall into one category or the other, they worked within these two paradigms. Russian society was polarized like our country today, with writers and the intelligentsia corresponding to “red” and “blue” America. This exchange of ideas was aired in public in journals, newspapers, and literature, and lasted over generations.

 

Take, for instance, Turgenev’s 1862 novel, Fathers and Children, where the author satirized the protagonist Bazarov, who was a nihilist and member of the intelligentsia. In response, Chernyshevsky published the following year his own novel, What Is to Be Done?, which refuted Turgenev’s claim about the importance and value of beauty and instead remained steadfast in its philosophy of materialist utilitarianism that denied human agency. These ideas, in turn, were mocked by Dostoevsky in Notes from Underground (1864) and Demons (1872), and later rebutted by Tolstoy in his own What Is to Be Done? (1886) which argued for the existence of moral responsibility. Yet in the next century, Lenin published his 1902 pamphlet, What Is to Be Done?, again echoing Chernyshevsky’s novel, and called for a vanguard party to educate and lead the proletariat to revolution.

The Three Archetypes

According to Morson, out of this exchange between writers and the intelligentsia emerged three archetypes that reflected the dominant personalities in Russian civilization. The first was the “wanderer” who was a pilgrim of ideas, often trading one theory for another, in search of the truth. Some writers experienced life-changing spiritual conversions, such as Tolstoy, as told in his Confessions, or Solzhenitsyn, as told in the Gulag Archipelago; while others accepted ideas bereft of God as the source of human salvation, such as Belinsky or Kropotkin. While both writers and intelligentsia looked to ideas for truth, the intelligentsia mistook theory for reality and thus became dedicated to a fanatical idealism. By contrast, writers like Chekhov and Dostoevsky understood the limits of theory in accounting for reality, acknowledging that mystery and wonder were at the root of human existence, and they criticized the intelligentsia for their naïve beliefs.

The second archetype was the idealist—the opposite of the wanderer, because he or she remained steadfast in loyalty to a single ideal, such as Don Quixote in his dedication to Dulcinea. In fact, the character Don Quixote was an object of fascination among Russian writers, especially Turgenev, as told in his essay, “Hamlet and Don Quixote.” In Russian literature there were two types of Don Quixote idealists: the disappointed and the incorrigible. Vsevolod Garshin was representative of the first—disillusioned with reality, accepting the ugliness that it was; Gleb Uspensky was emblematic of the second—unable to reconcile the horrid truths about the peasantry with his idealization of them. Uspensky remained incorrigibly committed to his ideals in spite of reality, leading him to praise despotism and justify policies of cruelty out of an abstract love of humanity.

 

The third dominant personality was the revolutionist who loved war and violence for their own sake. Bakunin, Savinkov, Lenin, Stalin, and others represented this Russian archetype. They were motivated by a metaphysical hatred of a reality that could not be explained with certainty, and, with Russian liberal acquiescence, they came to power to murder millions of Russian citizens.

All three of these archetypal personalities reveal the limitations of theoretical thinking in accounting for reality. Russian writers showed how the intelligentsia’s infallible methods of science fell short, as in the cases of Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, Pierre in War and Peace, and Arkady in Fathers and Children. Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Solzhenitsyn explained why human freedom and moral agency existed and why suffering brought one closer to God. Human beings cannot be simply classified as good or evil; doing so, as Solzhenitsyn wrote, was the key moral error of totalitarian regimes like the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany: “The line between good and evil runs not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart.”

The Mystery of Ordinary Life

Literature, particularly Russian literature, illuminates for us not only the actual but also the possible. There are no ironclad laws of human progress, nor does an inevitable future await us. In his analysis of Russian writers, Morson observes that Solzhenitsyn has shown us the Russia “that might have been” and Dostoevsky has illuminated the “cloud of possibilities” that every human confronts before choosing. As Morson states:

The poetic process suggests that no fate predetermines our future. Possibilities ramify. Constraints limit choice but allow for more than one. There will never be a moment when everything fits and stories are all complete. The future, like the past, will be a series of present moments, and each present moment is oriented towards multiple futures. Time’s potential is never exhausted.

Literature is especially suited to account for life’s endless possibilities, because its attention is on the ordinary—the family, marriage, personal happiness. Chekhov was a master at capturing the ordinary in literature, as were Tolstoy and Grossman. Characters were changed by their choices, but their choices were conditioned by their ordinary context. This is part of Morson’s theory of prosaics, that “Cloaked in their ordinariness, the truths we seek are hidden in plain view.” Meaning is not derived from some intelligentsia’s abstract ideology; it is discovered in our ordinary encounter with the world as it is.

Like Russian writers and their characters, we live in a reality that will always elude our understanding; we can respond with either wonder or certainty. Do we seek a life of contemplation and reflection that always will be incomplete, or one of convicted activism and dogmatic ideology? Does our happiness spring from being with our spouses, children, and local surroundings, or from dreams of an inevitable future of progress and enlightenment? Are we morally free creatures or merely products of a predisposed identity, whether it be race, class, or gender? This is a conversation that all civilizations have, but in Russia it was manifested in literature. All the more reason to revisit its writers and read their works.

12 Parsecs Designs Yggdrasil World Tree Leather Journal Review

(Sarah Read is an author, editor, yarn artist, and pen/paper/ink addict. You can find more about her at her website and on Twitter. And check out her latest book, Out of Water, now available where books are sold!)

This Yggdrasil World Tree Leather Journal from 12 Parsecs Designs is one of those items that falls into a special category I like to call "things I have to review before my teenager steals them for Dungeons and Dragons." If you're in the market for a book in which to record magical journeys, occult recipes, treasure maps, or any other flights of fancy, you should probably check out the Notebooks page over at 12 Parsecs Designs.

This thicc journal has a sturdy leather cover that's interfaced with canvas. Its back cover tucks into the front to conceal the fore-edge, and it closes with two brass buckles on the front. The cover of this particular one is embossed with an image of Yggdrasil, the Norse World Tree, with gorgeous Viking-inspired designs surrounding it. The leather is painted walnut brown with an almost woodgrain effect to the brushstrokes. Y'all, it's really pretty.

Inside this stunning cover are five signatures of 20 sheets of cushy watercolor paper, for a total of 100 sheets or 200 pages. The paper is very thick, soft, and pillowy. You could take a nap on this paper. I usually associate this fibrous paper with bleeding and feathering, but this is very well made sketchbook paper, and I did not have any issues. It is too soft, however, for sharp-pointed tools, so mechanical pencils, EF pen nibs, and ultra fine pen points are not going to be your friend here. And the paper is thirsty. While I was able to write with a medium point fountain pen just fine, it does drink the ink, and the pen's feed eventually struggled to keep up with the necessary flow. The best instrument I found for this paper was either a wood case pencil that's not sharpened too much, or a standard ballpoint pen. Of course, watercolors would be the specific ideal use for this paper, but I shan't disgrace it with my poor art.

The paper also has dried flowers scattered throughout its pages, which adds to the whimsical, fairytale effect. I know soft, flowery paper is going to send some of you running in the opposite direction, but that just leaves more fae paper for the rest of us, so bye.

This notebook is about as opposite as you can get from the streamlined, minimal, purely utilitarian notebooks that make up the bulk of my notebook stash. I love those, too. And I love this. This isn't a notebook that makes me think "perfect for meetings" or "I'll use this for class" or "so efficient and productive." No, this notebook says "time to play and dream" and I am so here for it.

12 Parsecs Designs suggests that this notebook is great for gamers, painters, scrapbookers, journalers, or even folks who want a cool photo album. I agree, and I'm impressed. For all this loveliness and versatility, they're only charging $31 (and they're actually on sale for less as I write this). That's much less than I expected after using the notebook. I can already tell I'll be back for more of these. Probably very soon, when my little Dungeon Master steals mine.

(12 Parsecs Designs provided this product at no charge to The Pen Addict for review purposes.)

---

Enjoy reading The Pen Addict? Then consider becoming a member to receive additional weekly content, giveaways, and discounts in The Pen Addict shop. Plus, you support me and the site directly, for which I am very grateful.

Membership starts at just $5/month, with a discounted annual option available. To find out more about membership click here and join us!

Sea Changes

Directions to Myself: A Memoir of Four Years by Heidi Julavits; Hogarth, 304 pp., $27

In his 1949 book of comparative mythology, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell argued that while the archetypal man’s journey is physical and outward, that of the woman is domestic and inward. Apart from the painfully reductive nature of this idea, what most annoyed me about the book was not so much Campbell’s distinction between genders but the implication that a journey inward is inherently less dangerous, less difficult, or less societally significant than a journey outward. In her new book, Heidi Julavits, a writer and a founding editor of The Believer magazine, rewrites that myth. Directions to Myself is about finding a way home in every sense of the word—and what it means to navigate there, not as Odysseus returning to Ithaca but as ordinary parents, teachers, writers, friends, and neighbors.

Julavits and her family split their time between school years in Manhattan and summers in Maine, and in Directions to Myself, she is concerned with finding a home in both landscapes. Each of the book’s sections opens with hand-drawn maps of places important to Julavitz—among them Small Point Harbor, Maine; Julavits’s childhood neighborhood in nearby Portland; and the neighborhood where she works and lives near New York’s Columbia University—complete with annotations like “do not climb” and “watch for broken glass.” The narrative moves associatively, rather than chronologically, through four years of Julavits’s life, documenting the effects of aging, shifting friendships, professional highs and lows, and the internal conflict she faces in preparing her children to go out into a world that feels increasingly destabilized.

Julavits’s central interest in geography is rooted in how our ability to navigate change allows us to feel at home, even if “home” is not a fixed place or concept. Realizing how she’s re-created the patterns of her childhood—moving to Maine, owning a sailboat—for her own family, Julavits writes, “Home is still defined by me as where I grew up, more or less, and so we bought this house, thus repeating the mistake of my parents, conscripting our children to spend summer vacations in a vessel that fills with water from below.” When she confesses that “as confusing and shameful as it is to be a homesick adult, homesickness becomes its own home after a while,” she is writing as much about the physical as she is about a period of her life that has slipped out of reach. “The older I get,” she goes on, “the more I understand [homesickness] as love that’s too big and has always been too big for one body to manage. That love is unbearable only when I’m not with the people who inspired it”—for Julavits, those people are her parents, her friends, and most of all, her children.

In a scene she returns to throughout the book, Julavits is approached by a famous writer who smugly “announc[es] that writers should never have children because each child represents a book the writer will not write.” Julavits offers a hypothetical retort: if she were his accountant, she’d ask him to run the numbers. Why is it children that this man sees as the primary impediment to his genius when bathing, eating, sleeping also must pull him away from his prolific and brilliant output?

And yet, Julavits acknowledges that she too sometimes falls prey to this belief. “For this reason, I kept my first pregnancy a secret,” she writes.” I’m ashamed now that I did this, even while I had what seemed like valid reasons at the time. … I didn’t want anyone to think I wasn’t serious about my career. If I were to visit a life accountant, my spreadsheet might reveal the following. … I have experienced the unceasing pressure of proving that, by having a child I’ve cost myself nothing, and this has cost me.”

As Julavits charts her journey through early motherhood, it becomes clear that having children has cost her something, in the way that any kind of care is inseparable from loss. When she spends a night laboring with and delivering her second child, a son, in her Manhattan apartment, Julavits evokes the language of Campbell’s hero’s journey and its cycle of departure and return with a gift:

People have been dying in childbirth for a thousand years and labor unites us. With my daughter, during the twenty-seven hours we lived between worlds, I felt more connected, as the pain swelled and ebbed, withdrew and revisited, to this lineage of strangers than I did to the human inside me that I hoped would choose life, and let me keep mine…I’m more confident, this time, that I’ll survive the trip. But she will never again be the only person with whom I’ve traveled through in-between places. And I’ll be bringing someone back.

Campbell, too, saw the abyss in childbirth—in part because of the very real potential for physical death—but Julavits seems to be alluding to a much less literal and much more ordinary death: having a child means losing the self who did not know the all-consuming love of motherhood. During labor, Julavits observes, “each completed orbit on this clock thins and thins the membrane covering the abyss where the self is annihilated and becomes the ghostly bridge connecting life with life.”

One afternoon, back on the ocean in Maine near where her son nearly drowned the previous summer, Julavits sees that he has grown increasingly independent. She guides her son, in a boat tethered to her own, as he makes his way through the same water she once navigated on long summer trips with her own parents. Recalling the night they spent together on that ghostly bridge of labor, Julavits writes: “I walked for longer than a day; I traveled a measurable distance through time and space to give birth to him.” Now, though, she is traveling a different bridge—the passage between her son’s childhood and adulthood. “I’ve been prepared for this day,” she explains, evoking the umbilical rope that connects their two boats: “His growing up is unfathomable to me, even as I can precisely mark the distance. My son is two fathoms away. He is three fathoms. He is four, seven, ten. As the tide rises and the beach shrinks, I start to lay the rope on the sand. I re-create the path the two of us took together before his cord was cut and our individual expeditions began.”

Directions to Myself is a book of dualities—about motherhood and childhood, birth and death, career and family, middle age and youth, the external and the internal. Even stylistically, it’s simultaneously serious and tender. Home, split both by time (childhood and adulthood) and place (Manhattan and Maine) is the book’s central duality—and it is Julavits’s ability to craft a cohesive narrative as she wanders through them that makes the memoir so striking.

By the book’s end, it seems that the real difference between the archetypal hero’s journey and the one that Julavits describes is that the latter is one on which all of us will embark—a natural consequence of caring deeply about our children, our work, and the landscapes we call home.

The post Sea Changes appeared first on The American Scholar.

A Feminism Embedded in Human Nature

What happens when elite women get what they want? Mary Harrington’s Feminism against Progress is in part a tale of a dream fulfilled: a feminism of pure freedom, driven by the ideals of progress, achieving its goal of unfettered self-actualization. However, viewed up close, the promised utopia is not as Edenic as it seems. In fact, it’s an anti-Eden: a rootless, borderless realm of liquidated social bonds, populated by atomized, disembodied selves, and the only deity walking amidst them is the devouring Spirit of the Market.

Harrington, erstwhile citizen of this anti-Eden, takes on the role of Virgil, a prophetic guide through our purgatorial present, regaling us, her readers, with an account of where feminism went wrong, and what can be done about it. The book unfolds in three parts, which can loosely be described as a glance backward at where we’ve come from, a hard look around at where we are now, and a glimpse of where we might go from here.

First, Harrington treats us to feminism’s origin story as a response to the situation of women in the era of industrialization. She describes modernity as a great disembedding, an uprooting of the productive, gendered household, in which work was once centered for both men and women. In this premodern model, the sexes were not seen as interchangeable units of production; rather, their distinct spheres of influence and activity were complementary and interdependent, as well as conducive to childrearing and family life. Their shared economic life was grounded in a “web of relationships,” and gendered asymmetries were sources of synergy, rather than exploitation.

 

According to Harrington, industrialization shifted the center of productivity from the household to the factory, thus introducing a schism between “work” and “home.” Under this new model, in order to engage in economic activity, women had to be estranged from their children and labor in cruel conditions. Families who had the option would send the men out to work and keep the women at home, in a newly narrowed domestic sphere centered on consumption rather than production. Harrington argues, with help from Illich and Marx, that industrialization “reduced women’s economic agency,” opening an era of separate spheres, where “women were to a far greater extent at the mercy of their legally and financially all-powerful husbands.” It is in this context that the first feminist movement emerged—not in response to the bogeyman of patriarchy, but to the effects of industrialization. As Harrington puts it, the “challenges addressed by feminism are less evidence of eternal male animus than effects of material changes.”

This nascent women’s movement, from the outset, was marked by a tension between what Harrington calls a “feminism of care,” which resisted the logic of the market, emphasizing interdependence and the domestic realm, and a “feminism of freedom,” which “embraced the individualist market logic, and sought women’s entry into that market on the same terms as men.” The movement, Harrington contends, was more or less balanced in an “ambivalent tension” until the mid-twentieth century, when feminism’s embrace of contraception and abortion tipped the movement decidedly toward the market. From this point on, “feminism largely abandoned the question of how men and women can best live together, and instead embraced a tech-enabled drive to liberate humans altogether from the confines of biology.”

In the book’s second arc, Harrington provides a dizzying and dismal tour of the impact of feminism’s alliance with transhumanism, which has wrought a “cyborg age.” Here, she shows her writerly knack for coinage: Bio-libertarianism, Cyborg Theocracy, Progress Theology, Meat Lego Gnosticism. “Bio-libertarianism” is a particularly helpful term that captures the gist of what freedom feminism has become—a worldview that “focuses on extending individual freedom and self-fashioning as far as possible, into the realm of the body,” in order to pursue “self-created ‘human’ autonomy.”

Harrington argues that what is cast as moral advancement—i.e., progress—is the “revolutionary destruction of previously immutable-seeming limits.” Those limits, as it turns out, are difficult to dismantle. Much easier to destroy are the social practices and codes we have “developed over millennia” to help us navigate those limits. What gets dissolved along with those norms are bonds: the bonds between the sexes, the bond between mother and child, and the bond with one’s own body. Bonds inhibit freedom. Love calls for sacrifice; even, at times, suffering. And so, in the name of freedom, bonds must go.

 

What, then, can provide social cohesion in the wake of widespread dissolution? The market. This is the central claim of Harrington’s critique, the sharpest point in her skewer: “Whatever has been smashed in the pursuit of progress ends up reordered to the atomised laws of the market.” The downstream effects of this “liquefaction” of bonds—and the commodification of what remains—are numerous and bleak. The sexes use one another, forgoing covenant and commitment; the female body is subjected to “biomedical mastery”; the innate bond between mother and child is pathologized and replaced by “impersonal, tech-mediated care”; and, with the advent of the “trans kid,” even children are now invited to dissociate from their bodies and pursue Meat Lego customization. Every aspect of human personhood that is accessible by tech, down to our secondary sexual characteristics, has been commodified.

As a critic of progressivism, Harrington will probably get mislabeled “conservative,” because we are increasingly unable to think beyond that bifurcation. But thinking beyond it is exactly what Harrington is trying to do. One of the strengths of her analysis is its resistance to easy political categorization. She relies heavily on Marx and Engels in her account of industrialization and its effects, and maintains steady suspicion toward the demiurge of the market. She also exposes the flaws of flimsy conservative narratives that scapegoat feminism for social ills that originate in the disembedding of industrialization and the transition to a market society. The conservative nostalgia for “traditional” gender roles, she aptly points out, is actually a nostalgia for “industrial” sex roles, not traditional at all, but peculiarly modern. While conservatism looks naively backward toward an idealized past and progressivism gazes deludedly toward a Meat Lego future, Harrington, in the final part of her book, offers a positive proposal grounded in the here and now, in the complexity of our bonds and the boundaries of our nature.

In this third section, Harrington successfully avoids two common pitfalls of the culture critic: maintaining a purely critical mode, which is always easier than making a positive proposal, and hovering safely in the theoretical and the abstract. Harrington does neither, instead focusing the final part of her book on what an alternative to bio-libertarian feminism could look like. In doing so, she takes what might be called an approach of subsidiarity, emphasizing the need to “think concretely as possible” within the smaller sphere of interpersonal relationships, rather than sweeping, top-down policies.

This positive program depends on reclaiming the notion that the well-being of women depends on the well-being of men, and vice versa. In sketch form, Harrington’s practical strategies are, first, to reinvigorate marriage and an interdependent, productive solidarity that is centered in the home—a twenty-first-century take on the premodern model. Second, to roll back the beige-ification of society, i.e., mandated gender neutrality. This would mean allowing men and women to form separate social clubs, as well as reestablishing sex realism in any sphere where sex dimorphism is salient, like prisons and military combat units. Third, Harrington makes a bold, pro-embodiment, pro-desire case for “rewilding” sex by ditching the birth control pill—that first transhumanist technology that sets women at war with their own bodies, and displaces sex from a context of trust, commitment, intimacy, and the thrilling risk of new life.

Harrington offers her proposal under the banner of Reactionary Feminism—a feminism that positions itself against the bio-libertarianism of progressive feminism. This framing is provocative, and appeals to the rebel spirit that has animated, in one form or another, the various waves of the women’s movement. It also highlights an uncomfortable truth: the delusions of Progress Theology have proven to be destructive to both men and women, but it is undeniably women who are the guardians—or as Harrington puts it, the “priestesses”—of this quasi-religion. According to Harrington, it is the “majority-female mid-tier knowledge class” that most benefits from and currently curates the alliance between feminism and bio-libertarianism, to the detriment of almost everyone else. This means that Harrington’s heretical feminists are not warring with an amorphous patriarchy, but with other women. It is elite women who “have always been the guardians of moral and cultural norms,” as Harrington puts it, and so it is elite women who must now rise up as reactionaries.

 

I’m all but ready to sign up and join Harrington’s army of feminist heretics—if there is one point to quibble over, it would be that this re-envisioned feminism has to be more than reactionary; it can’t simply remain locked in unending mimetic rivalry with Progress. I want to shift the terms slightly to emphasize that this reformulated feminism needs to have a reactionary phase, but must also be proactive.

This is a rhetorical quibble, because Harrington’s articulation of reactionary feminism gives a clear sense of what it offers, not merely what it rejects. “It is not enough just to resist,” she writes near the end of the book; “reactionary feminists need to take positive steps to institutionalize a worldview capable of supporting men and women as we are.” I emphasize those last three words, because here Harrington gets to the heart of the matter: a reclaimed feminism has to offer a coherent and abiding account of human nature—specifically human nature as sexual. This is something feminism, in all its forms, has never done. The entire trajectory of bio-libertarian feminism, to put it simply, has been an ongoing project of denaturalization, a flight from the very idea that we have a nature. Feminism has thus assumed an empty, atomistic anthropology, one easily shaped and co-opted by consumerism. On her penultimate page, Harrington calls for a “positive restatement of human nature” in the face of cyborg theocracy, and her book as a whole reveals the contours of that nature: embodied, generative, sexual, interdependent, relational, prudential, capable of love, commitment, and sacrifice. And as relational, this is a nature that must be formed and cultivated through healthy social bonds: we have a nature that requires nurture.

This new feminism must be realist, rather than utopian, grounded in the muck and magic of the real, even as it offers ideals to be pursued and enculturated. Those ideals, however, must be grounded in the contours of our nature—not in a transhumanist fantasy, but in a vision of what our nature looks like in a state of flourishing. Progress theology divorces human flourishing from human nature, and thus the flourishing it offers can only ever be inhuman.

In contrast, Harrington offers a rich and complex social vision, one that, in my opinion, is not adequately captured by the word “reactionary.” Yet Harrington is right that in our cultural moment, an embodied, relational feminism—one that does not see sexual difference as a threat—has to be reactionary; it is countercultural by default. Those hoping to realize that vision need to be against progress, but also for something more stable and enduring: a feminist movement that recognizes and embraces the limits of our nature, as well as norms that steward that nature; that guard it from pathological excess and enervation. It’s time to reject the utopian lie that we can “be anything we want to be.” Instead, we must learn to become what we are.

The Presence in Absences: A Conversation with Gina Chung

I first met Gina Chung at a going-away party for a mutual writer friend. In a warm back room, during the final days of summer, I wedged myself into a small circle and caught the final bits of something Chung said. She paused to clue me into their conversation. I was struck by her kindness and easy generosity, the way she openly shared her writing routine and practices with a group of old friends and new acquaintances. Months later, I heard about her debut novel, Sea Change (Vintage). The book sucked me into its effervescent, marbled world and ultimately buoyed my spirit, just like its author had at that summer party.

Sea Change follows Ro, an Asian American woman who is floating into her thirties on her own. Partly struggling, partly aimless, Ro is estranged from her mother, and grieving her father, who disappeared on a sea exhibition a decade earlier. Ro’s only companion is a Giant Pacific octopus, Dolores, the last remaining link to her father. As Dolores is about to be sold to a private investor, Ro has to reframe her understanding of past and present to make sense of her new world. Chung’s prose bubbles with delectable humor and metaphors, burrows into hard truths, and sets out to explore uncharted emotional ranges.

Chung is the recipient of the 2021 Center for Fiction Emerging Writer Fellowship and a number of literary awards, including a 2023 Pushcart Prize. Her writing appears or is forthcoming in the Kenyon Review, Literary Hub, Catapult, Electric Literature, Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, and the Rumpus, among others. She has a forthcoming short story collection, Green Frog (Vintage, 2024).

I spoke with Chung about Sea Change over Zoom a few weeks before her book launch. We talked about the role of silence and the unsaid in Asian American families, humor’s proximity to grief, subverting conventionality in character tropes, and how to take care of oneself in service of one’s art.

***

The Rumpus: I noticed that a lot of your work, Sea Change and a number of your short stories, often features the natural world. What drew you to ocean life and sea creatures as subjects and counterpoints to the characters in your novel?

Gina Chung: I’ve always loved writing about the natural world and thinking about animals that live in different ecosystems than us because it reminds me that we as human beings are also animals. I think we often forget that about ourselves; it’s really easy for us to see ourselves as being somehow apart from or above nature when in actuality we are very much a part of it. Whereas humans can and often do lie about what we need, animals can’t hide or be dishonest about their needs. Thinking about animals and what they need to survive and thrive inspires me as a writer to also try to be more honest on the page.

Rumpus: Within the characters’ environment, money is an oceanic force, capitalism as much a precondition to existence in the novel as it is in current modern life. With our protagonist, Ro, it seems there are few things that she can do in opposition to these forces, but she actively defies, withdraws from, and avoids this system in her own ways. Can withdrawal and avoidance be a form of agency?

Chung: In a lot of ways, withdrawing from or avoiding a decision can seem like a way to surrender one’s agency in a situation, but at the same time—my therapist and I always talk about this—not making a choice is still kind of making a choice as well. For Ro, avoidance is a huge part of how she navigates her day-to-day life because she’s been hurt and carries a lot of pain. That makes her feel afraid to engage directly with things that might hurt her or that she might be in disagreement with. When it comes to the impending sale of Dolores, it is one area where, even if she’s not consciously doing anything to fight back against the sale, she feels a direct kind of no in response. I wanted that to be an inciting incident for the book, too, because it gets her to understand how much this octopus means to her and how much she stands to lose if she were to lose this one point of connection.

Rumpus: This inciting incident also pits her against her best friend, Yoonhee. I was fascinated by their relationship. They grew up together with similar backgrounds but end up in very different positions at the aquarium and have different levels of motivation to rise the ranks. Why was it important for you to juxtapose their ambition and upward mobility?

Chung: I loved the idea of, as you said, pitting them a little bit against each other with this development that happens in their workplace. I wanted Yoonhee to feel like a character who has genuinely been a part of Ro’s life for a long time. They’ve seen each other through different ups and downs and phases of life since childhood. I’m always fascinated by the topic of friendship, in particular, old friendship. What does it mean to have old friends who have been with you for many years and who have been witness to all the different past selves that you’ve inhabited? It’s such a gift, but it can also be such a challenge because when you are friends with someone for that long, you both start to feel a little bit of ownership over past versions of one another. People change and grow over time. Friends can grow apart. They can also come back together.

I wanted Yoonhee to feel a bit like a foil to Ro but be a real person herself, too, as someone who has such a completely different outlook in life. She’s someone who is pretty straightforward, knows what she wants, and doesn’t hesitate to go after it. Just because she tends to be more conventional doesn’t mean that she’s a flat or two-dimensional character. I also wanted to examine what happens in a person’s life when they get to a certain age and feel like, “Oh, my gosh! Everyone is leaving me behind.” Because they’re so close, Ro can’t help but look at Yoonhee and feel, even if she doesn’t necessarily want the same things that Yoonhee wants, that she should want them and that she’s nowhere near getting them.

Rumpus: Craft-wise, how do you write someone who might fall into some of these tropes but also honor their individuality?

Chung: One thing I wanted was to have them interacting and bickering over small things—the way you do with siblings, old friends, or anyone you’ve known for years—and just see the ways in which they are both able to call each other out. That’s what really felt like the core of Yoonhee to me, this person who deeply cares about her friend. Sometimes there’s no other way of expressing it than, “Why are you this way?” in this exasperated but also deeply loving way. I also wanted to show, with the flashback sections of earlier versions of themselves, how vulnerable Yoonhee is. Just because she seems to have her life together doesn’t mean she doesn’t experience pain or doubt or fear.

Rumpus: Through flashbacks, the book alternates a lot between the past and present. How did you kind of conceive of this structure? I felt very taken care of as a reader to get into the story in this way.

Chung: I’m so glad to hear that. I love an alternating structure in a book, and there are so many books that do this amazingly well. One that was particularly close to my heart at the time of writing was Kristen Arnett’s Mostly Dead Things, which is also a later-in-life coming-of-age story, against a backdrop of family dysfunction that shows how she’s gotten to this point in her life. In that book, those scenes from the main character’s childhood and upbringing really helped me as a reader anchor the choices she was making in the present day. I wanted to do something similar with Ro: give the reader a vivid picture of not only who this person is today and how she is navigating the world but also what has led her to this point, including her parents’ choices. In those past sections, I especially wanted to excavate who Ro’s father was, since he’s not around in the present day of the novel. I wanted to give the reader a chance to get to know who he was and what he meant to Ro.

Rumpus: As you mentioned, the men in Ro’s life, her father and also her ex-boyfriend, are a bit more phantom than flesh. They are bigger figures in her head through her memories than they are in the present. They exist through their absences. What did you want to portray about absences and the stories we conjure about the people who are no longer in our lives?

Chung: You’re so right in saying that a person’s absence, once they’re no longer in our lives, can almost become stronger than their presence was back when they were around. There’s a kind of danger in that, since the person who is mourning might get caught up in imagining that things were better than they actually were with that person. Maybe they think that in losing that person, they’ve lost some irretrievable part of themselves too. With Ro, the book starts off with her having gone through this breakup with her boyfriend, who is leaving her for a privately funded mission to colonize Mars. As anyone who has ever been through a breakup knows, the things that you didn’t quite appreciate about that person when you were together seem to come back in full relief when they’re no longer in your life. That’s what she’s going through, in the process of mourning that relationship, and also the loss of her father, who was hugely influential in how she sees the world. Her father introduced her to this love for animals that they both share, and he encouraged her to be curious about the world. His absence is so clearly felt throughout her later adulthood. I wanted to show just how searing that kind of loss can be and how in the process of mourning someone, whether it’s because you broke up with them or because they’re literally gone and you will never be able to connect with them again, the mourning is never linear. Of course, it’s not that we shouldn’t remember or grieve the ones we’ve lost, but I wanted to explore what can happen if you get too caught up in that mourning.

Rumpus: I feel like silence, too, is more of a presence than an absence, in the way it pervades relationships between family, friends, and romantic partners in the novel. Silence feels particularly pertinent in my own Asian American community, especially in how it persists in the first generation and is continuing to manifest in other ways in future generations. What roles did you hope for silence to inhabit for the characters in the book?

Chung: I feel that so deeply. The silences of ancestors, the silences of our parents and grandparents, as well as the silences that we inherit as children of immigrants. It’s hard to ask folks about the past because there’s a lot of pain within those memories. It’s definitely something that I’ve noticed a lot in my own family. In many Asian and Asian American families, there’s an acute awareness of what it would cost for the other person to relive their story just by telling it. That’s something I’m always thinking about and living with. I don’t want to perpetuate the trope of the silent, sad Asian American family either, but I do think that silence exists for a good reason, and a lot of those reasons are bound up in pain and trauma. With Ro, I think we see it most with her mother because she and her mother have never been able to talk about things like her father’s disappearance. They’ve never really been able to process what they’ve both experienced and been through. In writing Ro, I wanted to investigate what it would be like to grow up with that silence and not even know how to broach it with your mom, your friends, or even yourself. Ro doesn’t have the language to name any of the feelings that she’s grown up experiencing.

Rumpus: One of my favorite passages in the novel is: “I used to wonder if we would take better care of our bodies if our skin was transparent, if every little thing we did and said and ate was observable. If every hurtful or careless thing we ever said to one another manifested itself visually in the body.” It’s interesting how everyone has their own version or perception of self-care, especially when we consider the juxtaposition between what we think we need and what others think we need. Could we talk about your intention with writing about self-care?

Chung: Ro is not very good at taking care of herself throughout most of the book. I think taking care of yourself—and I mean real care, not just the commodified ideas of self-care that we’re all sold nowadays—is actually very difficult, and it’s a practice. As someone who also struggles at times to take care of myself, I wanted to explore a character who has never really learned how to do this, and this is something I feel like I haven’t really seen much of in contemporary literature when it comes to portrayals of Asian American women and women of color. There is a sort of larger cultural moment right now around what I’ve seen some people refer to as “the disaster woman trope,” but I feel like those characters are almost always white women, and their meltdowns are still usually played for laughs. But I wanted to show what it would look like to have a character who is so afraid of everyone leaving her behind that she can’t help but leave herself in all these ways, whether it’s by drinking way too much and driving home afterward or avoiding important conversations with the people in her life that she loves. I wanted to show all the small and big ways that we as humans abandon ourselves when we’ve been abandoned many times before.

At the same time, I did notice throughout the course of writing the novel that whenever I put Ro in the position of having to take care of someone else, she was actually not bad at it, much to her surprise. It’s sometimes hard and uncomfortable for her, but she’s able to stay present in those moments in ways that she can’t always be for herself. I wanted to show how she is able to learn how to do those things and, in time, show up for herself too.

Rumpus: As someone who balances full-time employment with writing, do you have self-care practices that help you continue creating art?

Chung: I’m very used to thinking of myself as a brain in a jar. I don’t always remember to consider my bodily needs, especially when things get really busy or when I’m in the middle of an engrossing project. I’ve had to remind myself over the years to slow down when I need to and to take care of the container through which I experience the world.

My main tip is to listen to your body as much as you can. Take breaks and sleep when you need to. I’m someone who can easily ignore all my body’s warning signs and just keep going until the point of exhaustion. It’s just not worth it most of the time. There’s no need to flagellate yourself in the name of your art, and the wellspring of your creativity can’t be replenished if you don’t rest, no matter how guilty you might feel for not getting down a certain number of words per day. I’m still learning how to be gentle with myself in doing this. Now, whenever I feel like all the creativity is gone and I’ve lost it for good, I’ve at least learned to believe that’s not true. It’s my lizard brain panicking. I know it will come back. The only way you can care for your art is to care for yourself.

Rumpus: I laughed throughout the book, sometimes out loud, but it surprised me because some of my laughter was near moments of strife or grief. To what extent does humor and absurdity color your understanding of grief? How can humor be a tool in explaining grief, if at all?

Chung: Humor is so important to me, both as a writer and as a human being. Humor oftentimes hinges around this element of surprise. There’s this idea that writing about grief or difficult experiences can’t be funny or that it’s one note. So much of life isn’t like that, though. There have been times in my life where I’m going through heavy situations, but that doesn’t mean I don’t laugh if I see something surprising or ridiculous. Even in moments of my own despondency, I sometimes laugh at myself because of how dramatic I know I’m being. I think it’s important to be able to do that because otherwise life can be overwhelmingly difficult, and having those moments where you’re either laughing at yourself or at the situation is healthy and also lifesaving in a way. In terms of writing, I think funny scenes can sharpen the emotional quality of the sad ones, and vice versa. It’s like in cooking, where you have complementary but contrasting flavors, they heighten each other.

 

***

Author photo by S.M. Sukardi

Killing One to Save Many: Javier Marías’s Tomás Nevinson

Would it be morally justifiable to murder Hitler before he became the Fuhrer? In Diary of a Man in Despair, the author Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen recounts the time he chanced upon Hitler dining alone in 1936 and his regret at not having murdered the man although he had a loaded gun. In his defense, Reck-Malleczewen acknowledges that he could not have known the monster Hitler would become. Had he known, he surely would have pulled the trigger.

Another could-have-been is portrayed, this time in fiction, in Fritz Lang’s movie Man Hunt. It is 1939, and British Hunter Captain Alan Thorndike, hiding behind a bush with a rifle, entertains the idea of assassinating Hitler, but just as his determination sets in, he is captured by a guard. Without that moment of hesitation, the captain would have saved millions of lives.

These two instances are repeatedly mentioned by the narrator in Javier Marías’s new and final novel Tomás Nevinson (Knopf), who often reminds himself that “nothing is certain until it happens.

Nevinson has reason to repeat the truism. A retired British secret service agent in his forties, he has been living quiet and uneventful days when his past superior Betram Tupra reconnects with him. One last job, Tupra says, trying to recruit him for a new mission: assassinate a suspected terrorist before she plots an attack with mass casualties. The scene depicting the initial conversation between Tupra’s methodical speech to lure Nevinson out of retirement, and Nevinson’s deliberation on whether or not to accept, consumes the first hundred pages of the novel. Nevinson succumbs because he can no longer bear the purgatorial state of his life in retirement; he would rather choose hell where the action is than the safe haven where it is not.

Once on the job, he finds himself in his old world of “assumptions and permanent suspicion, distrust and callousness, of pretense and deliberate betrayals.” Supposedly, his target is an IRA-trained terrorist who masterminded the Hipercor bombing in Barcelona by the Basque Separatist Group ETA (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna: “Basque Homeland and Liberty”) that killed 22 innocent civilians in 1987. But there is one caveat: While there is only one terrorist, there are three female suspects—an unmarried restaurateur, a schoolteacher married to a criminal, and the socialite wife of an aristocrat.

Transferred to the small town where the three women live, he pretends to be a novelist writing about the town, befriending a local journalist, a drug dealer, and a politician, all to winnow down the suspects. Nevinson acquaints himself with the women, cautiously at first, although the restauranter soon becomes his lover. But the hiatus during retirement has impaired his acumen. While meeting these suspects is easy enough, he finds it more difficult to lure them into his vicinity, become a trustworthy companion, and bait the true terrorist into revealing herself.

When Tupra threatens to kill all three women to prevent a bigger catastrophe, Nevinson uses deduction to select a target, a conclusion with a large margin of error, an educated guess at best. The rising suspense culminates in his attempt to assassinate the supposed terrorist, though he worries that none of these women may be the criminal he is led to believe. Nevinson becomes equivocal: if he had been sure of the suspect’s culpability, would he have murdered her with no sense of guilt? Should he believe, as he did so during his active years, that by killing this woman, he is saving many lives? Nevinson comes to fear the consequences of his decision, quoting Macbeth, “‘Tis safer to be that which we destroy, than by destruction dwell in doubtful joy.” The novel puts into question Kant’s idea of categorical imperative when the standard of ethics in our world cannot divorce itself from consequences.

Javier Marías passed away last year, and Tomás Nevinson—his last and longest novel at 650 pages—was translated into English by Margaret Jull Costa, who had worked with him for the last 30 years. Tomás Nevinson is a companion piece to Marías’s previous novel, Berta Isla, Nevinson’s wife and protagonist of that novel. Tomás Nevinson continues where Berta Isla leaves off, but from a different perspective. A prior reading of Berta Isla is not necessary, although the emotional impact may be heightened by knowing the couple’s past, which is briefly sketched in the new novel. If Berta Isla probed the limits of knowing in human relationships, Tomás Nevinson explores the limitations of moral certainty. If Berta Isla toyed with the idea of the espionage novel, Tomás Nevinson consummates the genre.

Indeed, it is an espionage novel, which employs Marías’s signature style: digressive reflections, allusion to diverse literary works, and philosophical musings. Once again, his sentences rove with a compass rather than with a map, exploring uncharted psychological and philosophical territories of human affairs. His narrative enters a maze in which every possible route is inspected. Elliptical turns and backtracking are frequent, yet rather than being exhausting, they offer nuances and emphases.

In one sentence, Nevinson contemplates his illogical decision to accept the mission: “[T]he only way not to question the usefulness of what you have done in the past is to keep doing the same thing; the only justification for a murky, muddy existence is to continue to muddy it; the only justification for a long-suffering life is to perpetuate that suffering, to tend it and nourish it and complain about it, just as a life of crime is only sustainable if you persevere as a criminal, if villains persist in their villainy and do harm right left and center, first to some and then to others until no one is left untouched.”

Such sentences progress like blood flowing into all the channels of a vein, supplying the narrative with life and zeal. Marías is one of those gifted writers whose style sets him apart from other writers, whose authorship is apparent on every page he writes.

The plot of Tomás Nevinson includes a few real-life events that transpired during the long political conflict between Spain and the Basque Country, including the kidnapping and the subsequent murder of the Spanish politician Miguel Ángel Blanco by the ETA. Nevinson joins his neighbors marching to the town square in demonstration, perhaps to earn their trust, taking advantage of solidarity forged by the maddening atrocities incurred by the Basque nationalists. To Marías’s credit, a sense of urgency pervades the novel despite his introspective prose.

Endearing scenes between Nevinson and his wife Berta Isla, who have two children together, provide comforting reprieve from Nevinson’s stumbling undercover work. They care for each other, but long years of absence from the household during his active service rendered their marriage void. They no longer live under the same roof; Tomás is more like an avuncular figure to his children. Although they sometimes share Berta’s bed, Tomás does not probe into Berta’s private life, believing that he has no right. But the novel ends with promising notes as he recites Yeats’s “When You Are Old” to Berta:

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

With Marías’s untimely passing, we will never find out whether Berta and Tomás will rekindle their love, and yet as his final work, Tomás Nevinson, with his perennial theme of secrecy and betrayal, Marías has left us a towering works, a rightful culmination testifying to his genius.

 

 

*

The Virtues of Mary Wollstonecraft

In 1978, the University of Chicago Press journal Signs published a short essay introducing Mary Wollstonecraft’s lost anthology of prose and poetry she had published “for the improvement of young women.” Wollstonecraft’s anthology reproduced edifying fables and poetry; excerpted from the Bible, Shakespeare, and Milton; and included four Christian prayers Wollstonecraft had authored herself. Among the last is a lengthy “Private Morning Prayer” which reads, in part:

Though knowest whereof I am made, and rememberest that I am but dust: self-convicted I prostrate myself before thy throne of grace, and seek not to hide or palliate my faults; be not extreme to mark what I have done amiss—still allow me to call thee Father, and rejoice in my existence, since I can trace thy goodness and truth on earth, and feel myself allied to that glorious Being who breathed into me the breath of life, and gave me a capacity to know and to serve him.

Though Wollstonecraft is now regarded a canonical thinker in the fields of history, political science, and gender studies, secular feminist scholars still struggle to make sense of her religiosity. Many suggest, as Moira Ferguson did in her 1978 Signs essay, that Wollstonecraft’s own skepticism grew as she crafted her more influential political work. Meanwhile, religious thinkers tend to ignore her religiosity, subscribing to the selfsame interpretation of her as a duly secular proto-feminist.

Enter Modern Virtue: Mary Wollstonecraft and a Tradition of Dissent (Oxford) by Emily Dumler-Winckler, the first adequately theological treatment of Wollstonecraft’s pedagogical, social, and political thought. In a beautifully written, deeply learned, and insightful book, the St. Louis University theologian maintains that there is far greater continuity throughout Wollstonecraft’s work than scholars realize. The imitatio Christi commended in her early publications, including the Female Reader, is the key that unlocks her entire corpus. Deftly employing knowledge of Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas, but also Burke, Rousseau, Kant, Hume, and Paine, Dumler-Winckler situates Wollstonecraft in the Western canon as the seminal philosophical and theological thinker she rightly is.

 

Dumler-Winckler is at her best in revealing the kinship between Wollstonecraft and the pre-moderns, and distinguishing her from contemporaries like Kant. Such scholarly care helps Dumler-Winckler show how Wollstoncecraft’s thinking about virtue, justice, and friendship can inform those who resist various racial and economic injustices today.

However, Dumler-Winckler is less convincing in her efforts to distinguish Wollstonecraft’s pre-modern insights from those she dubs (and derides) “virtues’ defenders,” namely, Alasdair MacIntyre, Stanley Hauerwas, and Brad Gregory. Certainly, their thought—like the “virtue despisers” she more charitably challenges—would be well served by the rich encounter with Wollstonecraft that her book offers. But given Dumler-Winckler’s own judicious critiques of our modern ills, these “defenders” (especially Gregory) may be more friends than the foes she imagines.

Cultivating the Virtues through the Moral Imagination

Given Wollstonecraft’s sharp critique of Edmund Burke’s (prescient) condemnation of the French Revolution—as well as her Enlightenment-era claim of “natural rights” for women—Wollstonecraft has long been regarded a paradigmatically liberal thinker: akin to a female Thomas Paine, a feminist John Locke, a proto-Kantian. However, some scholars in recent decades have rejected these inapt comparisons, with most now placing her, rightly in my view, in the civic republican tradition that dates to Cicero. This reexamination of Wollstonecraft’s thought has also allowed for greater scrutiny of her argument with Burke over the French Revolution, with some now seeing far more affinity between the two English thinkers than was previously thought.

Dumler-Winckler’s 2023 book deepens these insights by foregrounding Wollstonecraft’s early pedagogical texts as the key that unlocks her account of the virtues, which itself is the prism through which to view her entire corpus. Throughout Modern Virtue, Dumler-Winckler strongly contests the view that Wollstonecraft’s account of virtue resembles that of the rationalist Kant, or the “naked” rationalism of the French revolutionaries Burke rightly scolds. Early on, Wollstonecraft writes: “Reason is indeed the heaven-lighted lamp in man, and may safely be trusted when not entirely depended on; but when it pretends to discover what is beyond its ken, it . . . runs into absurdity.” As Dumler-Winckler shows, respect for the ennobling human capacity for reason and its limits can be found throughout her work.

 

But Dumler-Winckler also ably distinguishes the proto-feminist from the “sentimentalism” of Hume, the “voluntarism” of some Protestant contemporaries, and the “traditionalism” of Burke. Dumler-Winckler finds the golden mean by looking beyond the moderns with whom Wollstonecraft is too hastily classified to show her kinship with ancient and medieval thinkers, especially Aristotle and Aquinas. It’s in the rich Christian tradition especially that Wollstonecraft finds dynamic resources to bring to bear on her “modern” subjects (abolition and women’s education, in particular)—even as the late-eighteenth-century thinker refines the tradition for the “revolution in female manners” she seeks to inspire. Thus, the seemingly incongruous subtitle: “a Tradition of Dissent.”

“The main business of our lives is to learn to be virtuous,” the pedagogue wrote in Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787). For Wollstonecraft as for Aristotle and especially Aquinas, argues Dumler-Winckler, one learns to be virtuous through the gradual refinement of all the faculties in a dynamic engagement of the imagination, understanding, judgment, and affections—especially through imitating the patterns of Christ-like moral exemplars. “Teach us with humble awe to imitate the divine patterns and lure us to the paths of virtue,” Wollstonecraft writes. One “puts on righteousness,” then, not ultimately as a rule obeyed, a ritual practiced, or a philosophical tenet held, even as obedience, rituals, and understanding are, for Wollstonecraft, all essential components.

Rather, one “puts on righteousness” as a kind of “second nature,” which is the refinement and cultivation of raw, unformed appetites (i.e, “first nature”). Wollstonecraft artfully employs Burke’s metaphor of the “wardrobe of the moral imagination” to depict the way in which cultivation of the virtues refines one’s “taste” in particular matters. “For Wollstonecraft, nature serves as a standard for taste, only insofar as the passions, appetites, and faculties of reason, judgment, and imagination are refined by second natural virtues. . . . [I]t is never the gratification of depraved appetites, but rather exalted appetites and minds . . . which are to govern our relations.”

In imitating Christ-like exemplars from an early age, we develop the the moral virtues that perfect our relation with God and others—being crafted and crafting oneself, in turn. “Whatever tends to impress habits of order on the expanding mind may be reckoned the most beneficial part of education,” Wollstonecraft writes in the introduction to the Female Reader, “for by this means the surest foundation of virtue is settled without struggle, and strong restraints knit together before vice has introduced confusion.” Pointing to this dialectical design, Dumler-Winckler shows how Wollstonecraft wished for Scripture and Shakespeare to “gradually form” girls’ taste so that they might “learn not ‘what to say’ but rather how to read, think, and even pray well, and how to exercise their reason, cultivate virtue, and refine devotional taste.” Schooling the moral imagination through imitation was the key to acquiring virtue for both Aristotle and Wollstonecraft—but so was making virtue one’s own: “[W]e collectively inherit, tailor, and design [the virtues] as a garb in the wardrobe of a moral imagination.”

Wollstonecraft’s argument with Burke, then, concerns not the evident horrors and evils of the Revolution itself (in which she agrees with him) but the causes of such evils. For Wollstonecraft, the monarchical French regime Burke extols had become deeply corrupt, with rich and poor loving not true liberty but honors and property. The French peasants (and the revolutionaries that emboldened them) thus lacked the virtues that would allow them to respond to injustice in a virtuous way: “The slave unwittingly becomes the master, the tyrannized a tyrant, the oppressed an oppressor.” “Absent virtue,” Dumler-Winckler insightfully writes, “protest unwittingly replicates the injustice it protests. For Wollstonecraft, true virtue is revolutionary because it enables one to justly protest injustice, and so not only to criticize but to embody an alternative.” Throughout the text, Dumler-Winckler exhorts those who would critique various injustices today to showcase, in their particular circumstances and unique oppressions, virtuous alternatives.

Women’s Rights for the Cause of Virtue

Just as Augustine distinguished true Christian virtue from its pagan semblances, Dumler-Winckler tells us, Wollstonecraft distinguishes true virtue from its “sexed semblances,” especially in the thought of Burke and Rousseau. For the latter two, human excellence was a deeply gendered affair. For Wollstonecraft, however, virtue is not “sexed”—even as men and women, with distinctive procreative capacities and physical strength, clearly are. Dumler-Winckler yet again turns to Aristotle and Aquinas as those who “supply the material” for Wollstonecraft to call upon women to imitate Christ and live according to their rightful dignity as imago Dei. Dumler-Winckler’s own words could summarize her important book: “The affirmation of women’s ability to recognize, identify with, and even emulate the divine attributes has been so crucial for the affirmation of their humanity and equality, it may be considered a founding impetus for traditions of modern feminism.”

Wollstonecraft knew that women’s education and role in society needed to be reimagined. Dumler-Winckler writes that “unlike most of her predecessors, premodern and modern alike, . . . Wollstonecraft could see that growing in likeness of God would require a ‘revolution in female manners’ and a rejection of ‘sexed virtues.’” Mrs. Mason, the Christ-like protagonist in Wollstonecraft’s Original Stories, taught her female pupils to think for themselves “and rely only on God.” Mason’s advice did not commend the Kantian autonomy so often extolled today, but rather “virtuous independence.” Mason taught: “[W]e are all dependent on each other; and this dependence is wisely ordered by our Heavenly Father, to call forth many virtues, to exercise the best affections of the human heart, and fix them into habits.”

And thus we come to the rationale behind Wollstonecraft’s late-eighteenth-century appeal for women’s rights. It was an appeal “for the cause of virtue,” as Dumler-Winckler quotes the proto-feminist again and again. Wollstonecraft grounded rights in the imago Dei, viewing them as both important protections against arbitrary and unjust domination, and specifications of justice’s demands: “what is due, owed, or required to set a particular relationship right,” as Dumler-Winckler nicely puts it. Unlike the Hobbesian Jacobins, Wollstonecraft recognized that “liberty comes with attendant duties, constraints, and social obligations at every step.”

Recognizing how Wollstonecraft advocated rights on the basis of Christian theological anthropology, not secular Enlightenment ideals, it is odd then that Dumler-Winckler picks a fight with the likes of Alasdair MacIntyre, Stanley Hauerwas, and especially Notre Dame historian Brad Gregory. It is true that in his 2012 Unintended Reformation, Gregory laments, in Dumler-Winckler’s words, “the eclipse of an ethics of virtue with a culture of rights,” but unlike MacIntyre and Hauerwas, who reject rights as a quintessentially liberal phenomenon, Gregory endorses an older grounding for rights. But this is precisely what Dumler-Winckler has shown Wollstonecraft offers: the good and right held together, just as, both happily acknowledge, Catholic social teaching does today.

 

Unfortunately, however, modern rights theories have followed not Wollstonecraft or CST but the “conceptions of autonomy and self-legislation” that both reject. Though Wollstonecraft’s view of “liberty is not, as Burke fears, a license to do whatever one pleases or as Gregory fears ‘a kingdom of whatever,’” that surely is a prevailing view of liberty today. Indeed, it manifests itself (in Gregory’s view) in acquisitive consumerism, “an environmental nightmare,” “exploitative (and often brutally gendered)” impact on workers, the decline in the “culture of care” and much, much more, about which Dumler-Winckler and Gregory (and I) agree! But more crucial, perhaps, is a common solution: if “disordered loves are at root, Wollstonecraft suggests, a matter of idolatry,” the remedy depends, according to Dumler-Winckler, on “their reordering, on the cultivation of what Wollstonecraft considers ‘the fairest virtues,’ namely benevolence, friendship, and generosity. . . . Not to banish love and friendship from politics, . . . but to refine earthly loves.”

Dumler-Winckler and I disagree about some of the practical implications of Wollstonecraft’s vision today. She sees unjust essentializing in the TERF movement; I, in the gender ideology against which TERFS rally. She hails Kamala Harris as an exemplar, I, Justice Barrett. But that we share a common understanding—and indeed an intellectual framework—that each person “learning to be virtuous” can transform a society for the common good is itself a great advance from the MacIntyrian lament. It is one for which she and I can both happily thank an inspiring and insightful eighteenth-century autodidact, one who should be more widely read—and carefully studied—today.

Sacred Foundations and the mechanism of political theology

A few days ago, when I was about halfway through the book, I wondered aloud on Twitter whether Anna M. Grzymała-Busse’s Sacred Foundations: The Religious and Medieval Roots of the European State might need to join the mini-canon of Schmitt-style genealogical political theology. Having finished it, I now think it provides a key point of reference for a lot of projects in that strange field, though it is very much not in the “style” of the most influential works (of the kinds of works that I have advocated adding to the mini-canon, like Caliban and the Witch).

It is a sober empirical analysis, at times even a little boring, but it supplies something crucial: an actual concrete mechanism for the kind of “secularization of theological concepts” that are our stock in trade. In a way, Grzymała-Busse’s lack of conceptual or theological ambition is necessary for her to uncover what has been hiding in plain sight: state institutions in medieval Europe quite literally copied practices and procedures from papal models. The reasons for this are both grandiose and mundane — on the one hand, the papacy obvious carried with it a unique kind of spiritual authority, but on the other hand, the church was the only institution that looked like it knew what it was doing. For things like literacy, documentation, regular procedures, disputes based on precedent and evidence, etc., etc., the church was for many centuries the only game in town.

The motivation to adopt church models for governance grew out of the papacy’s temporal ambitions, which produced a rivalry with secular states. In Grzymała-Busse’s telling, it also arguably led to a secularization of the church itself, as the papacy’s growing administrative efficiency and ability to project power went hand in hand with growing corruption and declining interest in spiritual and theological matters in favor of law. States that were lucky were able to adopt church templates and create their own parallel structures, allowing them to administer justice, collect taxes, and do all the other things at which the church excelled. States that were unlucky — such as the Holy Roman Empire or the divided Italian peninsula — found themselves intentionally impeding from developing the kinds of centralized power structures that would allow such ecclesiastical borrowings.

Grzymała-Busse’s main goal is to argue against purely secular accounts of state formation, the most popular of which attribute state centralization either to the demands of warfare, the need to develop some form of consensus to collect taxes, or both combined. As she shows — fairly conclusively in my view — those theories simply cannot be right. And in her concluding pages, she suggests that the idiosyncratic process of state formation in Europe, which was the only part of the world that had a powerful autonomous trans-national religious institution at the crucial period, should lead political theorists to make less sweeping claims about the universality or necessity of European state structures, much less the processes that led to them.

To me, the most interesting part of her argument from the perspective of “my” preferred brand of political theology is the view that the notion of territorial sovereignty actually grows out of the papacy’s contingent political strategies during the high middle ages. Grzymała-Busse argues that the notion that all kings are peers and no secular ruler has power over a king in his own territory was actually meant to head off the rise of a powerful emperor figure to displace the pope — but the more the pope grew to function as precisely that type of figure, the more the notion of territorial sovereignty became a weapon against papal interference as well. In short, the Westphalian/United Nations model — in which the world is parcelled out among sovereign territorial units that are all to be treated as peers, with interference in their internal affairs being prohibited except in extreme cases based on international agreement — that has hamstrung any attempt at global regulation of capital or any binding climate action, effectively dooming humanity to live on a permanently less hospitable climate… turns out to stem from an over-clever political strategy on the part of some 13th-century pope. It sounds almost absurd when you put it that way.

Grzymała-Busse’s book abounds in such ironies. Every innovation that the papacy introduced to shore up its power in the short run wound up empowering temporal rulers in the long run. The very religious authority that provided the popes the opportunity to fill Europe’s power vaccuum — and in the case of Germany and Italy, fatally exacerbate it with such skill and precision that it would persist for centuries after the conflict between church and state was decisively won by the latter — prevented the papacy from assuming the imperial prerogatives it worked so hard to prevent anyone else from having. Perhaps we can see now why Carl Schmitt was so enamored with the ius publicum Europaeum — it is quite literally a secularization of the papacy’s attempt at the indirect governance of Europe. (Meanwhile, I am at a loss for what this book could offer to the “politically-engaged theology” construal of political theology, because so much of what was formative for the “positive” aspects of secular modernity came from the “bad” period of papal history.)

There is more to say about this book, though perhaps my suggestion on Twitter that this book could serve as fodder for a book event was premature. It is a little too specialized and conceptually dry to spur the kind of discussion we normally aim to have. But I hope my political theology colleagues will read it, and if any of them have thoughts about it that go beyond what I say in this post, I would be happy to host them here.

“Actually, I’m Not Grateful”: A Conversation with Stephanie Foo

After graduating from college, Stephanie Foo created a podcast called Get Me On This American Life. In an effort to make this dream come true, she borrowed radio equipment and hitchhiked to the world’s largest pornography conference in Texas to find stories. She interned, then became a producer of the radio show Snap Judgement. In 2014, Foo landed her dream job at This American Life—where she remained as a producer for five years and, in the process, won an Emmy. She was a 2019–2020 Rosalynn Carter Fellow for Mental Health Journalism and has published essays in the New York Times and New York Magazine.

In February 2022, Foo released her memoir, What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma (Ballantine Books). It’s the story of her real self, a woman functioning with complex post-traumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD), a condition that can develop over the years following prolonged abuse. Foo’s memoir told the story of childhood trauma, parental abandonment, and the way her past continued to threaten her health, relationships, and career. Finding limited resources to help her, Foo set out to heal herself and map her experiences onto the scarce literature about C-PTSD.

We met via Zoom, where we spoke about the paperback release of her book (now a New York Times bestseller), how writing for the page is different from writing for the ear, why childhood trauma is often excused by traditionalists, and what she would tell her younger self if she had the chance.

***

The Rumpus: What about journalism appealed to you?

Stephanie Foo: Journalism brought me out of my box, forced me to talk to others. I could have these social interactions that are scripted in a safe way. Everybody knew what their role was. I appreciate it made me a more curious, open person. Brought logic to the chaos. I could bring order to other people’s stories even if I couldn’t bring order to my own. It was satisfying and fun and made it easy to completely throw myself into it and dissociate from other things like trauma.
Rumpus: So after years of telling other people’s stories on This American Life and elsewhere, why did you decide to tell your own?

Foo: Every time I was able to showcase somebody’s story, one that represented a larger group of people, there was always a great response from our audience. I found myself as a potential representative of a larger group, which had no representative. There wasn’t a first-person story about Complex Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome, so I thought, “I know how to do this.”

Rumpus: Writing is different from radio, of course, but exactly how different?

Foo: Writing a book is so much more relaxed than making a podcast or a radio show. There’s so much more time to consider the topic, do research, and go over many drafts to shape it into what I think is ultimately my voice rather than chaotically panic and put something out every week.

Rumpus: I read your powerful New York Times Mother’s Day piece. How have you evolved as a writer?

Foo: I think I was always a writer. However, I just didn’t let myself think of myself as one because I hadn’t published much since college. Even though radio producing is just writing—it’s the exact same thing except you read it out loud—I shouldn’t have needed the validation of the book or the New York Times article. It certainly helped, since I don’t have an MFA or anything. I didn’t know if my writing, after so many years of being written for the ear, translated to the page anymore.
When I was writing for radio, especially at This American Life, it wasn’t really my voice. It was my voice through the lens of an entire room of between three and ten people shaping my voice into the ideal of what it could be. But this book was mine, which was both intimidating and fun and freeing.

Rumpus: What kind of book did you set out to write?

Foo: I read a lot of memoirs and science-y books written by clinicians and experts, which I found to be lacking because they didn’t show the healing process. Meanwhile, a lot of trauma memoirs are just descriptions of all the horrible experiences that have happened for like 290 pages, and then in the last thirty, the person gets better. Everything is okay. I thought, “No, I’m sure that journey was a lot more arduous.” I wanted to learn from their journey. It was the same in the clinician books, as well, a long exploration of all the negative effects of C-PTSD on people’s brains and then a very small section in the back about what would actually heal.

My goal was to write a book that would be a resource, to show you’re not alone in what you’re going through, to normalize a lot of the feelings. I provided the basic science and psychology behind complex PTSD, so people can know what they’re up against. I hoped to educate them and provide a lot of the resources I found helpful. I aspired to show it is very much possible to get better. This book would be a roadmap for other people who didn’t know where they might go. I wanted the book to provide hope because I didn’t have it when I was diagnosed. Sometimes trauma memoirs can be so difficult to read, and if there is hope, it’s just a little at the end.

My desire was for the book to come from an optimistic place because having C-PTSD is painful enough. I didn’t want to make the process of reading the book agonizing throughout the whole thing. It was very important to me that only the first fifty pages detailed my abuse.

I wanted it to be the book I wished I’d had when I was first diagnosed, which I feel would have made my healing journey so much shorter.

Rumpus: Why do you think your healing would have been briefer if you had a book like yours when you were diagnosed with C-PTSD?

Foo: I would have felt so much less shame and despair. Mental illness is so pathologized. It’s so isolating. C-PTSD is not in the DSM, and it’s a relatively new diagnosis. I think there is societal prejudice around PTSD. The history of PTSD has been focused on soldiers, men at war. I think there’s a lot of sexism, a sort of racism within. That, and an underappreciation for childhood trauma and its lifelong effects. It’s been normalized. Judith Herman writes a lot about the lasting trauma in people who have experienced sexual assault. This is not to shit on survivors of war, which is very real and terrible, but trauma is much wider. I feel like it’s taken society a long time to catch up to that understanding.

Rumpus: Was it healing to write the book, and was it difficult to write the traumatic scenes?

Foo: Different authors have different processes. For some, writing heals. It was important for me to have the healing come before the writing in order to locate that optimism. There was a lot of casual writing that happened during the healing process, but I didn’t take the organization and the real writing seriously until I felt like I had gone through a year and a half of a very intensive healing journey. And I felt like I was in a really good place, so this made the writing easier. I was able to have a lot of empathy and generosity toward myself at those times instead of feeling the self-loathing I’d felt earlier.

The first fifty pages were the most difficult to write, and I wrote those many, many times. I just had to practice a lot of self-care. Those were tough to relive. I think my dissociation protected me. Dissociation helped me to force out what I could, then go play video games for the rest of the afternoon.

Rumpus: Did your feelings about your parents change over the course of writing the book?

Foo: I don’t know. It hasn’t brought forgiveness, if that’s what you’re wondering. It hasn’t made me less disappointed or angry. I think the healing process, if anything, made me angrier at them because it made me realize what I deserved as a child. Learning to treat myself with kindness has taught me that what I received was criminal and unacceptable. So yeah, I don’t think it’s made me forgive them. I hold them accountable for what they have done.

However, their cultural context was important—they had a lot of their own unresolved and untreated trauma—but instead of making me less angry at them, writing the book made me angrier at some of the societal forces that contributed to my parents’ situation. I’m just sharing and spreading that rage around.

It’s also made me angrier at our health care system in the United States and how it really doesn’t serve. It’s made for white, privileged, educated people. There is just such a distinct lack of culturally responsive care. People like my parents could have gotten the help that they needed if that care was more accessible.

Rumpus: What has been the response from people who have read this book?

Foo: It’s overwhelmingly positive. The book has received over 11,000 five-star Goodreads reviews. I receive a dozen messages a day, for the past year, from people saying, “You’ve changed my life, you saved my life, you’re giving me hope, you make me feel less alone. . . .” It’s exactly what I set out to do with the memoir. The fact that it worked is a great relief and a great honor. I feel very proud, and I hope this opens the door for more narratives like mine. A lot of people have told me my book has inspired them to write. I hope to see those books joining mine out in the world.

Rumpus: How does it feel that therapists and educators have started using your book as a tool?

Foo: It’s so affirming! It’s wonderful to know I’ve had this impact because I have so many complaints against therapists, not therapists in general, but against some of the ways therapists practice and the mental health care system. I just want it to be easier for those who come after me.

Rumpus: Did you feel pressure about representing the Asian American community?

Foo: Yes. I was charting new territory by writing about domestic violence and child abuse in the Asian American community. It’s sort of hinted at but excused in The Joy Luck Club, but the story is always Asian American parents can be difficult, but you must be grateful to them because they have provided so much. I was writing something edgy and dangerous, saying, “Actually, I’m not grateful. This wasn’t unacceptable. This was abuse.” We need to talk about abuse.

Rumpus: Is it strange that trauma has also driven you to become the writer you are?

Foo: Sometimes I feel I have this success because of my PTSD. It informed my drive. Literally, I wouldn’t have written this book if I didn’t have PTSD. I would trade not having so much success for being happier. I would rather have been loved than not have had to write this book.

Rumpus: About healing, how would you describe your current state?

Foo: I am healing. I have done a lot of healing. I wouldn’t say I’m done, but it’s much better than it was before.

Rumpus: What would you recommend to someone who is in a survival mode or being abused?

Foo: I think what I would tell my younger self is this: “You need to know you deserve love. You deserve better. And go chase that love. Run as fast as you can away from those who aren’t going to give it to you. Run as fast as you can toward anyone who knows you deserve love, even though it’s scary and you’re going to be skeptical of them. Run toward the love.”

 

***

Author photo by Bryan Derballa

Robert Mason on Leon Fink’s *Undoing the Liberal World Order: Progressive Ideals and Political Realities Since World War II*

In the historiography of the United States, studies of the relationship between liberalism and the political arena usually focus on the domestic—on movements and parties, on public policy and electoral Read more

The post Robert Mason on Leon Fink’s *Undoing the Liberal World Order: Progressive Ideals and Political Realities Since World War II* first appeared on Society for US Intellectual History.

Book Review: OK by Michelle McSweeney

In OK, Michelle McSweeney charts the history of the word ‘OK,’ from its origins in the steam-powered printing press through inventions like the telegraph and telephone and into the digital age. McSweeney illustrates how the linguistic creativity accompanying technological change enabled this versatile word to transition through new modes of communication, writes Chris Featherman. This blogpost originally appeared on LSE Review of Books. If … Continued

Proprietary Ink Cartridges: Endearing or Annoying?

It doesn't take long for new fountain pen users to recognize that all fountain pen ink cartridges aren't created equal. While there is such a thing as a "standard international" ink cartridge and converter, it’s neither “standard” nor particularly “international”, as that term has essentially come to mean that the standard version "fits pens with JoWo, Bock, or Schmidt nib/feed assemblies." Nearly all of the Japanese brands, as well as some European brands like Lamy, use their own proprietary cartridge/converter format. Today I'll talk a bit about why I tend to prefer the Japanese-style cartridges to the standard international format.

Note: Whenever you buy a new pen from a brand you haven't previously used, ALWAYS check whether you also need a specific converter and/or cartridge to go with that brand.

Pilot Makes My Favorite Ink Cartridge, Followed By Platinum

Why these two, you might ask? Capacity. While each format is unique to each brand, these cartridges hold a LOT of ink. Moreover, the "wide mouth" format of the cartridge both ensures better ink flow than the typical international cartridge (which has a narrower opening) and makes the cartridge easier to refill with ink of your choice using a pipette or small eyedropper rather than a syringe. Of course, part of the reason why these cartridges tend to work so well may be due to the proprietary nature itself, with the cartridge engineered to fit the brand's specific nib and feed.

As an aside, there has been a lot of speculation as to why Pilot recently released the Iroshizuku Inks in cartridge form, and why they believe they can price these cartridges at the relatively high price point of $14 for six. Personally, I think it's because a large portion of users write with fine or extra-fine nibs (if not finer). Given that Pilot cartridges hold a decent volume of ink, six of these cartridges could last someone up to a year, especially if they don't write extensively by hand and, for example, use their pen to make occasional notes in a planner. (Standard Pilot cartridges are much less expensive, as are Platinum cartridges, and are sold in boxes of one dozen.)

While Sailor cartridges also feature a proprietary format with a wider opening similar to Pilot and Platinum, and work just fine, they don't hold as much ink. On the other hand, I find that Lamy cartridges have narrower openings similar to the Western-style Standard International cartridge. As a result, the ink doesn't flow quite as well, and Lamy cartridges can be difficult to puncture to the point where I sometimes worry I'm about to break the pen.

Takeaways and Lessons Learned Over the Years

At the end of the day, the proprietary systems of cartridges and ink converters can be both a pain to navigate and part of the charm of using fountain pens. Sure, it would be much more convenient to have a single universal format for all brands, and to not have to worry about stocking refills from multiple brands, but over time I've just come to accept that "the cartridge singularity" is not going to happen and learned to love the different shapes and peculiarities of each cartridge. My own opinion is that the Japanese pen companies make better cartridges than Western manufacturers. Not only do I get better performance - mainly ink flow - when I use these cartridges, but the cartridges seem to last longer on the shelf. My insanely busy week/weekend of work saw me cycling through several cartridges on the fly, and the number of half-evaporated cartridges I discovered in my office desk drawer stash (mostly standard short international) reminded me that these things don't last forever. Use 'em if you got em'!

The Gentleman Stationer is supported by purchases from the T.G.S. Curated Shop and pledges via the T.G.S. Patreon Program.

A Step Forward in the Debate about Masculinity

Early in 2019, the men’s razor company Gillette raised eyebrows with a new commercial. The ad depicted stereotypically disordered male behavior—aggression, catcalling, and a “boys will be boys” indifference to both—and contrasted it with a new generation of men taking a stand against that patriarchal past: a father breaks up a fight between two boys, a young man cuts off another’s unwanted advances toward a female stranger.

Many on the right complained that Gillette drew a glib equivalence between masculinity and toxicity, and the commercial was admittedly both myopic and preachy. But the conservative dismissiveness of the ad largely settled into a defensive, abrasive machismo. The ad was simplistic, but its critics missed an opportunity to think through the meaning of masculinity, and about the importance of male—and especially paternal—role models.

Conversations about sex and gender are surely just as difficult now as in 2019. Any talk about masculinity can easily veer into the same sclerotic patterns of the Gillette hubbub: a left that paints with uncritically broad brushes, and a right that gets defensive and dumbs down its beliefs. Richard Reeves’s latest book, Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It, manages to avoid predictability, blending statistical insight and easygoing wit to craft a fruitful exploration of the male malaise.

Reeves, a liberal economist at the Brookings Institution, bookends Of Boys and Men by presenting the educational, economic, and cultural challenges men face, and he proposes policy and social solutions for each. They’re all insightful and (unsurprisingly) subject to debate, especially, in my view, his discussion of fatherhood and marriage. But one of the most important lessons of the book—which Reeves introduces to reassure readers that they can care about both women’s equality and men’s struggles—is that “we can hold two thoughts in our head at once.” In that vein, we can disagree, even deeply, about some of Reeves’s premises or proposals, while also recognizing that Of Boys and Men models the sort of intellectual dexterity needed to tackle complicated matters in our polarized times.

 

Men Falling Behind

Reeves begins his book by pointing out how boys are falling behind in the classroom. He surveys data showing they are 14 percentage points less likely than girls to be ready to start school at age 5, as well as 6 percentage points less likely to graduate high school on time. Look ahead at college, and young men are 15 percentage points less likely to graduate with a bachelor’s. Women are narrowing gaps between themselves and their male classmates in typically male-dominant subjects (such as STEM), while stereotypically female subjects like nursing and teaching remain so.

Men are also being outdone in the job market. Worries about the wage gap—which Reeves handles with careful nuance—or about a C-suite glass ceiling have some legitimacy, but overemphasizing them paints an incomplete picture. The lack of female representation among Fortune 500 CEOs tells us that a small—albeit influential—proportion of men are doing very well. But by the same token, the people struggling the most economically are more likely to be men. An astounding one-third of men with only a high school diploma (approximately 5 million men) are out of the labor force.

To address these labor market problems, Reeves draws from the women-in-STEM push and calls for similar efforts for men in health care, education, administration, and literacy—or as he calls it, HEAL. In the same way that Melinda Gates pledged $1 billion to promote women in STEM, Reeves proposes an equal “men can HEAL” push. He envisions a combination of government and philanthropic funds for training and scholarships, and for marketing these often well-paying careers. Child care administrators and occupational therapists, two examples Reeves cites, respectively earned on average $70,000 and $72,000 in 2019.

 

One of the most discussed policy proposals in the book deals with educational gaps, which Reeves wants to address largely by “redshirting boys,” or delaying their start in kindergarten by a year. It’s not that young boys are less able than their female counterparts, but rather that they cognitively develop at a different pace, about two years slower than girls. For Reeves, giving boys the “gift” of an extra year before starting school “recognizes natural sex differences, especially the fact that boys are at a developmental disadvantage to girls at critical points in their schooling.”

Reeves’s reasoning reflects an important aspect of his approach: he acknowledges the importance of biology, and thinks that understanding biological factors should moderate a tendency, frequently seen on today’s left, to confuse equality with sameness. After examining data on men’s and women’s different career interests and outcomes, for example, Reeves concludes that we should at the very least consider that biology and “informed personal agency” play some role in occupational choices. He rejects attributing all gender gaps to sexism, or expecting perfect 50–50 representation in all fields.

People of different political stripes can debate the scope and specifics of both the HEAL movement and redshirting boys, among other proposals in Of Boys and Men, but Reeves leaves the possibility of fruitful deliberation very much open. He helpfully frames his discussion of education and jobs so that potential disagreements will be about means, rather than  fundamental ends.

But the same can’t be said about the third aspect of the male malaise Reeves identifies: the cultural status of fatherhood.

Fatherhood without Marriage?

Reeves recognizes a sense of aimlessness has taken hold of many men’s most personal relationships: between men and women, and between fathers and children. But he primarily wants to address the latter problem, and to do so by envisioning fatherhood as an independent institution, considered separately from marriage. We should address and improve relationships between fathers and children first, irrespective of whether fathers are married to their kids’ mothers. Our safety net should expect more than mere economic support from fathers—particularly among noncustodial parents—and reward them for involvement in their kids’ lives. In a nutshell, our culture and policy should reconcile themselves with the reality that we live in “a world where mothers don’t need men, but children still need their dads.”

Why doesn’t Reeves concurrently advance a marital renewal? For one thing, he regards the traditional model of marriage as too rigidly predicated on the expectation of a male breadwinner, and by extension on the economic dependence of women. From it flows a notion of fatherhood that may have encouraged family formation in the past, but that is now “unfit for a world of gender equality.” The decline of marriage poses problems, but it’s largely indicative of positive gains in autonomy for women, in his view.

Reeves emphasizes that many unmarried, nonresidential fathers are very involved in their kids’ lives. Black fathers, for example—44 percent of whom are nonresidential—are more likely than white nonresidential fathers to help around the house, take kids to activities, and be generally present, according to one study he cites. Reeves argues that our cultural expectations of fatherhood “urgently need an update, to become more focused on direct relationships with children” (emphasis added). Since about 40 percent of births in the United States take place outside of marriage, he concludes that insisting on a model that assumes an indissoluble link between fatherhood and marriage is just anachronistic.

But Reeves doesn’t fully reckon with the gravity of divorcing fatherhood from marriage. Chapter 12 of Of Boys and Men, which Reeves dedicates to his independent fatherhood proposal, advances particular policies to support “direct” fatherhood unmediated by marriage, from paid parental leave to child support reforms, to encouraging father-friendly jobs. But he spends surprisingly little time directly arguing against the empirical and philosophical case for fatherhood within marriage as distinctly positive.

For example, Reeves writes that “there is no residency requirement for good fatherhood. The relationship is what matters.” Fair enough. But which model—fatherhood within marriage or nonresidential fatherhood—tends to facilitate more of the positive interactions needed to build healthy relationships between fathers and children? In general, the one where more of those interactions can potentially take place. A study by Penn State sociologist Paul Amato suggested this, reporting that from 1976 to 2002, 29 percent of nonresident fathers had no contact with their kids in the previous year, while only 31 percent had weekly contact.

 

In fact, contact with their biological father plays a positive role in advancing the two other major concerns Reeves has for boys: work and education. A 2022 report from the Institute for Family Studies found that “[y]oung men who grew up with their biological father are more than twice as likely to graduate college by their late 20s, compared to those raised in families without their biological father (35% vs. 14%).” According to the Census Bureau, approximately 62 percent of children lived with their biological parents in 2019, and 59 percent lived with married biological parents. In other words, growing up with a biological father is deeply intertwined with growing up with a married father—there are very few cohabitating biological or single biological fathers.

Beyond social science, there’s also a conceptual issue at the heart of Reeves’s proposal. It’s undeniable that many working mothers don’t need men in the same way past generations did—if what we mean by “need” is economic support. But it’s also very clear that mothers do need men. Without men, well, they wouldn’t be mothers (and vice versa) for the very simple yet profound fact that the sexes need each other in order to fulfill their biological end. This is more than a semantic trick—it’s a recognition that mutual dependence is at the heart of our biology. At the risk of putting too fine a point on it, men and women could not exist without each other—and that realization should caution us against overemphasizing independence.

Moreover, shouldn’t fatherhood also entail modeling what lasting commitment to a spouse looks like? Reeves is right to stress that fatherhood should mean more than just economic support, but he misses the fact that prospects for decoupling marriage from fatherhood are similarly discouraging in this regard. In a study by the late Princeton sociologist Sara McLanahan, 80 percent of unmarried parents were in a romantic relationship (with each other) at time of the birth of their child. But here’s how McLanahan summarized her five-year follow-up with them:

Despite their “high hopes,” most unmarried parents were unable to maintain stable unions. Only 15 percent of all our unmarried couples were married at the time of the five-year interview, and only a third were still romantically involved (Recall that over 80 percent of parents were romantically involved at birth.) Among couples who were cohabitating at birth, the picture was somewhat better: after five years, 26 percent were married to each other and another 26 percent were living together.

In divorcing fatherhood from marriage so hastily, Reeves misses an opportunity to consider why reimagining marriage is a key aspect of reinvigorating fatherhood as well. It’s the biggest drawback of Of Boys and Men.

Nevertheless, Reeves’s proposal has clearly opened a door to fruitful further debate. His case for direct fatherhood should temper a traditionalist reflex to assume that nonresidence is equivalent to abandonment—there are clearly many nontraditional, not-married, or separated fathers who embody dedication to their children. But if engaged fatherhood is so empirically and conceptually intertwined with marriage, then we would lose key aspects of both by separating them. We shouldn’t idealize marriage or how it affects fatherhood, but we shouldn’t hastily decouple marriage and fatherhood either.

Successfully reimagining marriage and fatherhood will probably even entail letting go of some of the overly rigid gender roles that Reeves criticizes in Of Boys and Men: more female breadwinners and paternal homemakers, as well as various policies and workplace arrangements to support the parent–child bond are all likely to be a part of the future of the family. But so should giving boys and men not just the tools to excel at school and work, but the habits and vocabulary to strive toward commitment, dedication, and love in the most personal dimensions of their lives.

 

Improving the Debate

Of Boys and Men is a book about men, written by a man, claiming that our culture doesn’t take men’s problems seriously. In the wrong hands, it would have been the latest entry in a seemingly incessant culture war, a callback to the silliness of the Gillette controversy. Yet it has been a resounding mainstream success. In matters of gender and sex, some might believe it’s impossible for there to be any interest in men’s issues across the ideological spectrum. The success of Of Boys and Men suggests that’s not the case.

Of Boys and Men has a point of view, but Reeves doesn’t close off the possibility of exchange or criticism by making a caricature of his opponents. This is the sort of book that not only exposes an often ignored issue, but elevates the quality of our conversations about it, even amid disagreement. That is perhaps its most impressive feat.

Lamy Balloon Rollerball Review

The proof of concept period is complete, which means it is time for Lamy to finish the transformation of the Balloon Rollerball into the Vista Fountain Pen.

I first reviewed the Balloon over a decade ago, and the tale of two pens that was present in that design - great barrel, poor refill - unfortunately continues on in their latest version of this colorful pen. That’s what gets me the most about the Balloon: it’s a stunner! At least to look at. Writing? Not so much.

The Lamy T11 rollerball refill is the single worst proprietary refill they make, in a sea of other good to great proprietary refills. That was my primary complaint with the previous model. Given the usage of the same refill, I had hoped to see some performance improvements over the years, but my hope was misplaced.

The medium blue refill is inconsistent. That’s the long and short of it. A good rollerball line should be consistent and smooth, laying down a saturated ink color. The line from the Lamy T11 is so inconsistent, repeatedly going from thin line to thick, that I would almost say it is skipping. That’s a word I’ve never used in relation to a rollerball refill. It’s a bad writing experience, to be kind.

Odds were that this would be the expected result of the writing experience, but that’s not why I bought this pen to review. I bought it for the barrel.

Even though the Balloon uses the same terrible refill it always has, Lamy made some changes to the barrel design. Primarily focusing on the cap, they changed the clip to the famed Lamy wire clip, including the addition of a separate finial cap to slot the clip into.

Kind of looks like a Lamy Vista, doesn’t it?

My dream for Lamy has long been to upgrade the Vista fountain pen lineup to include transparent color barrels. Fun colors, as seen in the Balloon for years. Currently, Blue, Lime, and Pink are part of the rotation. Imagine Purple, or Orange? The technology to manufacture this type of barrel is obviously available, and now parts to match have been added to the lineup. So I have to ask: when, Lamy?

Soon, I hope.

Until then, I would avoid the Lamy Balloon, despite the cool looks, and the reasonable $18 price tag. The writing experience isn’t worth it.

(Pen Chalet provided this product at a discount to The Pen Addict for review purposes.)

---

Enjoy reading The Pen Addict? Then consider becoming a member to receive additional weekly content, giveaways, and discounts in The Pen Addict shop. Plus, you support me and the site directly, for which I am very grateful.

Membership starts at just $5/month, with a discounted annual option available. To find out more about membership click here and join us!