"He who cannot draw on three thousand years is living hand to mouth."--Goethe
During my years as editor of Harper’s Magazine,
I could rely on the post office to mark the degree to which I was
living in what Goethe surely would have regarded as straitened
circumstances. Every morning at ten o’clock, I sat down to a desk
occupied by five newspapers and seven periodicals (four of them
embroiled in politics, the others concerned with socio-economic theory
or scientific discovery), three volumes of ancient or modern history
(the War of 1812, the death of Christopher Marlowe, the life of
Suleiman the Magnificent), a public opinion poll sifting America’s
attitude toward family values and assault weapons, and at least fifteen
manuscripts, solicited and unsolicited, whose authors assured me in
their cover letters that they had unearthed, among other items of
interest, the true reason for the Kennedy assassinations and the secret
of the universe.
The afternoon mail added to the weight of
evidence making the case for what I didn’t know and wasn’t likely ever
to know, and, over a period of years, I came up with a risk-assessment
model wired to the sound of the human voice. If, on first looking
through a dispatch from the Yale University library or the White House
Situation Room, I couldn’t hear the voice of its author, I let it go
the way of the Carolina Parakeet. The device operated as a loophole
through which I escaped the tax of having to read most of what rolled
out of the presses in any given year in one or another of the dead
languages designed for television broadcast or the teaching of better
business management. The volume of email traffic and the expansions of
the Internet over the last two decades have broadened the market for
“multimedia interfacing” and “innovative delivery strategies,”
brightening our horizons with “quicker access to valued customers,”
accelerating the transmission of unintelligible messages written in
academic cipher or ideological code. The surfeit of new and newer news,
“prioritized” and “context-sensitive,” now comes so quickly to hand
that, although we may wish it otherwise, we’re smothered in the
feathers of the stuff—on air, in print, online; as broadcast, podcast,
broadsheet, blog. Within the wind tunnels of the high-speed electronic
media, the time is always now; the data blow away or shred, and what
gets lost is all thought of what happened yesterday, last week, three
months or twenty years ago. Unlike moths and goldfish, human beings
deprived of memory tend to become disoriented and easily frightened.
Not only do we lose track of our own stories (who we are, where we’ve
been, where we might be going), but our elected representatives forget
why sovereign nations go to war.
On the assumption that the
blessed states of amnesia cannot support either the hope of individual
liberty or the practice of democratic self-government, Lapham’s Quarterly grounds its editorial premise on the risk-assessment model that allowed me to edit Harper’s Magazine.
If the words on the page translate into the sound of a human voice, I
don’t much care whether the author sets up the mise-en-scène in 1740s
Paris or Harlem in the 1920s. Some years ago on its editorial page, the
New York Times handed down the ruling that, “Great
publications magnify beyond measure the voice of any single writer.”
The sentence employed the wrong verb. The instruments of the media
amplify a voice, serving much the same purposes as a loudspeaker in a
ballpark or a prison. What magnifies a voice is the force of mind and
the power of expression, which is why Shakespeare’s plays still draw a
crowd in Central Park, and why we find the present in the past, the
past in the present, in voices that have survived the wreck of empires
and the accidents of fortune.
As a college student, I acquired
the habit of reading with a pencil in my hand, and, in books that I’ve
encountered more than once, I discover marginalia ten or forty years
out of date, most of it amended or revised to match a change in
attitude or plan. In a worn copy of Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby,
in what I take to be my handwriting at age nineteen, I find a series of
exclamation points subsequently crossed out and accompanied by the
remark, in my handwriting circa the age of thirty, “Too romantic.” In a
biography of Aaron Burr, I come across a note, “Too cynical,” corrected
at a later date and with a different pen, by the further note, “Maybe
not.” Reading the work of authors reporting from the front lines of
different centuries, it sometimes happens that I find myself at
different periods in the history of the same map coordinates—Herodotus
and T. E. Lawrence exploring the deserts of Arabia; George Orwell,
Martin Amis, and Samuel Johnson tempted by the seductions of London.
When I complicate the proceedings with a superimposition of marginalia
reaching across a distance of fifty years and written while traveling
in cities as unlike one another as Chicago and Havana, I can begin to
guess at what the physicists have in mind when they talk about the
continuum of space and time.
It’s been said that over the span
of nine months, the human embryo ascends through a sequence congruent
with fifty million years of evolution; that within the first six years
of life, the human mind replicates the dream of its five-thousand-year
journey from the sand castle cities of ancient Mesopotamia. The figures
in the dream have left the signs of their passing in what we know as
the historical record, navigational lights flashing across the gulf of
time on scraps of papyrus and scratchings in stone, on ships’ logs and
bronze coins, as epic poems and totem poles and painted ceilings, in
confessions voluntary and coerced, in five-act plays and three-part
songs.
The record is our inheritance, the one that Goethe had in
mind when he suggested a restructuring of the deal that Satan offered
Faust. It isn’t with magic that men make their immortality. They do so
with what they’ve learned on their travels across the frontiers of five
millennia, salvaging from the ruin of families and the death of cities
what they find to be useful or beautiful or true. We have nothing else
with which to build the future except the lumber of the past—history
exploited as natural resource and applied technology, telling us that
the story painted on the old walls and printed in the old books is also
our own.
Cicero made the point fifty years before the birth of
Christ: “Not to know what happened before one was born is always to be
a child.” The American historian, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., made the same
point in the essay that served as his epitaph when it was published in
the New York Times on January 1, 2007, two months before he
died. Under the heading, “Folly’s Antidote,” he prescribed strong doses
of history as a cure for “the delusions of omnipotence and
omniscience,” akin to those that persuaded the Bush Administration to
stage a rerun in Iraq of America’s misadventure in Vietnam. The failure
to connect the then with the now Schlesinger diagnosed as an illness
which, if left untreated, he thought likely to lead to the death of the
American idea. Children unfamiliar with the world in time make easy
marks for the dealers in fascist politics and quack religion. The
number of people in the United States at the moment who believe in the
literal truth of the Book of Revelation exceeds the number of people
who lived in all of medieval Christendom.
An acquaintance with
history doesn’t pay the rent or predict the outcome of next year’s
election, but, as the season or occasion requires, it makes possible
the revolt against what G. K. Chesterton once called, “the small and
arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about”;
instills a sense of humor; and brings with it the tray of “examples and
warnings” offered by the Roman historian Livy as, “fine things to take
as models, base things, rotten through and through, to avoid.” About
the methods of pacifying cities bloodied by civil war, I learn more
from Machiavelli’s Discourses or the Memoirs of
William Tecumseh Sherman than from the testimony of General David
Petraeus or the commentary on Fox News. When I see Hillary Clinton and
Rudy Giuliani being bundled around the country in a flutter of media
consultants fitting words into their mouths, I think of the makeup
artists adjusting the ribbons in Emperor Nero’s hair before sending him
into an amphitheater to sing with a choir of prostitutes. The
remembrance of the good old days in ancient Rome serves as a program
note for the performances on set with Diane Sawyer and Tim Russert.
To bring at least some of the voices of the past up to the microphone of the present, Lapham’s Quarterly
chooses a topic prominent in the news and, within the perimeter of that
topic, assembles a set of relevant texts—literary narrative and
philosophical commentary, diaries, speeches, letters, and
proclamations, as well as essays and reviews by contemporary
historians. The method assumes that all writing, whether scientific
treatise, tabloid headline, or minimalist novel, is an attempt to tell
a true story. Some stories are more complicated or more beautiful than
others. Some stories are immortal, others incoherent. Homer told a
story, and so did Albert Einstein; so do Jay Leno and Donald Duck. The
stories that bear a second reading are true in the sense that the voice
of the author emerges from the struggle to get at the truth of what he
or she thinks, has seen, remembers, can find language to express. I
know of no task more difficult, but it is the joint venture entered
into by writer and reader—the writer’s labor turned to the wheel of the
reader’s imagination—that produces the freedoms of mind from which a
society gathers its common stores of energy and hope.
My sense of such an enterprise I gathered from a prolonged correspondence with the readers of Harper’s Magazine—people
whom I never met and wouldn’t recognize if I came across them in an
elevator or a police lineup. The return addresses on their envelopes
didn’t amount to a demographic profile valuable to an advertising
agency (some of the readers drank a great deal of brandy; others
subsisted on mushrooms and dried fruit; some had attended as many as
seven universities; others had yet to graduate from high school), but
if I couldn’t guess at the weight of anybody’s automobile or stock
portfolio, I knew that I was talking to people bound together by their
interest in the meaning of words. When they found something amiss in a
published manuscript, they took the trouble to correct a wrong fact or
repair a disjointed paragraph. No matter what the subject under
discussion—the authorship of the Bible, the moral bankruptcy of the
Reagan or Clinton administrations, the trouble with New York literary
critics, the neglected reasons for the fall of the Ming Dynasty—the
care taken with the composition of their letters testified to the
importance they attached to the telling of a truer story. Like the
writers whose work appeared in the magazine, its readers were unafraid
of the first-person singular, willing to think out loud, to bet the pot
on a metaphor, to look for words that maybe could settle the wilderness
of their experience with the fence posts of a beginning, a middle, and
an end.
Addressed to readers similarly inclined, Lapham’s Quarterly
doesn’t aspire to the status of homework. It undertakes to foster and
extend an acquaintance with history, to suggest that the uses of the
past are as rich in possibility as were the American forests before the
arrival of Christopher Columbus. Again, I’m indebted to Arthur
Schlesinger, whose enthusiasms were communicable. Knowing that the four
most expensive words in the English language are “This time it’s
different,” Arthur also knew that the study of history is a perpetual
work in progress carried forward under the headings of the provisional,
destined never to reach a final verdict or discover the lost gold mines
of the imperishable truth. Some things change, others don’t, but absent
a knowledge of which is which, how then do we find our bearings in the
drift of time?
So also is Lapham’s Quarterly a work in
progress, provisional and incomplete, its elements forthcoming from a
quorum of contributing historians and at the suggestion of readers who
send texts and commentaries to www.laphamsquarterly.org; its
subscribers can expect the eventual additions of Letters to the Editor,
Notes on New Books, Counterfactual Speculations, and Recommended
Reading. Because the contents will never qualify for the label
“comprehensive,” the editorial choices come down to the difference
between writing that’s a pleasure to read and writing that isn’t.
Neither the holder of an advanced academic degree nor a candidate for
university tenure, I can afford to take liberties with the rules of
scholarly category and definition, and from an author whom I admire I
will listen to anything and everything—to reports of marvels in
Samarkand or Winesburg, Ohio, to descriptions of Talleyrand’s
mistresses or Kaiser Wilhelm’s uniforms, to suspicions of fraud in
Albany, or to a rumor of giant ants standing watch over the treasure of
Peru. If I’m to believe the physicists and the evolutionary record, the
figures in the dream inhabit the continuum of space and time, which
means that they depend for their existence on acts of the imagination.
Heraclitus named war “the father of all things,” and so it is with the first issue of Lapham’s Quarterly.
The decision wasn’t hard to reach. The history of Western Civilization
bills itself as the romance of war. On whom else do we bestow the prize
of immortality (Caesar, Genghis Khan, Napoleon, Adolf Hitler) if not on
the champions of mortal destruction? For generations it’s been said
that man’s destiny is war, the trials by combat endorsed by the
philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, as the “terrible,” but
“necessary” purgative that “saves the state from social petrification
and stagnation,” praised by the poet, William Ernest Henley, as the
“giver of kingship, the fame-smith, the song-master.”
An old
story, told and retold, in different languages, under different flags,
with the blessing of different holy names, across the span of a hundred
generations, the lines of bloodstained succession as fiercely preserved
as a family inheritance. Pick up the thread of the narrative in Babylon
in the days of Cyrus the Great, move forward in time to the triumphs of
Alexander of Macedon, student of Aristotle, to Caesar’s legions
governing what they knew as the province of Mesopotamia, through the
centuries of languid despotism imposed on the valley of the Euphrates
by the grand viziers of the Sublime Porte, to the division of the
Ottoman spoils at the Treaty of Versailles, and so at last, with a new
store of fireworks and a fresh set of headlines, to President George W.
Bush’s theory of democratic empire at play in the wreckage of downtown
Baghdad.
No matter how often told, the story begins with a call
to arms and ends with a cortege of postmortems. The sequence of texts
in this issue of the Quarterly follows the customary
procedure, the rules of engagement subject to change on short notice,
the fields of honor seldom as advertised. Had it occurred to President
Bush and his adjutants to conduct a similar review—of their thinking
about war as well as about the disposition of their horses and
guns—it’s at least conceivable that the U.S. Army might not have been
sent to trample out the vintage where Saddam Hussein supposedly had
stored the grapes of wrath. The industrial-strength bloodletting on the
Western Front in World War I discredited the notion of war as a
glorious undertaking certain to provide proofs of selfless valor and
noble character; the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan in August
1945 mothballed the use of large-scale warfare as the heavyweight
instrument of foreign policy. If it’s true that all societies trace
their origins to the god of war, it’s also true that over time they
learn to limit the collateral damage, to no longer regard war as a law
of nature but as a form of cultural expression, like the wearing of
togas and Halloween masks.
The military historian John Keegan observes in A History of Warfare
that sooner or later the captains and the kings find more
cost-effective ways of keeping the peace and robbing the populace.
“War, it seems to me, after a lifetime of reading about the subject,
mingling with men of war, visiting the sites of war and observing its
effects, may well be ceasing to commend itself to human beings as a
desirable or productive, let alone rational, means of reconciling their
discontents.” Not as tentative as Keegan, the historian John Mueller
(from whom an essay, “Band of Brigands,” appears on page 193) shapes
the argument of his book The Remnants of War on the premise
that “unlike breathing, eating, or sex, war is not something that is
somehow required by the human condition or by the forces of history.
Accordingly, war can shrivel up and disappear, and it seems to be in
the process of doing so.”
Consistent with the story lines of
the twentieth century’s wars to end all wars, the conclusions drawn by
Keegan and by Mueller suggest that President Bush’s splendid little war
in Iraq is the work of a man imprisoned in an obsolete tense. His
adjutants apparently find it hard to say anything in his presence that
doesn’t go well with the sound of bugles, and in the speeches staged
against a backdrop of flags and high-ranking uniforms, he presents
himself as a military commander in the romantic tradition of General
George Patton (page 24), captivated by the song of the sword that
Oliver Wendell Holmes brought to the students at Harvard University in
1895 (page 30), content with the blessing of Saint Augustine (page 36).
To accept as a consequence the price being paid to the piper in Iraq is
to acknowledge the truth of the old Arab proverb that says we have less
reason to fear what might happen tomorrow than to beware of what
happened yesterday. I know of no better reason to read history.
Construed as a means instead of an end, history is the weapon with
which we defend the future against the past.
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Sir Harold Evans is Editor at Large of The Week Magazine and the author of the critically acclaimed They Made America: From the Steam Engine to the Search Engine: Two Centuries of Innovators (Little, Brown and Company, 2004). Evans was the President and Publisher of Random House trade group from 1990-1997.
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Michael Lind is
Whitehead Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation. He is the author
of the ground-breaking study of American grand strategy, The American Way of Strategy: U.S. Foreign Policy and the American Way of Life (Oxford, 2006).
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Barbara Ehrenreich is the author of fourteen books, including the New York Times bestsellers Nickel and Dimed and Bait and Switch. A frequent contributor to Harper's and The Nation, she has been a columnist at The New York Times and Time magazine.
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Michael Hudson is
the President of The Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic
Trends and Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the
University of Missouri, Kansas City. He is the author, most recently,
of Super Imperialism: The Origin and Fundamentals of U.S. World Dominance (Pluto Press, 2003).
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Tim Weiner is author of Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (Doubleday, 2007).
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