Thoughts on the Decay of American Political Institutions via Francis Fukuyama

Anyone who know and cares about the American political system should read "The Decay of American Political Institutions" by Francis Fukuyama published in The American Interest. That our political process has become dysfunctional in many arenas is widely accepted by both the general public and those who contemplate these issues. Fukuyama's article addresses the problems that he believes lie at the root of our malaise. The blame goes to both the Left and the Right. On one hand, we have de-politicized too much of our decision-making and turned these decisions over to the courts. Good for us lawyers, but not for effective, responsive government. Another problem arises from legalized bribery. Not the quid pro quo that we think of as traditional bribery, but the gift-giving norm taken to excessive heights. Money corrupts our system in new and inventive ways. 

Read the Fukuyama article for details. His conclusion is downbeat: we're trapped in a bad equilibrium that is perhaps endemic to democracy. However, I think that we can improve. We made significant changes in our political system during the Progressive Era, although not all of them have worked as intended, such as the California referendum fiascoes. I'm supporting Root Strikers (led by Lawrence Lessig) and Represent Us, both grass-roots efforts to limit the corruption caused by money flooding through our political system. A cure all? Of course not, but it could help, and it's worth the try. In any event, if you care about our political system and how it's broken, Fukuyama's article is a good place to start.

Dante in Love by A.N. Wilson

Along with Shakespeare, Dante is the greatest literary figure in the Western tradition. In an awards contest, I'd give Dante the award for the greatest single work, while Shakespeare would receive the award for the greatest lifetime body of work. Such conjectures and contests are always a bit of a silly exercise. Both are great. But Dante, even more than Shakespeare, is daunting. Shakespeare wrote at the end of the Northern Renaissance and therefore helps lay the very foundations of our modernity. Dante wrote at the apex of the Middle Ages, when Pope Boniface VIII faced off with Phillip the Fair, king of France, over the competing claims of Church and State in the medieval world. (My thanks to the late Professor Ralph Giesey and to TA Nancy Neefie for introducing me to medieval history in my first weeks as a freshman in my Western Civ class.)

Dante, St. Thomas Aquinas, and the great Gothic cathedrals loom as the great cultural icons of the Middle Ages. However, despite some interest in the Middle Ages, and a pretty good introduction to the high points of the Western tradition, I didn't approach Dante until my mid-30s, when I decided that this was a seminal work that I should engage. I thought—rightly so—that it requires a degree of maturity to appreciate. (I hope that for me, however, that it did not mark midway on my life’s journey!) Reading Dante is not easy. References to contemporary Italian politics, as well as Classical and Biblical figures, abound. The work is one of poetry, so we have the rich metaphors and other figures of speech that challenge those of us who live in our prosaic world. I don't recall what translation I read, but the experience proved worthwhile. I've been reading Dante and his commentators ever since. I now can add A.N. Wilson's Dante in Love to the list of fellow Dante readers—nay, enthusiasts—who have found the effort of the Commedia intriguing and enlightening. 

Wilson emphasizes that he is not a Dante scholar, but he's been reading and appreciating Dante since his late teens, and so he's a fellow enthusiast who also happens to be an experienced and talented writer of biography, history, and fiction. Wilson writes that he intends his book to serve as an introduction and appreciation of Dante’s life and works in all their complexity. He intends to provide a guide for others like him who aren’t scholars, but interested readers. He succeeds in his intention. This book is the best single volume appreciation of Dante and his masterwork (and some of his lesser works) that I've encountered. His title references his central premise: Dante is the poet and philosopher of love in all its manifestations. 

Love is the central trope of Dante’s work. Love, for Dante, can be quite worldly, following the cultural lead of the troubadours, or quite ethereal, as we see with Beatrice, the idealized neighbor from his youth. Or it can be the Lady in the Window, the personification of philosophy. (Wilson speculates that perhaps Dante’s wife Gemma, whom Dante never names in his work, is the Lady in the Window.) However, in addition to his love poetry, Dante is a political actor, and it’s his political connections that lead to his exile from Florence. The treachery and confusion of Italian politics didn’t begin with the fellow Florentine Machiavelli and the Renaissance; the turmoil was rampant in Dante’s time, with Popes, Emperors, and city-states vying for political supremacy. Thus, to understand Dante, one must attempt grasp both human and divine love as well as Italian politics. It can seem daunting, but Wilson’s book helps answer the challenge.  

We can—and perhaps should—spend a lifetime reading and studying Dante. We could do much worse with our time. But whether you’re making a passing acquaintance or you decide to dive in headfirst, Wilson can serve as a personal Virgil to help you along the way. Indeed, as Wilson is quick to point out, there are many such guides, but his may have the widest scope and easiest access of any that I’ve encountered. 

Pick up Dante, read, and remember that you’re trying to understand “the Love that moves the sun and other stars”.

A Time for Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor

In December 1933, a young Brit picked up a freighter to Holland from London to begin a walk across Europe to Constantinople (Istanbul). He'd knocked about in school, never quite fitting into to the routine, although clever and widely read. He held no express goal for this journey except to complete it. After a brief stint traversing Holland, he crossed into Germany and began trekking up the Rhine Valley. After achieving southern Germany, he turned east, picking up the Danube, following the river’s course into Czechoslovakia. He concludes this portion of his journey at a bridge crossing from Czechoslovakia into Hungary. It will take him until January 1935 to reach his goal of Constantinople and a lifetime to complete the three volumes that recount his journey. The final installment, The Broken Road: From the Iron Gates to Mount Athos won’t be published in the U.S. until March 2014.

Three traits make this book so impressive. The journey across Europe, poised roughly midway between its two great 20th century cataclysms, puts the reader in a time machine with young “Paddy”. Fermor begins his youthful journey in the year that Hitler came to power, and he encounters Brown Shirts in beer halls and an exuberant thug who’s sloughed off his Communist trappings—physical and mental— to dive headlong into the Nazi movement. As Fermor journeys forward towards his destination, he moves backward in time. He sleeps under the open stars, in barns, in taverns, in hostels, in homes, and in castles. Fermor's youth and charm seem to provide an open sesame to ordinary folk, to the middle class, and to the fading aristocracy. He develops a web of connections among the well-to-do that opens doors as he travels into the next town or castle. He moves from pauper to prince and back with elegant ease. He deftly portrays the characters and scenes that he encounters, often providing digressions on history, flora and fauna, and landscape as he makes his way. A brief side journey to Prague elicits a short foray into the Defenestration of Prague. 

The second factor that adds luster to this work arises from the fact that he wrote this first installment over 40 years after his journey. Invited to write a magazine article about the virtues of walking, Fermor instead wrote this book (published in 1977). Thus, except from some brief excerpts taken directly from his journal, we have the work of a mature, worldly, and erudite man reconstructing his adventures as a very young man. The exuberance of youth mixes with the perspective of age, although the narrative is uninterrupted and of a single voice. We meet two selves speaking through one voice.  

Finally, Fermor's prose exceeds poetry in its beauty and grace. Fermor's work supports my contention that prose can exceed poetry in its beauty, fueled by more extended metaphors, descriptions, and narratives—if penned by the hand of a master such as Fermor. Poetry mimics music in its fleeting melody and open suggestions. Prose, like painting, is more plastic and invites detailed consideration, revealing nuances of meaning as the text retards time of allow a deeper contemplation of the scene created. Others, like William Dalrymple, praise Fermor as one ofthe great English prose-stylists. I concur. Fermor paints verbal portraits and landscapes that rival a Turner or Constable in beauty. 

My brief review does not indicate a lack of merit or enthusiasm for this book; quite the opposite, my ability is inadequate to do real justice to this gem. I’ll leave you with a quote from a passage of the book to provide you a better representation of what Fermor accomplishes with his prose. The setting is at the end of the book, as Fermor stands on the bridge over the Danube between Czechoslovakia and Hungary on Holy Saturday evening: 

I too heard the change in the bells and the croaking and the solitary owl’s note. But it was getting too dim to descry a figure, let alone a struck match, at the windows of the Archbishopric. A little earlier, sunset had kindled them as if the Palace were on fire. Now the sulphur, the crocus, the bright pink and the crimson had left the panes and drained away from the touzled but still unmoving cirrus they had reflected. But the river, paler still by contrast with the sombre merging of the woods , had lightened to a milky hue . A jade-green radiance had not yet abandoned the sky. The air itself, the branches, the flag-leaves, the willow -herb and the rushes were held for a space, before the unifying shadows should dissolve them, in a vernal and marvellous light like the bloom on a greengage. Low on the flood and almost immaterialized by this luminous moment, a heron sculled upstream, detectable mainly by sound and by the darker and slowly dissolving rings that the tips of its flight-feathers left on the water. A collusion of shadows had begun and soon only the lighter colour of the river would survive. Downstream in the dark, meanwhile, there was no hint of the full moon that would transform the scene later on. No-one else was left on the bridge and the few on the quay were all hastening the same way. Prised loose from the balustrade at last by a more compelling note from the belfries, I hastened to follow. I didn’t want to be late.

TO BE CONTINUED

Fermor, Patrick Leigh (2010-10-10). A Time of Gifts (Kindle Locations 4710-4721). John Murray. Kindle Edition.

And continue I shall with Between the Woods and the Water: On Foot to Constantinople from the Middle Danube to the Iron Gates, the next installment. As a little added bonus, I’m very much looking forward to hearing his biographer, Artemis Cooper, speak @ #JLF about her Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure published in 2013.

Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth by Reza Aslan

One of my favorite tracks on The Bells of Dublin album by the Chieftains is “The Rebel Jesus” performed with Jackson Browne, the composer of the song. The song doesn’t celebrate the usual pieties of Christmas: the Prince of Peace, our Savior Sweet and Mild. Instead, it celebrates a different view of Jesus, one that the Gospel accounts hint at but don’t explicate. Jesus was a radical in politics, economics, and religion. I thought of this song as I read Reza Aslan’s Zealot. The song could serve as the theme song for the book. (Too bad only movies get theme songs; it could prove an interesting exercise for books.) 

Aslan’s thesis is straightforward: Jesus was out to overturn the Roman rule of Palestine and to overturn those Jews—primarily those in the cities and the priestly class—who corroborated with the Romans. Aslan begins by providing a detailed description of the political economy of Palestine around the time of Jesus. The picture is not a pretty one. The Romans ruled Palestine (Judea, Galilee, and the surrounding lands) with sword, fire, and crucifixion. They did so through the corroboration of those who controlled the Temple in Jerusalem. The result is one of the oldest and most common stories in history: the wealthy elites in the cities extract wealth from the countryside by force. As the countryside becomes impoverished, increasingly destitute peasants flood into the cities, desperate and poor. Those who lived in a small village like Nazareth in Galilee would have felt the weight of oppression imposed upon them by “the rich”. It was from this milieu that Jesus—and many other would-be messiahs and rebels—emerged. No one succeeded in overthrowing the Romans, and finally the Romans destroyed Jerusalem in 70 C.E., when a Jewish rebellion went too far in Roman eyes.

Aslan’s thesis is not new or especially unique. He’s not a Biblical scholar, but he has done his homework. He especially acknowledges the work of John Meir (Catholic priest and Biblical scholar), whose four-volume work, A Marginal Jew, explores the world of  Jesus and the nature of his mission as best as history can reconstruct it. And this is the problem: the writers of the four canonical Gospels did not write history. They wrote to establish grounds for faith well after Jesus’ death. Those seeking to look behind the curtain, starting back in the nineteenth century, have had to search other sources and speculate (as logically and coherently as possible) about the history (not Good News) of Jesus. Aslan brings this search up to date in a readily accessible work that assumes no Biblical scholarship on the part of the reader.

The book was a pleasant surprise for me. I thought that historical scholarship focused on the idea that Jesus was primarily concerned with the end time, the eschatological vision inherited primarily from the Book of Daniel and reflected in the Gospels and other NT works. Aslan argues instead that Jesus’ mission, as Jesus experienced it, was primarily one of earthly concerns, such as bringing "the Kingdom of God" into the world in which he lived and walked. Terms like “the Kingdom of God” and “the Son of Man” were as enigmatic then as they are now. What did Jesus mean by these terms? That still isn’t clear, but Aslan argues that these terms didn’t address the end of the world in the physical sense, but they intended to signal a restoration of the Jewish people to their political independence and to their dedication to God.

Aslan also enlightened me about the conflict between Paul and the Apostles in Jerusalem, Peter, John, and James, the brother of Jesus (and known as “the Just” for his considerate treatment of the poor). The Roman destruction of Jerusalem destroyed this apostolic contingent as well as the city itself and its inhabitants. That catastrophic event allowed Paul’s view—a very different view of Jesus and his calling from that held by the Peter, James, and John—to dominate the NT corpus and the theology of the nascent Church. Indeed, the destruction of Jerusalem had a profound effect on both the new Christian movement as well as the whole of Judaism.

I really enjoyed Aslan’s book. It gave me fresh insights into the most important and enigmatic person in Western Civilization. I assume that I’m not the only person who’s pondered the conflicting visions of Jesus found in the Gospels and the remainder of the NT. Did Jesus come to bring peace or a sword? Why did he create such a ruckus in the Temple? And what was the Temple all about with its High Priests and such? Was he against the family? Do we have to sell everything and give it to the poor? I could go on and on. I now know that in the NT we have a collection of writings from different times and places with different perspectives, even different perspectives within what we might otherwise think of as a single work (say a Gospel). It’s not neat and tidy; in fact, as the Jesus Movement becomes Christianity, the story only becomes messier. In the end, we’re far, far away from whatever Jesus said, did, and intended some 2000 years ago. But that’s true of any figure: Socrates, Mohammad, Buddha—take your pick. In the end, I believe that it’s what we do with any legacy—how we apply it now—that really counts. Yet better understanding of how these stories came to be—and how they’ve changed—gives us a new depth that should help guide us. Aslan’s book helps greatly in our quest to better understand the figure of Jesus of Nazareth. 

N.B. Aslan goes to all of the right places: UI Writers Workshop, Hamburg Inn, and the Jaipur Lit Festival. He knows how to pick-em! Looking forward to seeing him again in Jaipur.