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City Journal
The Return of Dependency?
E. J. McMahon
Winter 2004
One of the big successes of the Giuliani years in New York City was welfare reform. When Rudy Giuliani took office as mayor in 1994, more than 1.1 million New Yorkers burdened the welfare rolls. Even before the federal Welfare Reform Act took effect in late 1996, the mayor began to transform New York's welfare program, putting in place a strong new emphasis on work and personal responsibility. The combined results of federal and city efforts were spectacular. From 1994 through 2001, New York's welfare caseload fell roughly 60 percent, an achievement that closely paralleled the city's rollback in crime during the same period. In both cases, Gotham sprinted ahead of national trends.
Unfortunately, the city's welfare rolls have stopped falling. What's more, other forms of public assistance have been steadily rising.
The trouble began once the five-year limit on welfare benefits kicked in at the end of 2001--a year that also marked Giuliani's exit from the mayor's office. As Chart 1 shows, tens of thousands of New York welfare recipients shifted virtually overnight from the federal Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) program to Safety Net Assistance (SNA), a program with no time limit, financed solely by state and city taxpayers. The city's SNA caseload is now larger than its number of TANF recipients. By the fall of 2003, the total number of welfare recipients in the city--the combined TANF and SNA caseloads--had begun rising (albeit slightly) on a yearly basis for the first time since the early 1990s.
While it's still too early to call the increase in the general welfare rolls a definite trend, other forms of public assistance clearly are on the rise. The Medicaid caseload, for example, has ballooned 48 percent in the last three years, so that, by late 2003, nearly 2.4 million New Yorkers (more than one out of every four city residents) were Medicaid recipients (see Chart 2). The number of federal food-stamp recipients in the city has also grown by 120,000 people over the last two years, reaching its highest level since the end of 1999 (see Chart 3). Finally, the city's average homeless-shelter population surged to a record level of more than 38,000 people in 2003--an incredible 81 percent jump from where it stood in the late 1990s (see Chart 4).
What's to blame for these disturbing numbers? The 2001 recession and the World Trade Center attack obviously were factors. But the trends also have a lot to do with deliberate policy choices in city hall and Albany.
Consider welfare reform. Efforts to get more people off public assistance have received zero help lately from Albany, where the State Assembly has rejected Governor Pataki's eminently reasonable proposal to enact tougher sanctions on welfare mothers who refuse to seek work or cooperate with child-support requirements. Nor has the city under Mayor Bloomberg been any tougher. As Heather Mac Donald reported in the Autumn 2003 issue ("Wimping Out on Welfare"), the Bloomberg administration has allowed the work-exemption rate for welfare recipients to rise steadily, and it is fighting federal proposals to toughen work-participation requirements.
Medicaid's growth is largely the outcome of three policy decisions: Giuliani's HealthStat initiative, specifically designed to enroll the uninsured into Medicaid and other government programs; Governor Pataki's Family Health Plus program, which extended a form of Medicaid to families with incomes up to 150 percent of the poverty level; and the post-September 11 "disaster relief Medicaid" outreach effort, which amounted to an express lane for new enrollees.
The upsurge in food-stamp recipients also results from a broader policy shift. Mayor Giuliani treated food stamps as a dependency snare to be discouraged, even though, as a federal program, it didn't directly have an impact on the city budget. The Bloomberg administration, though, supported by both the Pataki and Bush administrations, views food stamps as a necessary and appropriate subsidy for low-wage workers and the non-working disabled. However, Bloomberg has defied the poverty advocates by refusing to seek a waiver of the modest federal work requirement for food stamps.
Then there's the burgeoning homeless-shelter population. The ranks of the homeless swelled only slightly during the last recession and had remained stable for ten years before 2001--a tribute in part to the success of the Giuliani administration's tough-love approach to homelessness, which kept the homeless off the streets but also got them into treatment. To its credit, the Bloomberg administration has sought to continue the Giuliani approach. The city fought and won an important lawsuit giving it the right to hold single homeless-shelter residents to behavioral standards, on pain of eviction. And it has also reached a consent decree with homeless advocates that places some limits on a homeless family's right to turn down apartments indefinitely.
The big bump up in homelessness over the last couple of years is due primarily to an increase in the number of families seeking temporary shelter, at an average cost to taxpayers of $2,900 per family per month. Many of the shelter-seekers, it turns out, are new arrivals in the city, taking advantage of its overly generous temporary-shelter provisions. Over the first ten months of 2002 alone, at least one in six of the new homeless families arriving in emergency shelters had been living outside the city--even outside the country--the month before. New York is thus becoming an apartment-rental agent for immigrants and other newcomers to the city.
Despite these troubling developments, it's crucial to emphasize that the overall problem of dependency in New York remains dramatically better than it was a decade ago, or even five years ago. For example, as shown in Chart 5, the net drop of nearly 138,000 adult welfare recipients since late 1998 has coincided with a net rise of nearly 300,000 people in the city's labor force (those either employed or seeking a job) during the same period, according to preliminary U.S. Department of Labor data. With the national economy beginning to sizzle, the second half of Mayor Bloomberg's current term will be a critical time for reversing New York's troubling new public-assistance trends.
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City Journal
Stagflation Grips Gotham
Steven Malanga
Winter 2004
Politicians often confuse their own bottom line with the larger economy's. As long as tax revenues are growing and fattening the public kitty, everything is just swell to them.
We see a version of this thinking in New York now, as the Bloomberg administration declares that Gotham has turned an economic corner because city tax receipts are racing ahead of expectations, helped by growing profits on Wall Street. But while the Street's recovery--powered by a stock-market surge thanks to the federal government's capital-gains and dividend tax cuts last summer--is welcome news for New York City, Gotham's economy is still struggling, and some portions of it are heading ominously in the wrong direction. That corner that New York has turned may still lead to a dead end.
First some good news: the stock market's 20 percent gain in 2003, combined with cost cutting among firms, has fattened the finance industry's profits, with estimates that the industry earned more than $20 billion last year. That not only has helped bolster corporate tax receipts in New York but has already prompted a 20 percent increase in estimated city withholding-tax payments, much of it no doubt coming from Wall Streeters anticipating higher year-end bonuses.
Outside of Wall Street there has been other good news, too. The city's tourism industry--battered by 9/11--has recovered a bit, adding about 3,000 jobs through the first nine months of 2003, a credit to the Bloomberg administration's commitment to keeping the city's crime rate down. Spurred by low interest rates that boosted residential building, Gotham's construction business is also getting healthy, adding about 1,500 jobs in 2003. In the third quarter, such job gains, combined with rising profits on Wall Street, produced an ever so slight uptick of 0.3 percent in the gross city product, which in turn has spurred headlines declaring the recession over in New York.
But talk of a recovery is premature. The gross city product, for one thing, is not some precise state or federal government statistic, but a rough, inexact index of economic activity, a sort of guesstimate built upon multiple other guesstimates. A minuscule increase in such an imprecise index is inconsequential and no grounds for declaring an end to the recession.
By contrast, what's especially worrisome right now is that many of the city's key industries continue to struggle. The category of business and professional services--which encompasses law, accounting, management consulting, and other professions that define New York as an international center of business expertise--has lost 50,000 jobs since the recession began and continues shedding jobs. And despite the stock market's upturn, the city's finance sector shows no sign of an employment recovery, in what amounts to a replay of the last recession in New York, in the early 1990s. Back then, financial firms registered big profits for nearly two years before they started hiring robustly again, and it took three more years for the firms finally to replace all of the jobs that they'd cut during the recession. The current job numbers suggest that financial firms may not be in a serious hiring mood for some time yet.
Hiring weakness in such key sectors could slow the city's jobs recovery process. At best, what the jobs data show so far is that the rate of city job losses is slowing, but losses have not clearly ended yet. Most significantly, at no time during 2003 did the city record a month with more jobs than in the same month of 2002. By contrast, when the city's last recession ended in 1993, Gotham notched seven months in which its jobs total surpassed the same period a year earlier.
Other key indicators are heading in the wrong direction. Chief among them is inflation. Despite the sluggish economy, prices are rising in the city more rapidly than in the nation. That means that New York--already among the priciest places to live and do business--is growing even costlier than the rest of the nation. Right now, the New York area boasts an unusual distinction: it has among the highest unemployment and inflation rates of any U.S. city, creating the troubling condition known as stagflation, which the national economy hasn't seen since the Carter presidency.
A severe local downturn should be producing the opposite effect, bringing New York's prices more in line with the rest of the nation's and making the city more competitive, as decreased demand pushes prices down. But state and local government have piled on tax increases during the current recession. New York City alone has raised taxes and fees by more than $3 billion, while state tax increases on city residents amount to another $1 billion, meaning that the city's suppliers of goods and services either need to raise prices to pay the taxman, or they must absorb the tax increases, leaving less cash for new hiring and investment--or both.
All of this is also a replay of the last recession, with potentially distressing repercussions. State and local governments enacted hefty tax increases in 1990 and 1991, with the result that inflation rose even amid staggering job losses. It wasn't until 1993 that New York's inflation rate finally sank down to the national level. Only then did the recession end in New York, and it was not until 1994, when the area's inflation rate actually slipped below the nation's and New York regained some measure of competitiveness, that a substantial rebound began.
The city's own forecasters seem worried. Official forecasts call for a gain of a mere 26,000 jobs in 2004, an increase of only 0.7 percent, then another increase of 51,000 jobs, or 1.7 percent, in 2005. In other words, two years from now, by the city's own estimates, New York will have recovered fewer than 40 percent of the jobs it lost in the last recession and will still be 125,000 jobs below the jobs peak of three years ago.
All of this assumes that government won't do more to add to the burden. Mayor Bloomberg has pledged no new tax increases, but city spending is still rising rapidly--much faster than inflation--and without significant concessions from city workers, it will be difficult for New York to pay its bills even with growing tax revenues. Moreover, the state budget is also growing rapidly, and, despite pledges by Albany leaders not to boost levies again, there is talk of raising corporate taxes and fees.
Such actions could push back the city's recovery even further. Absent any unexpected boost to the economy, New York could take far longer truly to turn the corner.
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City Journal
A Federal Program for the Birds
E. Fuller Torrey
Winter 2004
You might not know this, but the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), the federal agency responsible for research on mental illnesses, is the world's leading center for study on how pigeons think--in fact, the agency funded 92 research projects on pigeons from 1972 to 2002. During the same period, by contrast, NIMH funded only one project on postpartum depression, a devastating mental illness that affects women like Andrea Yates, who killed her five children in Texas in 2001.
NIMH clearly has its priorities wrong. Serious mental illnesses like Yates's account for 58 percent of the total costs of mental illnesses in the United States. Yet NIMH is currently spending just a stingy 5.8 percent of its resources on research that could lead to more effective treatment of schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, severe depression, and other serious mental afflictions.
Worse still, a new study from the Treatment Advocacy Center (a group I am affiliated with) shows that the percentage of NIMH research resources devoted to serious mental illnesses actually fell over the past five years, even as the institute's budget doubled from $661 million to $1.3 billion. At the same time, federal costs for the care of seriously mentally ill individuals have been going through the roof; they now total $41 billion yearly and are rocketing upward at a rate of $2.6 billion a year. Expenditures on the mentally ill are a big factor in the surging costs of Medicaid and Medicare.
Even putting aside the fact that men and women with untreated serious mental illnesses make up a third of the homeless population and crowd our jails and prisons, transforming them into our de facto mental institutions, on economic grounds alone, we should be investing heavily in research on the causes and treatment of these diseases. Breakthroughs could save billions of dollars a year.
But NIMH doesn't see it that way. During the past five years, it has funded research on how Papua New Guineans think but refused to pay for a treatment trial for schizophrenia; bankrolled research on self-esteem in college students but nixed funding for research on bipolar disorder in children; and paid for a study on how electric fish communicate but not for research on why some individuals with schizophrenia refuse to take their medication. If NIMH were an individual, a psychiatric assessment would be in order.
The diagnosis would be terminal grandiosity. According to long-standing NIMH culture, the institute's mission concerns mental health--and that means that all forms of human behavior and social problems are legitimate research topics. From NIMH's perspective, mental illness is only a small, and not very interesting, part of its lofty purpose.
Since we can't call a psychiatrist to examine NIMH, we should at least get Congress to take a closer look. Congressional hearings should assess NIMH's priorities and require that a minimum percentage of the institute's budget--50 percent, say--fund research on serious mental illnesses. Furthermore, the General Accounting Office, charged with evaluating federal programs, should also critically examine NIMH's work.
Among many dubious recent NIMH research projects are several on the idea of happiness, including "Cultural Differences in Self-Reports of Well-Being." If the money spent on researching happiness had gone instead toward developing better treatments for depression, the NIMH likely would have added a lot more to the sum of human felicity.
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`Sanctuary' Laws Stand in Justice's Way
Janury 19, 2004
By Heather Mac Donald
Some of the most dangerous thugs preying on immigrant communities in Los Angeles are in this country illegally. Yet the Los Angeles Police Department cannot use the most obvious tool to apprehend them: their immigration status.
Dozens of gang members from Mara Salvatrucha, a ruthless Salvadoran prison gang, for example, have sneaked back into town after having been deported for such crimes as murder, assault with a deadly weapon and drug trafficking. Police officers know who they are and know that their mere presence in the country after deportation is a felony. Yet if an LAPD officer arrests an illegal gangbanger for felonious reentry, it is the officer who will be treated as a criminal for violating an LAPD rule.
That rule, Special Order 40, prohibits officers from questioning or apprehending someone only for an immigration violation or from notifying the immigration service (now known as Immigration and Customs Enforcement) about an illegal alien. Only if the person has been booked for a nonimmigration felony or multiple misdemeanors may officers even inquire about his immigration status.
Such "sanctuary" rules, replicated in cities with a high number of immigrants, are a testament to the political power of immigrant lobbies. "We can't even talk about" illegal alien crime, a frustrated LAPD captain said. "People are afraid of a backlash from Hispanics."
Police commanders may not want to discuss the illegal-alien crisis, but its magnitude for law enforcement is startling: 95% of all outstanding warrants for homicide in Los Angeles (which total more than 1,200) are for illegal aliens, according to officers. Up to two-thirds of all fugitive felony warrants (which total 17,000) are for illegal aliens. The leadership of the Columbia Li'l Cycos gang, which has used murder and racketeering to control the drug market around MacArthur Park, was about 60% illegal aliens in 2002, says a former assistant U.S. attorney who prosecuted them in 2002.
Good luck finding any reference to such facts in "official" crime analysis. The LAPD and the Los Angeles city attorney recently obtained a preliminary injunction against drug trafficking in Hollywood. The injunction targets the 18th Street gang and, as the press release puts it, "non-gang members" who sell drugs in Hollywood on behalf of the gang.
Those nongang members are virtually all illegal Mexicans, smuggled in by the gang. Cops and prosecutors say that they know the immigration status of these nongang "Hollywood dealers," as the city attorney calls them, but the gang injunction is silent on that aspect. If an officer were to arrest a dealer for his immigration status, or even notify immigration authorities, he would face discipline for violation of Special Order 40.
Likewise, although LAPD officers recognize previously deported gang members all the time, they can't touch a deported felon unless he has given them some other reason to stop him. Even then, an officer can arrest him only for the offense not related to immigration. Yet a deported gangbanger who reenters the country is already committing a federal felony -- punishable by up to 20 years.
The city's ban on enforcing immigration crimes puts the community at risk by stripping the police of what may be their only immediate tool to remove a criminal from circulation. Trying to build a case for homicide, say, against an illegal alien gang member is often futile because witnesses fear retaliation. Enforcing an immigration crime would allow the cops to lock up the murderer right now, without putting a witness at risk.
The department's top brass brush off such concerns. No big deal if you see deported gangbangers back on the streets, they say. Just put them under surveillance for "real" crimes and arrest them for those. But surveillance is manpower-intensive. Where there is an immediate ground for arresting a violent felon, it is absurd to demand that the understaffed LAPD ignore it.
The stated reason for sanctuary policies is to encourage crime victims and witnesses who are illegal aliens to cooperate with the police without fear of deportation. This theory has never been tested. In any case, the official rationale could be honored by limiting police use of immigration laws to some subset of violators: say, deported felons whose immigration status police know.
The biggest myth about sanctuary laws is that they are immigrant-friendly. To the contrary: They leave law-abiding immigrants vulnerable to violence. Nor will it do to say that immigration enforcement is solely a federal responsibility. When it comes to fighting terrorism, the LAPD understands that it cannot rely on the feds alone to protect Los Angeles. Similarly, the department should not wait for a few of the 2,000-odd immigration agents, stretched to the breaking point nationwide, to show up and apprehend felons who are terrorizing neighborhoods.
?2004 Los Angeles Times
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City Journal
What Makes a Terrorist?
James Q. Wilson
Winter 2004
Until the nineteenth century, religion was usually the only acceptable justification of terror. It is not hard to understand why: religion gives its true believers an account of the good life and a way of recognizing evil; if you believe that evil in the form of wrong beliefs and mistaken customs weakens or corrupts a life ordained by God, you are under a profound obligation to combat that evil. If you enjoy the companionship of like-minded believers, combating that evil can require that you commit violent, even suicidal, acts.
The Thuggees of India during their several centuries of existence may have killed by slow strangulation 1 million people as sacrifices to the Hindu goddess Kali. The Thugs had no political objective and, when caught, looked forward to their execution as a quick route to paradise.
In the Muslim world, one kind of terrorism, assassination, has existed since shortly after the death of the prophet Muhammad. Of his early successors, three were killed with daggers. The very word "assassin" comes from a group founded by Hasan Ibn al-Sabbah, whose devotees, starting in the eleventh century, spread terror throughout the Muslim world until they were virtually exterminated two centuries later. They killed rival Sunni Muslims, probably in large numbers. Perhaps one-third of all Muslim caliphs have been killed.
The Assassins were perhaps the world's first terrorists in two senses. They did not seek simply to change rulers through murder but to replace a social system by changing an allegedly corrupt Sunni regime into a supposedly ideal Shiite one. Moreover, the Assassins attacked using only daggers, in ways that made their capture and execution, often after gruesome torture, inevitable. Murder was an act of piety, and as Bernard Lewis has suggested, surviving such a mission was often viewed as shameful.
In modern times, killers have taken the lives of the presidents of Syria and of Sri Lanka; two prime ministers each of Iran and India; the presidents of Aden, Afghanistan, and South Yemen; the president-elect of Lebanon and the president of Egypt; and countless judges and political leaders.
But religiously oriented violence has by no means been confined to Islam. In the United States, abortion clinics have been bombed and their doctors shot because, to the perpetrators, the Christian Bible commands it. Jim Jones killed or required the suicide of his own followers at his camp in Guyana, and David Koresh did nothing to prevent the mass death of his followers at Waco. As Blaise Pascal put it, "men never do evil so openly and contentedly as when they do it from religious conviction." Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at the RAND Corporation, found that suicide attacks kill four times as many people per incident as do other forms of terrorism; since September 2000, they have taken about 750 lives--not including the 3,000 who died from the 9/11 suicide attacks. Of course, most religious people have nothing to do with terror, and in the past many important instances of suicide attacks, such as the Kamikaze aircraft sent by the Japanese against American warships, had no religious impulse. Terrorists among the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka were not driven by religion. Today, however, religious belief, and especially a certain interpretation of the Muslim religion, has come to dominate the motives of suicide terrorists, even when religious aspirations do not govern the organizations that recruit them. Some Middle Eastern terrorist groups, such as Fatah, are secular, and some people join even fundamentalist terrorist organizations for non-religious reasons.
Terrorism, however motivated, baffles people, because they cannot imagine doing these things themselves. This bafflement often leads us to assume that terrorists are either mentally deranged or products of a hostile environment.
In a powerful essay, Cynthia Ozick describes "the barbarous Palestinian societal invention": recruiting children to blow themselves up. She argues that these are acts of "anti-instinct," because they are contrary to the drive to live, the product of a grotesque cultural ideal. She is correct to say that this recruitment is not psychopathological, but not quite right to say that it defies instinct. It defies some instincts but is in accord with others.
To explain why people join these different groups, let me make some distinctions. One, suggested by Professor Jerrold Post at George Washington University, is between anarchic ideologues and nationalists.
Anarchist or ideological groups include the Red Army Faction in Germany (popularly known as the Baader-Meinhof gang), the Red Brigades in Italy, and the Weathermen in America. The German government carried out a massive inquiry into the Red Army Faction and some right-wing terrorist groups in the early 1980s. (Since it was done in Germany, you will not be surprised to learn that it was published in four volumes.) The Red Army members were middle-class people, who came, in about 25 percent of the cases, from broken families. Over three-fourths said they had severe conflicts with their parents. About one-third had been convicted in juvenile court. They wanted to denounce "the establishment" and bourgeois society generally, and joined peer groups that led them steadily into more radical actions that in time took over their lives. Italians in the Red Brigades had comparable backgrounds.
Ideological terrorists offer up no clear view of the world they are trying to create. They speak vaguely about bringing people into some new relationship with one another but never tell us what that relationship might be. Their goal is destruction, not creation. To the extent they are Marxists, this vagueness is hardly surprising, since Marx himself never described the world he hoped to create, except with a few glittering but empty generalities.
A further distinction: in Germany, left-wing terrorists, such as the Red Army Faction, were much better educated, had a larger fraction of women as members, and were better organized than were right-wing terrorists. Similar differences have existed in the United States between, say, the Weather Underground and the Aryan Nation. Left-wing terrorists often have a well-rehearsed ideology; right-wing ones are more likely to be pathological.
I am not entirely certain why this difference should exist. One possibility is that right-wing terrorist organizations are looking backward at a world they think has been lost, whereas left-wing ones are looking ahead at a world they hope will arrive. Higher education is useful to those who wish to imagine a future but of little value to those who think they know the past. Leftists get from books and professors a glimpse of the future, and they struggle to create it. Right-wingers base their discontent on a sense of the past, and they work to restore it. To join the Ku Klux Klan or the Aryan Nation, it is only necessary that members suppose that it is good to oppress blacks or Catholics or Jews; to join the Weather Underground, somebody had to teach recruits that bourgeois society is decadent and oppressive.
By contrast, nationalistic and religious terrorists are a very different matter. The fragmentary research that has been done on them makes clear that they are rarely in conflict with their parents; on the contrary, they seek to carry out in extreme ways ideas learned at home. Moreover, they usually have a very good idea of the kind of world they wish to create: it is the world given to them by their religious or nationalistic leaders. These leaders, of course, may completely misrepresent the doctrines they espouse, but the misrepresentation acquires a commanding power.
Marc Sageman at the University of Pennsylvania has analyzed what we know so far about members of al-Qaida. Unlike ideological terrorists, they felt close to their families and described them as intact and caring. They rarely had criminal records; indeed, most were devout Muslims. The great majority were married; many had children. None had any obvious signs of mental disorder. The appeal of al-Qaida was that the group provided a social community that helped them define and resist the decadent values of the West. The appeal of that community seems to have been especially strong to the men who had been sent abroad to study and found themselves alone and underemployed.
A preeminent nationalistic terrorist, Sabri al-Bana (otherwise known as Abu Nidal), was born to a wealthy father in Jaffa, and through his organization, the Fatah Revolutionary Council, also known as the Abu Nidal Organization, sought to destroy Israel and to attack Palestinian leaders who showed any inclination to engage in diplomacy. He was hardly a member of the wretched poor.
Alan B. Krueger and Jitka Maleckova have come to similar conclusions from their analysis of what we know about deceased soldiers in Hezbollah, the Iran-sponsored Shiite fighting group in Lebanon. Compared with the Lebanese population generally, the Hezbollah soldiers were relatively well-to-do and well-educated young males. Neither poor nor uneducated, they were much like Israeli Jews who were members of the "bloc of the faithful" group that tried to blow up the Dome of the Rock mosque in Jerusalem: well paid, well educated, and of course deeply religious.
In Singapore a major terrorist organization is Jemaah Islamiyah. Singaporean psychologists studied 31 of its members and found them normal in most respects. All were male, had average to above-average intelligence, and held jobs ranging from taxi driver to engineer. As with al-Qaida and Hezbollah members, they did not come from unstable families, nor did they display any peculiar desire toward suicidal behavior. Though graduates of secular schools, they attached great importance to religion.
Of late, women have been recruited for terrorist acts--a remarkable development in the Islamic world, where custom keeps women in subordinate roles. Precisely because of their traditional attire, female suicide bombers can easily hide their identities and disguise themselves as Israelis by wearing tight, Western clothing. Security sources in Israel have suggested that some of these women became suicide bombers to expunge some personal dishonor. Death in a holy cause could wash away the shame of divorce, infertility, or promiscuity. According to some accounts, a few women have deliberately been seduced and then emotionally blackmailed into becoming bombers.
That terrorists themselves are reasonably well-off does not by itself disprove the argument that terrorism springs from poverty and ignorance. Terrorists might simply be a self-selected elite, who hope to serve the needs of an impoverished and despondent populace--in which case, providing money and education to the masses would be the best way to prevent terrorism.
From what we know now, this theory appears to be false. Krueger and Maleckova compared terrorist incidents in the Middle East with changes in the gross domestic product of the region and found that the number of such incidents per year increased as economic conditions improved. On the eve of the intifada that began in 2000, the unemployment rate among Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip was falling, and the Palestinians thought that economic conditions were improving. The same economic conditions existed at the time of the 1988 intifada. Terror did not spread as the economy got worse but as it got better.
This study agrees with the view of Franklin L. Ford, whose book Political Murder covers terrorist acts from ancient times down to the 1980s. Assassinations, he finds, were least common in fifth-century Athens, during the Roman republic, and in eighteenth-century Europe--periods in which "a certain quality of balance, as between authority and forbearance" was reinforced by a commitment to "customary rights." Terrorism has not corresponded to high levels of repression or social injustice or high rates of ordinary crime. It seems to occur, Ford suggests, in periods of partial reform, popular excitement, high expectations, and impatient demands for still more rapid change.
But if terrorists--suicide bombers and other murderers of innocent people--are not desperate, perhaps they are psychologically disturbed. But I cannot think of a single major scholar who has studied this matter who has found any psychosis. Terrorists are likely to be different from non-terrorists, but not because of any obvious disease.
In short, recruiting religiously inspired or nationalistically oriented terrorists seems to have little to do with personal psychosis, material deprivation, or family rejection. It may not even have much to do with well-known, high-status leaders. Among West Bank and Gaza Palestinians, for example, there is broad support for suicide bombings and a widespread belief that violence has helped the Palestinian cause, even though as late as June 2003 only about one-third of all Palestinians thought Yasser Arafat was doing a good job. Indeed, his popularity has declined since the intifada began.
The key to terrorist recruitment, obviously, is the group that does the recruitment. Jerrold Post interviewed for eight hours an Abu Nidal terrorist named Omar Rezaq, who skyjacked an airliner and killed five passengers, two of them women, before an Egyptian rescue team captured him. The interviews sought to test the defense counsel's claim that Rezaq suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and so did not appreciate the wrongfulness of his actions. Post found no such disease.
He met instead a thoroughly calm, professional man, who, after a happy childhood devoid of poverty, had moved with his mother to a refugee camp following the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. At school he encountered a radical Palestinian teacher (and PLO member) who imbued him with a hatred of Israel and helped him join a camp where, at age 12, he began receiving military training. From there he went to a technical school sponsored by the United Nations. After being drafted into the Jordanian army, Rezaq deserted and joined Fatah, where he learned about Zionism and got more military training. He was sent on military missions against Israel, but periods of inactivity made him discontented. In time, searching for a stronger commitment, he joined Abu Nidal.
Abu Nidal ordered him to seize an airliner and hold it until Egypt released certain activists from prison. After the plane he seized landed in Malta, Rezaq began executing passengers, beginning with two Israelis (they were the enemy) and three Americans (they supported the enemy). Before he could kill more, a rescue team stormed the plane and captured him.
Rezaq spoke to Professor Post in a calm, orderly, unemotional way. He thought of himself as a soldier and of the people he shot as enemies. He realized that his actions were crimes--that was why he wore a ski mask--but he did not think they were wrong: he was, after all, fighting Zionism. The notion that he was mentally ill was absurd: Abu Nidal, a highly professional group, would have long since weeded him out. Abu Nidal had killed or injured many people in massacres at the Rome and Vienna airports and gravely wounded the Israeli ambassador to Great Britain: you do not accomplish these things by relying on psychotics.
While some suicide bombers have been the victims of blackmail, and some have been led to believe, wrongly, that the bombs in their trucks would go off after they had left them, my sense is that most recruitment today relies on small-group pressure and authoritative leaders. Anyone who took social-science courses in college will surely remember the famous experiments by Stanley Milgram. In the 1960s, Milgram, then a professor at Yale, recruited ordinary people through a newspaper ad offering them money to help in a project purporting to improve human memory. The improvement was to come from punishing a man who seemed unable to remember words read aloud to him. The man, a confederate of Milgram's, was strapped in a chair with an electrode attached to his wrist. The punishment took the form of electric shocks administered by the experimental subjects from a control panel, showing a scale of shocks, from 15 to 450 volts. At the high end of the scale, clearly marked labels warned: "Danger--Severe Shock." As the subject increased the imaginary voltage, the man who was supposed to have his memory improved screamed in pretended pain.
About two-thirds of the subjects Milgram had recruited went all the way to 450 volts. Only two things made a difference: the absence of a clear authority figure and the presence of rebellious peers. Without these modifications, almost everybody decided to "follow orders." This study suggests to me that, rightly managed, a cohesive group with an authoritative leader can find people who will do almost anything.
Terrorist cells, whether they have heard of Stanley Milgram's Obedience to Authority or not, understand these rules. They expose members to unchallenged authority figures and quickly weed out anyone who might be rebellious. They get rid of doubts by getting rid of the doubters.
This is not very different from how the military maintains morale under desperate conditions. Soldiers fight because their buddies fight. Heroism usually derives not from some deep heroic "urge" or from thoughts of Mom, apple pie, and national ideology, but from the example of others who are fighting.
Milgram did not train terrorists; he showed that one instinct Cynthia Ozick neglected--the instinct to be part of a team--can be as powerful as the one that tells us to be decent to other people. But suppose Milgram had been the leader of a terrorist sect and had recruited his obedient followers into his group; suppose teachings in the schools and mass propaganda supported his group. There is almost no limit to what he could have accomplished using such people. They might not have been clinically ill, but they would have been incorporated into a psychopathological movement.
The central fact about terrorists is not that they are deranged, but that they are not alone. Among Palestinians, they are recruited by Hamas, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, among others. In Singapore, their recruitment begins with attendance at religious schools. If ardent and compliant, they are drawn into Jemaah Islamiyah, where they associate with others like themselves. Being in the group gives each member a sense of special esteem and exclusivity, reinforced by the use of secrecy, code names, and specialized training. Then they are offered the chance to be martyrs if they die in a jihad. Everywhere, leaders strengthen the bombers' commitment by isolating them in safe houses and by asking them to draft last testaments and make videotapes for their families, in which they say farewell.
Given its long history, one must wonder whether terrorism accomplishes its goals. For some ideological terrorists, of course, there are scarcely any clear goals that can be accomplished. But for many assassins and religious terrorists, there are important goals, such as ending tyranny, spreading a religious doctrine, or defeating a national enemy.
By these standards, terrorism does not work. Franklin Ford concluded his long history of political murders by saying that, with one or two possible exceptions, assassinations have not produced results consonant with the aims of the doer. Walter Laqueur, in his shorter review of the matter, comes to the same conclusion: of the 50 prime ministers and heads of state killed between 1945 and 1985, it is hard to think of one whose death changed a state's policies.
Bernard Lewis argues that the original Assassins failed: they never succeeded in overthrowing the social order or replacing Sunnis with Shiites. The most recent study of suicide terrorism from 1983 through 2001 found that, while it "has achieved modest or very limited goals, it has so far failed to compel target democracies to abandon goals central to national wealth or security."
One reason it does not work can be found in studies of Israeli public opinion. During 1979, there were 271 terrorist incidents in Israel and the territories it administers, resulting in the deaths of 23 people and the injuring of 344 more. Public-opinion surveys clearly showed that these attacks deeply worried Israelis, but their fear, instead of leading them to endorse efforts at reconciliation, produced a toughening of attitudes and a desire to see the perpetrators dealt with harshly. The current intifada has produced exactly the same result in Israel.
But if terrorism does not change the views of the victims and their friends, then it is possible that campaigns against terrorism will not change the views of people who support it. Many social scientists have come to just this conclusion.
In the 1970s, I attended meetings at a learned academy where people wondered what could be done to stop the terrorism of the German Red Army Faction and the Italian Red Brigades. The general conclusion was that no counterattacks would work. To cope with terrorism, my colleagues felt, one must deal with its root causes.
I was not convinced. My doubts stemmed, I suppose, from my own sense that dealing with the alleged root causes of crime would not work as well as simply arresting criminals. After all, we do not know much about the root causes, and most of the root causes we can identify cannot be changed in a free society--or possibly in any society.
The German and Italian authorities, faced with a grave political problem, decided not to change root causes but to arrest the terrorists. That, accompanied by the collapse of East Germany and its support for terrorists, worked. Within a few years the Red Army Faction and the Red Brigades were extinct. In the United States, the Weather Underground died after its leaders were arrested.
But Islamic terrorism poses a much more difficult challenge. These terrorists live and work among people sympathetic to their cause. Those arrested will be replaced; those killed will be honored. Opinion polls in many Islamic nations show great support for anti-Israeli and anti-American terrorists. Terrorists live in a hospitable river. We may have to cope with the river.
The relentless vilification of Jews, Israel, and Zionism by much of the Muslim press and in many Muslim schools has produced a level of support for terrorism that vastly exceeds the backing that American or European terrorists ever enjoyed. Over 75 percent of all Palestinians support the current intifada and endorse the 2003 bombing of Maxim, a restaurant in Haifa. With suicide bombers regarded as martyrs, the number of new recruits has apparently increased. The river of support for anti-Israel terror is much wider and deeper than what the Baader-Meinhof gang received.
Imagine what it would have been like to eliminate the Baader-Meinhof gang if most West Germans believed that democracy was evil and that Marxism was the wave of the future, if the Soviet Union paid a large sum to the family of every killed or captured gang member, if West German students attended schools that taught the evils of democracy and regarded terrorists as heroes, if several West German states were governed by the equivalent of al Fatah, and if there were a German version of Gaza, housing thousands of angry Germans who believed they had a right of return to some homeland.
But support for resistance is not the same as support for an endless war. An opinion survey done in November 2002 by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research showed that over three-fourths of the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank supported a mutual cessation of violence between Israel and Palestinians and backed reconciliation between Israelis and a newly created Palestinian state. A majority favored the Palestinian Authority taking measures to prevent armed attacks against Israeli civilians. Another poll found that about half of all Palestinians wanted both the intifada and negotiations with Israel to go forward simultaneously, while 15 percent favored negotiations alone.
These facts, rarely mentioned in the American press, suggest how empty are the statements of many Middle Eastern and European leaders, who incessantly tell us that ending terrorism generally requires "solving" the Palestinian question by dealing with Arafat. These claims, often made to satisfy internal political needs, fail to recognize how disliked Arafat is by his own people and how eager they are for a democratic government that respects the governed and avoids corruption.
Matters are worse when one state sponsors or accommodates terrorism in another state. In this case, the problem is to end that state support. To do that means making clear that the leaders of such a state will suffer serious pain as a consequence of that accommodation. Though many people take exception to it, I think President Bush was right to condemn certain nations as being part of an "axis of evil," putting leaders on notice that they cannot fund or encourage Hamas, al-Qaida, or Hezbollah without paying a heavy price for it. Iraq has learned how high that price can be.
The Israeli government is trying to impose a high price on the Palestinian Authority because of its tolerance of and support for terrorist acts in Israel. It is too early to tell whether this effort will succeed. Arrests or deterrence, after all, cannot readily prevent suicide bombings, though good intelligence can reduce them, and seizing leaders can perhaps hamper them. The presence of the Israeli Defense Forces in Palestinian areas almost surely explains the recent reduction in suicide attacks, but no such presence, costly as it is, can reduce the number to zero. As Palestinian hostility toward Israel grows, reinforced by what is taught in Palestinian schools, recruiting suicide bombers becomes much easier.
The larger question, of course, is whether ending terrorism requires a new political arrangement. Ideally, the Palestinian people must grant Israel the right to a secure existence in exchange for being given their own country. There may be popular support among both Israelis and Palestinians for such an arrangement, but it is not obvious that political leaders of either side can endorse such a strategy. As the level of terrorism and state action grows, the opportunities for dialogue diminish, and public confidence that any new dialogue will produce meaningful results declines. No one has yet found a way to manage this difficulty.
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City Journal
Can We Make Iraq Democratic?
George F. Will
Winter 2004
Man isn't at all one, after all--it takes so much of him to be American, to be French, etc.
--Henry James to William Dean Howells
Woodrow Wilson was sleepless in Paris.
The president was awake all that night in 1919 because, he told his doctor the next morning, "my mind was so full of the Japanese-Chinese controversy." An American president was attending a conference to end a war that began in Belgium and raged mostly within 220 miles of the English Channel. Yet Wilson's sleep was troubled by Sino-Japanese relations. According to historian Margaret MacMillan in Paris: Six Months That Changed the World, Wilson was worried about "what Japan was getting in China, right down to the composition of the railway police in Shantung. (They were to be Chinese with, where necessary, Japanese instructors.)"
"Where necessary"? America's president was struggling to measure the necessity of the Japanese component of the Chinese railway police. Such worries were enough to give a man a stroke--and may have done so.
I hope to trouble your sleep with a worry related to what Wilson was doing in Paris. My worry is the assault on the nation-state, which is an assault on self-government--the American project. It is the campaign to contract the sphere of politics by expanding the sway of supposedly disinterested experts, disconnected from democratic accountability and administering principles of universal applicability that they have discovered.
All this is pertinent to today's headlines, for a reason that may, at first blush, seem paradoxical. The assault on the nation-state involves a breezy confidence that nations not only can be superseded by supranational laws and institutions, they can even be dispensed with. Furthermore, nations can be fabricated, and can be given this or that political attribute, by experts wielding universal principles.
The vitality of democracy everywhere is imperiled by the impulse behind the increasingly brazen and successful denial of the importance and legitimacy of nation-states. This denial is most audacious in Europe. But because many of America's political ideas arrive on our shores after auditioning in Europe, Americans should examine the motives and implications of European attempts to dilute and transcend national sovereignty.
When the Cold War ended, my friend Pat Moynihan asked me: "What are you conservatives going to hate, now that you can't hate Moscow?" My instant response was: "We are going to hate Brussels"--Brussels, because it is the banal home of the metastasizing impulse to transfer political power from national parliaments to supranational agencies that are essentially unaccountable and unrepresentative.
President Kennedy, in his inaugural address, proclaimed America unwilling to permit "the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed." Today there is a slow undoing of the elemental human right of self-government, accomplished by the attack on a necessary concomitant of that right--the sovereignty of the nation-state.
Europe's elites--and, increasingly, America's--favor a "pooling" of sovereignties in institutions insulated from accountability to particular national constituencies. To understand the long, tangled pedigree of this movement, return to Paris in 1919.
Because Wilson, unlike his French, British, and Italian counterparts at the Versailles peace conference, was a head of state, he was given a chair a few inches taller than Clemenceau's, Lloyd George's, and Orlando's. Not that Wilson needed that slight physical augmentation of his moral self-confidence; a former college professor, Wilson remained a pedagogue. "I am," he once said, "going to teach the South American Republics to elect good men!"
In Paris, pupils for this professor came from far and wide. Or tried to come. Historian MacMillan reports that "the Koreans from Siberia set out on foot in February 1919 and by the time the main part of the Peace Conference ended in June had reached only the Arctic port of Archangel." However, some pupils were already in Paris when the conference convened--such as a 29-year-old Vietnamese working in a hotel kitchen: Ho Chi Minh.
Many advocates of subjugated peoples and nascent nations came to Paris, drawn by the magnetism of the central Wilsonian principle: self-determination. What exactly Wilson meant by that was a mystery to, among others, Wilson's secretary of state, Robert Lansing, who wondered: "When the President talks of 'self-determination' what unit does he have in mind? Does he mean a race, a territorial area, or a community?" Nineteen years later, Hitler championed Sudeten Germans, using Wilsonian language about the right to ethnic self-determination.
There was a vast carelessness--an earnest carelessness--in the Versailles conference's rearranging of the world. Historian MacMillan, who is Lloyd George's great-granddaughter, says that in 1916, he mused: "Who are the Slovaks? I can't seem to place them." Three years later, he was helping place them in a new--and perishable--nation. Not until 1918 had Lloyd George discovered that New Zealand is east of Australia. When, in Paris, he dramatically spoke of the Turks retreating eastward toward Mecca, Lord Curzon sternly corrected him: the retreat, said Curzon, was toward Ankara, not Mecca. Lloyd George breezily replied: "Lord Curzon is good enough to admonish me on a triviality."
Laconic Arthur Balfour, who rarely seemed deeply stirred by anything, was angered by the spectacle of "all-powerful, all-ignorant men sitting there and partitioning continents." Harold Nicholson told his diary: "How fallible one feels here! A map--a pencil--tracing paper. Yet my courage fails at the thought of the people whom our errant lines enclose or exclude, the happiness of several thousands of people."
Several thousands? Many millions, actually. The maps were large, the pencils busy. Observers described the Big Four and their experts on their hands and knees crawling on the floor around maps too large to fit on any table.
Turkey was on the conference's agenda but was not auspicious clay for the experts to mold. Its recent rulers had included one who went mad and another who was so fearful of enemies that, when he desired a cigarette, he had a eunuch take the first puff. In polyglot Turkey, for the dockworkers in Salonika to function, they had to speak half a dozen languages. Never mind. Those experts in Paris, crawling on their hands and knees around those big maps, would fix Turkey in due time.
When French officials invited Wilson to tour the scarred moonscape of the Flanders battlefields, he angrily refused, saying that the French were trying to arouse his emotions. Pure reason, he thought, must prevail. Yet Wilson may have included in his Fourteen Points the restoration of Polish independence because at a White House party in 1916 he had been stirred by the pianist Paderewski's rendition of Chopin.
Speaking to Lloyd George's mistress, Frances Stevenson, over a luncheon plate of chicken, Clemenceau said: "I have come to the conclusion that force is right. Why is this chicken here? Because it was not strong enough to resist those who wanted to kill it. And a very good thing too!" What shaped Clemenceau's dark realism was life on a continent that included such countries as Albania, in parts of which one man in five died in blood feuds.
A story, perhaps apocryphal but certainly plausible, recounts that, when Wilson asked Clemenceau if he did not believe that all men are brothers, Clemenceau exclaimed: "Yes, all men are brothers--Cain and Abel! Cain and Abel!" Clemenceau did say to Wilson, "We [Europeans], too, came into the world with the noble instincts and the lofty aspirations which you express so often and so eloquently. We have become what we are because we have been shaped by the rough hand of the world in which we have to live and we have survived only because we are a tough bunch."
Now, fast-forward to today.
Most of the political calamities through which the world has staggered since 1919 have resulted from the distinctively modern belief that things--including nations and human nature--are much more plastic, much more malleable, than they actually are. It is the belief that nations are like Tinkertoys: they can be taken apart and rearranged at will. It is the belief that human beings are soft clay that can be shaped by the hands of political artists.
In the 85 years since 1919, many more than 100 million people have perished in violence intended to force the world into new configurations. The violence has served ambitious attempts at social engineering--attempts to create racial purity or a classless society or the New Soviet Man. Compared to this savagery, today's attempts to produce a new political architecture in Europe may look harmless.
Look again.
Today, European elites believe that Europe's nations are menaced by their own sovereignty. These elites blame Europe's recent blood-soaked history on the nation-state itself--including democratic states. For this reason, the European Union is attempting to turn itself into a single entity without sovereign nations--a federal entity, but a single political entity under a new constitution. The intended effect of the proposed constitution is to dissolve Europe's nation-states, reducing them to administrative departments of a supranational state. Its capital: probably Brussels.
In the hundreds of pages of the EU's proposed (and so far, rejected) constitution, you will find, among much else, the stipulation that "the physical and moral integrity of sportsmen and sportswomen" should be protected. A sweet thought, that. But what in the name of James Madison is it doing in a constitution?
The proposed constitution guarantees that children shall have the constitutional right "to express their views freely." That will make family dinners and bedtime in Europe litigious affairs. The proposed constitution bans discrimination based on birth--but does not say how to square that ban with the existence in the EU of seven hereditary monarchies. The EU's constitution decrees that, to protect the environment, "preventive action should be taken." That sentiment may seem merely vapid--until some judge discovers that it requires vast regulatory measures of his devising.
It used to be said that libraries filed French constitutions among periodicals. The EU constitution will before long seem as dated as a yellowing newspaper, because it gives canonical status--as fundamental rights elevated beyond debate--to policy preferences, even to mere fads, of the moment.
The aim of the proposed constitution's more than 400 articles is to put as many matters as possible beyond debate. Beyond the reach of majorities. Beyond democracy.
Article Ten of the EU constitution says: "The Constitution, and law adopted by the Union's Institutions in exercising competences conferred on it [sic], shall have primacy over the law of the Member States." Queen Elizabeth has asked for a briefing on the potential implications of the EU constitution for her role as supreme guardian of the British constitution.
British Europhiles simply deny the undeniable. They deny that the EU constitution will accelerate the leeching away of sovereignty from national parliaments. On the Continent, enthusiasts of the proposed constitution acknowledge the leeching away--and say it is a virtue. For them, what is called the EU's "democracy deficit" is not an ancillary cost of progress; it is the essence of progress.
The histories of America and Europe have given rise to markedly different judgments about democracy and nationalism. Americans have cheerful thoughts, and Europeans have dark thoughts, about uniting democracy and nationalism. Hence Americans and Europeans have different ideas of what constitutions should do--ideas that lead to different valuations of international laws and institutions.
Americans believe that a democracy's constitution should arise from, and reflect the particularities of, that nation's distinctive political culture. Europeans' quite different idea of constitutions implies a bitterly disparaging self-assessment. Their idea of what constitutions are for is a recoil from the savagery of their twentieth-century experiences. The purpose of their constitutions is to contract radically the sphere of self-government--of democratic politics.
American constitutionalism speaks with a Philadelphia accent, in the language of popular sovereignty: "We the people of the United States . . . do ordain and establish. . . . " European constitutionalism speaks with a Parisian accent--the Paris of the eighteenth-century philosophes, of timeless and universal truths, defined by intellectuals and given, as gifts from on high, to publics expected to accept them deferentially.
And note well this: the spirit of Europe's trickle-down constitutionalism was the spirit at work in Paris in 1919, where a coterie of experts rearranged the continent--and even the Chinese railway police--according to the coterie's abstract principles and reasoning. The 1919 spirit of trickle-down lawgiving is alive in Europe today. When a European committee wrote a constitution for Kosovo, the committee--which included no member from Kosovo--wrote the constitution after visiting Kosovo for just three days.
Well, what need was there for Kosovars, or for knowledge of Kosovo, if abstract speculation by elites has revealed timeless truths--truths that can gain nothing from being consented to by the masses? Indeed, what need is there for variations among nations, or for experimentation by nations? In fact, what need is there for nations?
So, here comes the supranational entity: Europe. Trouble is, the prerequisites of a real political community include a shared history, culture, and language. Thus the phrase "European political community" is oxymoronic: there are many democratic nations in Europe, but there is no single European demos. How can there be, with (soon) 25 members, 25 distinct national memories, more than 25 durable ethnicities, 21 languages, and annual per-capita GDPs ranging from $8,300 in Latvia to $44,000 in Luxembourg?
On the rare occasions when the electorates of European nations are allowed to vote on some step toward a European superstate, they say no. Swedes recently said no, regarding replacing their national currency with the euro, and all that implies in terms of the dilution of control of their destinies. Virtually all of Sweden's cosmopolitan classes--the entire political, commercial, and media establishments--advocated a yes vote.
When the Swedes obdurately said no, the German newspaper Die Welt sniffily blamed "a certain provincial eccentricity of Swedes." Well, yes--if to be provincial is to prefer one's own institutions and the traditions, customs, and mores that are both the causes and effects of those institutions.
Denmark has also said no to the proposed extinction of its national currency. The British, if asked, would say no, so British elites flinch from permitting a referendum. What do Sweden, Denmark, and Britain have in common? Charles Moore, former editor of the London Daily Telegraph, explains that each of the three has a "well-ordered and continuous historical polity. . . . These are countries that have a strong belief in the reality of their political culture. They do not have a history in which their whole previous set of arrangements was discredited by war or fascism or revolution."
In contrast, Germans seek to submerge themselves in Europe to escape German history. The French exalt Europe as something in which to submerge Germany. Italians contemplate the submergence of their political culture and think: good riddance. For Spaniards, the loss of sovereignty to a European superstate is a price willingly paid for a rupture with a past recently stained by Franco, fascism, and civil war.
Democracy and distrust usually are, and always should be, entwined. America's constitutionalism and its necessary corollary, judicial review, amount to institutionalized distrust. But although Americans are said to be suspicious of their government, they actually are less deeply wary of their government than Europeans are of their governments.
Scott Turow, the American lawyer and novelist, sees evidence of this difference in the sharply divergent American and European attitudes about capital punishment. It is, he says, exactly wrong to interpret European opposition to capital punishment as evidence of Europe's higher civility. Rather, says Turow, European democracies have a history of fragility and "have repeatedly been overwhelmed by dictators." So "the day seems far less remote when another madman can commandeer the power of the state to kill his enemies." In fact, "American opinion about capital punishment is subtly dependent on the extraordinary stability of our democratic institutions."
I suggest that there is a similar explanation for the sharp contrast between the European enthusiasm for expanding the reach of international law and institutions at the expense of national sovereignty, and America's more chilly and suspicious stance toward such laws and institutions. It is not quite fair to say that international law is to real law as professional wrestling is to real wrestling. But international law--so frequently invoked, so rarely defined--is an infinitely elastic concept. Who enacts, who construes, who adjudicates, and who enforces this law? Hobbes said: "Law without the sword is but words." But law backed by the sword--by coercion--must be legitimized by a political process. Americans wonder: How does that legitimation work for international law?
It is said that international law is the consensus in action of the "international community." Well, now.
The attempt to break nations--and especially our nation--to the saddle and bridle of international law founders on the fact that the "community of nations" is a fiction. Nothing can be properly called a "community" if it jumbles together entities as different as Saudi Arabia and New Zealand, Japan and Sudan, Italy and Iran, Norway and Libya.
The American Revolution was, at bottom, about the right of a distinctive people, conscious of itself as a single people, to govern itself in its distinctive manner, in nationhood. Here was a great eighteenth-century insight: popular sovereignty is inextricably entwined with nationality.
The nation-state has been a great instrument of emancipation. It has freed people from the idea that their self-government is subject to extra-national restraints, such as the divine right of kings or imperial prerogatives or traditional privileges of particular social classes.
Certainly Americans will not passively watch their nation's distinctive ideas of justice be subordinated to any other standards. Most Americans are not merely patriots; they are nationalists, too. They do not merely love their country; they believe that its political arrangements, and the values and understandings of the human condition that those arrangements reflect, are superior to most other nations' arrangements. They believe, but are too polite to say, that American arrangements are not suited to everybody, at least not now. These superior American arrangements are suited to culturally superior people--those up to the demands made by self-government.
And yet, my sleep is troubled by this worry: there may be a subtle kinship between--a common thread in--two ideas that are currently having large consequences. One is the un-American--and increasingly anti-American--idea that the nation-state is both dispensable and dangerous, and therefore that nations should increasingly be subordinated to international laws and the arrangements of the "community of nations." The other idea--one suddenly central to America's international exertions--is that nations are mechanical, not organic things. And therefore a can-do people with an aptitude for engineering--people like Americans--can build nations.
These ideas share a dangerous lack of respect for the elemental, powerful impulses that produce nations. Both ideas have a Wilsonian flavor. They shaped the American president's participation in Paris in 1919. And they shape the behavior of Wilson's nation 85 years later.
Do I seem anxious? Perhaps. But an English skeptic once said he wanted to carve on all the churches of England three cautionary words: "Important If True." We must inscribe those words alongside some of today's political utterances.
Last July, Prime Minister Tony Blair, addressing a joint session of the U.S. Congress, said: It is a "myth" that "our attachment to freedom is a product of our culture," and he added: "Ours are not Western values; they are the universal values of the human spirit. And anywhere, anytime people are given the chance to choose, the choice is the same: freedom, not tyranny; democracy, not dictatorship; the rule of law, not the rule of the secret police."
That assertion is important. But is it true? Everyone everywhere does not share "our attachment to freedom." Freedom is not even understood the same way everywhere, let alone valued the same way relative to other political goods such as equality, security, and piety. Does Blair really believe that our attachment to freedom is not the product of complex and protracted acculturation by institutions and social mores that have evolved over centuries--the centuries that it took to prepare the stony social ground for seeds of democracy?
When Blair says that freedom as we understand it, and democracy and the rule of law as we administer them, are "the universal values of the human spirit," he is not speaking as America's Founders did when they spoke of "self-evident" truths. The Founders meant truths obvious not to everyone everywhere but to minds unclouded by superstition and other ignorance--minds like theirs. Blair seems to think: Boston, Baghdad, Manchester, Monrovia--what's the difference? But Blair's argument is true only if it is trivial logic-chopping. That is, when he says "ordinary" people always choose freedom, democracy, and the rule of law, he must mean that anyone who does not so choose is therefore not ordinary. There are a lot of those people in the world. We are at war with some of them in Iraq.
President Bush recently said something that is important--if true. And perhaps it is even more important if it is not true. He denounced "cultural condescension"--the belief that some cultures lack the requisite aptitudes for democracy. And the president said: "Time after time, observers have questioned whether this country, or that people, or this group are 'ready' for democracy--as if freedom were a prize you win for meeting our own Western standards of progress."
Well. Multiculturalists probably purred with pleasure about this president's delicate avoidance of anything as gauche as chauvinism about "Western standards of progress." His idea--that there is no necessary connection between Western political traditions and the success of democracy--is important.
But is it true? Today his hypothesis is being tested in Iraq, where an old baseball joke is pertinent. A manager says, "Our team is just two players away from being a championship team. Unfortunately, the two players are Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig." Iraq is just three people away from democratic success. Unfortunately, the three are George Washington, James Madison, and John Marshall.
Iraq lacks a Washington, a universally revered hero emblematic of national unity and identity. Iraq lacks a Madison, a genius of constitutional architecture, a profound student of what the president calls "Western standards of progress" and a subtle analyst of the problem of factions and their centrifugal, disintegrative tendencies. Iraq lacks a Marshall, someone who can so persuasively construe a constitution that the prestige of his court, and of law itself, ensures national compliance.
Iraq lacks a Washington, a Madison, a Marshall--and it lacks the astonishingly rich social and cultural soil from which such people sprout. From America's social soil in the eighteenth century grew all the members of the Constitutional Convention and of all the state legislatures that created all the conventions that ratified the Constitution.
So, Iraq in its quest for democracy lacks only--only!--what America then had: an existing democratic culture. It is a historical truism that the Declaration of Independence was less the creation of independence than the affirmation that Americans had already become independent. In the decades before 1776 they had become a distinct people, a demos, a nation--held together by the glue of shared memories, common strivings, and shared ideals. As John Adams said, the revolution had occurred in the minds and hearts of Americans before the incident at Concord Bridge.
Now America is engaged in a great exercise in nation-building. America invaded Iraq to disarm a rogue regime thought to be accumulating weapons of mass destruction. After nine months of postwar searching, no such weapons have as yet been found. The appropriate reaction to this is dismay, and perhaps indignation, about intelligence failures--failures that also afflicted the previous American administration and numerous foreign governments.
Instead, Washington's reaction is Wilsonian. It is: Never mind the weapons of mass destruction; a sufficient justification for the war was Iraq's noncompliance with various U.N. resolutions. So a conservative American administration says that war was justified by the need--the opportunity--to strengthen the U.N., a.k.a. the "international community," as the arbiter of international behavior. Woodrow Wilson lives.
It is counted realism in Washington now to say that creating a new Iraqi regime may require perhaps two years. One wonders: Does Washington remember that it took a generation, and the United States Army, to bring about, in effect, regime change--a change of institutions and mores--in the American South? Will a Middle Eastern nation prove more plastic to our touch than Mississippi was? Will two years suffice for America--as Woodrow Wilson said of the Latin American republics--to teach Iraq to elect good men? We are, it seems, fated to learn again the limits of the Wilsonian project.
There are those who say: "Differences be damned! America has a duty to accomplish that project." They should remember an elemental principle of moral reasoning: there can be no duty to do what cannot be done.
What is to be done in Iraq? As Robert Frost said, the best way out is always through. We are there. We dare not leave having replaced a savage state with a failed state--a vacuum into which evil forces will flow. Our aim should be the rule of law, a quickened pulse of civil society, some system of political representation. Then, let us vow not to take on such reconstructions often.
Four decades ago I arrived at Princeton's graduate school, where I was to spend three happy years. I did not then realize that the 1910 decision to locate the graduate school where it is had been a momentous decision for the twentieth century--and perhaps for the twenty-first as well.
Princeton's decision to locate the graduate school away from the main campus was made against the bitter opposition of the university's president. He often was bitter when others failed to fathom the purity of his motives, his disinterested expertise, and the universality of his principles.
Having lost the argument about locating the graduate school, Woodrow Wilson resigned as Princeton's president and entered politics. Two years later, he was elected America's president. Just nine years after resigning from Princeton, he was sleepless in Paris, troubled by America's responsibility for fine-tuning the Japanese component of the Chinese railway police.
Wilson's spirit still walks the world. That should trouble our sleep.
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City Journal
A Neglected Genius
Theodore Dalrymple
Winter 2004
On February 22, 1942, two British nationals committed suicide by an overdose of barbiturates in their house in Petropolis, Brazil. The photograph of them on their deathbed is one of the most heartrending I know, the woman holding the man's hand and resting her head gently on his shoulder. The couple received a state funeral--in Brazil, not in Britain--attended by thousands of mourners. The man was Stefan Zweig, an Austrian Jew who for many years had been one of the most famous writers in German, his works translated into 50 languages. The woman was Lotte Altmann, his secretary and second wife.
Although Zweig had taken refuge in Britain and become a British passport holder, his work never won much appreciation in his adopted country, or for that matter in any English-speaking country, and such little fame as he achieved there has now evaporated. Even among highly literate English speakers, he stands nearly forgotten; even good bookstores in Britain, America, and Australia rarely stock his titles.
It is different in France. There, his biographical, critical, and historical studies, as well as his novellas and novel, have stayed in print (except during the occupation); mass-market editions of them are on sale almost everywhere, even at airports. Biographical and literary-critical studies of him appear regularly, and he enjoys almost universal regard as one of the twentieth century's great writers. In this, at least, I think the French have it right.
Two main themes pervade Zweig's writings. The first is the part that passion plays in human life. If reason, as Hume says, is and should be the slave of the passions, how can we control and reconcile our passions so that we may live decently together in society? And if, as Zweig's work suggests, the need for control and the need for expression are in constant tension, there is no abstract or perfect solution to man's existential plight. Any attempt to resolve the contradictions of our existence by dogmatic reference to a simple doctrine (and, compared with life, all doctrines are simple) will thus end in monomania and barbarism. And that reality informs Zweig's second preoccupation: the destruction of civilization by political dogma--as exemplified by the two world wars that destroyed Zweig's world and led him ultimately to commit suicide.
Zweig was born in 1881 into a rich bourgeois Viennese Jewish family, completely assimilated to Austro-German culture. His life charted a long descent from bliss to torment. In his memoir (The World of Yesterday), written at 60, when he was an exile in Brazil without documentation to aid his recollections, Zweig describes the happiness of living in a cultivated and tolerant cosmopolitan society in which politics were secondary, any wars (like government itself) were small, limited, distant, and unimportant, personal freedom reached its apogee, and everything had the appearance--delusory, of course--of solidity and permanence. People felt they could plan for the future, because money would always retain its value and interest rates would never change. The joy of material progress, evident year after year, was unclouded by the realization that man remained a wolf to man: moral progress seemed as natural as material progress.
Hapsburg Vienna, in Zweig's view, was deeply civilized because it was politically and militarily impotent:
There was hardly a city in Europe where the aspiration to culture was more passionate than in Vienna. It was precisely because, after so many centuries, the monarchy, Austria itself, no longer knew either political ambition or military success, that patriotic pride was so strongly attached to the achievement of artistic supremacy. The Habsburg Empire, which had once dominated Europe, had long been despoiled of its most important and prosperous Provinces, German and Italian, Flemish and Wallonian; but the capital remained intact in its ancient splendour, the seat of the court, preserver of a millennial tradition.
The contrast between Vienna's cultural and intellectual splendor and its political decadence no doubt inspired Zweig's lifelong pacifism. He contrasted the Viennese ideal with the aggressive German or Wilhelmine one:
[O]ne lived an easy and carefree life in this old city of Vienna, and our neighbours to the north, the Germans, looked down with something of spite and envy, and something of disdain, on us Danubians who, instead of showing ourselves to be hardworking and serious, and obedient to a rigid order, peacefully enjoyed our lives, eating well, taking pleasure in festivals and the theatre, and moreover making excellent music. Instead of those German "values" that eventually spoiled and envenomed the life of all other peoples, instead of that avidity to dominate others, instead of always being in the lead, in Vienna we liked to chat amicably, took pleasure in family reunions, and let everyone take part, without envy, in a spirit of friendly complaisance, that was perhaps even a little too loose. "Live and let live," said the old Viennese proverb, a maxim that even today seems more human to me than any categorical imperative. . . .
Such, in Zweig's experience, was the prelapsarian Vienna of Emperor Franz Josef, a man with little culture but also with little ambition other than keeping intact his ramshackle, polyglot empire (which existed with no justification beyond its immemorial existence). The emperor had no desire to intrude into the daily life of his subjects, which had not yet become deeply politicized, as it would during the twentieth century.
Yet the personal freedom of Hapsburg Vienna, great as it was--perhaps greater than any we know today--rested upon no deep philosophical basis but instead upon informal psychological and cultural traits that had developed organically over time. In the crucible of cataclysm, these proved weak protections. Here was a contradiction that Zweig preferred not to think about, let alone resolve: true freedom, he believed, required informality, yet informality offered no protection against the enemies of freedom. Like all pacifists, Zweig evaded the question of how to protect the peaceful sheep from the ravening wolves, no doubt in the unrealistic hope that the wolves would one day discover the advantages of vegetarianism.
In Zweig's Edenic Vienna, informal rules and conventions governed people's lives far more deeply than laws or rights conferred by legislators: Zweig recounts, for example, that his father, though a multimillionaire mill owner easily able to afford it, refused to dine at the Hotel Sacher, since it was the traditional haunt of the Empire's upper aristocracy. He would have felt it tactless to obtrude where he was not really wanted; and (an almost inconceivable attitude today) he felt no bitterness at not being wanted. His actual freedoms were more than enough for his appetites. What more could a man reasonably desire?
Zweig became a close friend of Freud's and published a study of him in a three-part book entitled The Healers (the other parts focusing on Franz Anton Mesmer and Mary Baker Eddy, a slightly ironic juxtaposition that Freud didn't find appealing). But Zweig admired his father in a completely pre-Freudian way and even modeled himself after him. A self-made man, Zweig's father was always modest, dignified, and unhurried, able to succeed so brilliantly because he lived in times propitious to men of his (good) character:
[His] prudence in the expansion of his business, maintained in spite of the temptations offered by favourable opportunities, was entirely in keeping with the spirit of the times. It corresponded, moreover, with my father's natural reserve, his lack of greed. He had adopted the credo of his epoch: "safety first"; it appeared to him more important to have a "solid" business--still a favoured expression in those days--supplied with its own capital, than to expand it vastly by resorting to bank credits or mortgages. It was a matter of pride for him that, in all his life, no one had ever seen his name on a letter of credit or a loan, and that he had always been in credit at his bank--naturally the most solid of all banks, Rothschild.
The key to Zweig's own character reveals itself in a passage in which he extols his father and then describes himself:
Although he was infinitely superior to the majority of his colleagues, in his manners, social graces and culture--he played the piano very well, wrote with elegance and clarity, spoke French and English--he refused all public distinctions and honorary posts, and . . . never sought or accepted any title or honour, although, as a great industrialist, he was often offered them. Never having asked for anything, never having had to say "please" or "thank you," his secret pride was more to him than any outward sign of distinction. . . . Because of the same secret pride, I have myself always declined any honorific distinction, I have accepted no decoration, title, or presidency of an association, I have never belonged to an academy, a committee, or a prize-giving jury; the simple fact of sitting at an official table is to me a torture, and the thought alone of having to ask for something, even on behalf of someone else, is enough to dry my mouth out before I have said a single word . . . it is my father in me and his secret pride that make me shrink [from the limelight] . . . for it is to my father that I owe the only good of which I feel certain, the feeling of inner freedom.
Zweig never suggested that his personal ideal was a social one: that no one should ever sit at an official table or accept membership in an academy. But having grown up in a world where it was possible to live happily as so free an agent, he found himself plunged into a world where it became impossible, where men had to organize to resist evil so that any freedom at all might be enjoyed. In such a world, Zweig's refusal to commit to any collective institution or endeavor appeared feeble and parasitic.
That said, however, his very lack of commitment, the very indefinition of his own personality, allowed him to enter the worlds of others in his fiction from the inside, and even more important, to convey those worlds to his readers so that they could enter them too. If he had been other than he was, his work would have lacked its peculiarly empathic quality.
Literature and high culture obsessed Zweig from an early age. At 19, he published his first serious article, in the literary supplement of the Neue Freie Presse, Vienna's newspaper of record (then edited by the founder of modern Zionism, Theodor Herzl), as well as his first collection of poems. But he soon realized that he was too young to have anything to say, and he traveled to Berlin and Paris in search of experience. In his travels, he met many of the young men who would become the most important writers of their age. And by cultivating the acquaintance of prostitutes, pimps, and others on the margins of society, he learned about the lower depths, from whose ugly reality his status as a child of the haute bourgeoisie had sheltered him. He spent several years translating into German the modernist Belgian poet Emile Verhaeren, self-effacing literary work of the kind that he recommended to any young person aspiring to become a writer but not yet mature enough to create anything original.
The Great War, of course, smashed to smithereens the old world that Zweig so esteemed. But Zweig clung fast to his prewar ideals, in a climate increasingly hostile to them. Repeatedly his work extols the worth of personal freedom and denies that abstract ideas can guide a man through life's dilemmas. Zweig retained his fear of joining any association or group, however laudable its ends; he never wanted to face the choice of upholding a "party line" against the dictates of his conscience. He was not devoid of general principles, of course: no man other than a psychopath could be. But a preference for kindness over cruelty, say, does not get anyone very far in considering particular cases, which requires reflection as to what kindness actually consists of in concrete situations. Sometimes accused of sentimentality, he was both explic-itly anti-sentimental and an anti-rigorist in morals.
His one full-length novel, Beware of Pity, explores the disastrous consequences that flow from sentimental and insincere pity. In this novel, set immediately before World War I, a handsome young cavalryman (the narrator) is posted to a provincial Hungarian town. There, he meets the crippled daughter of Herr von Kekesfalva, an ennobled Jewish peddler who has made an immense fortune. By his well-meaning but shallow expressions of sympathy for her, the cavalryman arouses hopes of a different kind of relationship, false hopes that he does nothing to dispel until too late, and disappointment leads the young woman to suicide. With brilliant clarity, Zweig traces the consequences of well-meaning emotional dishonesty--consequences far worse than what would have followed an initial callousness.
Zweig was master of the novella (which helps explain his lack of success in the Anglophone world: English-language publishers assumed that this literary form was uneconomic to print, despite its profitability in other countries, where Zweig sold by the million). He could capture huge historical shifts in a short compass, in plain yet evocative language. In Buchmendel, for example, he indicates symbolically, and with great force, the destruction of cosmopolitan tolerance by the nationalist madness of World War I in the fate of a single person.
Buchmendel is a Jewish peddler of antiquarian books in Vienna. For many years before the outbreak of the war, he carried out his business in a Viennese caf?. Buchmendel lives for books; he has no other life. He is astonishingly learned, in the offbeat way of secondhand book dealers; every scholar in Vienna (the Vienna, recall, of Brahms, Freud, and Breuer, of Mahler and Klimt, of Schnitzler, Rilke, and Hofmannsthal) consults him on bibliographical matters. (Zweig himself possessed one of the world's greatest private collections of literary and musical manuscripts until the coming of the Nazis forced him to dispose of it.)
Buchmendel is otherworldly. His wants are few, his interest in money minimal. The caf? owner is happy to have as a customer a man consulted by so many eminent men, even though he consumes little and occupies a table all day. The caf? owner understands, as does everyone else, that Buchmendel is a contributor to, because he is a conservator of, civilization, and being a civilized man himself, he is honored to welcome him. But then the war supervenes. Buchmendel does not notice it; he carries on as if nothing has happened. He is arrested, because he has written to both London and Paris, the capitals of the enemy countries, asking why he has not received copies of bibliographical reviews. The military censors assume that this correspondence is a code for espionage: they can't conceive that a man could concern himself with bibliography at such a time.
The government authorities discover that Buchmendel, born in Russian Galicia, is not even an Austrian citizen. Interned in a camp for enemy aliens, he waits two years before the authorities realize that he is only what he seems, a book peddler.
On his release, Vienna has changed. No longer the center of an empire, it has become the impoverished capital of a monoglot rump state. Buchmendel's caf? has changed hands; the new owner does not understand or welcome Buchmendel and ejects him. Buchmendel's life has fallen apart, as has the civilization to which he was a valuable contributor; now homeless, he soon dies of pneumonia.
Zweig makes it clear that though Buchmendel was eccentric and his life one-dimensional, even stunted, he could offer his unique contribution to Viennese civilization because no one cared about his nationality. His work and knowledge were vastly more important to his cosmopolitan customers than his membership in a collectivity. No man was more sensitive than Zweig to the destructive effects upon individual liberty of the demands of large or strident collectivities. He would have viewed with horror the cacophony of monomanias--sexual, racial, social, egalitarian--that marks the intellectual life of our societies, each monomaniac demanding legislative restriction on the freedom of others in the name of a supposed greater, collective good. His work was a prolonged (though muted and polite) protest at the balkanization of our minds and sympathies.
In the realm of personal morality, Zweig appealed for subtlety and sympathy rather than for the unbending application of simple moral rules. He recognized the claims both of social convention and of personal inclination, and no man better evoked the power of passion to overwhelm the scruples of even the most highly principled person. In other words, he accepted the religious view (without himself being religious) that Man is a fallen creature, who cannot perfect himself but ought to try to do so. For example, in his novella Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Woman, he tells the story of a woman so swept up by passion that, for 24 hours, she lives more intensely than in the rest of her life put together.
The book opens with a quotation from William Blake's "Auguries of Innocence" (though "Auguries of Imperfectibility" might be more apt):
Every night & every Morn
Some to Misery are Born.
Every Morn & every Night
Some are Born to sweet Delight.
The story takes place in a pension on the Riviera, just before the First World War. Suddenly, an untoward event shatters the little society's calm:
Madame Henriette, whose husband [a rich bourgeois French manufacturer] had been playing dominoes with his friend from Namur as usual, had not come back from her evening walk on the terrace by the beach, and it was feared she had suffered an accident. The normally ponderous, slow-moving manufacturer kept charging down the beach like a bull, and when he called "Henriette! Henriette!" into the night, his voice breaking with fear, the sound conveyed something of the terror and the primaeval nature of a gigantic animal wounded to death. The waiters and pageboys ran up and down the stairs in agitation, all the guests were woken and the police were called. The fat man, however, trampled and stumbled his way through all this, waistcoat unbuttoned, sobbing and shrieking as he pointlessly shouted the name "Henriette! Henriette!" into the darkness. By now the children were awake upstairs, and stood at the window in their night dresses, calling down for their mother. Their father hurried upstairs to comfort them. And then something so terrible happened that it almost defies retelling. . . . Suddenly the big, heavy man came down the creaking stairs with a changed look on his face, very weary. . . . He had a letter in his hand. "Call them all back!" he told the hotel major-domo, in a barely audible voice. "Call everyone in again. There's no need. My wife has left me."
A little later, "we heard the sound of his ponderous massive body dropping heavily into an armchair, and then a wild, animal sobbing, the weeping of a man who had never wept before. . . . Suddenly, one by one, as if put to shame by so shattering an emotional outburst, we crept back to our rooms, while that stricken specimen of mankind shook and sobbed alone . . . in the dark as the building slowly laid itself to rest, whispering, muttering, murmuring and sighing."
Zweig's sympathy for the deserted husband is palpable, and he makes us feel it. The novella is by no means an ideological anti-marriage, anti-bourgeois tract. But Zweig's sympathy also extends to Henriette, the man's wife. The following day, the guests of the pension have a vigorous debate about Henriette's conduct. The narrator opines that Henriette, who acted foolishly, will almost certainly soon regret her action bitterly and be miserable. She is therefore worthy of compassion as well as condemnation: after all, if her marriage were happy, if there had not been hidden depths, she wouldn't have behaved as she did.
The narrator's understanding of Henriette's conduct attracts the attention of Mrs. C., an aristocratic Englishwoman of perfect manners, now approaching old age. She takes him aside and tells him her own story, explaining why she, too, is unwilling to condemn Henriette in conventional terms, though she does not suggest that the adulteress has behaved well. Many years before, Mrs. C. says, after the death of her husband, to whom she had been happily married, she had traveled to Monte Carlo, where, in the casino, she had noticed a handsome young Polish nobleman, an inveterate gambler, who evidently gambled the last of his money away and left the casino with the aim of committing suicide. She followed him, to rescue him; one thing led to another, and she found herself, uncharacteristically, spending a passionate night with him in a hotel.
The following day, she and her young nobleman take an exhilarating drive in the country, where they enter a little Catholic chapel. He swears that he will give up gambling forever (it is a beautiful moment), and Mrs. C., now passionately in love, gives him a sum of money equal to what he has stolen from his own family to gamble with--a theft that, if discovered, will disgrace him forever. Instead of taking the train back to Poland, however, he returns to the casino, where that night she sees him gamble the money away again, in the process insulting his benefactress.
Mrs. C. has lavished her passion on a worthless man, and Zweig is certainly not suggesting that she behaved well or is a model that others should imitate. But the heart has its reasons that reason knows not of; and never to acknowledge that fact, never to make allowances for it, would be inhuman, just as always giving in to passion also makes us inhuman.
Zweig implies that only the reticent and self-controlled can feel genuine passion and emotion. Mrs. C.'s passion is so great precisely because she is normally a self-contained Englishwoman who had "that peculiarly English ability to end a conversation firmly but without brusque discourtesy." The nearer emotional life approaches to hysteria, to continual outward show, the less genuine it becomes. Feeling becomes equated with vehemence of expression, so that insincerity becomes permanent. Zweig would have dismissed our modern emotional incontinence as a sign not of honesty but of an increasing inability or unwillingness truly to feel.
Zweig saw the storm clouds gathering over his native Austria earlier than many. He bought a flat in London in 1934, realizing that the Nazis would not leave Austria in peace. By 1936, he accepted that he was a permanent exile. But other German exiles criticized him for being insufficiently vociferous in denouncing the Nazis. Some even accused him of trying to reach an accommodation with them to preserve his German income intact--a nonsensical charge: his books were among the first that the Nazis burned.
But it is true that he joined no anti-Nazi groups and hardly raised his voice against the Nazi horror. As a free man, he did not want the Nazis to be able to dictate his mode of expression--even if it were in opposition to them. The insufficiency of this fastidiousness at such a conjuncture needs little emphasis. But Zweig felt--in his own case, since he did not speak for others--that strident denunciation would grant the Nazis a victory of sorts. And--like many intellectuals who overestimate the importance that the intellect plays in history and in life--Zweig viewed the Nazis as beneath contempt. Their doctrine and world outlook being so obviously ridiculous and morally odious, why waste time refuting them?
The nearest he came to denouncing the Nazis was in one of his brilliant historical studies (his accuracy always won praise from professional historians), published in 1936: The Right to Heresy: Castellio against Calvin. Castellio was a French humanist and scholar, more or less forgotten until Zweig resurrected his memory. In a book entitled Treatise of Heretics, Castellio denounced Calvin's totalitarian suppression of free opinion in sixteenth-century Geneva in the name of a theological doctrine. In the book, the parallels between Calvin's Geneva and Hitler's Germany are unmistakable, though Zweig, true to his literary method, lets the reader draw them for himself. For example, Calvin not only burned books but drew strength from his initial expulsion from Geneva after his first, failed, attempt to dominate the city, just as Hitler drew strength from his imprisonment after the beer-hall putsch, his first, failed, attempt to reach power in Germany.
Zweig saw himself in the role of Castellio:
In wars of ideas, the best combatants are not those who thrust themselves lightly but passionately into battle, but those who hesitate a long time before committing themselves, and whose decision matures slowly. It is only once all possibilities of understanding have been exhausted, and the struggle is unavoidable, that they enter the fight with a heavy heart. But it is precisely they who are then the firmest, the most resolute. Such was the case with Castellio. As a real humanist, he wasn't a born fighter. Conciliation suited his peaceful and profoundly religious temperament better. Like his predecessor, Erasmus, he knew the extent to which all earthly and divine truth was multiple, susceptible to many interpretations. . . . But if his prudence taught him tolerance of all opinions, and he preferred to remain silent than involve himself too quickly in quarrels that did not concern him, his ability to doubt and his constant questioning did not make him a cold sceptic.
Of course, it was not so easy to dismiss the Nazis. The contempt of a fastidious aesthete would not defeat them: far sterner measures were necessary. But Zweig, born in the pre-ideological age, did not want to live in a world where the only alternative to one ideology was what he thought would be a counter-ideology. When Zweig committed suicide in Brazil, in despair at the news from Europe, and cut off from all he valued or any hope of ever again having an audience in his native language, Thomas Mann, among others, criticized him sharply. Zweig's suicide, Mann said, was "a dereliction of his duty, an egotistical disdain of his contemporaries," that would give comfort to "the enemy."
That Zweig's death would give much comfort to the Nazis seems doubtful to me, but Mann was alluding to every man's duty to do whatever he could, be it ever so little, to defeat the barbarism that threatened civilization. That Zweig was egotistical was true (though an odd accusation, coming from Mann): he did not want to live in a world where the price of freedom was submergence in a vast collective effort whose outcome he regarded, in the event wrongly, as uncertain.
We can find the key to Zweig's suicide, I think, in the life of Castellio. True, Castellio's belief in free inquiry triumphed over Calvin's narrow theocratic ideas long after his death (more than two centuries, in fact), but during their lifetimes, Calvin won all along the line, and Castellio escaped execution only because illness "snatched him from Calvin's claws." Suicide was the illness that snatched Zweig from Hitler's claws, or the claws of the world that Hitler made. He thought that Nazism, would win--not forever, but for long enough, and that he would never again have, or be allowed, an audience for his books. He thus no longer had a raison d'?tre.
In the event, Hitler was defeated, only three years after Zweig's death. Freedom returned, at least to the West. But I doubt that the modern world would have pleased Zweig very much. The shrillness of our ideological debates, the emotional shallowness, the vulgarity of our culture, would have appalled him. To read Zweig is to learn what, through stupidity and evil, we progressively lost in the twentieth century. What we have gained, of course, we take for granted.
Posted by maximpost
at 12:18 PM EST
Updated: Wednesday, 28 January 2004 12:27 PM EST
