conservatism

Review- Heinlein, “Starship Troopers”

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starship-troopers

Robert Heinlein, “Starship Troopers” (1959) – At bottom, science fiction is about exploring possibilities. The corpus of scifi has explored an exhaustive range of facets of existence, playing with everything from consumer technology to the structures of race and gender to the nature of time and space, in the full range of emotional registers. And it’s a project shared across the spectrum of writers, from exalted masters ala Le Guin, Delaney, and Dick to the lowliest fanfic scribbler. It’s genuinely one of the nice things about the twentieth century, warts and all, and one of the few we actually got to keep, in a real, vital way, in to the twenty-first.

So what possibilities does acclaimed science fiction icon Robert Heinlein imagine for us in “Starship Troopers,” then? Where does he go from that established jumping-off point for limitless possibility, humanity’s exploration of the stars? Well, mostly, he imagines boot camp. Endless endless boot camp, described by Heinlein’s impersonation of a happy-go-lucky grunt (Heinlein was an Annapolis grad and a navy officer who never saw combat), an update of Rudyard Kipling’s cockney Tommy ventriloquism. There’s a huge war in space going on — multiple wars, it seems — but none of that matters except as a rationale for boot camp and for a society seemingly organized around boot camp. There’s maybe fifteen pages of battle in the whole book, including maybe ten pages in the beginning. The rest is boot camp, and a lot of that is actually lectures about life and society. This is closer to a pedagogical novel than a war story.

The content of these lectures Heinlein puts in the voice of older authority figures bestowing wisdom unto the perspective-dullard — the primacy of force and the existential validity of its wielders — is less off-putting than the tone and context in which it’s delivered. Heinlein may have seen himself as critiquing late-1950s consumer society but his philosophers of the spartan life speak like they came off the tv of his period; bluff, bouncy schmaltz, scout-master-meets-snake-oil salesman. The society in which Heinlein’s rules have been applied — only veterans can vote, corporal punishment is liberally applied, and most of all, old fucks who think like him are paid and encouraged to babble at length and totally own anyone who challenges them — isn’t really all that different from the society in which Heinlein lived, except people are as a whole happier. Sometimes evil aliens will paste a city but we all know the powersuit boys will paste them right back (not that Heinlein is going to let us enjoy much of it).

What that contrast tells me is that Heinlein means it. He’s not doing a thought experiment, he’s not doing satire, we don’t need to apply “Niven’s Rule” (Niven was another middlebrow fascist slug, anyway) of separating the views of the author from the views of the narrator. If this shit was imaginary for him, he’d try extending his imagination. If anything, the idea of “service-guarantees-citizenship” is much less grotesque than the combination of unimaginativeness, dullness (seriously- just give us some fucking space battles, dude), and chipper banality with which his ideas are expressed.

The militarism is just a vehicle for what Heinlein really cares about in this book- the defense and extension of a world that suits him (1950s America but a little hornier and in space), and the humiliation and extinction of people with ideas that make him uncomfortable. To be honest, I think the dynamic we see here — people smart enough to think about the world around them but deeply scared of the implications of what they think seeking intellectualized schmaltz to form a security blanket — drives an increasing amount of right-wing thought today. It’s a sad irony a lot of those people invest in science fiction, which is supposed to be about impetuous imagination.

I wanted to like this book, or at least like it a little more than I did. I like a lot of work I disagree with much more than the actual content of this book (the boy scout tone really is skin-crawlingly off for me, I’ll admit). Heinlein also helped keep Philip K. Dick solvent, even after PKD made fun of him all the time, so I want to like the guy. He seems like a good sport. And there are a lot of great right-leaning speculative fiction writers: Lovecraft, Tolkien, Herbert, Vance, Wolfe, Simmons, Stephenson. They create imaginative worlds, mount incisive criticisms, weave intricate plots, are compelling writers. None of this applies to “Starship Troopers” (and only applied a little bit more to “Stranger In A Strange Land,” the only other Heinlein I’ve read, which is best described as “‘Starship Troopers’ for horniness instead of the military”).

Paul Verhoeven showed a much greater degree of fealty to what science fiction is supposed to be about when he took this dull book for raw material for an actually great scifi movie, which is a brilliant satire of the fascist undercurrents both in the book (and scifi in general) and in our society. The movie has humor, it has the courage and brio of Verhoeven’s insane choice to make a movie undermining it’s own source material in what’s supposed to be a dumb action movie, and it has actual… space… battles which, I’d like to stress, the novel basically lacked. Having read the source material, I can now definitively say “Starship Troopers” beats out “The Godfather” or “Children of Men” for the ultimate case of a movie being better than the book.

Gotta say… nothing disappoints more than getting boring fascism when you expect the more interesting literary kind. *’

Review- Heinlein, “Starship Troopers”

Review- Amis, “Lucky Jim”

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Amis_Lucky_Jim

Kingsley Amis, “Lucky Jim” (1954) – It’s probably for the best I read the great comic novel of academic fecklessness at the end of my grad student career (and, odds are, my academic career more generally) rather than at the beginning. I’ve spoken with people who say “Lucky Jim” speaks to their contemporary academic experience, and more-or-less believe them. But truth be told, the actual action in the novel is pretty far from my experience. Not that much happens, I find, and I’ve probably been lucky but the faculty I’ve worked with have all been very encouraging of me (probably a little more than makes sense given the market, but hey- I still appreciate it) and I don’t hate any of them.

But the overarching themes ring pretty true. Above all, there’s contrast between the high-minded idealistic palaver of what the university is all about, and the grubby reality based in very material things- money, sex, status, power in the most basic sense of being able to impose one’s will on others. I’m not sure that the actual grubbiness is any more grubby than any other field. But the contrast is as strong as any… though I get the idea that tech might give it a run for its money these days.

Maybe some of the difference is context. I have to admit, I find it a little hard to feel bad for our hero Jim, even beyond his own flaws, because the profession as it was ascending in the early 1950s can’t possibly be as grim as the 2010s, as humanities academia is slowly dying out. But Amis sells it pretty well. I get the impression he fell off after his first novel, but he has a sharp caricaturist’s eye. He also has the amoral sensibility with the tiny seed (or maybe infection) of moral outrage that makes classical satire work from Juvenal’s day onward. This results in a near-equal number of people who deserve it and those who don’t getting cuttingly caricatured. Amis operates in a target-rich environment of the first category — pompous academics, careerist snitches, pretensious artists — and he doesn’t spare the second category, either, mainly consisting of women just in general. Amis is a misanthrope, but the thing with misanthropy (in men anyway) is that it usually turns out to be misogyny with extra steps.

“Lucky Jim” was written while Amis was still at least drifting along with the far-left politics fashionable in British cultural circles at the time, though he quickly turned rightward, hard. There’s a vulgar class politics at work in the novel. Jim and the few people he likes are by-and-large working class people attempting to climb one or another pole greased not just by class hierarchy but by the very pretenses of progressiveness the notionally-more-cultured ends of that hierarchy like to display. Though it’s hard to say why Jim was in academia in the first place- he clearly hates history (though Amis gets across the fact, as true today as it was then, that actually giving a shit about your topic is by no means necessary for academic success). Why is he bothering?

Short answer- he doesn’t, for long. In the end, Jim is basically saved from the consequences of his own fuck-ups via the deus-ex-machina of an independently wealthy guy who finds him funny. This gets to an important pattern. The problem isn’t really with the social order- it’s with the wrong people (signified by wrong taste, which usually follows a wrong soul) being empowered by it. This is the message of most right-leaning satire, from South Park to Amis and, not that right-left distinctions mean much in such a distant past, but it was basically Juvenal’s point too. Maybe this is more a reflection of my own (historical) experience than anything else, but I think that’s a powerful rhetorical mode we can’t just wish away in the hopes something fairer and more structurally-woke will take its place. I’m not so sure we should, either. ****

Review- Amis, “Lucky Jim”

Review- Adams, “The Emancipation of Massachusetts”

Peter BerardLeave a comment

brooksadams

Brooks Adams, “The Emancipation of Massachusetts” (1886) – Another read courtesy of Project Gutenberg while temping, and another from the fourth generation of prominent Adamses. Brooks was the younger brother of Henry Adams (whose “Education” I reread a little bit ago in similar circumstances), grandson of John Quincy Adams, etc. Brooks was a historian and a social theorist, and is probably best known as a foreign policy advisor to Theodore Roosevelt. TR admired him but saw him as eccentric- he seems to have played a vaguely Gorka-like role, more of a big picture/theoretical guy than anything else. Among other things, by that time Brooks was a theorist of mass race/geopolitical war, using concepts somewhat similar to those Henry applied in the cultural realm — often misappropriations of then-newish physics concepts about energy and entropy — to argue that the US was doomed to destruction it couldn’t build an empire that could prevent its degeneracy (and probably doomed anyway), etc.

But in 1886, Brooks Adams was much more optimistic, but still combative. He took aim at the filiopietistic New England historians that had, for some time, been singing hymns to their Puritan forefathers as the originators of freedom in the land. He has a grand old time pillorying Cotton Mather and the various other pious bigots who ran things in the Puritan theocracy (who could hardly complain, being great fans of the pillory themselves). Adams also did a lot of that trick beloved in the early days of the historical profession and drowning the reader in pages and pages of direct quotes from his sources (in their barely-legible period English). Like his brother Henry, Brooks had imbibed deeply of the much more critical German tradition of historiography. The seed of “free institutions” (free for who, of course he doesn’t ask) might have laid dormant in the good Puritan stock, Adams argues, but it was foiled for decades by the theocracy. The titular emancipation was the loosing of the theocracy, the true fulfillment of the Reformation as allowing every man freedom of conscience, etc.

Nobody really does history like this anymore, and for a lot of good reasons. It interests me, though, what people got out of it and how they made use of it to construct their worlds. The Adamses were not above a certain ancestor-worship themselves, but always insisted on associating their line with national American institutions, not Massachusetts or New England ones (Henry Adams had a LOT to say about the treachery of the New England elites during the war of 1812, etc). Along with flexing his historiographical muscles, I think Adams was making a claim for a certain sort of political actor — men of the world, shrewd, pragmatic but principled (the profile the Adamses, at least before Brooks’s generation fell into neurosis and political irrelevance, like to cut) — as the central actors in the drama of progress.

All of which is undercut before it even begins, at least when I read it! There’s actually a pretty batty preface in the online edition I found, written over thirty years later in 1919, after Adams had gone full cultural pessimist, saying he was basically wrong about progress and that massive conflict between races and nations was inevitable, using a protracted exegesis on the Book of Exodus to prove it. So… elite social thought was always a weird critter, and from Brooks Adams’s day to Gorka’s (and let’s not forget that weirdo Cass Sunstein, lest anyone think I’m picking on republicans), intellectuals who get access to leaders typically do so more for extraneous factors than for the profundity of their insights. **

Review- Adams, “The Emancipation of Massachusetts”

Review- Hawley, “Making Sense of the Alt-Right”

Peter Berard1 Comment

hawley

George Hawley, “Making Sense of the Alt-Right” (2017) – This volume marks the beginnings of the efforts of political science to understand the altright, at least as far as work aimed towards a public goes. Like Dave Neiwert, Hawley is pitching the work towards an audience baffled (and presumably disgusted) by this new thing, so you get a lot of the same explanatory stuff, though from a markedly different angle. Neiwert emphasized continuity between the earlier far right, as well as mainstream conservatism, with the altright. Hawley insists that the altright is a complete negation of mainstream conservatism, with the usual references to William Buckley casting the Birchers out of the temple, etc etc. Nobody seems to ask why it has to be either/or- why can’t there be a certain degree of ideological continuity (white identity politics, which mainstream conservatives absolutely practice just at a softer pitch; worship of authority, hatred of liberalism, etc) as well as institutional bad blood? That seems to be how every other ideology, socialism included, works…

Hawley has what I think of as a polisci habit of shortchanging historical context. Sometimes this takes the form of asking tantalizing contextual questions – “why does mainstream conservatism not integrate the sort of people, like right-leaning college kids, that it used to?” – and then basically just punting to something like “conservative weakness” or “the internet.” True factors, both of them, but he doesn’t get into why these things have taken shape the way they did and what that might mean for his question.

He appears to have taken this subject on because he was the guy in polisci writing about right-wing critics of American conservatism (work I’d like to look at, despite not thinking much of this book). Focus on the way the altright hates mainstream conservatives (and they do, or anyway they hate the leaders and hope to convert the followers- and have a better chance of the latter than any of us would like, even if it’s still unlikely by the Vegas odds) occludes much of the rest of what makes the altright a thing. There’s a real lack of attention paid to gender politics, which just seems baffling to me given how poignantly obvious male insecurity is with these people. And there’s the usual judicious weighing of the altright vs the altlite, as though it makes a difference if you get jumped by an open white nationalist vs by someone too insecure to admit they are basically a white nationalist. There’s some good attributes of this book — it’s a relief to see a professionally-produced, well-written volume on this stuff, given the thrown-together quality of Nagle and Neiwert’s respective works — but viable critical perspective on this question continues to elude the print longform format. **’

Review- Hawley, “Making Sense of the Alt-Right”

Review- Neiwert, “Alt-America”

Peter BerardLeave a comment

altamerica

David Neiwert, “Alt-America: The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump” (2017) – I thought it would be interesting to try to keep up with the literature on the altright as it comes out, which is made a little easier given that few printed books have been written on it yet (and that it’s impossible to do more than try to keep up with the more relevant online pieces on the same subject). One downside of this is all of them, so far, appear to be rather hastily-assembled and not as well thought-out as one would like.

Dave Neiwert is a long-time watcher of the far-right for left-liberal circles, whose earlier work I haven’t gotten around to reading. I know he’s written about militias and about talk radio before, and both take up much of “Alt-America,” which places the altright squarely in a right-populist tradition that goes back… and here, things get vague. Neiwert does a good job going through the actual narrative of the 21st century far right in America, but he is very light on historical or political analysis of why these things happened the way they did. He does little to place the far right and the “Alt-America,” a whole different worldview/culture he posits but does not really flesh out, in any kind of context. Where the other most prominent book on the alt-right, Angela Nagle’s “Kill All Normies,” is thesis-heavy (it’s all vague-left culture warriors fault) and narrative-light, Neiwert’s work is the reverse. Arguably it’s somewhat more useful- it’s nice to have all those dates and events in one book. But it should be possible to have both.

A lot of the analysis he does provide is basically psychological- authoritarian types and social dominaters, etc. I don’t dismiss this as much as I used to but there needs to be something more- if nothing else to explain why these psychological types are so prominent now. And this weakness of analysis extends to what’s always the worst part of any of these types of books (not just ones about the right, either), the “what do now” section. If you’re referencing Harry Potter as a role model for how to deal with pretty much any political issue, and worse yet citing Rowling’s works as great literary examples of empathy, you’re kind of on the wrong track.

I get the feeling that this is where we’re gonna be at for books on the new far right for a while. They’ll suffer from the inevitable weaknesses of books about fast-moving contemporary movements (books about the altright’s more ambitious reactionary cousins in ISIS had the same issues a few years ago) and more from the way that these altright people make any decent type anxious and angry in a way that always comes out in the writing. And so we’ll wind up with very basic narrative explainers (Neiwert) or with inter-left ax-grinding using the altright as a prop (Nagle) or alarmism and often enough simple gawking at the weirdos over on the far right (most internet pieces). It’s a shame, because I think there’s some interesting historical dynamics that this whole thing illuminates, but that can be a hard sell for publishers, I suppose. ***

Review- Neiwert, “Alt-America”

Review- Wolfe, “Operation Ares”

Peter BerardLeave a comment

ares

Gene Wolfe, “Operation Ares” (1970) – I mainly associate Gene Wolfe with the Book of the New Sun, a staggering, profoundly immersive work and some of the best books I’ve read in the last few years. So it’s a little weird to read him doing straightforward pulp scifi, like “Operation Ares,” his first novel. In the early 21st century, welfare bureaucrats have suspended constitutional governance and run America into the ground. Wolfe’s depiction of callous, patronizing social service bureaucracy actually does seem pretty sharply drawn, though some of the other choices he makes for the world — namely, the welfare state consciously turning its back on technology, allowing the Soviets (now allies with the US) to pull way ahead — are real headscratchers even from the perspective of a paranoid mid-century American right-winger. The hero is a standard-issue scifi ubermensch, universally competent and cool-headed, who chafes under this reign of mediocrity and conspires with Martian colonists — who the liberals in the US abandoned and blame for their troubles — and, weirdly enough, the Maoist Chinese to rebel against the government and bring back the constitution.

Even leaving aside the politics, it’s a bit of a bummer to read Wolfe do such generic plots (and often hare-brained, ill-explained schemes- he would come to master the use of limiting information to the reader, but hadn’t at this time) and stock characters. But he brings some glimmers to it that more pedestrian writers wouldn’t. To his credit, the charges of the welfare bureaucrats are depicted as realistic humans (and, seemingly, aren’t racialized), and develop some interesting ideas of their own, including a sort of urban-primitivist hunter cult that’s pretty well-drawn. He gets some good mileage out of the strains in the alliance between the cerebral, technocratic Mars colonists, the Maoists, and the ragtag American constitutionalists, and isn’t naive about how much damage internecine war will do. But how much can you say about a scifi novel that ends with the hero lecturing King Bureaucrat about personal responsibility and the need for a Universal Basic Income to replace welfare entitlements? ***

Review- Wolfe, “Operation Ares”

REVIEW: SHEPPARD, “LEO STRAUSS AND THE POLITICS OF EXILE”

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strauss exile

Eugene Sheppard, “Leo Strauss and the Politics of Exile: the Making of a Political Philosopher” (2006) – Having come to political maturity in the Bush years, Strauss is indelibly associated with the neocons and the Iraq War in my mind. Sheppard acknowledges that link but tries to draw focus away from late-stage neocon-cult-leader Chicago Strauss and towards the young exile Strauss, and does a reasonable job of presenting why an intellectual historian might be interested. The picture that emerges of pre-Chicago Leo Strauss is of someone whose many overlapping identities and concerns — Jew, German, philosopher, conservative, exile — fostered a subtle and complex approach to problems of political philosophy, one that later ossified into the various strains of cultish Straussianism of his Chicago disciples. In particular, the idea that the philosopher walks an individual, never-completed path towards the good life (and that communities do the same towards the right regime) was conditioned by Strauss’s experience in exile- an experience of terror and unfreedom but also one conducive to deep thought on the meaning of politics, something he read back into political philosophers of yore. This vision didn’t loan itself to the sort of easy answers ideologues — including his eventual followers — look for. Sheppard illuminates a number of angles on this early Strauss, including his complicated relationships with Gershom Scholem and Carl Schmitt. I’m far from a Straussian — his esotericism strikes me as tendentious and I’m of the opinion everyone can and should learn to rule the state and their own lives — but his interpretative method is an interesting game, at least. ****’

REVIEW: SHEPPARD, “LEO STRAUSS AND THE POLITICS OF EXILE”

Review: Ellroy, “Brown’s Requiem”

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browns requiem

James Ellroy, “Brown’s Requiem” (1981) –

I’ve already written pretty extensively on James Ellroy (https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/06/a-red-with-an-fbi-badge). I think I was fair in my assessment of his major work — Underworld USA, the LA Quartet, and his autobiographical writings — but if I included his minor works the picture would probably be less flattering- he’s written a lot of confusing messes where his trollish qualities overwhelm his better aspects. Ellroy’s first novel, Brown’s Requiem, is pretty minor but you can see why people would’ve seen potential in him. He tries to do 80s Chandler and fails — he can’t do that kind of ironic distance — but you can see him exercising the instinctive knack for depicting power that would help make his major works so vivid. He grasps, better than any writer of this time that I’ve read, the relationship between small-scale personal domination — and he is, to put it politely, uninhibited in his depictions of such dynamics — and the social structures in which the characters are embedded. His plots aren’t generally tight (who remembers crime fiction plots after they finish, anyway?) and his characterization runs hot and cold, but his worlds rival the best scifi masters for granular reality (generally the granular reality of terror). There’s glimmers of it in Brown’s Requiem but it isn’t there yet. He was presumably trying to find his voice as a writer- among other things, his protagonist is clearly one of his wish-fulfillment characters: strong, strapping, self-contained, cultured. Whereas his villain is closer to the person he actually was: creepy, obsessive, hateful, weird-looking… and, amusingly, a golf caddy, as Ellroy was before his writing career took off. ***

Review: Ellroy, “Brown’s Requiem”

2016 Birthday Lecture: Merit and Lethality

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There exist any number of outlets of varying formats, qualities, and positions for those who want contemporary writing or film on the War on Terror, from blogs to TV shows. But much of the most popular and definitive retelling of the War on Terror falls into a category that itself can only be described as being something between an artistic sensibility and an organized body of work. I’m talking about the cultural phenomenon of special forces memoirs, at least a dozen of which have become bestsellers in the years since 9/11 and which have made at least a few noncommissioned officers household names in this country. These include Marcus Luttrell’s Lone Survivor, Mark Owens’ No Easy Day, Jack Coughlin’s Shooter, the most successful of them all Chris Kyle’s American Sniper, dozens more- there’s short descriptions of a few in the handout. There’s enough of them that military brass – especially those connected with the Navy SEALs, whose memoirs seem to the most in demand among all the various special forces units – have registered concern over the sheer number of memoirs being published by men who are meant to be undertaking secret missions, to say nothing of how many of these memoirists have had their accounts disputed by fellow soldiers.

Continue reading “2016 Birthday Lecture: Merit and Lethality” →

2016 Birthday Lecture: Merit and Lethality

Can liberalism adapt?

Peter BerardLeave a comment
It’s nice to have a hopeful argument, but I’m not sure I buy it. First, general principle- don’t rely on demographics. There’s a long litany of bad predictions based on the supposedly immutable political characteristics of supposedly surging demographics. Maybe that’s just a flinch on my part, but I can’t see where thinking demographics is on your side really helps. Assume it isn’t and work to make up for it.
Second, what I see is partly a general move leftward but mostly a collapse of liberalism, as it becomes clear that it both can’t and won’t support the progressive end of politics. Perhaps you have better ones, but for me the image that encapsulates this in all of its smugness, cowardice, and projected self-loathing is Paul Krugman and his readers being actually scared of Bernie fucking Sanders, of all people.
BUT I think at least some of this energy being generated by the collapse of the neoliberal order is going rightward. If the polling cited here isn’t picking that up it could be because the energy on the right will express itself differently than it has in the recent past. It would hardly be the first time the right reinvents itself.
So, superficially at least, liberals can point to a reenergized right — like liberals are now doing with Trump — and saying “you need us to stop them,” which is wrong but plays with some people. On a more structural level, I usually define liberalism as ideology that attempts to siphon energy from revolutionary and reactionary movements and channel it towards other ends, usually towards preserving or reforming a given existing structure (one of the reasons I have little patience for the “conservatives CONSERVE things, it’s right there in the name!” argument). A sort of apotheosis of temporizing.
The question is whether our liberals (or, to use the European phrase, liberal-conservatives) have the necessary adaptability to do anything with this moment. It’s hard to say, and my own loathing for establishment liberalism does not make me the best judge. Hmmm… I wonder if I could turn my coat and advise them on this for pay… academic job market is pretty grim these days…
Can liberalism adapt?