There’s no place like home. The trip to Israel and the Occupied Territories was a great experience, but now that I’m back inside the welcoming portals of the stately Mead manor I’m glad to be off the road at least for a couple of weeks.
While there was no time to post on literary topics on the trip (Jerusalem shut down on the Sabbath but that was when many of the meetings with Palestinians and long excursions were planned), my thoughts were engaged with the topic of reading lists more than ever.
For one thing, the teenage nephew who traveled with me is a voracious reader and told me that he is working on building and reading his own list of classics. “I want to get started in high school,” he said, “because I’ll be so busy with school work in college that I might not be able to read all the classics I want to.” He has a friend who feels the same way and the two of them read and compare notes. They’ve recently read Dante’s Inferno and are contemplating Paradise Lost and Gulliver’s Travels. From the standpoint of the Mead family fortune this may not be good news; this particular nephew may not be the one who enables the Meads to pass the Rockefellers and the Gateses on the list of great family fortunes — but on the whole I think we can live with this.
In any case, if there are any readers who would like to propose a list of 10 or 15 ‘starter classics’ for teenagers, the comment section is open. Fiction, non-fiction, poetry, drama: how should younger readers start navigating their way into literature? (My nephew is also putting together a viewing list of movie classics: suggestions are appreciated here, too.) I will pass the suggestions on and report any reactions.
But there was another reason why reading lists were on my mind during the trip. The sometimes depressing sessions with Israeli, Palestinian and US experts and political leaders combined with the renewed turbulence on the world scene reinforced my conviction that the world is moving into an era of rapid change and fundamental challenge. As I wrote back on May 7, we are no longer in an Age of Technique when the business of government (and of business) is to apply known techniques to existing problems in effective ways. We are in an age of upheaval when no clear consensus exists about what is happening or where the world is headed — but decisions have to be made nonetheless.
Our educational system is geared to turn out managers rather than leaders and, what is much the same thing, specialists rather than generalists. We will always need specialists who choose to know a great deal about a limited field, and the contributions they make to the general welfare should never be slighted. But in times like ours we are going to need people who are educated to lead and to choose — and to do that under conditions in which neither they nor the specialists will have a full understanding of the forces at play and the risks in the system.
That kind of education involves three things that our current educational culture is not very good at: education for character and moral development, the study of strategy and leadership, and a wide ranging knowledge of the history and exercise of power. What we need is an educational system that promotes non-conformity, originality, courage and sacrifice. What we have too often promotes very different characteristics.
If I am even half right about the kind of century we face, sooner or later the educational system will have no choice but to refocus around the challenges around us. But until and unless that happens, most American students are going to be in schools that teach them how to live in a world that is passing away. Students are going to have to work around the regular curriculum and go beyond it to prepare themselves for the future. That means taking more responsibility for your own education, reading books outside the curriculum, returning to the classic texts which have given generations of people fresh insight, and forming study groups and reading groups to teach yourselves the things that schools cannot or will not cover.
For those of us who have finished formal education, the task is even tougher. In addition to managing personal lives and careers, we need to retool ourselves — to develop and retain mental flexibility and a fresh cast of mind if we are to keep coping with the world around us.
People living in revolutionary times have different needs than people who live in calm eras. Here are a few books that I have found unusually helpful as I try to get a grip on what is going on in our world:
Polybius: The Rise of the Roman Empire
Some readers asked why I didn’t include this in my original list of classical histories. (The Yale Grand Strategy class reads this instead of Livy when we study the Second Punic War.) The reason is that I wanted to discuss this book separately from the other ancient histories. This one has a peculiar relevance for our times. It’s not just that the rise of the Roman empire is a subject that Americans (and those who must deal with us) would do well to understand; it’s also because Polybius is the first writer who takes what we now call globalization as his subject. “”Now in earlier times,” he writes, “the world’s history had consisted, so to speak, of a series of unrelated episodes, the origins and results of each being as widely separated as their localities, but from this point onwards history becomes an organic whole: the affairs of Italy and of Africa are connected with those of Asia and of Greece, and all events bear a relationship and contribute to a single end.” The combination of the rise of a single ‘global’ power, the advent of a ‘worldwide’ political system, Polybius’ analysis of the political and cultural roots of Rome’s supremacy and the crisis and upheavals of the Second Punic War make this required reading for anybody who wants to think clearly about American power and the problems of our contemporary world.
Anthony Trollope: The Way We Live Now
This is one of the great English novels, but more to the point it’s about life in a time of financial speculation and social upheaval. New fortunes are rising, old families are adjusting to new times, and traditional values are under fire in this novel about money and power in Victorian Britain. Trollope was a sharp observer and he spares no one: not the hypocrisy of the aristocrats or the greed of the speculators. The old values clearly no longer quite work for the characters in this book, but it is not clear what can replace them. As a special added feature, this is one of the first novels to look seriously at the relationship between Jews and Wasps in the English speaking world. The theme is an old one, with inauspicious roots going back to The Canterbury Tales; the less said about Little St. Hugh of Lincoln and The Merchant of Venice in this context perhaps the better. Sir Walter Scott introduces a more positive tone in Ivanhoe. Dickens famously had it both ways, atoning for his anti-Semitic portrayal Fagin in Oliver Twist with the more sympathetic portrayal of Mr. Riah in Our Mutual Friend. Trollope’s portrayal both of Jews and of the perception of Jews among the English is a fascinating portrayal of one stage of the encounter between Jews and the English against the background of a developing global economy. Reading this book is good preparation for life in a time of market turmoil; it’s one of Trollope’s more challenging novels, but if you like this one you are going to love the 46 other novels he wrote.
Thomas Carlyle: The French Revolution
This is one of the great modern classics, a book of colossal literary ambition and stunning insight. It is one of a handful of modern books that I truly believe that every educated person should read. The prose style is tough, with some Shakespearian echoes that take some getting used to. If you find Moby Dick tough going, you will have a hard time with Carlyle; as far as I can see Carlyle was the most significant influence on Melville’s outlook and style in that book. At some point I hope to devote a full post or two to this extraordinary work. But for now, let me just say that if you want a feel for revolution, for the upheavals that come when a society has lost touch with reality and its old institutions and beliefs have lost their vitality while new ones have yet to be born, this is the book for you. If you want to understand the volcanoes that are ready to erupt in one society after another across the earth today, and to begin to prepare yourself for living in a world shaped by these eruptions, this is a book you must make part of your life. I cannot recommend it too highly — though it should perhaps be taken in small doses at first. It’s a high mountain to climb, but the views from the top are unsurpassed.
Karl Marx: The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon
Although most Americans know little or nothing about him, Napoleon III casts a long shadow in world history. A great-nephew of Napoleon I, for most of his early life Louis Napoleon Bonaparte was a marginal character. But when the revolution of 1848 overthrew the ‘bourgeois monarchy’ of King Louis Philippe (son of the Duke of Orleans whose portrayal by Carlyle is one of the highlights of The French Revolution), Bonaparte emerged from relative obscurity to reprise his great uncle’s role of overthrowing a republic from within. His name recognition enabled him to win support from the half educated peasants, but his lack of legitimacy forced him into a combination of theatrical politics and police state tactics. Marx’s analysis of the forces shaping French society and French politics at this critical time is gripping. This may seem like ancient history of a far away country in an obscure time, but the forces that shaped French history then are clearly at work in countries like Thailand today. For an alternative vision of the same events, try Walter Bagehot’s brilliant Letters on the French Coup D’Etat. (Available in this edition of his collected works.) Bagehot was one of the most influential thinkers and journalists of Victorian Britain and his books on finance and the British political system are still consulted today; to read Marx and Bagehot on Louis Napoleon is an excellent way to begin to think through the problems of illiberal democracy that are going to cause a lot of trouble in coming years.