Author Archives: Peter Levine

my favorite book

I first read Middlemarch when I was 17. It was assigned in the Telluride Association Summer Program at Cornell, and I think I loved it because it was the first time that I had read any book in a seminar, with real college professors and many hours spent on a single text. It was my first experience with close reading and with the application of challenging theory to literature. Gradually, as the years passed, I forgot most of the content of the novel–even the plot. I used to joke that it had retired undefeated as my favorite novel. But then, about a month ago, I opened it casually to remind myself of something near the beginning, and I found myself unable to put it down. I finished the very same copy that I had read almost a quarter century ago.

What is Middlemarch? It is a great feminist text, an indictment of the structure of relations between men and women that is not an indictment of the men as individuals. Patriarchy stunts the lives of male and female characters alike; and women often actively promote it. (Mrs. Garth, for example, is consciously raising her son Ben to be superior to her daughter Letty, and she is able to do that because she has such strong ideas and such control of her household that her husband could not object.) The “imperfect social state” of patriarchy prevents Dorothea from achieving public greatness and reduces her to “liv[ing] faithfully a hidden life.”

It is a superbly constructed story. Henry James denied that Middlemarch was “an organized, moulded, balanced composition, gratifying the reader with a sense of design and construction.” It was, he wrote, “a treasure-house of details, but … an indifferent whole.” That was nonsense, and I suspect he was jealous. Five or six plots are carried throughout, intertwining and building pressure on the characters until the denouement reveals Dorothea’s true heroism. Although the novel is not overburdened with coincidences or artifice, one could spend months finding careful symmetries and parallels. Take, for example, the brief visit of Dorothea to Rosamond’s house that opens Book V. This is the first time that two major story lines intersect. The women are foils, different in class, character, and appearance. Their first encounter, in the presence of a man who becomes an object of jealousy, causes all three to see themselves differently, in ways that reverberate until the end. This episode is just one example of how skillfully the whole work is constructed.

It is a grown-up’s novel. “Marriage,” says the narrator, “has been the bourne of so many narratives.” A bourne is a brook, and many romantic stories are streams flowing toward the inevitable wedding, when the ingenues, having overcome obstacles to their love, are united in a timeless happily-ever-after. In Middlemarch, however, two of the three essential weddings come near the beginning, and then the plot really begins. The novel is not cynical about marriage, nor critical of it. But it refuses to dwell only on the moment of falling in love or becoming united. Lives go on, and going on is hard.

It is a novel that is remarkably clear-sighted about economics. “I will learn what everything costs,” Dorothea exclaims at a crucial moment. Debts and inheritances figure strongly in the plot. There is an important auction. People confuse “use value” with “exchange value” (what things are really worth versus what they capture in a market). Because of the social structure of a market, it is not easy to be moral. “Spending money so as not to injure one’s neighbours” is a challenge.

It is a novel about a large network. I wish I had marked each significant character on a piece of paper and drawn a line between them whenever they had some “connection” (which is an important word in the text). The result would be a complex web with at least 50 nodes and hundreds of connections, which often link the gentry to the riffraff in just a few steps. News and gossip travel with fateful effects along this network. In many cases, the parties who are linked directly do not understand one another. In fact ….

It is a novel about misunderstanding other people; and the misunderstandings arise for a huge variety of moral, psychological, and social reasons. People misread others out of vanity, fear, naivete, and even because of admirable faith. Middlemarch would be one kind of novel if the omniscient narrator patronized these characters for their all-to-human failure to know one another. But the third-person omniscient narrative voice is occasionally broken by a first-person acknowledgment of uncertainty. The narrator will remark that he (or she?) doesn’t know what a particular character was thinking. This must be a deliberate reminder that understanding other human beings is never possible.

The narrator also occasionally expresses an explicit judgment or even interrupts the narration irritably. These outbursts are comic surprises because the rest of the narration is so objective. For instance, I love this beginning of chapter XXIX: “One morning, some weeks after her arrival at Lowick, Dorothea–but why always Dorothea? Was her point of view the only possible one with regard to this marriage? I protest against all our interest, all our effort at understanding being given to the young skins that look blooming in spite of trouble; for these too will get faded, and will know the older and more eating griefs which we are helping to neglect.”

Perhaps the most prevalent reason for misunderstanding in Middlemarch is egoism, which comes in many forms, some contemptible and some fully excusable. Egoism is relevant to the idea of a network, because any node can be taken as the center and all the other nodes can be seen as arrayed around it in various degrees of separation. There is a famous and very rich passage in Middlemarch about our propensity to see ourselves as the central node:

An eminent philosopher among my friends, who can dignify even your ugly furniture by lifting it into the serene light of science, has shown me this pregnant little fact. Your pier-glass [mirror] or extensive surface of polished steel made to be rubbed by a housemaid, will be minutely and multitudinously scratched in all directions; but place now against it a lighted candle as a centre of illumination, and lo! the scratches will seem to arrange themselves in a fine series of concentric circles round that little sun. It is demonstrable that the scratches are going everywhere impartially and it is only your candle which produces the flattering illusion of a concentric arrangement, its light falling with an exclusive optical selection. These things are a parable. The scratches are events, and the candle is the egoism of any person now absent …

The narrator supplies a heartbreaking reason that we must place ourselves at the center of the network, act egoistically, and fail to understand one another fully. “If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar that lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.” Our “stupidity” is essential for our survival; none of us could bear to comprehend the suffering of everyone else.

Finally, Middlemarch is, I suppose, a comedy. It has jokes, a lightness of tone, and a satisfying conclusion that I would not call tragic. Most of the loose ends are tied up. And yet there is a powerful sense of the weight of norms and the inertia of history. We are left with a deep question: whether Dorothea’s life has turned out to be a good one.

[Spoiler warning: I can’t address this question without giving away the conclusion.]

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the big story about developing countries’ debt

The Washington Post ran a story on Saturday about the declining significance of the International Monetary Fund. The lead was a decision by Ghana to reject loan conditions proposed by the IMF. Ghana could negotiate from strength because it has a growing economy and other options for borrowing. “That decision underscores the changing role of the IMF as developing economies have roared to life in recent years, with the fund increasingly becoming more adviser than lender.”

The tone of the article was somewhat critical, focusing on challenges for the IMF as an institution. Indeed, there are plans to cut the Fund’s staff by 13 percent to reflect a shrinking portfolio. But of course the story could have been told very positively; the headline could have been, “IMF Succeeds.” Someone I know at the Fund told me the following story:

In the 1980s, developing nations were burdened by enormous debts, often run up by dictators. This was a huge problem, morally and practically. Admitting that the loans should never have been made in the first place was too embarrassing for the lending countries. The IMF and World Bank literally didn’t have the cash to write off their loans. Forgiving debts can create a moral hazard (encouraging more borrowing). Yet the debt was a plague on the poorest people of the world.

This problem has been very substantially reduced through a combination of debt forgiveness and economic growth. Perhaps the process was far too slow or too costly for the poor countries–I don’t know. What is important right now is that we have passed through the debt crisis to a large extent. The following graph, which I generated using the IMF’s interactive website, shows foreign debt per GDP for Subsaharan Africa and for Ghana (the focus of the Post article). The decline since the 1990s is striking and highly positive. The debate can now be about how to develop, not how to manage debt.

on leaving DC

We’re getting ready to move CIRCLE to Tufts University on July 1 (as previously announced), and that means a move for my family as well. I’ve lived in DC since 1992; my wife, somewhat longer. I’m not sure that I would claim that DC is an objectively better place than others, but one develops a deep fondness for a city where one lives for a long time and experiences whole stages of life. I was a young single guy here, learning about the work world. I was married here and had children here. I’ve received joyous and tragic news here. The parts of the city where I have spent lots of time are not very extensive. Within those areas, I can recall specific events that took place on virtually every block, sometimes in six or seven buildings within a single block.

I’ve been writing here about “DC,” not “Washington.” The latter is the capital of the United States, the diplomatic, political, and media center. The former is a large city in the mid-Atlantic region with a fairly stable population and a distinctive local culture. This distinction is not simply one of class or income. You can be a poorly-paid environmental lobbyist and belong to “Washington,” or a successful restauranteur or real-estate lawyer who is very much part of “DC.” Nor is the distinction simply one of race. “DC” is predominantly Black, and Washington is predominantly White; but they are both quite diverse. It’s a subtle distinction with blurred borders, which one can observe at Redskins games, firework celebrations on the Mall, and the downtown department stores. But there is a difference, and it’s mainly DC that I will miss rather than Washington. I’ll miss the brick townhouses with cornices and pyramidal roofs, seafood from the Bay, the accents of both African American and white natives, settings from George Pelicanos’ novels, the Post Style Section, Pollo Compero, and Metro drivers who announce “Joodicuary Square.” As a yuppie who came to town to work for a political organization, I can’t say I’m really of DC. But as a member of a DC public school family and a commuter who has spent 90 minutes every day on the Metro for the past 15 years, I can say that I have some DC in me. And I don’t think I’ll shake it off.

explaining a lack of principle

Recently, and by coincidence, I have twice heard Mickey Edwards talk about his new book, Reclaiming Conservatism: How a Great American Political Movement Got Lost–And How It Can Find Its Way Back. Edwards was a member of Congress for 16 years, during which time he served on the powerful Appropriations Committee and chaired the House Republican Policy Committee. In those years, he also co-founded the conservative think tank known as the American Enterprise Institute Heritage Foundation. He was a “movement conservative” if there ever was one.

His book, however, excoriates today’s Republicans for ignoring constitutional limits on the power of government. I have not read the book, but Mr. Edwards argues in public that the problem is basically moral. It is the duty of the legislative branch to preserve and uphold the Constitution and to check the power of the president. Lately, Republican members of Congress have abandoned both roles because they have identified more with their party than with their institution. Edwards is especially outraged by presidential signing statements and violations of the FISA statute, because these actions threaten the rule of law.

It is appealing when an avid member of a movement reproaches his own side on moral grounds. (At any rate, I, as an opponent of this particular movement, find this particular apostasy appealing.) But I’m not sure that Edwards’ diagnosis is complete. Why do politicians sometimes put institutions and institutional self-interest ahead, and at other times heed partisan interest? It is not clear that a self-interested politician should yoke himself to either an institution or a party. It requires some explanation why a group of politicians should switch from one loyalty to another. Understanding the reason can help guide reform.

In this case, I suspect the the “party of limited government” forgot all about limits for several reasons. Party leaders have gained control of important sources of campaign money and use the cash to enforce discipline. Public opinion doesn’t help; Americans are insufficiently concerned about the Constitution. But here’s a third important reason: polarization. There are hardly any liberal Republicans left in Congress, and not all that many conservative Democrats. This means that strategy sessions on both sides are relatively homogeneous. It is therefore easier to fall into “group think” and a kind of team spirit in which anything that we do is good and anything that they try to do is suspect. Conservatives can easily talk themselves into the belief that liberals are not only competitors; they are enemies of the constitutional order. If the great threat to the Constitution is the other side, then beating them becomes a moral obligation, even if one has to compromise a bit on specific constitutional principles. Such reasoning may not be the cause of Republican tactics, but it is a psychologically compelling rationale; and rationales matter.