Vintage Reading

by Robert Kanigel

  Richard Wright never “defends” Bigger, never justifies his crime. He explains it, but does not explain it away; he says, in effect, “What do you expect?” Subject an entire race first to slavery and then to economic colonialism, pack them together under desperate conditions, deprive them of their human dignity, and Bigger Thomas is the more-than-occasional result: As stimulus breeds response, and oppression breeds crime, so do three centuries of racism breed Bigger Thomas.

  III

  Books That Shaped

  the Western World

  Essays — Michel de Montaigne

  Dialogues — Plato

  The Wealth of Nations — Adam Smith

  An Essay on the Principle of Population — Thomas Malthus

  The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire — Edward Gibbon

  The Origin of Species — Charles Darwin

  The Histories — Herodotus

  The Federalist Papers — Hamilton, Madison, Jay

  The Annals of Imperial Rome — Tacitus

  The Peloponnesian War — Thucydides

  Democracy in America — Alexis de Tocqueville

  _________________________________

  Why be surprised when these tomes, represented as shapers of Western thought and among those products of the human intellect most worth reading and rereading, prove to be just that? Not all are easy. But after 200 or 2000 years, they amply repay any extra effort they require. In Herodotus, we meet the first historian. In The Federalist Papers, Hamilton, Madison, and Jay virtually think a nation into being. Darwin and Adam Smith advance some of the most powerful ideas of the past two centuries. And Montaigne? He is the brother and friend a lot of us wish we had.

  Essay

  ____________

  By Michel de Montaigne

  First appeared in 1580

  “This is the only book in the world of its kind, and its plan is both wild and extravagant,” wrote Michel de Montaigne of his Essays.

  What he meant was, first, that he was himself their subject. And second, that instead of following a line of lockstep logic to some one end, he chose instead to let his thoughts float freely where they wished, however hesitant or contradictory the results might be.

  He begins one essay, for example, by distinguishing between goodness and virtue, the first being natural and effortless, the second difficult to achieve; he comments on how—even in his day!—the words goodness and innocence had taken on a tinge of contempt; he notes an Italian’s assessment of the soldierly qualities of the French, Spanish, Germans, and Swiss; he tells of how he abhors most of the more brutal vices—but that had he been born with “a more unruly temperament,” he’d have likely yielded to them: “I have never observed any great firmness in my soul,” he writes, “that would be capable of resisting even the mildest of passions.” He goes on to offer a glimpse at his own sex life; gives graphic descriptions of the kinds of torture and execution prevalent in his day—pointing out that whatever cannibals might do is less barbarous by far. And closes with a comment on man’s relationship to animals: “I am not ashamed to admit,” he says, “that I cannot easily refuse my dog when he offers to play with me.” Grand conclusion to all this? None.

  The essay, as a literary form, is Montaigne’s legacy. In French, essai means a trial or experiment, and that’s just how this 16th century humanist saw it—as a tentative, questioning, poking-around into this or that subject: “Of the hundred parts and aspects that each thing has, I take one, sometimes merely licking it, sometimes scraping its surface, and sometimes pinching it to the bone ... Since I scatter a word here and a word there, samples torn from their piece and separated without plan or promise, I am not bound to answer for them... I am free to give myself up to doubt and uncertainty.”

  Montaigne learned Latin before he did French, and his essays are studded with quotations from Plutarch, Cicero, Seneca, and others of the classics. Indeed, the essays started out as little more than their author’s notes on books he’d read—made necessary, he reveals, by a memory so bad he often forgot what he’d read or, when he did manage to remember, his impressions of it. Later in life, he retired from a legal career to the family estate in southern France, there to think and write on every conceivable subject—on books, lying, the education of children, friendship, the art of conversation ... With time, the essays became more intimate, more revealing. Collectively, they amount to an autobiography.

  Montaigne, on encountering difficult passages in a book: “I do not bite my nails over them; after making one or two attempts I give them up ... What I do not see immediately, I see even less by persisting. Without lightness, I achieve nothing; application and over-serious effort confuse, depress, and weary my brain.”

  On smells: “If I touch [my mustache] with my gloves or my handkerchief, it holds the scent for the whole day. It betrays the place where I have been. The close, luscious, greedy, long-drawn kisses of youth would adhere to it in the old days, and would remain for several hours afterwards.”

  Women may sometimes feel offended by Monsieur Montaigne: “Those undisciplined appetites and perverse tastes that they display during their pregnancies are present in their hearts at all times,” he writes. It is not the only instance when, in commenting on women, he seems irretrievably locked into his age.

  But more often, he reaches across the centuries, with perfect meaning and relevance, to our lives today. For he is preoccupied not with some sterile philosophical question but simply on what it means to live well. In that pursuit, he is a tireless questioner, never satisfied that he’s gotten to the bottom of things, never willing to toss off too-easy explanations. He is ever fresh.

  The Essays of Montaigne are a pleasure to read. Montaigne, the man, is a pleasure to meet.

  The Dialogues

  ____________

  By Plato

  First written in the fourth century B.C.

  In 399 B.C. Socrates was condemned to death by an Athenian court. With his friends gathered round him, he carried out the order by drinking from a cup of hemlock, his body growing gradually colder and stiffer as the poison worked. “This was the end of our comrade,” as his disciple Plato recorded it, “a man... of all then living we had ever met, the noblest and the wisest and the most just.”

  Plato was 29 at the time. And in a series of two dozen works written over the rest of his life, he set down the ideas of his master as well as—it is a blurring that scholars still dispute— his own. These, collectively, are known as The Dialogues.

  It was not the first time men (women didn’t figure much in the intellectual life of ancient Greece) had inquired into Truth, Goodness, and Immortality. But in The Dialogues such themes get a treatment they do nowhere else. This is not some Great Mind earnestly setting down his beliefs, or expounding a dogma, or issuing a manifesto. Rather, Socrates and his friends meet at the agora and follow, through a process of merciless questioning, a line of argument to its seemingly inevitable conclusion. The “Socratic Method,” as we call it today, is not the Truth itself, but a means of pursuing Truth. And it is probably more central to Western thought than any of the particular ideas Socrates held.

  In one dialogue, Socrates impresses a passing boy into service as a sort of intellectual guinea pig. Watch, he tells a friend, demonstrating his method, “I do nothing but ask questions and give no instruction. Look out if you find me teaching and explaining to him, instead of asking for his opinions.”

  But isn’t intellectual debate often just an exercise in frustration? And isn’t the embrace of an idea, only to have it dashed, apt to lead to an abandonment of the search for truth? Such experiences can, Socrates admits to Phaidon, lead people to think that “there is nothing sound and wholesome either in practical affairs or in arguments.” But such people are victims, in the same way the misanthrope is a victim of having too often been taken in by would-be friends. Ultimately, “he hates everybody, and believes there is no soundness in anyone at all.”

  “Don’t let us be ‘misologues,’ h
ating argument as misanthropes hate men,” Socrates cautions Phaidon. “It would be a pitiable disease when there is an argument true and sound... and [that one should] deprive himself of the truth.”

  As for the subjects of the Dialogues, they are many and varied. In the Meno, Socrates argues that “virtue,” the Greek notion of moral excellence, comes through divine dispensation, and cannot be taught.

  Similarly, in the Ion, he maintains that the gifts of the poet come through God, not human artistry.

  In the Phaedo, he considers the nature of the soul, and speculates about the after-world.

  Some of the reasoning is intricate, requiring work the casual reader may not want to give it. But much of it, though “philosophical,” is accessible, and demands only common sense, readerly attention, and an appreciation for the pleasures of rhetoric.

  That truth can be gained through unaided reason, enriched by only minimal contact with the world around us, is a cornerstone of the Socratic method. And this flies in the face of modern science, for example, which stresses a constant checking of reason and logic against nature—a lookingout orientation rather than a looking-within. In the Phaedo, Socrates reports on his youthful interest in “natural philosophy,” which today we call science. A sterile business, says he. Can anyone believe, he asks his friends, that how our bones and sinews are connected, say, really furnishes the “cause of how we live, or why we act as we do?”

  As one or another of Socrates’ intellectual combatants fails to raise a seemingly natural objection, the modern reader may feel inclined to jump in with, “But Socrates, isn’t it true that...?” In the Crito, for example Socrates concludes he must resist importunings that he flee Athens rather than take the hemlock, because it would undermine justice. For a justice-seeker like himself, he says, it would be like being an athlete with a crippled body; his would be a life unworthy of life.

  But does cooperating with a corrupt legal system, one might ask, truly serves justice? And could Socrates not accomplish more good by remaining alive? And isn’t the life-wish a gift from God, and oughtn’t that be honored? Valid or not, and quite aside from how Socrates might answer them, such questions are just the sort The Dialogues invite.

  An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of

  The Wealth of Nations

  ____________

  By Adam Smith

  First published in 1776

  The story unfolds in a pin factory in eighteenth century Britain. There, one man draws out the wire. Another straightens it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it, and so on through 18 distinct operations. An unskilled worker on his own, “could scarce, perhaps, with his utmost industry, make one pin in a day, and certainly could not,” we are told, “make 20.” Yet this primitive factory, manned by just 10 workers, produces 48,000 a day. It is this division of labormultiplied production which, we learn, accounts for “that universal opulence which extends itself to the lowers ranks of the people”

  The observer of this phenomenon was Adam Smith, professor of moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow, tutor to a duke, and commissioner of customs for the city of Edinburgh. The year was 1776, and the book he wrote helped, as one political columnist has put it, “make the modern world.”

  An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations can be reckoned the founding document of the economic doctrine known as laissezfaire—the notion that the maximum good is done when free men and women meet in a free market to conduct their business unencumbered by government rules, regulations and restraints; laissez-faire is French for “let ‘em do it.”

  The division of labor from which so many benefits flow, Smith wrote, is a natural consequence of “a certain propensity in human nature... to truck, barter and exchange one thing for another.” When people can do so freely, prices fall to their lowest level, supplies of scarce goods are fairly apportioned, and even the most menial workers manage to eke out a living. And all this good comes not from any human inclination to do good, but as a natural consequence of actors on a great economic stage pursuing their own ends.

  A conservative economist, writing in the 1950s, cautioned that readers should not expect to find in “The Wealth of Nations” an understanding of modern economics. “Reading Smith,” wrote Ludwig von Mises, “is no more a substitute for study of mathematics.” The advice is sound; it was a different world that Smith inhabited.

  It was a world before the Industrial Revolution had expanded the scale of enterprise and power. It was a world, predating the “service economy,” where people actually made things and raised crops, instead of pushing paper and manipulating information. It was a world where, in America at least, labor was in such short supply that a widow with four grown children was a hot marriage prospect. And it was a remarkably stable world—one where the wages paid soldiers were exactly as they’d been 150 years before, and where the prices of some commodities had remained constant for half a century.

  All the more remarkable, then, that so many of Smith’s insights apply today. He writes, for example, that “philosophers, or men of speculation, whose trade it is not to do anything, but to observe everything,” are just as inclined to a division of labor as workers in a pin factory; hence the academic departmentalization of today’s university and the narrow specialties of our scientific research.

  Smith even comments on the old nature vs. nature debate. The difference between “a philosopher and a common street porter... seems to arise not so much from nature, as from habit, custom and education,” he writes. Though perhaps similarly endowed at birth, the two are pointed down very different paths. In time, whatever “difference of talents... widens by degrees, till at last the vanity of the philosopher is willing to acknowledge scarce any resemblance.”

  Despite his links to a laissez-faire outlook that leaves workers at the mercy of impersonal market forces, this is not the only time Smith seems to sympathize with them. During Smith’s day, workers labored under “combination laws” that barred them from forming trade unions or going out on strike. Ideally, worker and master negotiated as between free equals, Smith felt. But he was hardly blind to the reality of it. “It is not... difficult to foresee which of the two parties must, upon all ordinary occasions, have the advantage,” he wrote, citing the combination laws and the employer’s superior resources. “Masters,” he wrote, “are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform combination” to keep wages down. And sometimes even “to sink the wages of labor” through agreements “conducted with the utmost silence and secrecy.”

  Some things never change. Then, as now, men were moved to buy and sell by the same impulse to personal gain, and greed. And it is for insight into this uncanny constancy of human nature that we read Adam Smith today.

  An Essay on the Principle of Population

  ____________

  By Thomas Malthus

  First published in 1798

  Man is consigned to bleak subsistence, because population, left unchecked, grows faster than the food supply needed to feed it.

  This is the essential “Malthusian” idea—and yet it does not quite represent Thomas Malthus fairly. For in the inevitable and unremitting human desperation it suggests, it lays the stress in a way he, I think, never intended. The English philosopher and critic Anthony Flew was right when he said that “what Malthus himself actually advocated differs in important ways from what has become associated with his name.”

  A clue to how Malthus became intellectual history’s Gloomy Gus may lie in his famous essay’s full title: “On the Principle of Population as it Affects the Future Improvement of Society, with Remarks on the Speculations of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet, and other Writers.”

  Condorcet was the author of A History of the Progress of the Human Spirit, which has been called “the most sublimely confident book... ever written.” It declared, among other things, that “there is no limit set to the perfecting of the powers of man; that human perfectibility is in reality indefinite.”


  Meanwhile, Godwin—who like his French counterpart was aflame with the new utopian ideas coming out of the French Revolution—envisioned a society in which “there will be no war, no crimes, no administration of justice, as it is called, and no government. Besides this, there will be neither disease, anguish, melancholy, nor resentment. Every man will seek, with ineffable ardor, the good of all.”

  Well, then, set against such sentiments as these, Malthus may indeed be reckoned a reactionary, a negativist, an apologist for the misery and injustice in the world—but only against such a backdrop.

  In fact, Malthus’s essay is full of brighter visions and cheerier insights. At one point, he outlines a hierarchy of human needs similar to that advanced by modern psychologists of the humanistic school. At another, he denies the inferiority of sensual pleasures as compared to intellectual, cautioning only moderation in their enjoyment. (“Intemperance,” he writes, “defeats its own purpose. A walk in the finest day through the most beautiful country, if pursued too far, ends in pain and fatigue.”)

  Malthus does point out that nature’s “infinite variety” includes a darker side. But this, he writes, gives “spirit, life, and prominence to her exuberant beauties, and those roughnesses and inequalities, those inferior parts that support the superior, though they sometimes offend the fastidious microscopic eye of short-sighted man, contribute to the symmetry, grace, and fair proportion of the whole.”