Cultural Amnesia (91 page)

There are no genres, there are only talents.

—JEAN-FRANÇOIS
REVEL,
Le Voleur dans la maison vide
, P. 311

R
EVEL, WHEN HE
wrote
this in the late 1990s, was defending the status of journalism against lofty minds who presumed to despise its immediacy. In France, the philosophers, the sociologists and the savants in general
had always enjoyed an automatic superiority to journalists, because for the savants the unit of thought was the book, whereas for the journalists the unit of thought was only the article. Books
outweighed articles. Revel had good personal reasons to question this hierarchy. The philosophers in particular, with Sartre always in the ascendant, had an impressive record of getting the
post-war world wrong, whereas Revel and some of his fellow journalists had been getting it right. Revel was too modest, however, to quote from his own works in order to demonstrate that the
mainspring of this talent was a capacity for compression that left the philosophers sounding vapid. They weren’t just peddling falsehoods, they were pumping the life out of the language
while they did so. Revel pumped the life in. He could do so from an historical perspective, which always helps. On
the matter of Malraux’s inflated prestige as an
omniscient pontifex of the visual arts, for example, Revel could go all the way back to Hegel for evidence that real knowledge about art sounded less like a tinkling cymbal. Hegel, said Revel,
actually looked hard at paintings and judged before he theorized. Revel found the French art-history tradition critically short of of Jewish scholars. Elie Faure, august author of that
platitudinous tome
L’Esprit des formes
, had emerged not from a proper scholarly tradition but from a vacuum, and Malraux represented the same vacuum
with better publicity. Revel scorned that kind of highfalutin cultural globetrotting for its second-hand world-historical verbiage (“
le verbiage
historico-mondial de deuxième main
”—the sandbag swings more elegantly in the original). He called it vulgarization in an ampule. But the phrase that counted was
déclamatoire prétentions métaphysiques
. It was the claim to philosophical status that riled him.

Well schooled in philosophy himself, Revel thought the philosophy that mattered most had always begun
from the level of well-written journalism, which was in touch with the world and had a professional imperative to keep the contact while making specific propositions. He put a premium on the
thinking that did not give itself a licence to get above writing. The danger of that position is to overvalue simplicity: its proponent had better be able to suggest everything else while he
zeroes in on a neat precept. Revel could, and can: we need the two tenses because he gets better as he gets older. His prose, right down to the epithet, demands to be unpacked, and it is a long
time before we see the bottom of the suitcase. He is the master of the non-moronic oxymoron. In any language, practitioners of broadsheet commentary love the oxymoron as a device, because it
hints at a pipeline to profundity. But an oxymoron from Revel always pays its way. He was the first to come up with a two-word formulation for the miraculous ability of pundits to deduce that a
past event had been inevitable: “retrospective clairvoyance.” In an everyday piece for a newspaper, he called terrorism “systematized delirium.” Most authors of a treatise
on the subject would be very glad to think of an expression as rich with implication as that.

Even in straight expository prose—no rhetorical devices, no tricks—he has the gift of putting a large argument
into a small space, usually when he is summarizing what he has just been expounding. In a searing
article on the deliberate dumbing-down of the French education system, he
encapsulates the possible consequences: “a non-selective diploma is a passport to unemployment.” (Note the resonance of the buried metaphor: a passport implies a foreign land, which
is what unemployment is.) In Britain, Kingsley Amis got into the language with a phrase about the same theme:
More will mean worse
. (He actually
wrote
it in italics, which helped the op-ed journalists to home in on it without the tax to their poor brains of reading it in context.) But the strength of
Amis’s point depended on his treating education specifically, as an absolute; and the strength was also a weakness, because he had no inclination to extend his view to a social tendency.
Revel’s phrase leaves the way open for an argument about whether a proposed cure for social ills might not exacerbate them. Always characterized by the
bien
pensant
left as a diehard right-winger, Revel was fruitfully obliged to go on pointing out that he was in fact a liberal democrat who was genuinely concerned that doctrinaire
gauchiste
measures would leave the underprivileged less privileged than ever. Being misrepresented can be a stimulus, and in France Revel could depend on being
misrepresented from all directions. He was energized by a vivid knowledge of what the states in the East had been like when their official thinkers had been in a position to translate their
vilification of a dissident into practical action.

As things are now, it is getting hard to imagine just how reluctant the French intelligentsia was to give up on its
righteous commitment to the international anti-capitalist dream. “A school of thought that knows itself to be in decline,” said Revel in
La
Connaissance inutile
, “fights all the more furiously to conserve its identity.” As it became clear that the West, in order to bring communism to ruin, didn’t have to do
anything except exist, the French left became more vindictive, and not less, against liberal democrat commentators of Revel’s stamp. The left actually intensified, instead of diminishing,
its insistence that the Communist world was beseiged by hostile forces. Revel got his answer into a nutshell: “The Communist world is indeed a fortress besieged, but from within.” His
critics might conceivably have one day forgiven him for thinking like that. But they have never forgiven him for writing like that. They would prefer to call his way of putting things
irresponsible: mere journalism. At the end of 2001, Bernard-Henri
Lévy published his portentously titled
Réflexions sur la
guerre, le mal et la fin de l’histoire
. A commentator with philosophical credentials, Lévy is so madly fashionable that his new book appeared in the vitrines of the fashion
boutiques along the Boulevard St. Germain. More than three decades having elapsed since the events of May 1968, Lévy has had the time, and the good sense, to work his way to an acceptance
of liberal democracy. But from the way he states the position he now holds you wouldn’t know that it had been held from the beginning by men like Revel, who never gets a mention.

Later in the same passage from
Le Voleur dans la maison vide
,
Revel goes on to confess that whenever he wrote an article he was always thinking of how it would fit into a book. This confession might seem contradictory: if talent matters and genres
don’t, why should a journalist publish books at all? But the question answers itself. The attraction of journalism is that one runs no lasting risks. But that’s just what encourages
the sloven. I prefer to be encouraged by a man like Revel, who has always written even the most fleeting piece as if he might need to defend it on the day of judgement—and for any craftsman
proud of his work, of course, the day of judgement is always today.
Ce jour
: journalism. In French the connection is obvious. In English, we tend to forget
that journalism means today, and we are seldom encouraged to remember that history is made of nothing else except one today after another.

Ideology functions as a machine to destroy information, even at
the price of making assertions in clear contradiction of the evidence.

—JEAN-FRANÇOIS
REVEL,
La Connaissance inutile
, P. 153

This is an example of Revel restraining himself, rather than letting fly. The propensity of left
ideologists to argue from a sense of history while lacking a sense of fact has always got his goat, but he has managed to stay coherent. Sometimes one wishes that he would sideline the suave
sarcasm and give way to a bellow of rage. On the same page of the same book, Revel quotes Regis Debray’s ringing assurance, dating from 1979, that “the word Gulag is
imposed
by imperialism.” (The italics are
there in the original French, where they have even more the effect of a proud smile from a man in
tights who has just farted a blue flame.) Debray’s confident pronouncement would have been bizarre enough in 1959, when even Beauvoir must have been having doubts, but for 1979 it was a
striking example of the determination of the French far left to call their retreat an advance. Revel was the first to spot that those ideologists who did give up parts of their position became
very angry if it was suggested that they had done so in response to criticism. “Those who hold the monopoly of error reserve to themselves the monopoly of rectification.”

Revel had always been good at cutting a section through the mechanism of the totalitarian mind so that
you could see the cogs turning. Raymond Aron had begun the job in his
L’Opium des intellectuels
, where he pointed out the essential difference between
a sense of history and an ideology. A sense of history reveals variety, and an ideology conceals it. Revel made an advance on Aron by picking up on the bullying aspect, the set of coercive mental
habits that made an ideologist a totalitarian even in his way of thought. On a later page of
La Connaissance inutile
––and also, with the
appropriate scholarly back-up, in
Pourquoi des philosophes
—he pinpoints Heidegger as a case of
totalitarisme dans le
démarche discursive
, tirelessly and needlessly accumulating affirmatives: “terrorist tautology” in the style of Hitler and Stalin. In
Le
Voleur dans la maison vide
, Revel drew sad conclusions about the ideologists in general: “The intellectuals have the opportunism of the exterminator” (p. 231). After the verbal
battle of a lifetime, he had come to accept that the reason for the readiness of the intellectuals to connive at mass extermination was that their language was itself a totalitarian instrument.
Hence the hollowness of what he called the eternal dream of the
bien pensant
left:
un totalitarisme
végétarien
(p. 557). The reluctance of ex-ideologists like Bernard-Henri Lévy to acknowledge their debt to Revel is quite understandable. He isn’t telling them
that they were bad writers because they thought that way. He is telling them that they thought that way because they were bad writers.

RICHARD RHODES

An American journalist with showbiz status, Richard Rhodes has a diva-like shyness about revealing
his precise age, but the records show that he graduated from Yale in 1959, which probably means that he was born somewhere around 1938. Like many of us who were children during World War II
and found out while we were growing up that the world we inherited had been shaped by technology to an unprecedented degree, Rhodes pursued a fascination with machines and systems. Most of
the eighteen books published under his name are about technical matters at a high level of complexity, which he can talk about with professional expertise. At various times he has been a
visiting scholar at both Harvard and MIT. On subjects other than science and technology he can fall prey to catch-all sociological theories—for the machine buff, there is always the
temptation to think that society is a machine too—but on purely technical matters he has a rare knack for putting difficult topics in clear, and even self-effacing, prose. He is also a
novelist. With his work in that area I won’t pretend to be familiar, but at least two of his non-fiction works are compulsory reading, and one of those is a book that every student of
liberal democracy should know in detail.
The Making of the
Atomic Bomb
(1986) depends on a
thoroughness of research that would scarcely have been possible without the author’s being supported for five years by the Ford Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. (The
availability of aid on such a scale is probably the chief reason that the United States produces so many more of this type of writer than say, Britain: it isn’t just their unabashed
can-do attitude, it’s the depth of their back-up.) Rhodes deserves personal credit, however, for having done an unusually judicious job in tying the story together.

In a still rarer feat, he has managed to dramatize a technical story without fudging the science. The
spectacular nature of some of the human material on display might have helped in this dramatization. The minds assembled at Los Alamos were often histrionic characters even when they shrank
from human contact, and the way Robert Oppenheimer marshalled their talented and sometimes temperamental efforts was a theatrical event. But finally the object they were all after depended on
physics and engineering, and Rhodes’s real triumph is to make a drama out of those things too. The narrative catches the reader up in an excitement that is unlikely to suit his
proclivities, unless he believes in advance that it was necessary not only to build the bomb, but to drop it on a city.

On the latter issue, Rhodes lays out the case without fudging the arguments on either side. Those who think there is
only one side, against the bomb’s use, will discover that Oppenheimer was never among their number. Even though the war against Germany was over, he thought there was a case for using
the bomb to bring about a quick and certain end to the war against Japan, and he presented the case with logic hard to fault. Oppenhimer’s sensitivities about the nuclear weapons he had
been instrumental in bringing into existence were concentrated not against the uranium bomb but against its successor, the hydrogen bomb. Rhodes, again with the aid of a couple of large
foundations, tells the story of the hydrogen bomb too, in
Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb
(1995). The second book is as uncompromisingly
thorough as the first but necessarily less fascinating, because the moral
problem remained notional. The hydrogen bomb was too destructive to be used in war, and the fact
was plain to any given government, which would rein in its own military leaders if they thought it could. As it happened, it was in the United States, during the Cuban missile crisis, that
the military got closest to starting a global thermonuclear war on its own account, when the air force, and especially its Strategic Air Command, tried to provoke the Soviet Union into
action, against John F. Kennedy’s clear orders as commander in chief. The Constitution held, but only just. Since the end of the world came that close, it is easy to argue that the
development of nuclear weapons was evil in itself: even those ready to contemplate that the nuclear strike against Japan might have been an acceptable price for shortening the war are usually
less ready to concede that the threat of a fried planet might have been the price of freedom. But liberals should face two uncomfortable possibilities; first, that it was a necessary evil;
second, that nothing else, in the Cold War years, could have stopped the two major powers from fighting. The left is always at its weakest when it argues for an alternative past, administered
by better men. They can only mean men like them. (This assumption of personal superiority is where the perennial left comes closest to the classic right.) But the past was administered by men
as clever as they were at the very least. The chief virtue of Rhodes’s book about Los Alamos it to give you the feeling of how a group of the cleverest men on Earth combined their best
efforts in the belief that building a bomb to kill a hundred thousand people at a time was the only thing to do. There can be moral discussions of the modern world that don’t take that
fact in, but they won’t be serious.