335. Donald Trump's Deep, Respectable Power Source

Adam Gopnik once said, of a very gifted columnist (I think it was Walter Lippmann — it's been too long), that more important than giving liberals their arguments, he "showed them how to sound."  The right note for an untuned, uncertain orchestra.  And that, I think is what Trump does for his ragged band.  To the violins: don't sound apologetic.  To the brass: end on a note of confidence.  What Trump's followers mean when they say, "He tells it like it is" is, "He shows us how to sound."  The manly sound is more important than the sense.

We know well by now what the resulting senselessness brings on.  English teachers up the wall.  Logic teachers with their heads in a bowl.  TV satirists, party wits, everybody in the game enjoying the low bar, having a field day.  The well-educated never had such a chance to display their worth. 

And I am in the crowd, applauding.  I can't leave, however, without wanting to post a warning.  First, if we hear in Donald Trump just a sound we miss what even the basest notes should tell us: that this is an expression of one of the fundamental forces in human life.  It goes by various names, like "will to power."  I name it "testosterone" but whatever it's called it's eternally set against this other great force in our lives, the instinct to love and be kind and considerate — out of (to me) an opposing estrogen. 

My warning is like the warning a colleague, Edgar Whan, issued to me about a student radical in the sixties as we stood listening to one of the fellow's radically absurd speeches.  "Don't laugh so hard," said Whan.  "He's trying to tell you something.  He may not be telling it very well, and he may not understand it very well himself, but it's important.  And you better listen."

What, listen to a twenty-year-old so full of juice that he thinks he can end an argument by zipping up his jacket and saying, "Bullshit"?  He thinks that's the way do it, that's all it takes, energy and conviction?  Passionate intensity?

Why would anybody with an office in the ivy want to listen to testosterone?  That's what George W. Bush listened to.  C-student, fraternity-president testosterone.  That's what made us invade Iraq, wasn't it, rationalized testosterone?

It's so hard to say a good word for testosterone these days, after all that it's gotten us into.  If only we didn't have such short memories, such short lives.  We forget that the days we live in are particular days, bringing particular gifts.  In our day the gift is security and affluence and time to attend to moral and esthetic refinements.  We have to have lived very long to know days that were otherwise, with no such gift.  Either that or be able to read history with a very creative, or re-creative, imagination.

What I would like to have my contemporaries re-create, to the point of getting inside of, is the child in Europe, needing protection, watching the lines of Nazi advance on newspaper maps, on and on, towards him or her.  John Updike brought me close to that when he recalled watching Allied armies "fleeing like harried insects" on the maps he had spread out on his living room floor in Pennsylvania, early in the war.  I had done the same thing.  But we weren't children in Europe.  Neither was Meg Greenfield, but she was a Jew, and when she in Newsweek delivered her message to her young contemporaries (essentially, "you know the Allies were going to win; we didn't") she brought us about as close as we're going to get to that European child.

In that child, stripped of our security and affluence, we ask in fear, "What will stop the Nazi armies?"  And the answer, I think, has to be "testosterone," as we have been conceiving it. You can't control testosterone without drawing on it.  It's the back fire that stops the fire heading for the town.  With the Nazi fire nothing else will do.  Years of enlightened emptying, privileged peace, may conceal the need, but one Hitler will reveal it.

I don't know what the equivalent of that is in government, in politics, in the choices offered the American voter, but surely it's something we can't afford to kill, or hoot entirely off the stage.  We need aggressiveness, we need competitiveness, we need the last-ditch, dig-in, goal-line pride. 

Recognize that need and we at least won't take Trump as a joke, an opportunity for wit.   As the noise of the crowd and the size of his vote should tell us, Trump's testosterone must be treated with respect, meaning treated the way Clausewitz advised us to treat war.  "Don't be casual about it.  You're handling fire."  Maybe a threat to life, maybe a preserver of it, but certainly fundamental to it.

So as a nation we've just got to live with testosterone.  That will be hard, especially for academics.  A balancing act.  We've got to respect it and value it for what it can do and at the same time educate it so we can stand to listen to it.

129. Camus and Charisma

 

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There's knowing a philosopher's position, the stands he (or she) takes on important questions. There's understanding how it fits into or opposes other philosophers' positions and appreciating what it took for him to take that position. There's wondering where you, and maybe the intellectual world, would be without him. And then there's reading him.

Here's Albert Camus, whom I know and understand and appreciate in all the above ways, presenting to me (in The Myth of Sisyphus) the heart of his philosophy:

I want everything explained to me or nothing. And the reason is impotent when it hears this cry from the heart. The mind aroused by this insistence seeks and finds nothing but contradictions and nonsense. What I fail to understand is nonsense. The world is peopled with such irrationals. The world itself, whose single meaning I do not understand, is but a vast irrational. If one could only say, just once: "This is clear," all would be saved.

He can't say that and, looking at his own condition, he forms his conception of the absurd:

At this point of his effort man stands face to face with the irrational. He feels within him his longing for happiness and reason. The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.

Reading that passage as my teachers taught me to read, testing against my own experiece, I find myself almost immediately lost. Nothing Camus talks about so urgently matches my experience. In the world I have known there are some contradictions and nonsense and some consistencies and sensible meanings. That's what fills the world's vastness. I don't see how Camus can call that world, the whole thing, "irrational."

I welcome help and here's Adam Gopnik (New Yorker, 4-9-12) supplying it: Camus meant "life is absurd" in "the sense of unjustified by certainty." I, seeing some uncertainty and some certainty, have the same problem reading Gopnik that I had reading Camus. Gopnik adds, "Life is absurd because Who Knows?" That's a mountaintop answer: "If you've climbed up this far you know what I mean." Gopnik takes no better care of me than Camus did.

And I think I see why, right there in his New Yorker piece. The old Camus charisma still has Gopnik in its spell. He knows it's charisma, his piece features it (in paragraphs on Camus' appearance, his role in the war, his weight in cafe conversations, a photo of him in a trenchcoat), and yet he lets it govern his reading, his response to words on a page.

I think that a charisma-free reader would take the statements I quoted the way an experienced composition teacher would take them: as all-or-nothing declarations of an immature mind. Like adolescent writers who ask the questions he asks, Camus is not really requesting knowledge about any world he shares with his reader, and would not be satisfied if he got it. It would keep him from making the big move, the move that in its grandeur distinguishes him from the writers composition teachers usually see, the move from "I" and "what I fail to understand," to "man" and "the unreasonable world."

That a clear-sighted writer like Adam Gopnik should have his eyes closed by the Camus charisma is testimony to its extraordinary power. Gopnik's own prose is a model of perceptive reader-care. Consider this, from the same piece:

Good editorial writing has less to do with winning an argument, since the other side is mostly not listening, than with telling the guys on your side how they ought to sound when they're arguing. It's a form of conducting, really, where the writer tries to strike a down-beat, a tonic note, for the whole of his section. Not "Say this!" but "Sound this way!" is what the great editorialists teach.

He's a hard hitter. When somebody like him goes soft, and writes soft sentences, you know that this thing that's working on him, this charisma, is pretty strong.

I think it's not just the Camus charisma. I think it's the whole Sartre-Camus-existentialist-postwar-Paris charisma. It's so strong that it holds those writers on their eminence year after year no matter what they have said. They seem to me as invulnerable in the intellectual world as Ronald Reagan was in the political world. I want to call them teflon intellectuals.