Gotham Diary:
Ivory Tower
27 June 2014
Kathleen had to be in the office this morning, so she arranged for a car to fetch her. I remained tucked in while she got dressed, and, after she gave me a kiss and left, I fell back asleep. My punishment was a rather dreary dream of farewells and long drives. This came to a point in the fruitless search for a tote bag containing my laptop. I woke up and swung out of bed in a panic, but before my feet reached the floor I knew that I needn’t bother. So I dozed for a bit more. Some people never learn.
While I was reading Alice James, the book that I wrote about yesterday, part of my mind was puzzling out a striking correlation. Jean Strouse’s book came out in 1980, which was also the year in which I came out from law school in Indiana to settle down with Kathleen in New York. We lived in another apartment in this very building, but we’ve been where we are now for over thirty years. That stability is mirrored in the ongoing simplification of my affairs, as, over time, I have abandoned projects of less than signal importance and focused on things that really mattered. The dark humanism of Henry James — Alice’s brother — is certainly one of those things. It almost seems as if I, like Alice, have taken to my bed — I have, in that sense, certainly taken to my apartment — but not in order to attract attention and malinger in hypochondria. I did it (at first quite blindly and inefficiently) in order to learn how to think.
And I see now that I have built up a kind of coral reef of ideas. It is time to take stock of that. But not here.
***
In the London Review of Books, I read a review of a book called Dangerous to Know, by the centenarian journalist Chapman Pincher. Pincher’s specialty was armaments: he believed that Britain ought to be well-armed, and he cultivated military and diplomatic sources whose concerns he shared and was happy to share with his readers. I knew at once that my father-in-law would love to read this book, so I ordered a copy — his ninetieth birthday is coming up — from Amazon.uk. While I was at the site, I came across another book that I’d read about, John Campbell’s Roy Jenkins: A Well Rounded Life. Almost against my will, I ordered this door-stopper as well. When are you ever going to read that? my prudence demanded. Where do these impulses come from?
I groaned all over again when the book arrived, more loudly, in fact, because Roy Jenkins really is a doorstopper. Wherever will you put that thing? What usually happens to these big, serious books is that, lying at the bottom of piles, they accumulate an ectoplasm of guilt and remorse that makes them even more unreadable. By the time they are finally disposed of, unread, they have become an embarrassment. Something different happened yesterday. I picked up Roy Jenkins and began to read it. I soon found that I couldn’t put it down.
Although I certainly don’t know very much about him, Roy Jenkins is a figure of interest to me. He’s part hero, part warning. He was a complicated politician whose mature instinct was always for an inclusive center and for means of social improvement that would involve the least dislocation. At the same time, he didn’t give larger economic matters much thought; he was too much the traditional parliamentarian for that. At the end of his life, he slipped into ceremonious irrelevance because his skill at maneuver and debate atrophied his ability to think about the objects of political activity.
At the same time, he was a successful writer who supported a “well-rounded” lifestyle (with a taste for fine wine) with his publications. My closest contact with him, until yesterday, was his biography of Gladstone, which came out in 1995. I doubted very much that anybody could make Gladstone interesting to me, but Jenkins succeeded — or at least kept my yawns to a minimum (Gladstone could be such a Victorian humbug at times). Jenkins was clearly amused by the sprawl of Gladstone’s long life — the family history, the penchant for chopping down trees, the strange marks in his diary that signified no-one-knows-what about his meetings with prostitutes — and he shared his enthusiasm on the page. But is Gladstone the thoughtful book that it might be? No, because Jenkins never investigates the contradictions at the heart of the Victorian experiment.
Similarly, as the LRB convincingly argued, John Campbell does not investigate the economic developments that transformed the postwar West into its current condition of noxious inequality. Jenkins was too complacent about business organizations, too ready to see them as providers of jobs — which they certainly were, until just about the prime of his career. Then something happened. What this something might be, neither Jenkins nor any other liberal could tell, because it happened in a corner of the world that didn’t interest them and marked a development that they could not have imagined as anything but perverse. This was nothing less than the financialization of everything that eventually brought about the market valuation of the priceless.
This was not only a political catastrophe for liberals but a collapse of humanism overall. But the liberals, who prided themselves on their understanding of big pictures and bold prognostications, and who were humanism’s most significant defenders, lacked the intellectual wherewithal to see it coming. Indeed, in their globalizing zeal — Jenkins sacrificed his own chance at 10 Downing Street to his commitment to the EU — they facilitated the early stages of trans-sovereign finance. This isn’t to say that they ought to have been more protectionist in the common sense of that word. But they might have given more thought to the protection of the structures and scales that would insure the widespread prosperity of their constituents. Today’s liberals on both sides of the Atlantic seem not even to possess the rudiments of a program for reforming business organizations as such for the social benefit. This would involve imposing conditions on businesses that preserve capitalist projects wherever they are useful, while protecting economic health from the excessive (thus malignant) pursuit of profits. By “as such,” I mean that business organizations must also be protected from governmental interference. Once the political decisions about organization and regulation have been taken, there is nothing for the state but its exercise of ordinary police powers.
We need business. We need more businesses — lots more. And we need a government capable of providing the large-scale services that make gigantic business organizations as unnecessary as they are undesirable.
Bon weekend à tous!
Daily Blague news update: Literally.