The Age of Certainty Is Over, and There Are Fewer and Fewer Voices of Reason | QDaily's Annual Book Recommendations, No. 8

At a time like this, we especially need to value the voices of intellectuals.

A year has passed, and China and the world, society and the state, the economy and our own lives have all been at the mercy of huge questions. In the middle of that shock, the disappearance of intellectual voices — or their drowning in the noise — has only deepened our confusion. Or perhaps a turning point is about to appear. In any era, wise thinking is scarce, and people of insight are what allow us to see the road ahead.

That is why our “2018 Annual Book Recommendations” aims to introduce, as broadly and diversely as we can, some books we think are worth reading.

As in past years, every book that came within our view has been read by our editorial staff, who introduce them to readers in good faith.

We have also drawn on the help of guest writers, who are always ahead of the curve and whose insights run deeper. Our thanks to them all.

This is the fourth installment in our nonfiction book recommendation series, on the anxieties and predicaments of our era. The author, Liu Zhizhen, is an editor at QDaily.

1.

“I hope that some day we may choose a president who is really a businessman,” Rockefeller sighed when Woodrow Wilson was elected. In November 2016, his wish came true.

It has turned out terribly.

Much as many people have argued, a businessman prizes interests and weighs gains and losses in terms of interests. The good side of that is a belief that if interests are allocated well, the world will move toward its best outcome. The bad side is that politics runs on an entirely different calculus.

Raymond Aron said: “To suppose that people would sacrifice what they love for the sake of interest would be to deny everything our century has taught us.” Aron said this against the backdrop of Algeria's independence movement. When Tony Judt quoted the line in 2002, he was warning people after 9/11 that they had to learn how to “forget” — if Palestinians remember only expulsion, land use, and economic exploitation, and Israel remembers only the siege by the Arab world, then peace in the Middle East will never arrive, and the tragedy of 9/11 will happen again. Traumatic memory belongs to no country alone; if a conflict is to be resolved, “forgetting,” or compromise, may be the only way out. This is the lesson the 20th century ought to have left us.

People do not sacrifice what they love for the sake of interest. The Arabs of Algeria undoubtedly lived better under French rule than they have under the native despotisms that replaced it. The same can be said of many former British colonies. But whether life in a given place is good or bad is not measured only by local income levels, life expectancy, or even safety.

This is a lesson Trump the businessman may not grasp.

Jennifer Homans edited Tony Judt's last book, When the Facts Change, a collection of the essays and lectures he published in his final years. Homans was his widow. In her introduction she lists the many companions who filled Tony's vast, deep world of thought: Keynes, Isaiah Berlin, Raymond Aron, A.J.P. Taylor, Bernard Williams, Alexander Pope, Philip Larkin, Jean Renoir, Vittorio De Sica, Karl Marx, the Marx Brothers, Orson Welles. “The men Tony felt closest to were Camus and Orwell,” Homans writes. “Tony didn't really have heroes of his own, but many people who had already died kept him company — some he had known, others he knew only through books.”

All of them are dead.

We have to look again at how our grandparents' generation answered comparable challenges and threats. European social democracy, and America's New Deal and “Great Society,” were both explicit responses to the insecurity and inequality of their time. In today's Western world, few old people are left who know what it means to watch the world collapse in front of them. We can hardly imagine liberal institutions collapsing altogether, or the democratic consensus dissolving completely — yet it was exactly that kind of collapse that set off the debate between Keynes and Hayek, out of which came the Keynesian consensus and the social-democratic compromise. We grew up inside that consensus and that compromise, and today their appeal has been obscured by their own success.

Globalization was one of the great successes humanity achieved in the second half of the 20th century. Now it is attacked from every side: the problems it had papered over have burst out since it stumbled, shaking some of the basic systems of belief in universal values, and new, intractable questions seem to spring from it as well. Solving them falls to the two great powers that gained most from globalization — except that one happens to have just installed a president who made his career as a businessman and wants the world to enter the allocation of interests as he understands it, while the other is only now stepping out of an old era, uneasy in its new, weightier role and without a way to manage its relationship with the world. As if overnight, the world has slipped back into an age of mercantilism.

Tony Judt has been dead for almost nine years. The “old people who know what it means to watch the world collapse in front of them” are not only few — there is barely any consensus left among them either. There are fewer and fewer voices of reason, and the world moves closer to the terrifying reality that “the 20th century was lived in vain.” This is the largest predicament of our time.

2.

In one country, people suddenly stop dying; death no longer plays its central role in human life. At first people are overjoyed, but soon every sort of metaphysical, political, and practical “embarrassment” returns to their world. The Catholic Church realizes that “without death there is no resurrection, and without resurrection there is no Church.” Families with the old and the frail realize that only death can free them from a lifetime of caregiving. A small criminal outfit appears, smuggling the old and the sick across the border into a neighboring country (where death can still be chosen).

The prime minister warns the monarch: “If we no longer die, we have no future.”

Ivan Krastev thinks the Western experience of globalization is “somewhat like” the “frivolous fantasy of immortality” in José Saramago's novel Death with Interruptions.

This is a nightmare that came out of nowhere. Only a few years ago, many people in the West still tended to see the opening of the world as the end of all trouble. That enthusiasm is gone. Instead we are watching a worldwide revolt against the “post-1989” progressive liberal order — an order defined by open borders for people, capital, goods, and ideas — and this worldwide revolt now takes the form of democracy rising up against liberalism. …… A recent study finds that the paradoxical effect of democracy's spread in the non-Western world is that “citizens of some ostensibly consolidated democracies in North America and Western Europe have not only begun to criticize their political leaders harshly, but have also grown more cynical about the value of democracy as a political system itself; they are less willing to do anything that might affect public policy, and more willing to voice support for authoritarian alternatives.” The study also finds that “the younger generation cares less about the importance of democracy” and is “less willing to take part in politics.”

The Great Regression includes Ivan Krastev's essay “The Majoritarian Future.” The essays in it are a collective act of thinking by European intellectuals — after Trump's election as US president, Britain's announcement that it would leave the EU, and Europe's slide into populism, the rise of the far right, and the migration crisis.

Globalization — this “frivolous fantasy of immortality” — is a central subject of that collective thinking, and in a sense its only subject. Twenty years have passed since anti-globalization first showed its colors in Seattle in 1999, and what was once a marginal, left-leaning current has become a mainstream problem. In his 2008 speech accepting the Hannah Arendt Prize, Tony Judt warned:

The promise of a new American century looks far from certain. First of all, we have been through a time like this before. That the logic of economic efficiency will inevitably sweep everything before it is the founding article of faith of globalization's prophets (a classic 19th-century fallacy). But at the peak of the last great age of globalization — on the eve of the First World War — the logic of economic efficiency really did seem to be sweeping everything before it, and many observers then likewise predicted the decline of the nation-state and the coming age of international economic integration. What actually happened was, of course, not what people expected: not until the mid-1970s did the level of international trade, transport, and mobility again reach what it had been in 1913. Sudden events in domestic politics can overturn the “laws” of international economic behavior, and they may do the same again now. Capitalism's reach really is global, but its forms in different places have always been varied, and they still are. That is because economic activity shapes national institutions and legal norms, and national institutions and legal norms in turn shape economic activity; economic activity is rooted deep in entirely different national and moral cultures.

Twenty years ago the debate still turned on globalization's exploitation and the losses of the working class. Now the challenge comes at the level of the system itself: did global decline and poverty begin with globalization? Financial capitalism took most of the gains from globalization — is it inevitable that what it leaves the middle class is falling incomes? The United States and China are the acknowledged biggest winners from globalization, yet America's cities, its middle class, and its wealth gap have proven just as unable to escape decline. What is being questioned now is not only globalization but the entire value system of Western commercial civilization on which globalization depends for its survival.

As Tony Judt put it, “economic activity shapes national institutions and legal norms, and national institutions and legal norms in turn shape economic activity; economic activity is rooted deep in entirely different national and moral cultures” — and if the 20th century is not to have been “lived in vain,” the continued thinking of intellectuals deserves our attention.

3.

It is the same question again: everything we now take pride in, or are troubled by, is a new question. Trying to find the answer in history is futile.

The modern city we take for granted, for example, grew out of the concentration of the factors of production after the Industrial Revolution; it is not simply an inheritance from the market towns that had existed since the Middle Ages. But when those factors change — the most typical case being the shift from a gathering of producers to a city of consumers, the arrival of what David Harvey called the “Keynesian city” — and blue-collar workers, the middle class formed from Britain's industrial belt to New York, Chicago, and Detroit in the United States, fall into trouble, what then?

One marker of the urban middle class is private homeownership. When jobs and homes end up in different places, the classical liberal belief that a mobile supply of labor maximizes labor's value in the job market runs into trouble too. A man with property has a settled heart, as the saying goes — but when blue-collar jobs vanish, are there enough modern service-sector jobs to take their place? Is every blue-collar worker, and every one of their children, able to compete for work in the modern service economy? When these conditions change, what then?

Hillbilly Elegy is said to explain how Trump won votes in the Rust Belt. J.D. Vance tells the story of three generations of tragedy in Middletown, the place where he grew up.

The house becomes a tragedy:

From Jimmy Carter's Community Reinvestment Act to George W. Bush's “ownership society,” federal housing policy has always encouraged people to own their own homes. But in a place like Middletown, owning a home comes at too high a social cost: as jobs in an area disappear, falling property values trap people in a community they cannot pull themselves out of. Even if you want to move away, it is hard to manage, because the market has long since hit bottom — your house has its price, but nobody is willing to pay it. The cost of moving is so high that many people have no choice but to stay put. And of course, the people who get trapped tend to be the poorest, because everyone who could afford to leave left long ago.

The welfare system has also become a source of perverse rewards — one reason the working class abandoned the Democratic Party:

Political scientists have already spent endless words trying to explain why the people of Appalachia and the South went, in less than a generation, from firmly supporting the Democratic Party to firmly supporting the Republicans. Some blame race relations and the Democratic Party's support for the civil rights movement. Others point to the region's religious faith and evangelicalism's grip on social conservatism. Many of these explanations rest on facts a great many working-class white people saw for themselves — the same thing I saw at Dillman's grocery store. As far back as the 1970s, working-class whites began supporting Richard Nixon, because they shared an impression that, as one person put it, the government was “paying people to sit around! These people are laughing at our society! And those of us who work hard every day are the ones getting laughed at!”

In The Great Regression, Nancy Fraser's essay “Progressive Neoliberalism versus Reactionary Populism: A Hobson's Choice” finds the source of J.D. Vance's Middletown tragedy in top-level design and a much longer history:

Progressive neoliberalism developed in the United States over roughly thirty years and won recognition with Bill Clinton's election in 1992. Clinton was the chief architect and leader of America's “New Democrats” — which can be seen as the American version of the New Labour once led by former British Prime Minister Tony Blair. To replace the “New Deal coalition” built out of manufacturing unions, African Americans, and the urban middle class, he assembled a new coalition of entrepreneurs, suburbanites, new social movements, and the young, all of whom proclaimed their modern, progressive good intentions by embracing diversity, multiculturalism, and women's rights. Yet even while endorsing these progressive ideas, the Clinton administration never forgot to court Wall Street. Handing the US economy over to the Goldmanite Democrats, lifting government regulation of the banking system, and negotiating free-trade agreements that sped up deindustrialization — all of this left the American Midwest's “Rust Belt” cast aside, once the stronghold of New Deal social democracy, now the region that handed the Electoral College to Donald Trump. Runaway financialization, spreading step by step over the past twenty years, has dealt this region — and the South's new industrial centers — a heavy blow. Clinton's policies were carried on by his successors, Obama included, and living conditions for working people, especially those in industrial production, kept getting worse. In short: weakened unions, falling real wages, more contingent work, and the rise of the “dual-income family” in place of the abolished family wage — Clintonism bears heavy responsibility for all of it.

That we face new problems does not mean we cannot inherit the wisdom of those who came before us, or their ability to get hold of a problem. On this point at least, intellectuals show us where the threads can be traced, and we can draw something from that.

In his last years Tony Judt kept returning to the question of Israel. He had been a Zionist in the 1960s who took part himself in building an Israeli commune; by his later years, his reflections on Israel led him to see how closely Israel's problems resembled those the United States faced after 9/11, and that once Americans entered Israel's way of thinking too, the damage to the world would be plain.

In The Great Regression, Eva Illouz uses Israel as her case to tell us about “the crisis of populism, or of the liberal elite” — why Trump won the election, why populism took hold in the Rust Belt, and how liberals, retreating step by step, have squandered the great lessons of the 20th century and the spirit of reason that runs from the Enlightenment onward.

At the founding of the state of Israel, Jews from Arab countries were sorted by the Zionist establishment into a single, unified category — Mizrahi Jews — and given an identity entirely different from that of the Jews who had come from Western and Eastern Europe, the Ashkenazi Jews. To be exact, from the start Mizrahi Jews held a status resembling that of “France's Maghrebi labor force, Britain's colonial populations, Germany's Turks” (and perhaps China's “migrant workers” as well).

Although Mizrahi Jews were somewhat more Westernized in their secularism and their grasp of modern civilization, their relatively low political status still sealed their fate of being overlooked.

So when Menachem Begin, leader of the right-wing Revisionist movement, took in the Mizrahi Jews, they no longer belonged to Labor. This was the beginning of Israel's long slide down the road of populism. As Eva Illouz puts it: “This is the big bang of Israeli politics; from it we can trace the birth of populist politics, the irreversible collapse of the left, and the turn to ethnic and racial identity politics. By accepting Mizrahi Jews as Jews, Begin then offered them what the left could not: equality with Ashkenazi Jews on the basis of Jewishness itself.”

Later the Mizrahi Jews founded their own ultra-Orthodox religious party — the fundamentalist Shas. The irony is that “Mizrahi fundamentalism had not yet taken shape before they arrived in Israel.”

Shas became the only party organizing the working class. Through a large network of charitable institutions, it fed hungry children, helped poor families, and ran religious education. In short, it went where the state and the left had never been. This is why Shas was able to change the values of Mizrahi Jews: many of them came from modern cities and had gone through a process of secularization, but through Shas and Likud they retreated into a backward-looking, fundamentalist politics.

And what was the left busy with at the time? “Academia and the intellectuals completely ignored or completely denied the plight of the Mizrahi Jews; they fought mainly for women and gay people (and even for the Arab minority they were not especially prominent).”

Eva Illouz says this is a dispiriting example: “Such an enormous class and ethnic conflict sits at the center of Israeli history, yet it has been ignored to the greatest possible degree — and it is exactly what drives all of Israeli politics from behind.”

What does it tell us?

Right-wing populism flourishes because the world of the working class has not only been destroyed by capitalism as a whole, but also disparaged by the culturally progressive elite — since the 1980s, the intellectual and political energy of that elite has been concentrated only on gender and cultural minorities. Once the working-class world has been ignored and broken, it can be repaired by promising back the racial, religious, and ethnic privileges it has lost. Trump's win ought to wake up the left worldwide. However polarized the separate worlds of the cultural elite and the conservative working class have become, the left must throw everything it has into rebuilding a moral life-world — one that has already been torn to shreds by the ripple effects of colonialism and capitalism. If it does not, then in the long run liberalism is probably doomed.

What happens next? Hasn't enough happened already? In his essay “Overcoming the Fear of Freedom,” Paul Mason recalls the Germany of the 1920s and 1930s as Erich Fromm saw it.

Fromm concluded that it was driven not only by discontent brought on by the economy, but by a “fear of freedom.” The authoritarian thinking present among Germany's petit bourgeoisie and some workers at the time led them to answer their own powerlessness with a “longing to be controlled.” Although labor organizations and the liberal, Catholic bourgeoisie resisted Nazism strongly, that resistance in the end collapsed. The reasons were, first, a state of “inner exhaustion and a wish to give up”; second, the objective legacy of the defeats German workers suffered between 1919 and 1923; and last, the fact that from about 1930 on, the ideology of resistance had been used up.

4.

None of this is scaremongering.

The contest between Europe and the United States ended in an American victory. At bottom it was a contest between what Europeans took to be their own rationalist European spirit, born in the Enlightenment, and a capitalist, instrumental America. Seen from the outside, as we see it, Europe and America are one and the same. But Europeans would rather trust Lenin's Soviet Russia than let down their guard against capitalist America.

In Reappraisals, Tony Judt quotes Raymond Aron on how Marxism's appeal to European intellectuals came out of the Enlightenment and the classical liberal tradition: “The Marxist project, like the earlier socialist dreams it transplanted and absorbed, is one link in the chain of the great progressive narratives of our era: it shares the view of classical liberalism — its complementary historical twin — and gives an optimistic, rationalist account of modern society and its possibilities for development. Marxism's obvious twist — the claim that the ideal society to come would be a classless one, the product of economic processes and social upheaval after capitalism — was already hard to believe by 1920. But the social movements produced under the influence of Marx's original analysis went on being talked about and acted upon for decades, as if they still believed in that project of transformation.”

In another book, Past Imperfect, Tony Judt goes further into why, in the 1960s, when the Gulag and the Great Purge were already known to the world, Soviet Russia still attracted radical European intellectuals.

From the beginning it was intoxicated with a romantic image of itself, while claiming to be rooted in the classical, rationalist cause of progress familiar in French thought and politics. The Stalinists' arrogant claim that they would “change human nature” not only tied the Soviet cause tightly to the path of the European Enlightenment, but drew sympathy through the sheer perversity of its grandeur. This was a country genuinely built by Prometheus. And so, even if the Soviet vision of the future was not the best one on offer, it held an allure through its ambition, at least in the eyes of the disillusioned intellectuals of postwar Western Europe. Strangely, intellectuals instinctively understood that although the revolution of 1917 called itself a “workers' revolution,” in essence it was an “intellectuals' revolution,” and showed it more plainly than the revolutions of 1848 had. The reasons Lenin, Trotsky, or Stalin gave for seizing and holding power appealed most strongly — and genuinely made sense — to those intellectuals, in Russia and elsewhere, who were steeped in the radical French intellectual tradition that began in the late 18th century. For mid-20th-century intellectuals, the century's already-broken promises no longer held any appeal, and communism stood for the only remaining hope of re-enchanting the world. It helps a great deal to understand that modern socialist thought took its style and content from the early-19th-century struggle with liberalism over the legacy of the French Revolution, because on this very question, as socialism once again finds itself in struggle with the lingering illusions of liberal thought, the two — as “mutually hostile brothers” — know each other well enough to strike exactly at the other's weak points.

This is the biggest difference between Europe and America. While European intellectuals struggled over where the Enlightenment should go next, instrumental Americans, after two world wars, turned themselves into a beacon nation through global trade.

Anyone who believes in universal values naturally believes that all these great achievements came out of liberalism's practice since the 18th century. “Four broad ideas guide the practice of liberalism and pull the story of liberalism together into one: an acknowledgment that ethical and material conflict in society is unavoidable, distrust of power, confidence in human progress, and respect for people.”

True enough.

But as European intellectuals scornfully pointed out, what really made America attractive was probably not this great Enlightenment tradition, but simply “being rich.”

The real message America has always sent the world is economic abundance, not liberty. America has a huge middle class — the first society in world history in which the distribution of wealth is shaped like neither a pyramid nor a tree. As a “people of plenty,” Americans could afford the expensive housing pattern of the metropolitan fringe and low-density homes.

Crabgrass Frontier quotes this insight from David Potter. Whether it is the sharpest insight available matters less than the question it leads to, which may be crueler still.

Namely: when America is no longer rich, will it still have the power of a beacon of liberty?

Europe's defeat in the contest with America — settled, in fact, by the start of the last century, and beyond dispute by the 1980s — carries a real tragedy, and it is not that Europe grew poor. It is that America's instrumental, utilitarian standard of value became almost the only standard. In the past we wrongly tied the glorious traditions of liberalism, the Enlightenment, and rationalism to the self-satisfaction of wealth.

But as America declines, these great traditions are being called into question along with it.

What may really worry European intellectuals is that American-style success, at bottom, recognizes and submits to economic rise in any form — whether it comes from authoritarianism, from colonial-style plunder within a country, or from squeezing ordinary people. The world faces a new and nameless behemoth, and there is no force left to hold it in check.

The long contest between Europe and America, and its long, slow ending, may have left behind exactly this.

It is worth going back once more to Fromm's worry at the end of the previous section.

5.

There are two parables.

One comes from Kafka:

From far away came the sound of a horn. I asked my servant what it meant. He knew nothing and had heard nothing. At the gate he stopped me and asked: “Master, where are you going?” “I don't know,” I said. “Only away from here, only away from here. Only by going away from here, only that way, can I reach my goal.” “So you know your goal?” he asked. “Yes,” I answered him, “didn't I just say so — away from here. That is my goal.”

The other comes from Hobsbawm:

We face the third millennium in the spirit of the unnamed Irishman who, asked how to get to Ballynahinch, thought it over for a moment and then answered: “If I were you, I wouldn't start from here.”

This predicament, after several decades in the one case and a dozen or so years in the other, has become the truest picture of the age we live in.

Hobsbawm sums up his own parable: and yet, here is exactly where we start.

On October 19, 2009, in his last lecture, Tony Judt reminded us to face the world squarely.

We too have lived through an age of stability and certainty; we too once held the illusion that the economy would grow indefinitely — and all of that is now past. For the foreseeable future we will be insecure economically and uncertain culturally. We really do have less confidence than at any time since the Second World War in our collective purpose, in the well-being of our environment, or in our personal safety. We do not know what kind of world our children will inherit, but we can no longer fool ourselves into assuming that the reassuring parts of our world will carry over into theirs.

In his speech accepting the Hannah Arendt Prize, Tony Judt called Arendt “a destroyer of people's peace of mind.” He thought this was her finest quality. It should also be the shared finest quality of Tony Judt and of every intellectual who faces problems head-on, does not hide what is on their mind, and has the courage to tell the world: something is wrong right now.

The first time I read Eichmann in Jerusalem I didn't like it; I was a hot-blooded socialist and Zionist at the time, and Arendt's conclusions in the book made me very uneasy. But in all the years since, I have come to recognize that Arendt's finest qualities are all on display in that book: facing painful questions head-on and looking for solutions; refusing to echo the official line; stirring up argument not only among her critics but among her friends as well; and most important of all, challenging widely accepted ideas, so that people can no longer accept them with an easy conscience.

The cover image is of Tony Judt, Photograph: Gina LeVay/Redux/Eyevine; the banner image is from pxhere.