Author Archives: Peter Levine

10 books that I would like to say influenced me

Various bloggers are listing the top 10 books that have influenced them. Some of these lists look pretty pretentious. I would be the first to admit that the books that have really influenced me are a miscellaneous bunch, starting with Richard Scarry’s Busy, Busy World and continuing through various teen adventure novels, read-alouds for my kids (Go, Dog, Go! is up there), and a fair amount of downright junk. But there’s benefit to listing books that you have actually read and that have shaped your serious, professional work–call them “aspirational influences.” Here are mine, in the order I first read them:

George Eliot’s Middlemarch, the great novel for grownups (because it begins instead of ends with a marriage). I first read it in a college-style seminar at the Telluride Summer Program for high school kids, and it was my earliest experience with real criticism: close reading, understanding a text in context, applying theoretical frameworks. That was eye-opening and inspiring. I have even deeper respect for the novel now, having re-read it in middle age. By the way, the city of its title is industrializing. It is in the “March” of its development, with a long summer of growth ahead. Many of our cities today are experiencing de-industrialization; they are at November. More than anything, I would love to read a Middlemarch of the post-industrial American city.

Edmund Wilson, To The Finland Station, which I read when I was a teenager. It introduced me to historicism, the idea that fundamental premises and values change from culture to culture and that modernism is a response to that recognition. Those were also basic ideas for my father, and Wilson helped me to understand his work.

Ernst Gomrich, Art and Illusion, which I also read when I was a teenager. It gave me a scheme with which to assimilate the Italian art that we had seen during six months living it Italy. Gombrich’s theory is fundamentally not historicist: he sees painters as scientists, learning to represent objective nature by trial-and-error. I accepted both Wilson and Gombrich and tried to harmomize them in several long and unsuccessful undergraduate papers. I still think it is essential to reconcile progress and problem-solving (Gombrich and others) with some kind of relativism (Wilson and others).

Karl Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies, which I have not opened since I was about 18, but I read the whole thing then, and it made me want to be a political philosopher. It also helped to make me a liberal, although that outcome was probably overdetermined.

Shakespeare, King Lear. Hardly an original choice, but I have seen at least a half dozen productions and published a chapter about this great study of human love when life has no purpose.

Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations. Although I rarely quote him, my sense of moral reasoning is heavily Wittgensteinian. Moral concepts are not one kind of thing and do not all have one logic. They are miscellaneous but they work in their various contexts. Further, the Investigations exemplifies how philosophy is a kind of writing (to quote Richard Rorty); its form matters as much as its conclusions.

Theodore Lowi, The End of Liberalism (1969, revised in 1979), which argues that American politics has degenerated into negotiations among organized interest groups, while the notion of the public good had been lost in both academic theory and political practice. Lowi remains completely timely, alas.

Dante, Inferno–in the Robert Pinsky translation and glimpsed dimly in the original Italian. Dante is great to “think with.” I’ve been struggling with him since I took three college seminars on the Divine Comedy, and this winter I published a book-length study of him. He is fundamentally alien to me but he challenges us with his strong and clear vision.

Nabokov, Lolita. Some of the worst misreadings in history are the ones that interpret this book as some kind of defense of Humbert or an argument for sexual liberation. Humbert is a monster; the hero is the child he rapes. Nabokov, the Russian aristocrat, could see the world from the perspective of a suburban, gum-popping, American tween, which was was a great feat of empathy and moral imagination. Humbert’s sophisticated rhetoric almost erases her, in a profound illustration of tyranny.

Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull-House teaches the spiritual benefits of civic engagement, the need to respect ordinary people and vernacular cultures, citizenship as co-creation, and the value of listening with an open mind.

guard dogs, human sleep, and the origins of culture

The fossil record shows evidence of domesticated dogs at least 31,000 years ago; the first date of domestication is unknown. Believers in the Great Leap Forward assert that human beings made rapid cultural progress starting about 50,000 years ago, when they developed dance, painting, hunting traps, burial, clothes, and jewelery. Could their dogs have helped their cultural development?

Early humans must have been unable to sleep soundly and dream deeply. They must have slept like other large mammals, with their senses sharply attuned to threats in the night. But once they had guard dogs with them, they could go into deep sleep. Surely that had significant benefits for their imaginations. Dogs retained their ability to sense danger while asleep, and humans used the same nighttime hours to refresh their brains and enrich their consciousness.

(This is mere conjecture, asserted with no evidence whatsoever. I haven’t even seriously Googled the topic, let alone studied it.)

PS, the photo shows our dog Barkley zealously guarding my wife Laura.

state, market, and original sin

Imagine that the pure and original human condition is freedom from all political constraint; and when governments intervene, they introduce arbitrary and illegitimate power. Then the market is Eden and the government is original sin. In that case, anyone who deliberately increases the scope of government must either be a purposeful or a deluded friend of sin. Regardless of what the Congressional Budget Office or the American Medical Association may say about the new health care act, it can only be a snake in the garden. The difference between literally “taking over one sixth of the economy” by nationalizing health care and merely adding some new insurance regulations and subsidies (as Congress did this week) is immaterial, because sin is sin. On this view, the only important political distinction is between those who would protect freedom from the state and those who would use government for their ends. Communists, fascists, liberals, and moderate conservatives–despite what I observe as profound differences–run together.

I am certainly not the first to note a similarity between this specific kind of libertarianism and religious thought. In 1922, Charles A. Beard argued:

About the middle of the nineteenth century, thinkers [in the field of Political Economy] were mainly concerned with formulating a mill owner’s philosophy of society; and mill owners resented every form of state interference with their ‘natural rights.’ … The state was regarded as a badge of original sin, not to be mentioned in economic circles. Of course, it was absurd for men to write of the production and distribution of wealth apart from the state which defines, upholds, taxes, and regulates property, the very basis of economic operations; but absurdity does not stay the hand of the apologist.

Beard wanted to rebut the idea that markets were primeval and natural by demonstrating that states originally created modern markets by seizing territory, chartering corporations, coining money, literally building physical exchanges, and so forth. But Beard’s language suggests another point. The doctrine of laissez-faire echoes Christian principles, but almost precisely in reverse. (And to teach an inverted Christian doctrine would be blasphemous.) The conventional Christian view is that property was absent in Eden and among Jesus’ apostles. Property entered because of sin; anointed or otherwise legitimate governments rightly restrain it with law.

I think Tom Paine represents an intermediary stage between the original doctrine (property is sin) and its laissez-faire inversion (property is pristine). In Common Sense, he writes:

[Natural] Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. This first is a patron, the last a punisher. Society in every state is a blessing, but government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil . . . Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence.

This is not yet philosophical libertarianism, because Paine thinks that government, like dress, is a good idea under the circumstances. But it introduces the association of government with original sin.

Glenn Beck waded into the same territory when he denounced churches that embrace “social justice.” His sense of sin was religious, I think, although his doctrine was the precise reverse of what all Christian denominations still officially hold. Jim Wallis has a nice rebuttal in the Huffington Post. If the official and traditional religious position still influences believers, then Beck bit off more than he can chew.

on Minnesota Public Radio

From 9 to 10 am Central Time today, I’ll be on Minnesota Public Radio’s show called Midmorning with Kerri Miller. It’s a call-in show, so call in. My fellow guest will be Morley Winograd, co-author of Millenial Makeover: MySpace, YouTube, and the Future of American Politics. The topic is young people and politics.

debating Bleak House

Steven Maloney has a thoughtful post about moral issues in Dickens’ Bleak House. He cites two of my posts on the same subject, so this is a bit of a back-and-forth. I would summarize my thoughts about the novel as follows:

1. Mrs. Jellyby illustrates how an author’s judgment of a character can be correct even though the same author’s choice of that character is problematic. I find Mrs. Jellyby awful, as does Dickens. She is callously unconcerned about her own family because she is obsessed with an obviously foolish charitable scheme in Africa, a place of which she knows nothing. No doubt there were women like that in Dickens’ day, when paths to national political and civic leadership were reserved for men. But bourgeois women were also struggling to play useful public roles despite a powerful cult of domesticity. Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch–for example–is a great soul largely squelched by her narrow opportunities for improving the world. So it bothers me that Dickens would choose to portray a woman who should just stop worrying about society and serve her family better.

Steven makes a fair point that a whole range of characters populates Bleak House, and both the men and women exhibit various levels of social and domestic responsibility. The fact that Messrs. Skimpole and Carstone are as irresponsible as Mrs. Jellyby reduces the misogyny of the novel. Yet there is no female character with any capacity for social improvement–despite the terrible needs that Dickens portrays–and that seems a flaw.

The general category that interests me here encompasses fictional characters who have genuine virtues or vices, but whose description reinforces a harmful stereotype.

2. I think that Bleak House is a nationalistic novel, encouraging readers to broaden their sympathies to encompass all Englishmen (while stopping at the coasts of England). That’s certainly not my favorite ethical stance, but it’s better than a narrower frame or a vacuous and sentimental concern for human beings in general. Such nationalism is a form of solidarity, not just empathy. Building the nation-state as a community of mutual concern was an arduous task that could still fail today. Bleak House (and the liberalism it represents) improved the world.

Steven makes an important observation about Mr. Skimpole, who professes literally not to understand his social obligations. That creates an interesting problem for moral assessment. I think Steven is right that Skimpole is ultimately a charlatan and his kind of non-understanding is either inexcusable or spurious.

I’ve written much more about the ethical interpretation of literature in Reforming the Humanities: Literature and Ethics from Dante through Modern Times (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).