A single spot on a pristine surface

One doesn't know whether to laugh or cry upon reading the word euphemisms, in the New York Times obituary of William Safire, misspelled as "euphamisms." The writer, Robert D. McFadden, is not likely to have responded to my profile on dating web sites, when I used to use them; but his sisters-in-kind used to write that they enjoyed "quite" evenings at home, which immediately caused me to stop reading.

Safire himself is probably laughing at McFadden's gaffe. It reminds me of Garrison Keillor, whose Writer's Almanac program I greatly enjoy, telling us every April 9 about Lee and Grant meeting "at the Appomattox Court House" to negotiate the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia. They didn't meet in a court house but in the parlor of Wilmer McLean's farm house; "Appomattox Courthouse" was simply the name of the nearest town!

On the other hand, I liked it very much when Keillor described one of the last acts of William Shawn, longtime editor of The New Yorker:

"Four days before he died in 1992, Shawn had lunch with Lillian Ross, and she showed him a book cover blurb she had written and asked if he would check it. She later wrote of that day, "He took out the mechanical pencil he always carried in his inside jacket pocket, and ... made his characteristically neat proofreading marks on a sentence that said 'the book remains as fresh and unique as ever.' He changed it to read, 'remains unique and as fresh as ever.' 'There are no degrees of uniqueness,' Mr. Shawn said politely."

I had not known that Safire arranged Nixon's famous "kitchen debate" with Kruschev and had forgotten that, as a former White House speechwriter, he was apparently the source of the phrase made famous by Spiro Agnew: "Nattering nabobs of negativism."

The ability to convey a great deal with a few well-chosen words is all too rare. I greatly admire the opening paragraph of James Gleick's biography of Sir Isaac Newton:

Isaac Newton said he had seen farther by standing on the shoulders of giants, but he did not believe it. He was born into a world of darkness, obscurity, and magic; led a strangely pure and obsessive life, lacking parents, lovers, and friends; quarreled bitterly with great men who crossed his path; veered at least once to the brink of madness; cloaked his work in secrecy; and yet discovered more of the essential core of human knowledge than anyone before or after. He was chief architect of the modern world. He answered the ancient philosophical riddles of light and motion, and he effectively discovered gravity. He showed how to predict the courses of heavenly bodies and so established our place in the cosmos. He made knowledge a thing of substance: quantitative and exact. He established principles, and they are called his laws.

The prose is lithe and supple; Gleick's longest sentence, the second, is a series of short clauses and is immediately followed by the elegant eight-word "He was chief architect of the modern world." He uses three-word series but does not overuse them, as Samuel Johnson sometimes did. In 142 words, there are only 15 of 3 syllables or more—only 2, quantitative and philosophical—of 4 syllables or more. The tone is intimate and yet somehow commanding, making the reader feel as if he has encountered something important that ought to require his full attention.

C.S. Lewis would have quarreled fiercely with Gleick's assertion that knowledge became "a thing of substance" by being "quantitative," but he shared Gleick's talent for powerful writing, intelligent and yet accessible to the general reader. As someone who no longer agrees with Lewis's beliefs in the most important things, I was still startled, this past week, to hear an intelligent friend who shares Lewis's faith, remark that Mere Christianity was so written that my friend couldn't really consider it very clear or engaging. Out of curiosity, I reread it for the first time in about 15 years, surprised to find it available online in .PDF format.

I remembered Lewis's flaws well enough but had forgotten some of his strengths. I can't finally agree with the book but found it quite gripping in places. As to writing style, Lewis knew the value of pithiness as much as anyone, but was still a very perceptive critic of that quality used for meretricious ends. I have often enjoyed, and still agree, with his comments on Bacon's Essays from Lewis's History of English Literature in the 16th Century:

"Even the completed Essays of 1625 is a book whose reputation curiously outweighs any real pleasure or profit that most people have found in it, 'a book' (as my successor admirably says) 'that everyone has read but no one is ever found reading.' The truth is, it is a book for adolescents. It is they who underline (as I see from the copy before me) sentences like 'There is little friendshipe in the worlde, and least of all betweene equals': a man of 40 either disbelieves it or takes it for granted. No one, even if he wished, could really learn 'policie' from Bacon, for cunning, even more than virtue, lives in minute particulars. What makes young readers think they are learning is Bacon's manner; the dry, apophthegmatic sentences, in appearance so unrhetorical, so little concerned to produce an effect, fall on the ear like oracles and are thus in fact a most potent rhetoric...."

In another place (I thought it was here but can't find it), Lewis says something like "Nothing could be less practical than the desperate practicality of Bacon's maxims." Actually, it may be just as well that poor Lewis has gone on to his reward; were he alive today, so far from complaining about the too-great attraction of the Essays for adolescents, he would be chagrined to learn that the likelihood of high school students appreciating or even comprehending Bacon's work on any grounds is considerably less than it was in Lewis's own day. In fact, I had forgotten until writing this that one night, about 10 years ago, some young person instant-messaged me on AOL® out of the blue, having seen the word "writer" in my profile and wondering if I could help her understand, what she had been given as homework, Bacon's essay "Of Truth." With more charity than sense, I gave her a long explanation of it, at the end of which she said "Yes, but what does it mean?"

© Michael Huggins, 2009. All rights reserved.

The best laid plans of imps and men

St. Augustine's "mousetrap" theory held that the crucifixion of Christ was actually a clever trap into which Satan blundered, forever sealing his doom, when he overreached and shed the Savior's innocent blood. Osama and Bush both thought they were advancing God's work, but French critic and analyst of Islamic affairs Gilles Kepel argues that both repeated the tactical error of the Evil One. In Beyond Terror and Martyrdom: The Future of the Middle East, reviewed in the current Economist, he makes the argument that the policies of each would-be destroyer of evil has been chastised with a vengeance by the law of unintended consequences:

In Gilles Kepel’s telling, it is not only Mr Bush whose strategy failed after September 11th. Osama bin Laden’s strategy failed too. The Bush administration’s “global war on terror” encompassed not only the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq but also a project to spread democracy to the Arabs and remake the dysfunctional Middle East in America’s image. It was, in Mr Kepel’s phrase, “a vision of global rectification through violent means”. That was precisely al-Qaeda’s project as well. Mr bin Laden did not intend only to inflict pain on America and force its armies out of the Middle East. Martyrdom was also supposed to lead the Muslim masses to identify with al-Qaeda, to hasten a general uprising against “apostate” governments like Saudi Arabia’s, to precipitate the establishment of an Islamic state and destroy Israel.

In the event, as Mr Kepel demonstrates, both of these grand, transformative narratives “crashed against a wall of reality within the Muslim world”. Instead of throttling jihadism, the American occupation of Iraq recruited an army of new martyrs to the cause. But far from rallying the Muslim world at large to its banner, the murderous jihad in Iraq—and al-Qaeda’s killing of many Muslims in other Muslim lands—ended up repelling the very audience this epic struggle was intended to attract. Indeed, to the extent that radical Islam grew stronger during this encounter, it was not the Sunni zealots of al-Qaeda who benefited but their rival pretenders to leadership of the Muslim world: notably the Shia leaders of Iran and, after the 33-day war with Israel in 2006, Iran’s Hizbullah co-religionists in Lebanon.

So far, so good, but then, Kepel shows that no one can be so wrong as an expert, when he goes on to argue that Europe is the one place where experiments in cultural integration are working(!) and that its countries are an ideal venue in which to develop a unique deterrent against terrorism. I'm aware of the reputation of the French for sophistication and subtle wit, but this argument, as James I once said about a philosophical treatise by Bacon, is like the peace of God—it passeth understanding. (Of course I have to take the word of The Economist that this is what his book actually says; in any case, the reviewer politely comments that Kepel's ideas on this point seem "more wishful than professorial." Indeed.)

Kepel claims that polling data reveal that the Paris banlieue riots of 2005 had more to do with disgruntlement over poverty than an urge to wage jihad—yes, and...? Can Kepel really be unaware that the poverty and despair of the marginalized in any society are the very elements most likely to result in religious extremism and violence? One of the reasons that Europe is precisely not as successful in integrating Muslims as it ought to be is its lack of success in providing sufficient economic opportunity for unskilled Muslim immigrants. Americans may be reading Tim LaHaye and watching John Hagee on television, but anyone of any faith or national origin willing to put in his time at the cash register of a Circle K can have the same chance as anyone else to earn his flat screen TV. On the other hand, if he tried to knife a critic or stone an apostate, he would learn that this is not Europe after all, an aspect of life in which Europe is learning, to its sorrow, that "I'm OK, you're OK," is a maxim not universally applicable.

I'm not sure what Continental savants are reading, but if Kepel will check the website for Time, he can find an excellent article on India's Muslims, exploring the volatile relationship between poverty and extremism. In that regard, a Hindu colleague at my office insists that western media are exercising far too little skepticism toward Indian Muslim claims of oppression and failing to hold them accountable for their own shortcomings; see this article for a jaded view of Islam by 94-year-old Kushwant Singh, in the Hindustan Times. Similarly, Dr. Subhash Kapila of the South Asia Analysis Group argues that India's Muslims cannot progress until they free themselves of the burden of backward-looking leadership. Soutik Biswas, on the other hand, writing for BBC News, while duly noting the lack of credible middle-class leadership among India's Muslims is also willing to attribute part of their plight to the "apathy and ineptitude" of the government.

© Michael Huggins, 2008. All rights reserved.