Back Again From Southern France

No jet lag this time around, as my travels were done from my own front porch. There were no photographs or other illustrations in Tony Judt’s scholarly study of Socialism in Provence 1877-1914, and yet, at the same time my brain was working overtime to take in his arguments and evidence, it was also picturing scenes from southern France – along with, I must admit, my grandparents’ modest little “farmette” (they called it that) in Ohio in the 1950s and today’s Leelanau orchards and vineyards and CSAs.

One of Judt’s quarrels with research previous to his in French social and political history was a tendency of researchers to lump regions and classes into large homogenous groups and make sweeping generalizations based on a composite portrait thus drawn of the populace. An area might be called agricultural, and a certain percentage of the population identified as peasants, and from that the researcher would assume conservatism and little active interest in politics.

Yet the difference between an isolated mountain hamlet (we ventured up a terrifying road to explore one in the Auvergne in 2000) and a bustling country village connected to other villages and towns by good roads was enormous in the time period Judt was studying. Moreover – as was true with my grandfather and as is true of many Leelanau farmers today – those working the land were not always themselves landless. They could be and often were owners of small property, working others’ land, as well as their own, or working in a small manufactory by day and on their land in the evenings (this was my grandfather’s pattern), or migrating from place to place with the seasons, following available work, or working part-time in the fields and part-time at other jobs. Artisanal workers and farm workers, laborers for others and property owners – these were not mutually exclusive categories. Judt found that while conservatism did reign in poor, remote areas, peasants on better land in the Var region, particularly farmers who actually owned property, were more likely to support socialist politics and programs. They saw collectivism as their best hope for being able to continue living on and working the land, despite bad crop years and market challenges from the larger world.

What impressed me most was the difficulty of categorizing the ways in which people earned their livelihoods. There was my grandfather, working in the casket factory by day and tending his raspberry patch and vegetable gardens and fruit trees in the evenings. There are farmers here in Leelanau who also work office jobs or hold political posts or teach school in the winter. I own a small business, and yet one fall I was among the county’s orchard workers, picking apples for a local grower. This has been the truth of country living for a long time, all over the world.

Another nonfiction book I mentioned here recently, Self-Theories: Their Role in Motivation, Personality, and Development, excited me greatly, and yet when I showed it to a very well-educated friend, with interests far beyond his own field, he laughed and said he would never have picked up a book with that title and cover, never imagined that it could be interesting, much less (as I found it) compelling, thrilling and inspiring. Here is what I sent him and another friend, by e-mail, under the subject heading “This book just keeps getting better and better,” when I was only halfway through the book:

It was published in 2000 by Psychology Press, an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, as part of a series called ESSAYS IN SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY, so I'm talking about a book that is already 16 years old. One of the author's findings is that "we can influence students' theories [about themselves and their intelligence]. Although students came to our study with their own theories, what we told them had a clear impact. This means that people's theories of intelligence are malleable." So students who initially believe their intelligence is fixed can come to believe they can increase it, and this means they will be willing to take on challenges they would otherwise avoid. They can learn to learn! The author carefully says that the studies do not show such changes in belief to be permanent, but the initial belief wasn't permanent, either. Human beings can learn, not simply through trial and error, but by coming to believe they have the capacity to grow.   

She calls the two theories "entity" and "incremental." Entity theories think of intelligence as a fixed trait; incremental theorists (these "theorists" are all of us, at every age of life!) think of intelligence as knowledge and skill, something that can be cultivated and improved. The entity theorists are performance-oriented, and when they "fail," they fall into despair and helplessness, because to them failure is a sign that they are not smart, after all. Incremental theorists have a very different view of failure, seeing it as an opportunity to learn, to employ new strategies, to try harder or focus differently, etc.   

She doesn't stop there. She goes on to see if success and failure in relationships, and responses to perceived setbacks in relationships, follow the same pattern. She finds that they do. And then (I'm as yet only halfway through the book, and there are many, many studies conducted and cited), she finds that entity and incremental theorists not only judge themselves differently but judge others very differently, also. Entity theorists are quick to judge a person's character on the basis of a single action, but the author stresses that these quick judgments are not "impulsive," but "seem to grow out of a belief in character as a unitary thing that permeates virtually all actions and displays itself with great consistency."   

The really great thing is that students in a classroom can, with appropriate readings, change from entity to incremental theorists. The author does not know if the change in belief would be long-lasting [results of research do not preclude but do not establish such a conclusion], but imagine retraining the thinking of people who work in prisons to believe that prisoners can learn and become better, more self-aware people!

My excitement continued through to the last page of the book.

Similar to the way Tony Judt, in Part III of his study, extrapolated his findings to say something about socialism in France in general, Dweck takes her findings (about how people’s self-theories affect the way they view success and failure and influence responses to failure and challenges) and carries those into a larger theory of motivation and personality. In Chapter 18 she surveys other theories of personality and motivation. “Trait theories,” she tells us, are all about description but offer little in the way of explanation. They are particularly weak when it comes to explaining change. Not surprising, as Dweck notes: “In fact, many trait theorists don’t really believe much in personal change....” (This was my objection to the popular Please Understand Me and the Meyer-Briggs personality type test.)

“Motive theories” (she cites various in the group, but I am omitting the lists) leave out anything to do with goals, beliefs, or cognitions. Both biological theories and Freudian theories come in for criticism. Of course we inherit certain temperaments, she acknowledges, but “temperament is not destiny,” and biological theories “don’t look at adaptive functioning.” As for Freud, his theory left no room for impetus toward growth, ignored goals specific to a particular self, and posited all achievement as the result of defenses.

Growth, goals, beliefs – in Dweck’s theory, these are central, with the meaning given by the individual the most important factor in motivation, regardless of words used in explanations. Some “entity theorist” learners may believe luck is a factor but see luck not as unpredictable but as a feature of personality they either have or lack, just as they see ability.

In her final chapter, Dweck addresses questions and objections to her picture of human personality and motivation. One question is posed as follows: “Isn’t It Naive to Believe that Everyone Has the Potential to Change?” Excellent question! Here, in part, is Carol Dweck’s response:

...I have not tried to argue that anyone can become Albert Einstein or Mother Theresa, but I have tried to argue that we do not know what anyone’s future potential is from their current behavior. We never know exactly what someone is capable of with the right support from the environment and with the right degree of personal motivation or commitment. ... The danger of the entity theory is not so much that it argues for human limitation, but that it suggests we can know people’s limitations so quickly and then grants them so little potential for growth. I believe that people and society gain a great deal when we search for ways to help people realize their potential instead of labeling or punishing them when they do not.

Children can become “smarter” and more successful, Dweck has shown, when they incorporate into their belief system the idea that “failure” is an opportunity for learning and growth, not a sign of stupidity or badness. People who take on this new belief about themselves can also improve their personal relationships, no longer seeing setbacks as signals to give up. And everyone can see others differently, too – as capable of change and improvement.

Imagine! Imagine an electorate and a justice system, not only schools, believing in the possibility of personal growth. Imagine not writing off others (or allowing oneself to be written off) with “He can’t help it. It’s the way he is.” Being shy does not mean one must be paralyzed by shyness. That’s just one example.

And it is true at any age. I’ll let the author have the last word:

Some years ago, as I reached one of the landmark ages, I asked myself what I would like to be able to say at the end of my life, and it was this: I want to be able to say that I kept my eyes open, faced my issues, and made wholehearted commitments to things I valued. I did not want to be haunted by a litany of regrets or left with a bundle of potentialities that were never realized. As adults in this society our mission is to equip the next generations with the tools they need to live a life of growth and contribution. Can we make the commitment to help them become smarter than we were?

Recently: Eastern Europe and Me

Kathleen Stocking’s essay about her Peace Corps teaching experience in Romania probably kicked it off. “Something Else Week” is the title of one of the essays in Kathleen’s new book, The Long Arc of the Universe: Travels Beyond the Pale.  Then, can Russia be considered Eastern Europe in some sense? Letters from Russia, by a Frenchman who traveled to Russia in 1839, surprised me by how much 19^th-century czarist Russia sounded like things I’d read and heard about life in the U.S.S.R. in the 20^th century.

The late Tony Judt wrote of past and present all over the world, but one of his special areas of interest and expertise was Eastern Europe, a geographic area he felt had been sorely neglected by Western historians. While I may never make my war entirely through Postwar, many of Judt’s essays posthumously edited by his widow and published under the title When the Facts Change: Essays 1995-2010 either focus on or somehow make reference to Eastern Europe.

Halfway through my reading of the Judt collection, I plucked from my bookstore shelves Cafe Europa: Life After Communism, by Slavenka Dakulic, and took it home to read. Cafe Europa is a book that’s been in the shop for a while now, without anyone buying it and carrying it off – luckily for me, or I might have missed reading it. The author, born in Croatia in 1949, writes of the changes her native land has seen in her lifetime and the difficulty of shaking habits, mental and social, that may be holding back the arrival of truly responsible democratic citizens. Again and again in Drakulic’s essays comes the theme of the rewriting of history, still going on in Eastern Europe although Communism is gone.

Tony Judt was concerned with rewritten history, also, as was the Marquis de Custine when trying to understand Russia under the czars and where it might go from there. You might say that an interest in Eastern Europe leads naturally to a concern for honest history, given the way the subject has been mistreated in that part of the world. Not only there, of course, but to an important and serious extent, beginning in the past and continuing in the present. Another feature common to Judt’s and Drakulic’s essays is the idea that “Europe,” as a unitary place, the salvation of smaller countries from Russia to the Atlantic and the Arctic Circle to the Mediterranean, is itself a myth, a vague article of faith with little correspondence to reality.

Time for a switch to fiction – and what jumped out at me? War with the Newts, by Karel Capek, with a little upside-down caret over the ‘C’ that I can’t find in my “insert symbol” menu. This novel, “considered by many to be Capek’s greatest book,” is in the “satiric tradition of Wells, Orwell, and Vonnegut,” according to the blurb on the back. I also find there this account of the author:

Karel Capek (1890-1928) earned recognition as a journalist, playwright, and novelist in Prague before and just after the First World War. In the Czech Republic of the 1920s, his reputation was broadened by the international acclaim that greeted his play R.U.R. as well as subsequent novels and stories....

What did I expect? Whatever it was, it wasn’t what I found inside the covers of this paperback novel. This “Eastern European” novel, at least as far as I’ve read so far, is set mainly in the South Seas, where the captain of a freight-carrying and pearl-fishing expedition boat encounters a colony of – well, we are not sure yet what they are. Newts? Lizards? Tritons? They live in the ocean but are very dexterous and quick verbal learners. Preyed upon by sharks, the tapas (as the narrator calls them, following local native practice) bring up pearl-bearing oysters to the captain subsequently trade him pearls for knives, and eventually learn not only how to open oysters with the knives but how to use them to kill sharks. The plot has thickened considerably! What next? I’ll let you know how it goes. The real question will be how much of the political satire I am able to decode from the story.

And in my Bohemian country neighborhood, as you can see, the farms are doing well. 

Can You Score Higher Than a Goldfish?

Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, 

Where wealth accumulates, and men decay. 

-      Oliver Goldsmith, The Deserted Village, 1770

The quote above appears on the dust jacket front cover of Tony Judt’s book, Ill Fares the Land, which takes its title from Goldsmith. Judt made the point more prosaically:

This is still the case. It is the growing inequality in and between societies that generates so many social pathologies. They generate internal division and, sooner or later, internal strife—usually with undemocratic outcomes. 

-      Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land (2010)

Not much over 200 pages, with short chapters and generous page margins, Judt’s book can be read in a relatively short time. The catch is that it must be read attentively. As always with this writer's work, his encyclopedic knowledge, skillful synthesis, and a superlative command of the English language demand -- and deserve -- focused reading.

The other day I began drafting a blog post that grew and grew to unwieldy length, an alarming and self-defeating result since my topic was reading attention span, distractions, and multitasking! How could I hope to hold anyone’s attention for that long with my own poor words on a screen? So here’s only a bit from the beginning of what yesterday's word avalanche-in-draft:

---

How do you or I compare to a goldfish when attention spans are compared? (The site says “gold fish,” two words, but the color of the fish, as I’m sure we all agree, is irrelevant. Red fish, blue fish, one fish....) The answer might surprise you. But then, upon reflection, you may also think, as I did: How many things does a goldfish have to pay attention to, anyway? How many distractions typically divert the attention of a goldfish from its usual focus (whatever that may be)?

Pursuing my own questions about attention spans, I gleaned from another online site these four points directly relevant to multitasking:

Multitasking reduces level of performance.

Studies find individual variation in concentration amid distractions, but everyone’s overall performance declines below a fairly low multitasking level.

The more adept a brain at excluding distractions, the better the memory, the more learning.

When distracted, we rely on “habit memory” rather than on processing new information.

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I’ll stop there. Much of what I went on to write had to do with new scientific information and how ill-equipped are most Americans, even those who think of their perspective as very “scientific,” to evaluate the findings presented in mainstream media. Maybe that’s a topic for another time.

Today, however, I’ll simply close with a lament for all the young people – for all the Americans, young and old, but especially for the young, the audience Judt hoped to reach -- who will never read Ill Fares the Land or other similarly thoughtful books that go beyond the shallow “two sides” of what passes for political debate in the United States today. Beyond labels, beyond slogans, there is a wealth of history and educated, intelligent, carefully considered opinion that would inform us and enrich our national conversation. Tony Judt was one of those voices, and, while he is no longer among us, we still have his books. Hearing what he had to say, however, demands that we take a break from multitasking and engage with his thought in a focused way. This one small book is both deep and dense. For this reason, it is demanding reading.

The thing is, when you close a book like this, you’ll go on thinking about the ideas in it for a long time.

Tony Judt: Much More Than Just “Amazing”

I don’t think I quite grasped it at the time, but “understanding” was becoming for me an increasingly central objective: harder, deeper and more enduring than merely “being right.” – Tony Judt, Thinking the Twentieth Century, with Timothy Snyder (NY, Penguin, 2012)

How to begin to describe the mind of Tony Judt? That is the question that came into my mind yesterday. In current parlance, one would automatically say “Amazing!” But then, everything is “amazing” these days, isn’t it? A new jacket, a movie, a hairdo? So to use the word in a serious (let alone a casual) context is to say nothing at all.

First of all, his mind was “well stocked.” The phrase is his own, as he referred to the memories he used to construct the essays in The Memory Chalet. That writing was reflective and impressive, along with being personal, even deeply intimate, but in Thinking the Twentieth Century we see more clearly yet the extent to which Judt’s mind was stocked not only with personal experience but with a lifetime of reading and intense engagement with both experience and ideas.

His mind was engaged. It is clear from reading this book that his mind was always engaged and that the engagement ended only with his death. He didn’t just “talk his way” through this book. He and Snyder talked it, and then Judt edited each chapter, continuing to clarify his ideas about our world in the twentieth century, because it mattered to him. Thinking was not an idle game for him but an activity of crucial importance. He cared about his world and felt a responsibility to the present and to the future.

He thought critically. He did not easily give his assent.His was not a mind to acquiesce easily, either in the pronouncements of others or to his own initial responses, and he continued to question others, the world, and himself as long as he drew breath. But neither was he one to dissent merely to be different, to gain attention, or to play devil’s advocate lightly, as a diversion. Again, he analyzed and reflected endlessly but never as a game—always because he saw thinking as important work.

His thinking and expression had a style all their own. Analytical by temperament and by training, Judt retained a poet’s love for the sensuous details and the great romance of the world about him. Anyone who has read The Memory Chalet knows this. Whoever has not read it, should.

For the remainder of this post, I want to highlight a few passages from Thinking the Twentieth Century, beginning with the somewhat unromantic (most would say) of economics. Judt identifies the Reagan-Thatcher view, “that the right to make any amount of money unhindered by the state is part of an unbroken continuum with the right to free speech,” and he goes on as follows:

It is perhaps worth reminding ourselves that this is not what Adam Smith thought. And it was certainly not the view of most neoclassical economists either. It would simply never have occurred to them to suppose a necessary and permanent relationship between the forms of economic life and all other aspects of human existence. They treated economics as benefitting from internal laws as well as the logic of human interest; but the motion that economics alone could supply the purposes of human existence on earth would have struck them as peculiarly thin gruel.

On the role of the historian, a topic of great importance to him, he is particularly eloquent.

The task of the historian, if you wish to think of it this way, is to supply the dimension of knowledge and narrative without which we cannot be a civic whole.

Has anyone ever described the job better? A couple of pages later he is more precise:

I would break that thought into two parts. The first is simply this: the job of the historian is to make clear that a certain event happened. We do this as effectively as we can, for the purpose of conveying what it was like for something to have happened to those people when it did, where it did and with what consequences. This rather obvious job description is quite crucial. The cultural and political current flows in the other direction: to efface past events—or to exploit them for unrelated purposes. It’s our job to get it right—again and again and again. The task is Sisyphean: the distortions keep changing and so the emphasis in the corrective is constantly in flux. But many historians do not see it this way, and feel no responsibility of this kind. In my view, they are not real historians. A scholar of the past who is not interested in the first instance in getting the story right may be many virtuous things, but a historian is not among them. However, we have a second responsibility. We are not merely historians but also and always citizens, with a responsibility to bring our skills to bear upon the common interest. ... We are never free of that.
 Accordingly, we must operate in two registers simultaneously....

Critical as he was of all national political agendas, Judt was very clear in his mind that before students can criticize history, they must learn it. Facts first. Without facts, “criticism” becomes a hash of opinions slung about willy-nilly. And, in thus making history irrelevant, in making it chaotic, “we [historians] lose any claim upon the civic conversation.”

He thought a lot, also, on the distinction between history and collective memory:

...I profoundly believe in the difference between history and memory; to allow memory to replace history is dangerous. Whereas history of necessity takes the form of a record, endlessly rewritten and re-tested against old and new evidence, memory is keyed to public, non-scholarly purposes: a theme park, a memorial, a museum, a building, a television program, an event, a day, a flag. Such mnemonic manifestations of the past are of necessity partial, brief, selective: those who arrange them are constrained sooner or later to tell partial truths or even outright lies—sometimes with the best of intentions, sometimes not. In either event, they cannot substitute for history.

I could quote endlessly from this book but give these samples only in the hope of inducing hunger for more, so the last passage I have chosen for today is one from my previous post, and it has to do with faith and judgment:

...It is one thing to say that I am willing to suffer now for an unknowable but possibly better future. It is quite another to authorize the suffering of others in the name of that same unverifiable hypothesis. This, in my view, is the intellectual sin of the century: passing judgment on the fate of others in the name of their future as you see it, a future in which you may have no investment, but concerning which you claim exclusive and perfect information.

Tony, his wife tells us, believed in two things: love and serious public debate. That is, love and informed conversation. Both require that human beings care.

Ideas and Memory as Writer’s Refuge

Thinking the Twentieth Century, by Tony Judt, with Timothy Snyder, is exactly what the title says it is. Conceived as a “spoken book” in the traditional European sense (not, that is, as an audio book but as one proceeding from conversation), it is the last written record of his thoughts by the author before his untimely death at the age of 62 of ALS. It is also a collaboration between two minds well schooled in history and particularly in Eastern European political history and drawing, therefore, on two lifetimes of extensive and catholic reading. As Judt’s conversational partner, Timothy Snyder, remarks in his foreword, “This book makes a case for conversation, but perhaps an even stronger case for reading.”

Judt’s wife, Jennifer A. Homans, says that Tony did not prepare for the weekly two-hour conversations with Tim, that he went into them without notes, and that the two men talked without a break (“Tony Judt: A Final Victory,” New York Review of Books, March 22, 2012). Toward the end of his life, this book was very much what he lived for--clarifying thought, retrieving memory.

For Tony the incentive behind the book—and it had to be a powerful one to overcome the discomfort and depression that were his constant companions—was primarily intellectual, a matter of clarification. ... Sick Tony ... was able, with Tim and through sheer mental and physical exertion, to find some relief and exhilaration in the life of the mind.

The conversations between Judt and Snyder took place in the Judt family apartment in New York City. At their first meeting, Tony was able to walk to meet his friend at the door, although already he could not open the door himself. By their final meeting, he was bedridden and paralyzed except for his head, eyes and vocal chords. It isn’t difficult to imagine how these islands of stimulating conversation must have stood out in a glow of their own for Tony Judt in his last bleak, paralyzed days. Again, Jennifer Homans—

I didn’t fully understand it at the time, but I now see that the dead can extend feelings across the divide separating the living from the ever after. But—and this is a big but—they can only do it if they think of it in advance, before they actually die.

Although the topics covered in Thinking the Twentieth Century are fully as serious as Judt’s earlier Postwar, and the background information assumed every bit as erudite, the structure here and the conversational tone make the book more readily accessible to the nonacademic reader. There are no footnotes. There is no bibliography. This is the work, basically, of a single well-informed mind, speaking to and being drawn out by another. Each chapter begins with a short autobiographical section by Tony Judt, which serves to situate his thought and its development over time. As Ian Buruma observes in the current issue of The New York Review of Books (April 5, 2012),

Passion and skepticism would always be in competition in his mind, as though he were forever debating his own enthusiasms. He has been criticized for being inconsistent in his views. But arguing with oneself, especially with one’s passions, is the mark of a real thinker. And Judt didn’t stop thinking until he drew his last breath. [My emphasis added]

Because Judt never rested dogmatically with any particular view of life or of history, he was able to to bring to his last thoughts both an insider’s and an outsider’s viewpoints on many different beliefs. He was also able to see striking similarities, of a kind indiscernible to true believers, between militantly opposed viewpoints. For instance, in the third chapter of Thinking the Twentieth Century, he spoke to Snyder of Christianity and Marxism as having an important commonality not shared by social democratic liberalism. Both the Christian and the Marxist, he said, can justify inflicting suffering in the present for the sake of a future they believe the suffering will bring—e.g., torturing save immortal souls or murdering for the sake of the Revolution.

...It is one thing to say that I am willing to suffer now for an unknowable but possibly better future. It is quite another to authorize the suffering of others in the name of that same unverifiable hypothesis. This, in my view, is the intellectual sin of the century: passing judgment on the fate of others in the name of their future as you see it, a future in which you may have no investment, but concerning which you claim exclusive and perfect information.

Put another, it’s one thing to be ready to die for a belief and quite another to be ready to kill for it, and the two kinds of readiness are not morally equal.

It was clear to Tony Judt that no one had perfect knowledge of the future and that every political or economic decision, therefore, must be based on very incomplete information. At the same time, he lived every day with the certainty of his own death. Thus, of this book, his wife Jennifer Homans writes, “Thinking the Twentieth Century was a labor on behalf of a future he knew he would not share.”

This is not a review of Judt and Snyder’s book, as I have only reached the fourth chapter in my first reading of it, but Tony Judt is one of my heroes, and it is important to me to say something about his last work before I am completely overwhelmed and rendered speechless by it. As I have been reading the book, I want to quote from page after page, so that by the time I reach the end—well, you see how that would go. So rather than choosing another few lines from the book, my last quotation today comes again from Jennifer Homans and has to do with Tony Judt’s beliefs and this book and with conversation and public debate:

...The only thing he was an idealist about was serious public debate. This was the one thing, along with love, that was always left standing no matter how much was felled by the disease, and so much was. Tony called it the core. To me it was a narrowing beam of light in the darkness that was separating Tony from us all. And if Thinking the Twentieth Century stands in the no-man’s-land between what is and what should be, as I think it does, this is in part because it was driven by the darkness but also part of the light. It was besieged, as he was.

 As is liberalism? As is democracy?