—Reviewed by Carren Jao

A robust civic life is essential to building a great country. It is no wonder, then, that former President John F. Kennedy’s call to the American people to “ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country” still rings powerfully to this day. With a struggling economy, a broken health care system and economic bubbles popping left and right, the need for citizens willing to volunteer to help fix this nation’s ails is ever more crucial. But the question of how those volunteers can be most effective remains.

Most volunteers have probably found themselves asking the same question. Filled with passion and vigor to make a difference, they stride up to a nonprofit of their choice and willingly offer whatever time and resources they have. Once there, most are confronted not with the life-changing euphoric experience they imagine, but with a shadow of an experience that often pales in comparison to their ideals.

Making Volunteers sheds some light on the matter by diving deep into a constellation of youth programs. Author Nina Eliasoph, a sociologist at the University of Southern California, spent almost five years in Snowy Prairie, “a mid-sized city in the American Midwest,” where she embedded in various types of so-called “empowerment projects”: short-term, open-ended, what-you-make-it volunteer opportunities funded through multiple sources. Eliasoph was involved as a volunteer (working with the youth) and also as an adult organizer (interfacing with adults to help make the projects happen). Her conclusion is that the U.S. increasingly relies on these volunteer programs to achieve real societal change, but that they could be more effective with longer-term volunteer commitments, more careful planning and fewer financial and bureaucratic hurdles.

While in Snowy Prarie, Eliasoph was able to tease out the surprising complexity of such seemingly straightforward organizations. One such paradox includes what Eliasoph has called the “temporal discords” of empowerment projects: they use a customized doublespeak, hoping to convince their young volunteers of their potential. “’You are leaders’ means ‘we hope you eventually become leaders’; ‘we invite the community to attend this supper’ means ‘we hope that by attending this supper, you will eventually become a community,’” she writes. In the same way a priest may use the words, “I now pronounce you man and wife,” organizers use the declarative in the hopes of making true what they wish to happen.

Mismatched timelines also add to the confusion. Due to the short-term funding of empowerment projects, adult organizers end up brainstorming and applying for grants in the summer, then handing them off to youth volunteers that don’t arrive until the fall. In a logistical sleight of hand, the youth volunteers take up these projects as if they had planned them, while adult organizers are content to remain on the sidelines.

In another scenario, Eliasoph points out just how much empowerment projects smooth out the bumps of cultural and economic differences among volunteers and those being helped, though she reminds readers that sweeping those differences under the rug does not make them any less salient. One program puts together the at-risk youth alongside the relatively well off, but refuses to name them as such. (Within the context of empowerment projects, labeling was taboo.) Though not equals in any sense of the word, these two groups were expected eventually to be set on equal footing simply by working together.This taboo on labeling prevents volunteers from truly opening themselves to the group or gaining understanding of each other’s circumstances, Eliasoph argues. If the lesson was for the non-disadvantaged individuals to gain a better appreciation for the disadvantaged ones and vice versa, the lack of transparency and the constant walking on eggshells surely does not help. So by papering over differences among people, she concludes, leads only to a superficial understanding, which may or may not be enough to keep volunteers engaged in the process.

Making Volunteers details these and many other complex relationships and interactions, and the book provides some suggestions for improving the current empowerment project structure. Yet the book is by no means prescriptive; instead, it aims primarily to bring to light the intricate socio-political structure that underscores what many perceive as efforts fueled only by passion and emotion.

Eliasoph’s academic background in ethnography, the nonprofit sector and political structure shines through, helping her expose the complicated relationships embedded in this socio-political structure. Along the way, she introduces the reader to a host of characters and scenarios that can easily cause confusion, despite her best efforts. Expect to exercise a little patience and be willing to re-tread the content more than once. Eliasoph’s essentially ethnographic research is a rich, highly dense and enlightening tome that will help organizers more fully understand the motivations that undergird their efforts and what volunteers can reasonably expect under such circumstances.

Excerpt: Empowerment Projects aim to build leadership by drawing on leadership, building community by drawing on community, build good desires by drawing on desires that the person already feels. A second set of temporal puzzles arose when participants treated the lack of leadership, community, wholesome pleasures, and good choices as problems, and also as solutions to those same problems. To align these possibly discordant time lines, organizers riveted their attention onto a potential future, in which people already had a better community, already had made better choices, already were in touch with that inspirational inner ocean. In a game of temporal leapfrog, organizers asserted that participants were already doing good things, that community already existed, that youth volunteers were already having fun creating community. Leadership, community, fun, volunteering: the uses of the words became obvious in practice. Organizers hoped that telling a youth volunteer “you are a leader” would create a happily self-fulfilling prophecy.” It was a way of making tiny adjustments to the discordant time lines, as if, implicitly, most of life took place in “the future perfect” : The future perfect is a verb tense: will + have + past participle, indicating an action that already will have been completed at some point in the future: “this will have happened.” This implicit tense was a very predictable element of the organizational style-a clear pattern in the rug.

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Carren Jao is a freelance art, architecture and design writer based in Los Angeles.

*Photo courtesy of taubuch.

The post Perpetual Potential appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

—Reviewed by Marc Jaffee

A memoir does not instruct. It searches. In 2008, Meghan O’Rourke’s mother died of cancer, at the age of fifty-five. In The Long Goodbye, a remarkable, probing chronicle of grief, O’Rourke not only articulates the experience of her mother’s illness and death but speaks of the impossibility of addressing something so difficult, sad, and strange.

“If the conditions of grief are nearly universal, its transactions are exquisitely personal,” she writes, with pithy Tolstoyan precision. O’Rourke delves deeply into the process of grief, from the day the cancer is diagnosed to the second spring after her mother’s death. In crisp, assured prose, the author expresses her lack of assurance, her sense of dislocation when faced with the incomprehensible. She navigates the harsh, unexpected ways in which she is set adrift by her mother’s death. No matter how much we think we can prepare, or “come to terms” (as it is often delicately phrased), we cannot. “I was not prepared,” she writes, “for how hard I would find it to reenter the slipstream of contemporary life, the sphere of constant connectivity…” Grief is alienating.

To read this memoir is to be a witness to a parent’s deterioration – the hospital visits, chemo sessions, the physicality of illness and its mental debilitation – all of the uncomfortable specifics of dying. Nobody wants to talk about this sort of thing. O’Rourke finds it hard to communicate with others, even with her own family. One of the great strengths of the book is her courage in speaking about the silence and solitude that she experienced. I have experienced this too. It is easy to pretend that everything is fine; it is hard to say that everything is not.

I was most struck by how well the book captures one of the least discussed aspects of the grieving process: frustration. The sheer frustration – frustration at illness, at death, at making decisions, at doctors, at one’s friends, at one’s family, and, perhaps most of all, at oneself. Some of the frustration stems from the problem that, in our culture, there is a lack of ritual when it comes to death. Rituals channel our grief into something definite, something rhythmic. Without them, there is no clear grasp of how to proceed. People often speak of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s five stages of grief, which progress cleanly from one to the next, but O’Rourke found that her grief was “jumbled, inchoate, and often unpredictable.”

And yet, for all this, the book is not excessively dark. When grief is turned inward, it becomes heavy, unmanageable. Yet ultimately, grief can be turned outward, made positive, made sensible, because it can be communicated. The Long Goodbye is that act of communication.

The solace of grief lies in the keepsakes of life – what is left of a life lived, a life that touched our own. The act of having cared for a loved one gives us a sense of strength. In a chapter titled “Observing Grief,” O’Rourke writes, “Parents died, while children lived, and in some sense it was meant to be.” There is a Zen story in which the disciple asks the master to define happiness. The master answers with a koan: “The grandfather dies, the father dies, the son dies.” The disciple wonders, of course, how this can be considered happiness. What the koan implies is that these things happen in their natural order – first the grandfather, then the father, then the son. Happiness.

My mother died when I was 10. I barely remember the funeral, but I do remember afterwards, when my family came to my father’s house for dinner. Two of my friends came over. We were joking around, having fun the way ten year-olds do. It was almost like any other play date. I remember one of us said something so funny that we couldn’t stop laughing. We were laughing so much that even just looking at each other made us redouble in laughter. An adult came over and told us to stop, that it wasn’t appropriate or respectful. So we calmed down, but I thought at the time, No. That is not true. This is how I want to honor my mother. It was the first time, I think, that I’d laughed so hard my eyes welled up with tears.

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Marc Jaffee is a poet and freelance writer who lives in Brooklyn.

*Photo courtesy of Resident on Earth.

The post Braving the Silence appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

—Reviewed by Lee Linderman

For decades, acclaimed writer Chris Hedges has worked as a journalist, author, and war correspondent, specializing in Middle East and American politics and wartime societies. He spent 15 years as a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, including working with a team of reporters in 2002 that won the Pulitzer Prize for their coverage of global terrorism. He has taught at many of the United States’ top undergraduate schools, such as Columbia University, New York University, and Princeton University. In 2002, his best-selling book War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning was chosen as a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction. Needless to say, the man’s pedigree is impressive for its prestige and longevity.

So it was with great anticipation that I picked up his newest publication, The World As It Is: Dispatches on the Myth of Human Progress, a collection of essays written by Hedges for Truthdig.com between 2006 and 2010 compiled into one neatly packed anthology. The book spans a wide range of subjects and partitions each broad topic into its own subsection. Specifically, Hedges includes 24 essays under the Politics heading (titles range from “Buying Brand Obama” to “This Country Needs a Few Good Communists”), 12 essays discussing Israel and Palestine (including “Israel’s Barrier to Peace” and “Israel’s Racist-in-Chief”), six entries on The Middle East broadly (such as “A Culture of Atrocity” or “Opium, Rape, and the American Way”) and finally 15 essays packaged under “The Decay of Empire” (including “We Are Breeding Ourselves to Extinction” and “The American Empire Is Bankrupt”).

My eagerness for the book quickly soured. Hedges takes little time to alienate many readers, calling his columns “sermons” and himself a “minister” and noting that “[s]ermons, when they are good, do not please a congregation. They do not make people happy … I write not with the anticipation of approval but often of hostility.” To that end, he derides contemporary media members as “lack[ing] a moral compass,” calling them “nothing more than courtiers to the elite, shameless hedonists of power, and absurd court propagandists.” Ironically, because his book is filled with unconditional language and an I’m-right-you’re-wrong attitude, he’s the one who comes across as myopic.

Hedges spends most of his book espousing in absolute terms doomsday prognostications for the United States’ future. In the first few pages he spews fear-mongering rhetoric: “Our way of life is over,” “poverty and despair will sweep across the landscape like a plague,” “[o]ur empire is dying,” “America is devolving into a Third-World nation,” etc. He subsides on controversial vocabulary like “totalitarianism,” “propaganda,” “corporate elitism” and “puppetry.” The much-too-strong language holds Hedges back from being taken seriously, which is unfortunate, because a close read reveals that his criticisms are not partisan or incoherent (as may be true of others who write in a similar style). Indeed, he caustically attacks both Democrats and Republicans, Barack Obama and George W. Bush, The New York Times and Fox News, and so and on. While this is a refreshing dose of nonpartisan criticism, it comes across as bombastic and self-righteous rather than helpful or illuminating. It’s Hedges’ way or the highway. Perhaps this impression results because the book is comprised of isolated blog entries – oftentimes written months apart – crunched together, one after another. That is, in small doses Hedges’ near-radical language may very well be tolerable and indeed could derive strength from its brevity. But when several strong, repetitive entries are presented as one, the work as a whole suffers and becomes more of an assault on the reader’s sensibilities.

That’s not to say the book is meritless. Hedges writes with clarity and skill throughout. When he’s not prophesying about the downfall of America, Hedges reveals the journalistic prowess that garnered him awards. One particularly striking chapter is “Israel’s Barrier to Peace,” which comes midway through the book in the “Israel and Palestine” section. The chapter is bold and riveting: Bold because it is staunchly un-American in championing the Palestinian cause while casting Israel’s treatment of erecting a wall along the West Bank in an arguably evil light; riveting through its graphic and human portrayal of the Palestinian lives affected by the wall. Hedges expertly explores and weaves together the human stories often lost in discussions about the longstanding conflict. His beautifully tragic descriptions of the landscape and heart-wrenching stories of lost homes and lives prove poignant and memorable. Unfortunately, these engaging and profound chapters are few and far between, hidden among the repetitive radicalism that saturates the rest of the work.

Excerpt: The daily bleeding of thousands of jobs will soon turn our economic crisis into a political crisis. The street protests, strikes, and riots that have rattled France, Turkey, Greece, Ukraine, Russia, Latvia, Lithuania, Bulgaria, and Iceland will descend on us. It is only a matter of time. And not much time. When things start to go sour, when Barack Obama is exposed as a mortal waving a sword at a tidal wave, the United States could plunge into a long period of precarious social instability.

At no period in American history has our democracy been in such peril or has the possibility of totalitarianism been as real. Our way of life is over. Our profligate consumption is finished. Our children will never have the standard of living we had. And poverty and despair will sweep across the landscape like a plague. This is the bleak future. There is nothing President Obama can do to stop it. It has been decades in the making. It cannot be undone with a trillion or two trillion dollars in bailout money. Our empire is dying. Our economy has collapsed.

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Lee Linderman holds a J.D. from the University of Southern California and degrees in creative writing and history from Northwestern University. In August, he begins a judicial clerkship with the Hon. Christina A. Snyder in the Central District of California.

*Photo courtesy of Anita363.

The post The World According to Chris Hedges appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

—Reviewed by Adam Fleisher

Abraham Lincoln delivered his second inaugural address with victory in a long, brutal and bloody civil war at hand.  The Union – and the American experiment – would be saved, the scourge of slavery eliminated, the North vindicated in its righteousness. Given this climate of triumph, historian David Goldfield suggests, Lincoln’s humble and magnanimous speech was something of a letdown. By speaking only of God’s inscrutability, and by treating “this terrible war” as punishment for the nation’s collective sin of slavery, Lincoln rejected the sentiments of a nation that “believed weighty political issues could be parsed into good or evil.”

According to Goldfield’s book America Aflame: How the Civil War Created a Nation, that absolutism came to characterize antebellum political debate as a result of the rise of evangelical Christianity. It also made political compromise impossible, as both North and South perceived their interests to be ordained by God. Goldfield thus argues that the Civil War was not inevitable, but that moral certainty infused into politics by religion made for “an especially toxic factor in limiting the options of political leaders.”

Leaving aside the possibility that politics always has a moral dimension, America Aflame has grafted a patina of religiosity onto the more traditional explanation of secession resulting from the inevitable tensions between the South’s desire to protect the political-economic institution of slavery and the North’s desire to perpetuate the American Revolution via the westward expansion and economic development plan known as Manifest Destiny. Goldfield sees religious revivalism as the major force behind Manifest Destiny and the idea of ridding the nation of slavery, and sees the two linked by the conviction that their collective realization would enable the rebirth and renewal of America and fulfill the nation’s “destiny as a democratic, Protestant beacon to inspire other peoples and nations.”

Slavery initially became a national political issue because of America’s economic and territorial growth. Expansion brought the question of whether new states would be free, while the Fugitive Slave Law and the Dred Scott decision both resoundingly rejected the idea that blacks could be free and thus directly implicated northerners in the institution of slavery. But as religion seeped into politics, slavery became a moral stain, a sin to be purged. And as secession and war loomed, northern politicians and intellectuals – infused with the language of evangelicalism – came to see slavery as a test of American moral and religious ideals, a struggle between right and wrong, good and evil.

When the Civil War began with the Confederacy’s bombardment of Fort Sumter, northerners welcomed it with an outburst of patriotism and optimism, confident that it would solve the problem of the south and slavery quickly and painlessly. It would be a “magic elixir to speed America’s millennial march” and carry on the spirit and ideals of the Revolution, Goldfield writes, as Northerners “saw the opportunity to extend and protect the Revolutionary legacy, to transform an experiment into a permanent, indivisible country.”

As the horrors of war reached civilians, the optimism and idealism dissipated. But Lincoln had always been more grounded. In the beginning, he wanted only to preserve the Union and the idea of self-government; he was a constitutionalist, not an abolitionist. Lincoln’s speech in 1845, then, used the same framework as his Gettysburg address – the sin of slavery an obstacle to the nation’s destiny – but added the burden on all to fight and suffer.

The war, of course, proved intractable and incredibly deadly. But in a country racing toward its Manifest Destiny, the South had lost before it began. The war evolved from a regional fight to a prolonged battle between a nation and a southern insurgency. The South was being destroyed while the Northern economy expanded and federal power increased. The new transcontinental railroad cemented a “reunited nation” of east and west – psychological compensation for the separation of north and south. Although the nation emerged stronger, more confident in the future and more united after the war, the South was devastated, its people bitterly opposed to the (temporary) reality of black equality and, of course, struggling to make sense of how they could lose a holy war with God on their side.

Unfortunately, the North moved past the good feelings that resulted from victory fairly quickly, as weariness replaced idealism and “freedom” took a back seat to getting on with the business of expansion and growth. Northern disinterest allowed the creation of black codes that severely restricted the freedom of the newly freed slaves, the rise of anti-black violence and the founding of the Klan.

So maybe the problem wasn’t so much the moral certainty of antebellum America, as Goldfield argues, but that the Civil War eliminated it. The freedom blacks enjoyed after the war proved almost as ephemeral as the northern passion for redemption. America Aflame ends with the nation’s centennial, celebrating as one country but not quite with liberty and justice for all. But, Goldfield writes, the Union victory did preserve the ideals of the first American century, even if the country was not yet ready to live up to them or to fight for them again.

Excerpt: A fog had lifted; the way was now clear. Ambiguity and uncertainty had dissipated. . . . “It seems as if we never were alive till now; never had a country till now,” a New Yorker exclaimed. People poured into the streets, even in such southern-leaning places as New York City and Cincinnati, to proclaim their patriotism. George Ticknor, a Boston educator, marveled to an English friend, “The whole population, men, women, and children, seem to be in the streets with Union favors and flags . . . . Civil War is freely accepted everywhere . . . by all, anarchy being the obvious, and perhaps the only alternative.” Pacifists who had rejected violence, even in support of righteous causes, turned bellicose. Ralph Waldo Emerson enthused, “Sometimes gunpowder smells good.”

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Further Reading: Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era by James M. McPherson; This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War by Drew Gilpin Faust

Adam Fleisher is a law student at the University of Virginia.

*Photo courtesy of Magician pug.

The post The Moral War appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

—Reviewed by James Romoser

William Byers opens his dense and detailed book on the philosophy of science with a provocative claim: Many of the most serious problems afflicting contemporary society have their roots in a fundamental misunderstanding of how science works. This misunderstanding is “the crisis of uncertainty” – the hyper-rational (yet impossible) expectation that science or mathematics can provide perfect knowledge and control over the world.

Take, for instance, the meltdown on Wall Street that helped throw the world into recession. That crisis can be traced to the failure of complicated numerical algorithms introduced by highly-trained quantitative analysts, or “quants.” In the chaotic world of investing, “nothing sells so well as the ‘sure thing,’ Byers writes in The Blind Spot: Science and the Crisis of Uncertainty.

The financial devices pushed by the “quants” were not well understood, but they carried the air of scientific objectivity, precision and predictability. As Byers recounts, “People convinced themselves that the risks were not that great, that these new mathematical tools would ensure that money could be made no matter whether the market went up or down.”

On Wall Street, the over-reliance on scientific certainty was famously disastrous, and Byers contends that a similar over-reliance is commonplace in our culture. Many laypeople believe that the purpose, and inevitable outcome, of scientific activity is to uncover some objective certainty, whether about the origin of the universe, the nature of the electron or the tumult of the stock market. But Byers argues that, in fact, “absolute certainty is illusory and that the human need for certainty has often been abused with noxious consequences.”

Unfortunately, Byers, a retired professor of statistics and mathematics, spends too little time addressing these “noxious consequences” or how we might mitigate them. Instead, his book is packed with examples of brilliant men grappling with the intrinsic ambiguities in all sorts of scientific and mathematical problems.

Scientists have been coming to grips with impenetrable uncertainty for millennia. The ancient Greeks could not conceive of the concept of zero or the square root of two. In the 20th century, quantum physics showed that it is impossible, even in principle, to simultaneously measure the speed and position of a particle. And Byers convincingly demonstrates just how deeply the current of uncertainty ripples throughout all of modern science.

Some of his examples are fascinating, as when he discusses the ambiguity inherent in Einstein’s famous E = mc², which says that all mass is energy and all energy is mass. Others are highly arcane, as when he details certain problems in mathematics that are “undecidable” – that is, problems “for which it is impossible to construct a single algorithm or set of formal rules that will invariably lead to a correct yes-or-no answer.”

For the non-academic reader, the best parts of The Blind Spot are when Byers considers the broader implications of his thesis. His discussion of the financial meltdown is one of those parts, and it is powerful evidence for his contention that the arrogant quest for certainty can create a dangerous misapplication of the scientific method. But oddly, he devotes only three pages to the subject.

And despite his urgent declaration in his preface that “modern civilization is in crisis!”, Byers never elaborates on how his way of thinking about science can help us, as a practical matter, navigate the crises of modern times. The closest he comes is on the very last page of his book, with a throwaway mention of global warming in which he asserts that certain proof of human-caused climate change is impossible. The best we can do, Byers says, is to determine “whether there is a strong likelihood that global warming exists and that human activity is contributing to it.”

That may be true, but it’d be nice to hear more about how the Byers philosophy – which embraces ambiguity and inherent paradox – would respond to the (overwhelming, if not “certain”) evidence of a global climate crisis, not to mention other areas in which science and public policy frequently intersect, like bioengineering, epidemiology, space exploration or the health care system.

Byers, preferring to dwell on abstract mathematics and on a conceptual discussion of the philosophy of science, leaves these areas untouched. Still, despite the omissions, The Blind Spot is valuable because it proposes an approach to science based not on power or control, but on creativity and wonder. And it reminds us of a humbling yet thrilling truth: No matter how precise our microscopes get, and no matter how deep we peer into the cosmos, there will always be a part of reality that we are not able to see.

Excerpt: Now certainty is so attractive that many people think that mathematics and science involve the search for a kind of absolute certainty, which is often what is meant when we talk about the “truth.” I believe that the certainty that accompanies acts of creativity was so seductive that it was isolated from creativity as a value in its own right – for many it was the value. Logic, proof, and deductive thinking – instead of being seen as add-ons to acts of creativity – came to be seen as ends in themselves. This was the birth of the worldview that came to dominate our culture – the search for absolute certainty, absolute truth, a theory of everything. Certainty, considered as a basic drive of our civilization, is the attempt to replace the contingency of life with an ordered, static, and objective world that would not require further acts of creativity because everything was not only pinned down, but even algorithmic.

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James Romoser is a freelance writer in Washington, D.C.

*Photo courtesy of nicubunu.photo.

The post The Uncertainty Principle appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

—Reviewed by Jacob Heilbrunn

Francis Fukuyama, almost singlehandedly, belies the belief that the age of great books in the field of political science is a bygone one. He seeks not the flash of a shocking assertion, but the profundity of a genuine insight. His tone is lapidary and explanatory. Linking Fukuyama’s varied explorations of world politics are the fairness of his judgments, the lucidity of his prose, and above all his relentless questing for fresh insights. He exemplifies Max Weber’s belief in scholarship as a vocation.

The steady heightening of Fukuyama’s mastery was by no means a foregone conclusion. The neoconservative world, from which Fukuyama emerged, became enveloped in a costive parochialism. But Fukuyama managed to absorb the best of neoconservatism-a penchant for heterodoxy and intellectual inquisitiveness-while rejecting utopian experiments on the world stage. Fukuyama openly parted ways with his neocon comrades in an essay for the National Interest in which he criticized the Bush administration for its conduct of the Iraq War. (This prompted Charles Krauthammer to vilify him as trafficking in anti-Semitism.)

Fukuyama followed this with a book, based on a series of lectures delivered at Yale, called America At the Crossroads. It posed a question that neocons have never really been able to answer. Why, if the early neocon emphasis was on the difficulties inherent in social engineering (exemplified in the writings of Irving Kristol and Daniel Patrick Moynihan), did the current generation of neoconservatives, which included Fukuyama’s own former mentor Paul Wolfowitz, now champion nation-building in the forbidding terrain of the Middle East?

Fukuyama’s query had a special resonance because Fukuyama was a student of Allan Bloom, who, in turn, had been a disciple of political theorist Leo Strauss. Much obloquy has been heaped upon Strauss for having produced his followers, but in fact Strauss, who died in 1973, had nothing but scorn for contemporary utopians who sought to create modernity in their own image. One of the enduring mysteries of the rush of Paul Wolfowitz and William Kristol to overthrow Saddam Hussein is why they were so heedless of Strauss’s warnings about the perils of trying to reengineer whole societies.

Fukuyama, in his own way, may be the last heir to the older Straussian tradition. His interests are capacious, but he has for several decades been focused particularly on the role that ideas play as the motor of history. In Fukuyama’s case, some of the most influential ideas in his lifetime have been his own. In the 1989 essay that first made him famous, Fukuyama exuberantly declared an end to history, thanks to the ideological triumph of liberal democracy. It was an assertion so bold and seductive that it helped usher in the very mood of triumphalism that Fukuyama later criticized-the complacent sense that might makes right and that America can go it alone, intervening whenever and wherever it likes, regardless of what other powers may think.

Now, in The Origins of Political Order, Fukuyama takes a fresh look at the conundrum of state-building. Fukuyama sees his book as a successor to Political Order, a classic by the late Samuel Huntington. Why is it that societies have organized themselves into democratic or authoritarian states? To explain why Europe, China, and India followed different paths to modernity-and why some areas of the world remain pre-modern-Fukuyama draws as much on evolutionary biology as on notions of warfare.

The book has an old-fashioned feel to it. It’s compendious. It offers sweeping judgments. And Fukuyama conducts a kind of running conversation with Max Weber, Ferdinand Tonnies, Karl Marx, and other sociological thinkers as he ranges across the centuries to explain human development.

This is no polemical tract praising the greatness of the western tradition. Fukuyama has no time for the complacent belief that the rise of western civilization is the story of perpetual progress. Instead, he makes it clear at the outset that he is apprehensive about the ability of the contemporary American political system to adapt to change instead of being swept into the dustbin of history.

Fukuyama points to a list of familiar contemporary ailments: the presence of entrenched interest groups, the polarization of Congress, the homogenization of neighborhoods and regions along ideological lines, and the lack of intergenerational mobility. But he sets them into a broader context of the rise and fall of civilizations. America has reached a new political and economic crossroads that will require its elites to engage in the kind of sacrifice that they have shirked in recent decades. As Fukuyama sees it, societies that have failed to confront major political or fiscal threats usually resort instead to quick fixes, convinced that what worked before can keep working now. “There was no necessary reason why the Mamluk Sultanate in Egypt couldn’t have adopted firearms earlier to meet rising external threats, as the Ottomans who ultimately defeated them did,” says Fukuyama. “Nor was it inevitable that emperors in the late Ming Dynasty in China would fail to tax their citizens adequately to support an army that could defend the country from the Manchus. The problem in both cases was the enormous institutional inertia existing behind the status quo.”

As he ranges across history, Fukuyama explodes a number of myths about mankind. He observes that the old belief propounded by Rousseau, Hobbes, and Locke that human beings tend to be isolated individuals in the state of nature is not correct. The reverse, Fukuyama says, is the case: man began as a social animal and then began to develop more individualistic traits. He notes that the fatal flaw of neoclassical economics, at least in its pure form, is the notion that human beings are rational creatures who always seek to maximize their income. This school flourished during the 19th century, much to the chagrin of Charles Dickens, who mocked the neoclassical Manchester school of economics for its assertions that people could be understood in terms of acting in their interests-“as if the vices and passions of men had not been running counter to their interests since the Creation of the World!”

Fukuyama doesn’t make the mistake of ignoring human nature. Rather, he emphasizes that “inclusive fitness, kin selection, and reciprocal altruism are default modes of sociability.” This is why most human societies are organized in the same fashion-on the principle of kinship, or what is often called a patrimonial society. Fukuyama notes that the communist impulse contravened this principle. “Forced collectivization by the Soviet Union and China in the twentieth century sought to turn back the clock to an imagined past that never existed, in which common property was held by nonkin,” he says.

How did societies move away from a patrimonial order toward the creation of the leviathan that is the modern state, characterized by Nietzsche as the “coldest of all cold monsters”? Fukuyama points to several theories of state formation. One connects the rise of large states to the need for irrigation (Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, and Mexico). Another theory emphasizes population density. A third is that states are produced by violence-Prussia, for instance, was known as an army in search of a state.

For Fukuyama, the key to state formation is the existence of a potent and centralized bureaucracy. This can often be driven by the threat of warfare. The fledgling Chinese state, Fukuyama notes, was waging battles almost continually from the Zhou dynasty onwards. To do this effectively required a bureaucracy, which was something that China developed much earlier than the western democracies.

In contradistinction to Western Europe, however, China did not develop modern capitalism or the rule of law. The conditions for the growths of states differ, and there is no single path to modernization. “Contrary to the Marxist view that feudalism was a universal stage of development preceding the rise of the bourgeoisie, it was in fact an institution that was largely unique to Europe,” writes Fukuyama. “We should not necessarily expect to see non-Western societies following a similar sequence.”

Fukuyama is himself waging war of sorts. His foes are the procrustean political theories that try to offer monocausal explanations for complex historical events. As he ranges around the world, Fukuyama makes it clear that he is not a cultural essentialist. Nor does he believe that geography is destiny. Despotism isn’t the only mode of governance possible for Russia, for instance. “Russia,” he says, “is in no way trapped by its history. The absolutist precedents set by Ivan IV, Peter, and Stalin were followed by periods of liberalization.”

Such assertions are persuasive. To presume that Russia or other countries are slaves to the past is to banish contingency from history. The paths that nations follow may be as much the result of folly as of foresight. They are in any case unpredictable, which is why the revolutions of 1989 came as such a shock to both academic and political elites, who had become habituated to the status quo.

When it comes to the power of democracy, Fukuyama is surprisingly glum for someone who became famous for lauding its triumph. While the industrial revolution and its attendant rise in productivity created a world in which the severe doctrines of Thomas Malthus no longer obtained, Fukuyama gives minimal credit to democratic institutions in fostering this new prosperity. Economic growth might help to create stable democracies, but many authoritarian countries have compiled impressive growth records, too. “While having a coherent state and reasonably good government is a condition for growth, it is not clear that democracy plays the same positive role,” Fukuyama says. This is a rebuke to those who believe that the free enterprise system cannot function other than in a democracy.

Fukuyama’s tone, as he takes aim at prevailing myths, is never less than calm and self-assured. This volume ends on the eve of the French Revolution, and Fukuyama promises a sequel that will take his account of political order up to the present. Perhaps he’ll present the Iraq War as the apogee of American power before the country was shorn of greatness. It wouldn’t be altogether surprising, for the truth is that there has always been a somber cast to Fukuyama’s writing. James Atlas, writing in the New York Times in November 1989, observed that Fukuyama seemed to have a measure of contempt for the culture whose triumph he seemed to be celebrating.

Fukuyama’s gloom is rooted in sound caution, though. The record of civilizations that Fukuyama chronicles in his magnum opus offers as much room for doubt as hope. He notes that the real danger to liberal democracy comes not when the state is too strong, but when it is too weak to act decisively. At a moment when the right is calling for emasculating the federal government, Fukuyama’s warning is all too timely.

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Jacob Heilbrunn is the author of They Knew They Were Right: the Rise of the Neocons.

*Photo courtesy of Giampaolo Macorig.

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The Fear: Robert Mugabe and the Martyrdom of Zimbabwe
By Peter Godwin

—Reviewed by T.A. Frank

For a brief spell, starting in 1980, Zimbabwe looked like it might set an example for the world, its citizens united in a newly established multi-ethnic democracy undergirded by strong colonial-era British institutions. Rebel leader Robert Mugabe had peacefully assumed office, embraced the country’s minority tribes as well as its white citizens, and all but assured everyone that business would pretty much go on as usual.

That lasted about two years. Then, in 1982, Robert Mugabe unleashed a North-Korean-trained brigade on a rampage against members of the Ndebele tribe in the southern region of Matabeleland, leaving thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, dead. It was an effort to quash his political opponents, and it worked. The rest of the world, loath to kill its dreams of a happy Zimbabwe, looked the other way. But to anyone willing to confront reality, the true nature of Robert Mugabe had become all too clear.

The first journalist to report on the massacres was a young lawyer named Peter Godwin. Born in Rhodesia in 1957, Godwin had grown up in a rural part of the country and served in the British South African Police under Prime Minister Ian Smith. After getting a university education in England and becoming hopeful about a new and better nation replacing white-ruled Rhodesia, he’d returned to his country of birth to be a lawyer. But the subversion of the rule of law under Mugabe quickly disillusioned Godwin, and he abandoned the legal profession. Then, at great risk to himself, Godwin ventured into the killing zones of Matabeleland in 1982 and reported to the rest of the world on the mass murder unfolding there.

Having made himself an enemy of Mugabe and his regime (and barely escaping Matabeleland with his life), Godwin left Zimbabwe for good, returning only for reporting trips or visits with family. He lives today in New York, but he continues to report on the ceaseless decline of what was once the breadbasket of Africa. No writer has chronicled the fall of Zimbabwe more thoroughly, movingly, or vividly. While Zimbabwe managed to survive the 1980s in a relatively prosperous state, by the 1990s corruption and economic mismanagement had taken a severe toll. In 2000, Mugabe began to confiscate white-owned farms, sending food production levels plummeting, and inflation degenerated into hyperinflation, with even a bottle of beer costing trillions of Zimbabwe dollars. Poverty and starvation overtook the country.

Godwin’s latest book, The Fear: Robert Mugabe in the Martyrdom of Zimbabwe, is the third he has written about his native country. The book begins in March 2008, when Mugabe held an election in which voters rejected him so overwhelmingly that even bribes, threats, beatings, and ballot-stuffing couldn’t obscure the results. For a few days, it seemed almost possible that Mugabe was going to relinquish power. Then those hopes were put to rest, as Mugabe unleashed a wave of horrific attacks on supporters of the opposition party.

Godwin takes us through the weeks and months that followed the 2008 election, introducing us to a striking collection of heroes and villains. The stories of evil are terrible – so disturbing that one hesitates to include any in this review. Let the one sample be that of a woman who was raped while being forced to hear the screams of her father being beaten to death. Such is the enforcement of Mugabe’s rule.

But Godwin’s book is far too varied in scene, mood and tone to be simply a parade of horrors. It’s beautiful in some places, funny in others. What’s also striking is the courage of the good people he chronicles. They are the opponents of Mugabe who return to Zimbabwe knowing full well that what will greet them at the airport is a phalanx of police waiting to cart them off to a jail cell. They are the election workers who resolutely try to keep the process honest, even though they know that they can expect arrest and torture. To be good is to be brave. The stories in The Fear remind us of that central truth. So does Godwin’s courage in telling them.

Excerpt: Borrowdale Racecourse has limped on, through all of Zimbabwe’s crazy decline, though with a vastly reduced field… That is what’s so bizarre about this place. That even as the violence goes on, there is somehow an illusion of normality, a tuning-out of the awfulness that surrounds us, just as surely as the airwaves above us thrum with ZBC’s [Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation’s] malign message. Yet here people are placing bets on horses, and drinking bad sparkling wine. That, I suppose, is the genius of the human condition, its ability to adapt, even to the most extreme situations.

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T.A. Frank is ideas editor of Zócalo Public Square.

Photo courtesy of United Nations Photo.

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Baseball in the Garden of Eden: The Secret History of the Early Game
by John Thorn

—Reviewed by Joe Mathews

John Thorn’s Baseball in the Garden of Eden is much more than a history of the national pastime’s beginnings. It is an account of how and why Americans developed their special talent for self-delusion.

In describing how a Civil War hero named Abner Doubleday earned bogus designation as baseball’s creator, Thorn offers a magisterial history of how history can be manufactured. And while the book is set mostly in the 19th century, it couldn’t be more timely or newsy in the way it hones in on profound weaknesses in the American character. It thus belongs alongside recent volumes such as Seth Mnookin’s The Panic Virus (an account of the falsehood that vaccines cause childhood autism) and Michael Lewis’ The Big Short (about the financial crisis and the fictions that spawned it) that have shown our unwillingness to face facts, even those right under our noses.

Central to this American disease, as dissected by Thorn, is our susceptibility to the Great Man Theory of change. Our devotion to stories of geniuses and heroes is so total that when such stories don’t exist, they must be invented. The narrative of the book revolves around how Albert G. Spalding, early baseball participant and sporting goods magnate, helped turn Doubleday – the war hero from Cooperstown, New York — into baseball’s Founding Father.

Related to the American preference for Great Men is our unwillingness to accept evolutionary explanations for the development of institutions. We cling to our guns and our creation myths, even in baseball. One reason for this devotion to creationism is our belief that America itself is a magical creation, of the Creator and the divinely blessed Founding Fathers. Those who believe this simply have been loathe to acknowledge the foreign influences that have shaped our major institutions, including baseball.

The authors of baseball’s bogus history, thus, labored to counter considerable evidence that baseball’s roots are in England with games that involve bats, balls pitched to bats, two sides alternating innings, multiple safe havens (or bases), and a round circuit on the field. Hence Doubleday. And when Doubleday’s creation myth was exposed as fraudulent, a minor figure in baseball history, Alexander Cartwright, was named the new creator.

“Cartwright became, no less than Doubleday, a tool of those who wished to establish baseball as the product of an identifiable spark of American ingenuity, without foreign or evolutionary taint,” Thorn writes.

This kind of American mythmaking is exasperating, not least because the truth about our history is always more fun and interesting than the hokum – for exactly the same reason that the Immaculate Conception, for all its lasting power as narrative, is not nearly as fun and interesting (for participants and observers alike) as the genuine article.

As Thorn shows, baseball was tweaked and shaped by clubs and men, few of them with heroic biographies. Among those who helped evolution along were gamblers, political thugs, and the owner of Magnolia Club, a 19th century New York establishment that provided any service a man of means desired. And from its earliest days in baseball (Thorn pegs baseball’s American beginnings to “about 1735” in the hotbed of Upton, Mass.), the appeal was not the game’s poetry but “its genial backwoods sadism, epitomized in the practice of plugging a runner to put him out between the bases, and stinging the hands or battering the countenance of the catcher; these translated to courage.”

As the game evolved, rules like this were changed to make it less brutal, but also less beautiful. Thorn pines openly for the earlier version of baseball known as the Massachusetts game, which produced more freewheeling, fast-paced contests that required athleticism from the players. What we have today is the staid New York version, which grew more popular in part because it was “easier for unathletic clerks to play.” Evolution is cruel like that.

Thorn offers three unholy reasons why baseball became the American game. Its rhythm and rules, with its pitch-by-pitch action, made it ideal for gamblers, who found it full of individual contests upon which to make wagers. The game also produced statistics that were easy to follow in the papers, giving the game a crucial boost of publicity. It also didn’t hurt that baseball was the sort of sport that could be played or watched while eating junky food or drinking alcohol.

Thorn’s book, at its weakest moments, offers too much detail about all the tiny evolutionary pivots in baseball’s history. But at its best, Baseball in the Garden of Eden is social history of the first order.

Some of the characters are unforgettable. There’s a Congressman and early club owner who has his players forfeit a game they are certain to lose in order to protect a bet he has made on them. The secretary of an important early team turns out to be a billiard room owner and Tammany Democrat linked with the party arm that intimidated undecided voters.

Angelenos may smile at the story of Abner Graves, the man whose letter claiming that he had witnessed Doubleday’s invention of baseball was the linchpin of that creation myth. Graves was, Thorn reports, “a real estate huckster in Southern California” who in May 1895 tried to sell the people of Pasadena on “an elevated railway whose cars are said to be able to make a speed of 200 miles an hour.” Mr. Graves later shot and killed his wife.

And then there’s Thorn’s moving account of Louis Fenn Wadsworth, the forgotten man who may have had the greatest impact on the game. (He gave the game nine men and nine innings). After his 19th century playing days, he married a wealthy woman and became a judge. But then she died and he drank. In 1898 he committed himself to the poorhouse, where he spent the last decade of his life, without a single visitor.

Thorn, who has been researching baseball’s paternity for nearly 30 years, writes in the acknowledgments that he’s not likely to write on the subject again. This book is one heck of a curtain call.

Joe Mathews, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, is California editor of Zócalo Public Square.

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*Photo courtesy of HutDoG83.

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The Rights of the People: How Our Search for Safety Invades our Liberties
by David Shipler

—Reviewed by Adam Fleisher

One might get the wrong impression of an author who passionately argues the government is infringing the liberty and privacy of ordinary Americans, stoking that “red-blooded American revulsion” when our elected leaders trample our Constitution. It may not help matters to know that he sees potentially ominous parallels with the Soviet Union. Presumably, the author of The Rights of the People is an anti-government Tea Party sort, right?

In fact, the writer is Pulitzer-Prize winning former New York Times columnist David Shipler, whose last book argued that the nation is failing in its responsibility to help poor people. Fittingly, The Rights of the People does not condemn the entire government, instead focusing on the ACLU-friendly issue of how the police and military overreach in their efforts to keep America safe. So his narrow point is a legitimate one: whether the government is fighting crime or terrorism, “incursions into liberty are part of the same set of constitutional issues.”

About half of The Rights of the People consists of excellent reporting on how cops on the beat actually fight the wars on guns and drugs. Shipler effectively juxtaposes the Supreme Court’s Fourth Amendment jurisprudence – which has gradually expanded the definition of a “reasonable” search – with the ways officers ignore or manipulate the limited procedural limitations. Then again, for most of their searches, the officers don’t even need to come up with a constitutionally justified exception for searching citizens’ vehicles without a warrant. Riding along with a gun interdiction unit called the “Power Shift,” Shipler observes officers generally relying on “citizens’ acquiescence.” When they don’t get consent, they quickly push the limits of allowable searches.

Shipler then pivots to the “crime of terrorism.” Just as the “terror of narcotics” has led to violations of Constitutional protections, the fear of terrorism since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 has led to what he describes as “jarring violations of constitutional principles.” He goes through a laundry list of abuses, from secret phone eavesdropping to NSA data mining to the dishonest, sloppy and incompetent use of National Security Letters – not subpoenas nor warrants, but administrative demands from the FBI. The Rights of the People effectively situates these pieces of American anti-terror policy in the larger context of historical “great departures” from Constitutional principles like the Espionage Act during World War I, the internment of the Japanese during World War II, any number of CIA and the FBI actions during the Cold War, and so on.

The reporting in The Rights of the People is spot-on, but the analysis misses the mark. Though the book starts with the (very reasonable) premise that war – and wartime anxiety – tends to increase the power of the state at the expense of individual liberty and the Bill of Rights, the narrative drips with Shipler’s apparent personal hatred for politically conservative leaders. So he writes of the “neoconservative Republicans” in the Bush administration who “strayed egregiously from constitutional principles essential to democracy,” after Sept. 11, barely mentioning that Bush’s policies had broad support in both parties. Nor does Shipler acknowledge that the current Administration has embraced much of the war on terror framework developed by its predecessor or that key element of that framework, including the government’s ability to eavesdrop without a warrant, came courtesy of the Clinton Administration. Overstepping the Constitution for moral or political purposes is not endemic to a certain political party.

And Shipler’s tone too often takes a sensationalist turn: “From time to time the shadows of autocracy flicker across our shining enterprise,” he writes, and we must look to the Soviet system so we know “what to watch out for”: right-wing ideologues. Like Stalinists, right-wingers, he writes, believe in the expansion of executive power, spin science for political aims, and enforce ideological political correctness.

Yet The Rights of the People in spite of itself demonstrates that aggrandizements of government power – to fight land wars, terrorism, drugs, guns, crime, poverty or any other social ill – come at the expense of individual liberty, especially for those least able to defend themselves. Some of the most striking reporting in Shipler’s book is about how the “Power Shift” police unit obliterates any concern for privacy in its pursuit of illegal weapons in the District of Columbia. He notes that the Supreme Court recently expanded the scope of the Second Amendment in the much-discussed Heller case, which could curtail the types of invasions of privacy the Power Shift relies upon. While Shipler’s diagnosis of the root causes of problem might be wildly off the mark, he would likely enjoy a consensus on his core claim: the liberty valued by people of all political stripes relies on a “durable foundation of constitutional protections.”

Excerpt: “The first time I went out with [the undercover team], they were after a bigger dealer than the street sellers who hang around on seedy corners. This one had already sold crack to three U.C.s, as was slated tonight to make a fourth sale of a greater amount, over fifty grams, which would bring a heavier punishment. It’s common police tactic to induce larger and larger sales until the defendant qualifies for a long stay in prison, and sometimes, defense attorneys say, the dealer is duped into borrowing the drugs just to meet a contrived demand that is uncharacteristic of his usual level of business. Usually in vain, the lawyers try to persuade judges that this constitutes entrapment, because the crime – in this case its magnitude – is instigated by the police.”

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Further Reading: When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment by Mark A. R. Kleiman; Terror in the Balance: Security, Liberty, and the Courts by Eric A. Posner & Adrian Vermeule

Adam Fleisher is a law student at the University of Virginia.

*Photo courtesy of Farfahinne.

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Bringing Up Oscar: The Story of the Men and Women Who Founded the Academy
by Debra Ann Pawlak

—Reviewed by Ellen O’Connell

In January 1927, Louis B. Mayer, head of MGM Studios, invited 35 other film industry giants to Los Angeles’ Ambassador Hotel to discuss an idea. Mayer’s plan to create a unified body for the film business to “resolve disputes, discuss industry-wide challenges and promote the film community’s positive side” was favorably received. As a result, the 34 men and two women formed the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the committee in charge of the Oscars.

Debra Ann Pawlak’s new book Bringing Up Oscar tells the story of those 36 people, tracing their career arcs and explaining the unique perspectives that combined to create the famous award show. The book begins with an engaging premise – after all, we almost cannot help our interest in behind-the-scenes looks in anything, and the mysterious and glamorous stars of the past make appealing characters. Yet the book’s fractured biographical and anecdotal nature does not make for an easy read. Like a Wikipedia article with too many exclamation points, Pawlak’s prose is often inundated with easy similes (“When Louis B. Mayer wanted something, he went after it like a hound focused on a foxhunt.”) and unnecessary repetitions (patrons are “tuxedoed” at a black-tie event).

Pawlak shows readers how little the Academy relates to anyone else’s lives – just how much of an insiders’ club it truly is. With dangling narratives about each of the 36 people that never quite intersect, we are left with obscure personal histories, very little original research, and no enhanced knowledge of what the Academy does when they’re not busy handing out awards. She does remind us that some things have changed; having only two women on the Academy would not fly in 2011, although it remains male-dominated. The golden statue now has a nickname and, according to Pawlak, has gained a little weight. A few of the original categories have changed, and the members of the Academy now are hard-pressed to nominate 10 candidates for Best Motion Picture instead of five.

But knowing the birthdays and relatives of the original Academy members does not create the narrative Pawlak promised. We are not offered a glimpse into the sordid and lecherous goings-on of the Hollywood elite, nor do we learn how the history of the original Academy and its forgotten legends led to the glitzy and over-exposed modern-day equivalent. The book settles into lists – who won what and when, when founding members were born and when and how they died – details so quickly noted that they cannot possibly stick in one’s mind even long enough to become dinner table repartee.

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Ellen O’Connell has been published in several national literary magazines and is a contributing writer to the forthcoming book, The Moment (2011 Harper Perennial). This year she was nominated for the 2011 Pushcart Award and currently teaches creative writing at UC Santa Barbara.

*Photo courtesy of Adarsh Upadhyay.

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