Frederic Raphael

MAN FOR ALL SEASONS

How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an
Answer
By Sarah Bakewell (Chatto & Windus 370pp £16.99)
Michel Eyquem de Montaigne was born in 1533 and
died (following an attack of kidney stones, like his
father) in 1592. His mother was of Marrano descent;
her family had been Sephardic Jews, forced into
Catholicism. Montaigne himself was always formally
obedient to the Church. 'Otherwise', he wrote, 'I could
not keep myself from rolling about incessantly. Thus I
have kept myself intact, without agitation or
disturbance of conscience.' In this respect, he was
somewhat the precursor of Evelyn Waugh, who said
that, had he not been a Catholic, he would scarcely
have been human. Montaigne, however, was a genial
man of no officious piety; a dutiful mayor of Bordeaux,
unaggressive lord of his modest Périgordin manor, and a courtier without grand
ambition.

His essays advocated good-humoured acceptance of the vagaries of human life. For
all his formal orthodoxy, he was a manifest sceptic: 'There is', he observed, 'no
hostility that exceeds Christian hostility.' In practice, he preferred the Stoic amor fati
to religious absolutism and abominated the righteous cruelty of those with
undoubting convictions: 'It is putting a very high price on one's conjectures to have
someone roasted alive on their account.' Sarah Bakewell takes this to be an allusion
to the spate of witch-hunting which accompanied the religious wars, but it is no great
stretch to see in it a reference to the ongoing series of autos-da-fé on the other side
of the Pyrenees. For those who choose to read him so, Montaigne was a bit of a
crypto-Jew.

Fearing 'chimeras and fantastic monstrosities', he recruited reason, wryness and

literacy to allay their hold on him. He declined to be engaged on either savage side
in the religious wars which were the contemporary signs of that France 'divisée en
deux' that first split Catholics from Huguenots, later Jacobins from Girondins, and
then Socialists from the Droite classique. He played a key, but diffident, part in
bringing the Protestant Henri of Navarre to the French throne and, one guesses,
encouraged the king's view that Paris was worth a Mass. At the same time,
Montaigne observed that, however lofty the throne, 'we are still sitting only on our
own rump'.

If, in his mature years, he was happy to withdraw to the tower room - what he called
his 'arrière-boutique' - in his chateau (the lintel of its doorway only a forbidding five
feet from the floor), he was never aloof from the world's dangers nor reluctant to
savour its pleasures. It is said that, as a young blade, he practised debauchery, but
refrained from it with his beautiful wife, Françoise, whose naked breasts were never
revealed to him: he saw only her hands and face uncovered. He made love to her,
he dares to concede, 'with only one buttock'. Like his mother, Françoise outlived him,
by many years. He gives neither woman a flattering press, but for Sarah Bakewell to
say that they somehow drove him to his death is unworthy.

Montaigne's father, Pierre, played a key part in his formation. An opinionated,

perhaps somewhat abrupt man, he insisted that 'Micheau' learn Latin as his first
language and had small faith in formal schooling. While Ovid's Metamorphoses
chimed with Montaigne's mutability and primed his imagination, Bakewell thinks him
'cheeky' for saying that Virgil's Aeneid 'might have been brushed up a bit'. In fact,
Virgil himself (and not a few critics) thought the same thing; hence his wish for the
poem to be destroyed after his death.

Pierre Montaigne triggered his son's literary life when, probably in 1567, he handed
Micheau a 500-page Latin manuscript, the Theologia Naturalis, sive liber
creaturarum, written over a century earlier by the Catalan Catholic apologist
Raymond Sebond, and said (in Bakewell's words), 'Translate this into French for me
when you get a moment, will you, son?'

Montaigne's almost book-length assessment of Sebond's work became the

centrepiece of the second volume of his Essais. Sainte-Beuve regarded this
seemingly deferential analysis as a covert attack on Christianity. As Joseph Epstein
reminds us, in an elegant and succinct essay, Montaigne had a prescient word to
say about such deconstruction: 'Once you start digging down into a piece of writing,
there is simply no slant or meaning ... which the human mind cannot find there.' In
our own time, as the Janus-faced Paul de Man would prove, bad faith and critical
ingenuity often go hunting together.

How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an

Answer is a lively, well-sourced account of the man and the work. Bakewell is
tellingly accurate when she comes to the savage instability of sixteenth-century
provincial life. Catholics and Huguenots, neighbours and friends, were inspired to
slaughter each other with pitiless self-righteousness. Bordeaux was the scene of
exemplary massacres and vindictive repressions, in which Montaigne strove, with no
little courage and some success, to play a reconciling role.

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Courageous but never pugnacious, except in self-advocacy, his sense of his own
fragility and his innate tolerance warned him against what Byron (a somewhat
kindred spirit, who also pampered his own inner divisions) called 'enthusymusy':
over-keen religious partisanship. Two centuries later, Talleyrand (another Périgordin
grandee) would counsel young diplomats to avoid 'trop de zèle' and played the
Bishop of Bray, so to speak, with similar, but much more cynical, versatility.

Montaigne's want of dogmatic rigour, his willingness to settle for a good life this side
of the grave, earned him the ardent reproaches of both Pascal and Descartes and, in
time, the anathemas of the Church (once on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, the
essays were not reprieved until the mid-nineteenth century). He always did his duty,
in pious and political terms, but his abiding pleasures were mundane and country-
gentlemanly. His contemporary, Justus Lipsius, called him 'the French Thales'; but
Montaigne would never, I suspect, have fallen into a well, as Thales supposedly did,
while staring at the heavens. Micheau always watched his step with some care.

His eccentric schooling allowed him to pillage Latin literature with facility (if not
always with precision) and to embrace Plutarch and Greek philosophy, although not
in the language in which they were written. He indulged his cacoethes scribendi
without restraint, but said that he would 'hate a reputation for being clever at writing,
but stupid at everything else'. His essays were a reminiscential ramble around the
estate of literature, issuing in what he termed 'des excréments d'un vieil esprit'. Self-
portraiture and self-caricature regularly punctured his own seigneurial complacency.

Bakewell's well-sourced, spritely and anecdotal book does not benefit from being
dressed as some sort of self-help manual. She gets off to a trendy start by
recommending Theodore Zeldin's website The Oxford Muse (oh dear!), which invites
self-revelation from 'all and sundry' as a means towards 'replacing national
stereotypes with real people'. The site, we are promised (or should that be
'threatened'?), contains essays with 'titles like' - meaning, I suppose, such as - 'Why
an educated Russian works as a cleaner in Oxford'. This preliminary digression may
pay tribute to Bakewell's mentor, but it has little to do with Montaigne. I doubt if the
exploratory self-centredness at the heart of his genius would choose to be
associated with Zeldin's collation of brief lives.

Montaigne's shortest answer to the question 'how to live?' would probably be the
banal recommendation to take it easy. His meandering answers are much more
interesting and more diverting than any sound-bitten moral nostrum. Carpe diem, the
Epicurean motto, is best honoured by caressing the quotidian details and
appreciating the ordinary. Montaigne responded, prophylactically, to Heidegger's
vision of man as living 'towards death' by advising against thinking too much about it.
The variety of life on earth (not least that of the domestic animals with whom we play
and who, Montaigne suspected, play with us) was an advertisement for unaffected
pursuits, as against 'super-celestial' apprehensions or apocalyptic hopes.

Bakewell does not mention that he also said that, in the final confrontation with
death, there was no sense in feigning. In extremis, Montaigne insisted, 'Il faut parler
français.' The punning implication being that when it came to honest expression
(franchise), the vernacular alone could provide a specific against cant. There is a sly
hint here that the consolations of religion, which he received on his pain-filled
deathbed, were not entirely to his taste.

Bakewell is properly dubious about the too clever notion that Etienne de la Boétie's
precocious 'Discours de la servitude volontaire' was actually written by Montaigne
himself and subsequently wished on his beloved friend (who died young, of the
plague, with Micheau in close attendance), because he feared being taken for a
dangerous revolutionary. La Boétie, under whose statue in Sarlat we often park our
car, had a clear, brave voice of his own. His attack on tyranny and its spineless
apparatchiks is a classic of virile provincial outspokenness.

Montaigne is, in truth, an entertaining companion rather than a therapist or a

prototypical Miss Lonelyhearts. When Sarah Bakewell frees herself from the
formulaic frame into which she has elected (or agreed) to be compressed, she is a
generous, well-informed guide, not least to the afterlife of Montaigne's Essays, which
leaked into Shakespeare, thanks to John Florio's English translation, and later
inspired William Hazlitt. Montaigne's admirer Nietzsche's title 'human, all too human'
is one that Micheau might have been happy to adopt. He (rather than the self-
important Sir Thomas More) was, and remains, my man for all seasons.

Frederic Raphael is finishing a novel called 'Final Demands' (the third in his 'The
Glittering Prizes' trilogy), to be published in the spring.
David Lodge
SHORED AGAINST HIS RUINS
The Original of Laura: A Novel in Fragments
By Vladimir Nabokov (Penguin Classics 278pp £25)
In 1962, following the international success of Lolita
that made him financially independent, Vladimir
Nabokov gave up his professorial post at Cornell and
settled in Montreux, Switzerland, where he resided at
the Palace hotel with his wife Vera and wrote his later
novels, until his death in 1977. In the last two years of
his life, which were marred by various accidents,
illnesses and increasing physical debility, Nabokov
worked on a novel called The Original of Laura, writing
it, as was his habit, by hand in pencil on small index
cards. It was unfinished - very far from finished in fact -
when he died, and he had expressly directed Vera to
burn the manuscript in that eventuality. Having rescued Lolita from the incinerator
many years before, when Nabokov had a sudden failure of nerve about publishing it,
his widow understandably hesitated to carry out his wishes with respect to his last
work. The Original of Laura has lain in a bank vault for thirty years, the object of
intense curiosity and speculation among aficionados, while Vera and the Nabokovs'
son Dmitri agonised over whether or not to allow it to be published. They finally
decided to do so, and here it is.

The work has been lavishly and reverently designed and produced. Every index card
is photographically reproduced in the top half of the recto page, white on a pale grey
background, with a printed transcription underneath. On every verso page there is
the reproduction of another, blank, index card, perhaps to represent the words
Nabokov never lived to write, perhaps to give the reader a convenient space to make
his own notes, perhaps merely to bulk out a text of no more words than a long short
story to make a full-length book.

The subtitle, 'A Novel in Fragments', was presumably not Nabokov's, since he hoped
to complete it, but it is an accurate description. Nabokov was never a straightforward
storyteller - he always required close concentration from readers and delighted in
setting them little traps and puzzles and surprises - but we have to work especially
hard to construe and connect the various fragments of The Original of Laura. The
first line is a typically Nabokovian tease, an answer to a missing question: 'Her
husband, she answered, was a writer too - at least, after a fashion.' The 'she' here is
Flora, a young woman married (we discover in due course) to an older man, Dr
Philip Wild, a grossly obese but distinguished neurologist who was not able to attend
the party at which she is speaking to a writer who must have asked the question,
'What does your husband do?'
In this first episode, which is narrated from the writer's point of view, he accompanies
her to a borrowed flat where they have sex, or rather the coitus interruptus that is her
preferred contraceptive method. The daughter of a ballerina and a photographer,
both of Russian extraction, Flora is a femme fatale, beautiful, wanton, cruel,
irresistible, 'an object of terror and tenderness' to her husband, and of the same
lineage as Lolita. To the writer 'the cup-sized breasts of that twenty-four year old
impatient beauty seemed a dozen years younger than she'. Lolita was twelve when
Humbert Humbert first met her, and the prepubescent Flora, we learn, suffered the
attentions of an elderly lover of her mother's called Hubert H Hubert. She lost her
virginity at fourteen and was soon enjoying al fresco boyfriend-swapping.
'Sometimes a voyeur would be shaken out of a tree by the vigilant police.'

The writer uses Flora as the transparently recognisable model for Laura, the heroine
of a bestselling novel, which her husband, when he can no longer resist reading it,
will find a 'maddening masterpiece', one more item, as he says, in 'the anthology of
humiliation to which, since my marriage, I have been a constant contributor'. Philip
Wild's main comfort in his unhappy personal life is a strange application of his
professional expertise: he develops a technique for sending himself into a kind of
trance in which he is able to remove various parts of his anatomy by a kind of virtual
amputation, projecting a stylised image of his body upon the screen of his closed
eyelids and deleting a selected area. He begins with his toes (Dmitri Nabokov tells
us in his introduction that the author himself was tortured by ingrowing toenails in the
last months of his life) and moves on to more vital parts of the body. 'I hit upon the
art of thinking away my body, my being, mind itself. To think away thought - luxurious
suicide, delicious dissolution!' The trick is, he emphasises, to retain the ability to
come out of the trance before one actually kills oneself. In this way he explores
various possible kinds of death without actually succumbing to it and achieves a kind
of orgasmic ecstasy in the process. The last recto page of the book reproduces not
an index card but a small piece of graph paper down the middle of which Nabokov
scrawled in a slanting hand a list of words: 'efface expunge erase delete rub out wipe
out obliterate'. It makes a fitting tailpiece to the book, but it was not of course
Nabokov who placed it there.

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The way the manuscript has been ingeniously edited and reproduced overcomes to
a large extent the disappointment and frustration inherent in reading an unfinished
and disconnected narrative, and achieves an interesting aesthetic effect unintended
by the author. If the manuscript had been printed in the conventional way we would
have hurried through it vainly seeking some coherent plot or hint of its ultimate
direction. As it is the book invites us to linger over the text's quiddity, relishing not
just its stylistic feats but also the physical marks on the index cards, the poignantly
shaky hand of an ailing author, his revisions and insertions and smudged rubbings
out, and the tantalising space he left to be filled in later when he found the right word.
'The only way he could possess her was in the most position of copulation'.
Few readers will probably read the whole text continuously from the cards, but the
matching printed text underneath also has a defamiliarising effect on the act of
reading when, quite often, the last line does not extend to the margin. Page 7 for
instance ends 'when they and their dog do not happen', and by habit one's brain tries
to make sense of this as a complete clause before turning the page to find 'to need
it.' This is an effect akin to a caesura in poetry, and indeed the structure of the work
as a whole is more akin to modern poetry of the Eliot-Pound kind than a conventional
novel, shifting from one voice to another without explanatory links. Towards the end
these jump cuts become more abrupt, and there are more cards which bear just a
few lines, sometimes evidently Nabokov's notes to himself. A line from The Waste
Land, 'These fragments I have shored against my ruins', might have been a suitable
epigraph for The Original of Laura, but the last lines of page 21 would make a better
one: 'Only by identifying her with an unwritten, half-written, rewritten difficult book
could one hope to render what'.

Is it, as the blurb claims, Nabokov's 'final great book'? No. Does it contain brilliant,
funny, astonishing sentences only Nabokov could have written? Yes. Should it have
been preserved and published? Definitely.

David Lodge is a novelist and critic, and Emeritus Professor of English Literature at
the University of Birmingham. His most recent novels are 'Author, Author' and 'Deaf
Sentence'.
John Gray
WISHFUL THINKING
In Defence of the Enlightenment
By Tzvetan Todorov (Atlantic Books 161pp £16.99)
There is a sect of rationalists who never cease harping on the childishness of
religion, and it has to be admitted that there is sometimes something to their
complaint. One of the symptoms of a childish mentality - a condition that afflicts
adults, not children - is the conviction that things must be either good or bad. Evil can
never come from good, it is believed, for the essential nature of good is to be simple
and pure. The essence of the Christian religion, for example, is love. In that case,
how could Christianity have anything to do with religious warfare or persecution?
Such blemishes can only be the result of a perversion of Christian teaching, which in
its original purity contained nothing hateful. No doubt much that is odious has been
done in its name, but Christianity - the essence or spirit of the religion - is innocent of
all evil.
This is childish reasoning, if only because it fails to understand that like every religion
Christianity is made up from a variety of sources, not all of them wholly benign. Pure
Christianity is a figment of fundamentalism, a way of thinking that is typical of the
childish mind. But fundamentalism is by no means confined to those who call
themselves fundamentalists, or to religious believers. Nowadays it is defenders of
the Enlightenment who provide some of the best examples of fundamentalist
thinking, and Tzvetan Todorov is a case in point. In this stiff and leaden volume he
seeks to rescue the Enlightenment from distortions. He does so in the faith that once
it has been properly understood no one - no one who is not fanatical, deluded or ill-
willing, at any rate - can fail to accept the Enlightenment's essential message.
A central part of this didactic enterprise is to argue that the Enlightenment is
implicated in none of the evils of modern times. Jacobinism, communism and the ill-
fated exercises of recent years in exporting democracy at gunpoint may have been
promoted by people who were adamant that these projects served 'Enlightenment
values'. But these people were deluded; their activities had nothing to do with 'the
humanist spirit of the Enlightenment', which promotes individual autonomy and
rational criticism. On the contrary, Todorov insists, it is to the Enlightenment that we
owe everything that is most valuable in the modern world. Without it we would not
have liberal democracy and Europe would not exist, for 'Europe, as we conceive it
today, has its origins in the Enlightenment'.
Todorov concedes that some Enlightenment thinkers have held unreasonable views.
He quotes the eighteenth-century French Enlightenment economist and statesman
Turgot as declaring, 'the whole mass of the human race advances continually,
though slowly, towards greater perfection', and cites the Sketch for an Historical
Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind of Condorcet - long an Enlightenment
hero - as asserting that 'no matter how slow and discontinuous progress might be,
humankind would eventually reach adulthood through the spread of culture and
knowledge'. These two highly influential philosophes had a belief in semi-automatic
progress that they transmitted to later Enlightenment thinkers. 'This view of history as
the accomplishment of a plan', Todorov writes, 'was picked up and reinforced by
Hegel and then by Marx through whom it became part and parcel of Communist
doctrine.' But the fact that these eminent Enlightenment thinkers propagated an
absurd faith in progress tells us nothing about the essence of the Enlightenment,
according to Todorov: 'It would be mistaken to attribute this belief to the spirit of the
Enlightenment itself.' Turgot, Condorcet, Hegel and Marx were not the authentic
exponents of the Enlightenment they imagined themselves to be. Like Lenin, who
described himself proudly as a latter-day Jacobin, and like the Jacobins themselves,
they were heretics, deviants from a pure Enlightenment tradition that is innocent of
any complicity in modern terror.
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It would be hard to find a clearer statement of Enlightenment fundamentalism. Just
as religious fundamentalists postulate a pristine faith uncompromised by two
thousand years of history, so Todorov posits a quintessential Enlightenment that has
had no part in the disasters of recent centuries. An émigré from Stalinist Bulgaria, he
is especially anxious to rebut any claim that Enlightenment thinking had a role in
engendering communist tyranny. 'One would have been hard put to find any traces
of the (Enlightenment) heritage in the actual workings of communist societies:
individual autonomy was reduced to nothing.' But might it not have been the pursuit
of an Enlightenment dream of human autonomy that led to a destruction of freedom
far more complete than any that could be envisioned in the flawed Russia of the
tsars? For Todorov even the question is unthinkable. The Enlightenment could no
more have produced the Gulag than Christianity, as understood by its more simple-
minded believers, could have engendered the Inquisition.
Todorov's claim that Europe is a creation of the Enlightenment expresses a view of
history that is no less simple-minded. It may well be true that the European
Commission is an offspring of Enlightenment rationalism, but European civilisation is
the product of many traditions, not least those of Christianity and Judaism. Rightly,
Todorov notes that the belief of some Enlightenment thinkers in a mechanical march
to perfection is 'nothing more than a transposition of the Christian doctrine of the
ways of providence into profane space'. He omits to note other and more benign
ways in which Jewish and Christian traditions have shaped Enlightenment thinking. It
was John Locke, an early Enlightenment thinker who was also a Christian, who
propounded the ideal of toleration that was taken up in much of Europe (and later
America). It was an unorthodox Jew, Benedict Spinoza, who presented an early but
still highly instructive account of freedom of thought. Modern toleration and pluralism
are mainly the work of religious dissenters. There is no clear dividing line between
Judaeo-Christian traditions and Enlightenment thinking. In its positive as well as its
negative aspects the Enlightenment was shaped by Western religion, though one
would not know this from Todorov's account.
The Enlightenment that Todorov defends is one from which anything malign or
suspect has been airbrushed away. It is also one from which everything that is
remotely challenging has disappeared. Todorov gives some space to David Hume,
an Enlightenment thinker from whom we still have a good deal to learn; but little is
said of Hume's sceptical defence of habit and convention, so different from
Todorov's eulogy of rational autonomy and so much wiser. Doubtless because
Freud's ironic and stoical view of things is unsuited to high-minded didacticism, there
is no discussion of the founder of psychoanalysis, who more than anyone else
continued the Enlightenment into the twentieth century.
In Defence of the Enlightenment is best read as an exercise in rationalist pedagogy.
If only dim-witted humanity could seize hold of a few simple truisms, Todorov seems
to believe, the world would be much improved. But the truisms he presents are
mostly false or only half-true, and it is he rather than the readers he seeks to instruct
who has failed to grasp simple truths. At times beneficent in its effects, as when the
philosophes campaigned against torture, the Enlightenment has also been
disastrous - as when Lenin and assorted neoconservatives endorsed or turned a
blind eye to torture as a means of speeding up human progress. No differently from
other traditions, the large and quarrelling family of thinkers and movements of which
the Enlightenment is comprised has always partaken fully of human folly. Believing
otherwise is childishness, a trait not uncommon among those who offer to lead
humankind out of its infancy.

John Gray's most recent book is 'Gray's Anatomy: Selected Writings' (Allen Lane).
Francis Wheen
A WINK AND A NUDGE
On Rumours: How Falsehoods Spread, Why We Believe Them, What Can Be Done
By Cass R Sunstein (Allen Lane/The Penguin Press 100pp £16.99)
This slim volume, skinnier than a size-zero model, belongs to the increasingly
tiresome genre of clever-dick lit. If you have heard of Blink, Nudge, Snark or
Freakonomics, you'll know the form; indeed you could probably write one yourself.
Choose a proverb, any old proverb: 'more haste, less speed', say. Reformulate it as
a cute title - Trudge: What the Tortoise Can Teach Us About Wealth, Health and
Happiness - and the book more or less writes itself. Sit back and wait for Barack
Obama or David Cameron to be seen reading it. You are now officially a guru.
Even so, you may struggle to keep pace with Cass Sunstein, whose Nudge was
admired by both Obama and Cameron. He is the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law
at Harvard, the Harry Kalven Visiting Professor at Chicago, the author or co-author
of thirty-five books and now also a member of the Obama administration, running the
White House's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. Amid all that, as he
boasts in the acknowledgements, he somehow found time to father a baby boy,
Declan, born in April 2009. Never again let it be said that men can't multitask.
So what can Papa Cass tell us about rumours and those who believe them? If you
hear something shocking about your best friend - that he has stolen money or
betrayed his wife - you'll probably be inclined to dismiss it; if you hear the same
rumour about someone you despise, you may well accept it as truth. 'But why?' A
rhetorical question, surely, but he answers it anyway for the benefit of readers who
don't have a Felix Frankfurter Professorship of the Bleedin' Obvious: 'We do not
credit rumours unless we want to do so.'
The prof then drops another bombshell: some people are readier to believe than
others. Or, as he puts it, 'in any society, people will have different "thresholds" for
accepting a rumour'. Note those inverted commas: Sunstein salts and peppers his
text with 'tipping points' and 'diverse thresholds', 'group polarisation' and 'bias
assimilation', to disguise the banality of his observations. When he informs us that
'rumours often spread as a result of conformity cascades', all he means is that
sometimes people affect to believe a rumour because all their mates believe it.
'Disconfirmation bias', likewise, is the clever-dick way of saying that we prefer
rumours that confirm our beliefs to ones that contradict them.
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But is he too clever by half? One flaw is apparent from the start: his title and subtitle
imply that 'rumours' and 'falsehoods' are synonymous. Only in the final pages does
he concede that they may not be identical, and even then he treats it as a distinction
without a difference: 'Some rumours are not false, but they invade individual privacy.'
For him all rumours, whether true or not, are a thoroughly bad thing and we must be
deterred from spreading them.
Alas for Sunstein, public figures such as him get little or no help from the American
courts, which are 'highly speech protective'. How unlike our own dear courts -
notably the one in the Strand presided over by Mr Justice Eady, which is so
oppressively unprotective of free speech that spivvy libel tourists from all corners of
the world are now scampering to London to take advantage. English editors and
MPs may harrumph about Eady's chilling effect on the media, but in Sunstein's not-
so-humble opinion 'the chilling effect is a very good thing'. How remarkable, more
than two centuries after the framing of the American constitution, that a liberal jurist
from Harvard Law School yearns for a bracingly cold douche of olde English
censorship.
Has he ever heard of John Wilkes? Does he actually know any history at all? You
wouldn't guess it from this flimsy essay. It's as if rumours never existed before the
Internet. In the era of bloggers and Google, according to Sunstein, 'audiences can
be manipulated in order to believe things that, whether or not literally false, are not
exactly true'. He is unimpressed by the argument that blogs and Google also make it
easier than ever to correct false rumours. 'Often the truth fails to catch up with a lie.'
Nothing new there: the complaint that a lie can be halfway round the world before the
truth pulls its boots on has been heard for centuries. You'll find it in Virgil (Fama,
malum qua non aliud velocius ullum - 'Rumour, the swiftest of all evils') and in the
prologue to Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part II: 'Open your ears; for which of you will
stop / The vent of hearing when loud Rumour speaks? / I, from the orient to the
drooping west, / Making the wind my post-horse ...' Sunstein cites neither of these,
presumably because they would sabotage his ahistorical implication that the bush
telegraph is a by-product of YouTube and Facebook.
In his final paragraphs, Cass Sunstein asks us to imagine a dystopian future in which
propagators of rumours 'are rewarded, economically or otherwise', and a utopian
alternative in which they are 'discounted, and marginalised'. He concludes that 'the
choice between these futures is ours'. Is the choice really so simple, so binary? The
best riposte to this sort of twaddle is George Orwell's: 'One has to belong to the
intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.'

Francis Wheen's most recent book is 'Strange Days Indeed' (Fourth Estate).
Bryan Appleyard
GROW UP, GREENS!
Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto
By Stewart Brand (Atlantic Books 316pp £19.99)
In 1968 Stewart Brand produced the first edition of the Whole Earth Catalog. It had a
picture of the earth seen from space on the cover and inside were lists of useful tools
for transforming the planet by distributing power to the people. I remember seeing it
in bookshops. Thrilling and demanding, it called on me to join my generation. Like
Woodstock, student demos, dope, tie-dyed T-shirts and improbably flared trousers,
the Catalog told us we were different.
We were. But now different has become mainstream. The Catalog was, above all,
Green. It treated the planet as a single, finite system whose contents could be
catalogued. Now the whole world is Green and the Internet lists its contents. David
Cameron and Ed Miliband believe what only doped-out freaks in sandals and Afghan
coats believed in 1968. And so Stewart Brand returns to take stock.
Whole Earth Discipline is immensely entertaining, moving and slightly confusing. The
confusion is twofold. First, Brand is an unreconstructed cataloguer. The book is, at
one level, simply a list of developments in biotechnology, climate science,
urbanisation, agriculture and so on. This tends to leave one wondering if these things
do tie together in quite the way Brand says they do. Secondly, much of the book is
about the author's changes of mind. He is now, for example, pro-nuclear power and
genetically engineered foods. This is honourable but it does cast a slight shadow of
doubt over his latest enthusiasms.
That said, the book brilliantly defines our present predicament - our need to deploy
science to clean up the mess made by science. The modern world was made by
burning half a trillion tons of carbon since the Industrial Revolution. The next half
trillion will be burned in about forty years at present rates of increase. If that
happens, then global temperatures will rise by up to 4 degrees and it is reasonable
to assume, on the basis of current scientific thought, that our species' continued
existence will be at risk.
As Brand, heavily influenced by James Lovelock, perceives, this means that the
Greens are going to have to reverse some of their primary positions. In the giddy
days of 1968, eco-awareness was an aspect of the ideological package that included
resistance to the Vietnam War and to The System, often defined as the military-
industrial complex. We wanted to get 'back to the garden', to a condition of pastoral
simplicity. This pastoralism seemed to be the way to save Spaceship Earth and it still
clings to the Green movement with its belief in organic foods, wind power and
sustainability in general. None of this will work because climate change is happening
too quickly.
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'That means', writes Brand, 'that Greens are no longer strictly the defenders of
natural systems against the incursions of civilization; now they're the defenders of
civilization as well. It's a whiplash moment for everyone.'
Climate change really means Mother Nature is preparing to rid herself of humans. If
we are to survive, we can no longer worship her, we must fight back with smart
weapons. So we have to embrace nuclear - there is no other source of clean energy
which can sustain our societies - and genetically engineered 'Frankenfoods'. Ideally,
these would be synthesised in laboratories. Farming, as Lovelock has pointed out, is
a planetary catastrophe, stripping out biodiversity and filling the atmosphere with the
methane from cow farts.
The Green dream must thus become a very hi-tech dream rather than the muddy
paradise of Woodstock. Brand's conversion to this view is the central drama of this
book and it sends him off on a genial and enthusiastic safari through wild science
and cool facts.
Did you know, for example, that only a tenth of the cells in your body are you? The
rest are microbes - 'We are a portable swamp.' Did you know that Stora Enso in
Sweden is the oldest surviving corporation? King Magnus IV granted its charter in
1347. Did you know that in a fifth of a teaspoon of seawater there are a million
bacteria and ten million viruses? Well, now you do.
This is all good fun but the heart of the matter is the word 'ecopragmatist' in the
subtitle. Brand's big point is that we must do what works without prejudice. Green
prejudices have, in the past, often been on the wrong side of the argument. The
campaign to get DDT banned because of its effects on birdlife, for example, may
have cost the lives of 20 million children in Africa who were left to die of malaria. And
The System we all hated in the Sixties and Seventies produced Norman Borlaug, the
man behind the very capitalist Green Revolution - increased crop yields - which may
have saved a billion lives.
Now the Greens are threatening to do more damage. They're suckers for anything
labelled 'natural'. 'In the marketing world,' remarks Brand, '"natural" now means
anything the seller wants to charge extra for or distract your attention with.'
They also resist nuclear power and persist in deluding people into thinking all we
have to do is build wind farms and cycle to work. They also go on about the loss of
the rainforest when, in fact, fifty-five times more is growing back each year than is
being cut. Perhaps worst of all, for Brand, they advocate the Precautionary Principle
which requires that any new technology has to be shown to do no harm. This is, of
course, impossible. It is also self-fulfilling because it effectively prevents the testing
of new technologies to establish risk. Greens have not escaped the pastoralism of
their roots and thus find themselves not just on the side of nature, but on the side of
nature against humans.
But Stewart Brand lives in hope and this is a very upbeat book. He plainly thinks we'll
get there in the end. The Greens are going to have to grow up. This book should
help get them out of the nursery.

Bryan Appleyard writes for 'The Sunday Times', blogs and is working on a book
which he cannot yet explain.
A C Grayling
IN TWO MINDS
The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western
World
By Iain McGilchrist (Yale University Press 597pp £25)
There is something magnificent about the ambition of Iain McGilchrist's book. It
offers nothing less than an account of human nature and Western civilisation as
outcomes of the competition between the human brain's asymmetrical halves. Thus
baldly described, the endeavour doubtless seems implausible at least.
Before jumping to that conclusion, though, you should know that this is a beautifully
written, erudite, fascinating and adventurous book. It embraces a prodigious range of
enquiry, from neurology to psychology, from philosophy to primatology, from myth to
history to literature. It goes from the microstructure of the brain to great epochs of
Western civilisation, confidently and readably. One turns its five hundred pages - a
further hundred are dense with notes and references in tiny print - as if it were an
adventure story. And in one good sense it is. All the way through there is a single
recurrent theme like a drumbeat, a theme McGilchrist thinks we urgently need to
understand and do something about. It is that once we understand the structure and
function of the brain, we see that the wrong half of it is in charge of our civilisation.
Now to return to that matter of jumping to the conclusion that what McGilchrist's book
seeks to do is, at very least, implausible. Alas, it is. The chief reason is that far too
much is made to turn on the suppositious and slender state of knowledge in brain
science. Although a great deal of intensely interesting work has been done and is
being done in that field (McGilchrist tells us about the rapidly evolving technologies
and experimental work in fascinating and lucid detail), nevertheless it simply does
not permit such claims as that 'the right hemisphere underpins our sense of justice',
'only the right hemisphere understands metaphor', 'the left hemisphere closes most
routes to reality', and the overarching claim for which McGilchrist argues, namely that
the narrow, fragmenting, thing-based, mechanical, overly self-confident, black-and-
white, unempathetic, even zombie-like left hemisphere is dominating our civilisation
to its cost.
As this characterisation of the left hemisphere implies, the right hemisphere is
McGilchrist's favourite. Chapter after chapter is devoted to explaining and exploring
the contrast between the two hemispheres, chiefly to the right hemisphere's credit. It
is more in touch with reality and life; it is global and integrating in its activity, creating
a holistic view of the world; it recognises individuals, and is the seat of most forms of
attention; it is the home of emotion and therefore of empathy and its offspring
morality. To it belong music, art, religion and social connectedness. It is or should be
the master hemisphere, but its quondam servant, the left hemisphere, whose job
should be the instrumental and subordinate one of focusing on details and applying
rational calculation when needed, has usurped it - principally because the left
hemisphere's chief interest, says McGilchrist, is power: it wants to divide and rule,
and by underpinning the emergence of the analytic philosophy, science and
bureaucratic organisation of the Western world in the last half dozen centuries, has
succeeded in doing so.
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And as this further implies, McGilchrist wishes us to return to a right-hemispheric
way of being. That means getting in renewed touch with our emotional and empathic
sides, and allowing instinct and religion back onto centre stage. He thinks that
modern art is an example of the left hemisphere's attrition of the values that the right
hemisphere would prefer us to live by, including the beautiful art of the past, the
legends and myths, the metaphors and larger openness of feeling and belief - the
inclusive and numinous vaguenesses, one might say - that characterised life in most
of our civilisation's earlier history.
On reading McGilchrist's prescription for reasserting the right hemisphere's influence
on our lives I found myself, no doubt because I am quite considerably a left-
hemispheric creature, shuddering. At the end of his book he gives a detailed picture
of what an entirely left-hemispheric world would be like, an unappetising portrait of a
kind of utilitarian, even emotionally fascist, wasteland which is as narrow as it is
bleak and desiccated. He does not offer a right-hemispheric world portrait, but he
obviously intends us to assume that it would be a much gentler and happier place,
more realistic and therefore more connected with others and with nature.
Unfortunately, if one accepts the logic of his argument that our Western civilisation
has declined from a right-hemisphere to a left-hemisphere dispensation, we do not
have to imagine what the former would be like, because history itself tells us: in it
most of us would be superstitious and ignorant peasants working a strip farm that we
would never leave from cradle to grave, under the thumb of slightly more left-
hemispheric bullies in the form of the local baron and priest.
I do not mean to caricature McGilchrist's argument, but it does indeed come down to
the straightforward claim that the left hemisphere of the human brain has become
damagingly over-powerful in the affairs of Western civilisation. His argument might
have been framed in quite different terms, closer to the standard counter-
Enlightenment tropes that promote the authority of emotion, art, religion, ethnic
feeling and the like over the supposed reductive barrenness of reason. But
McGilchrist is not anti-reason or anti-science - far from it: his book is an exercise in
applying both by the bucketload - and he is at pains to insist that human life needs
both the brain's hemispheres, and that both are anyway engaged in all aspects of
mental life. Early in the book he insists that claims to the effect that the left
hemisphere is the specific home of language and logic while the right hemisphere is
the specific home of spatial ability and emotion are mere popular misconceptions.
But then he proceeds to go much further than this in assigning whole rafts of highly
complex functions and capacities to one or other side of the head, building the
pictures just sketched of the two different worlds that the respective hemispheres
generate for us, with the radically different value implications of each.
The fact is that the findings of brain science are nowhere near fine-grained enough
yet to support the large psychological and cultural conclusions Iain McGilchrist draws
from them. Absorbing and fascinating though the book is, it does not persuade one
that returning our Western civilisation to the government of such supposed right-
hemisphere possessions as religion and instinct would be anywhere near a good
thing.
A C Grayling's latest book is 'To Set Prometheus Free' (Oberon Books), published
last month.