Sometimes reading younger writers on Twitter makes me feel like Nikolai Petrovitch in Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons. If you haven’t read the novel, Nikolai’s son has returned home from university for the summer—an event Nikolai had been anticipating with great excitement—only to have his son arrive with a friend, a “nihilist” named Bazarov, who knows everything and scoffs at everyone who disagrees with him (particularly at Nikolai’s brother, Pavel Petrovitch, for his outdated way of life). Nikolai’s son, Arkady, like a mindless Twitter follower, loves everything Bazarov says and does.
This leads Nikolai to a hard conclusion that he nevertheless accepts: “‘So that,’ began Pavel Petrovitch, ‘so that’s what our young men of this generation are! They are like that—our successors!’ ‘Our successors!’ repeated Nikolai Petrovitch, with a dejected smile. He had been sitting on thorns, all through the argument, and had done nothing but glance stealthily, with a sore heart, at Arkady. ‘Do you know what I was reminded of, brother? I once had a dispute with our poor mother; she stormed, and wouldn’t listen to me. At last I said to her, “Of course, you can’t understand me; we belong,” I said, “to two different generations.” She was dreadfully offended, while I thought, “There’s no help for it. It’s a bitter pill, but she has to swallow it.” You see, now, our turn has come, and our successors can say to us, “You are not of our generation; swallow your pill.”’”
It may seem that Nikolai is giving up too easily, but there’s wisdom in his resignation, and it’s this: The younger generation will replace you whether you like it or not and espouse ideas you find foolish or horrendous, and one day there will be nothing you can do about it. Yes, young people can be brash and stupidly self-confident (so self-confident, in fact, so afraid of appearing not to know something, that they don’t realize how obvious the charade is). One day, they too will be replaced. At the same time, not everything is a posture. Real differences exist and won’t always be resolved in this life. (Though, if you’ve read the novel, there’s hope.) Don’t take me to mean that older writers or thinkers should give up. Not at all. Nikolai doesn’t, but his discourse is seasoned with the salt of this reality.
Well, enough with the moralizing! Let’s get to the reviews and news, shall we? First up: Alan Jacobs reviews Edward Tenner’s The Efficiency Paradox: “Essential to Tenner’s approach is the difference between efficiency and effectiveness. For instance, a mechanical plow using an internal combustion engine is far more effective at plowing a field than a horse is, but it uses about 13 times as much energy—which is not very efficient. Tenner argues that our current technocratic elite focus on efficiency—a focus that has been increasingly obsessive for more than a century—leads to a series of ‘wasted efforts and missed opportunities.’”
Will Brewbaker reviews Mark Wagenaar’s latest book of poems: “In Mark Wagenaar’s new book, Southern Tongues Leave Us Shining, the poet’s third, the speaker searches constantly for evidence of God’s presence in the world. It is a book of doubt just as much as it is a book of faith. Indeed, doubt threatens, at every line break, to wrest faith from the speaker’s hands. But books of doubt are books of faith, and Southern Tongues understands this.”
Did the notorious Zinoviev letter ever exist? “No one has ever seen it. All we have are copies of copies of a possible forgery. But it created havoc in 1924 and still perplexes us today.”
Did you know about the parasitic vine that slowly sucks the life out of wasps?
A rousing defense of nationalism and odd critique of liberalism: Samuel Goldman reviews Yoram Hazony’s The Virtue of Nationalism: “Hazony’s critique of liberalism in the name of conservatism is likely to be among the most controversial aspects of this book. That is regrettable, because it rests on a confusing and counterproductive use of terms. In short, what Hazony calls liberalism is more helpfully described as ‘rational constructivism.’ The terminological distinction is important because few of the original thinkers who knew and accepted the label of “liberal” were opponents of nationalism. On the contrary, liberals like John Stuart Mill argued explicitly that the nation-state was the best possible setting for the preservation of individual freedom and the practice of constitutional government. Hazony knows this and cites Mill’s Considerations on Representative Government with frequency and admiration. His definition of liberalism, however, requires Hazony to disassociate Mill from the concept that was associated with him in his own time and has come to define his intellectual legacy. It is a strange definition of liberalism that includes Ayn Rand while excluding not only Mill but also Benjamin Constant, Alexis de Tocqueville, and their masters and students, such as Montesquieu, Isaiah Berlin, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Raymond Aron.”
Essay of the Day:
In Commentary, Joseph Epstein investigates charm—his own:
“Full in the face of my one firm rule about charm, that if one thinks one is charming one probably isn’t, I wish to say I do believe I am charming: mildly charming, and, alas, resistibly, highly resistibly, so, but still somewhat charming. Mine is at best a secondary charm. (Charm, unlike pregnancy and the quality of uniqueness, admits of qualification and gradations.) I have never charmed exotic women into my bed or charmed my way into theirs. So far as I know, I have never gained a job or vast sums of money or advancement of any serious kind through such charm as I may possess. The best that my charm may have brought me is a few new friends—people who, after a brief while in my company, may have noted to themselves that I seem a person of possible interest, someone mildly amusing or clever, with no obvious side to him, and is, who knows, perhaps worth knowing a little better.
“I cannot recall ever having been called charming. The only evidence I have of my charm are the smiles and the laughter of family and friends and acquaintances, when I have been able to evoke them. The closest I have come in recent years to having an open avowal of my charm was the claim made by a publisher who invited me to a very expensive dinner at a now-defunct Chicago restaurant called Charlie Trotter’s. The morning after our dinner, he sent me an email saying that he was miffed by the fact that our conversation was so enjoyable that he couldn’t remember any of the wonderful food he had eaten the night before. A charming compliment, this, and one that suggests, now that I think about it, the publisher may well be more charming than I.
“Some people are content to be charmed; others among us feel we must impose our charm, such as it is. I write “us,” for I have most of my life been among those who feel it incumbent upon themselves to assert what they believe is their charm, however minor it might be, in however circumspect a manner. Why do I feel it incumbent at all? I was not a boy that girls found especially appealing. I was a respectable but less than terrific athlete. As a student, I may be said not to have existed, finishing just above the lower quarter of my high-school class. As a field of successful endeavor, that left charm, or what, in my high-school days, passed for charm.”
Photo: Dust storm
Poem: Bruce Bennett, “Epitaph in a Paupers’ Cemetery”
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