BiblioAddict The First Step on the Road to Recovery

On the Ayn Rand possession, the “oy” of cooking (and eating) animals, and when brute force doesn’t always work:

Yesterday morning, before I left the house, I pulled an old, unread New Yorker out of my mountainous pile of old, unread New Yorkers. I have more than a few that date back to August, but this one is only a few weeks old with an issue date of Nov. 9.  It’s an exceptionally good issue with articles on Ayn Rand, Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals, the murder rate in America, and a short story by none other than Stephen King, among other very interesting things.

The article on Ayn Rand, “Possessed” by Thomas Mallon*, wonders if Ayn Rand’s cult “outstripped her canon.”  Mallon argues that though Rand’s influence on a certain segment of the conservative right is undeniable, critics shouldn’t forget that, for all her influence and creation of the Objectivist philosophy, Rand’s books weren’t really that good. In fact, Mallon writes, Rands “intellectual genre fiction puts her in the crackpot pantheon of L Frank Baum and L. Ron Hubbard.”  That, I admit, is a little harsh – unless, of course, you happen to be a devoted fan of Baum and Hubbard – but, for me at least, it’s kind of hard not to agree.  Frankly, Mallon had me at ‘hello’ when he writes in the second paragraph:

Most readers make their first and last trip to Galt’s Gulch – the hidden-valley paradise of born-again capitalists featured in “Atlas Shrugged,” its solid-gold dollar sign standing like a Maypole – sometime between leaving Middle-earth and packing for college.

I’ll be darned if that wasn’t exactly my experience.  When I was a senior in high school, my junior year English teacher recommended that I read Atlas Shrugged, which I proceeded to read over the course of several months.  At the time, I didn’t think it was all that bad, mostly because it was a novel experience for me to read a book that had a theme and espoused a philosophy – at least, a theme and philosophy that was as clearly evident as it was in Atlas Shrugged. I found it exhilarating to read a book that made me think about my approach to life and the way that I interacted with the world.  For that, I thought it was one of the best books I’d ever read.  That is, until I went to college and discovered that all great literature made you think and most of it did it with better writing than Atlas Shrugged.  Also, after a little investigation and even less time, it wasn’t hard for me to see that Objectivism was almost completely opposite to my own personal philosophy.

In two key paragraphs near the middle of “Possessed,” Mallon manages to sum up everything I’d come to find problematic with Atlas Shrugged.  He writes:

The novel drops enormous set pieces of free-market oratory upon the “moochers” and “looters” and “college-infected parasites” whose world will soon, thanks to Galt’s secret recritings, be robbed of the all the brainy enterprise it needs in order to run…. In explaining why the passengers on a Taggart train are all unconsciously complicit in the bureaucractic buck-passing that will soon cause an accident that takes their lives, Rand notes, “The man in Roomette 3, Car No. 11, was a sniveling litle neurotic who wrote cheap little plays into which, as a social message, he inserted cowardly little obscenities to the effect that all businessmen were scoundrels.”  The only words missing are “stooge” and “lackey.”

Whether Dagny will opt out of the dying real world and settle herself in humming Galt’s Gulch is one of the novel’s many foregone conclusions masquerading as matters of suspense.  She is certainly ready for a change, knowing as she does “That an emotion was a sum totaled by the adding machine in the mind,” and that nothing leaves an afterglow like rape – so long as one keeps the act attached to those frequently checked philospical premises.  As Francisco d’Anconia, the most cerebral pseudo-Latin lover in literary history, explains to Hank Rearden, “Just as physical action unguided by an idea is a fool’s errand, so is sex when cut off from one’s code of values.”

Elizabeth Kolbert, she of last week’s criticism of SuperFreakonomics‘ approach to global warming, tackles Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer in “Flesh of Your Flesh.”  To be honest, after reading John Williams’ most excellent review of Eating Animals in “The Oy of Cooking,” I was a little underwhelmed by Kolbert’s review.  As far as I’m concerned, Williams’ review is everything a great review should be: detailed, entertaining, well-argued, and drawn from a large body of work.  Williams’ review seems more concerned with breaking down the reasons why Foer’s book doesn’t work, while Kolbert seems more concerned with the ethical question Foer’s book raises: Is eating animals wrong?

However, Kolbert and Williams both agree that Foer’s Eating Animals doesn’t really accomplish what it sets out to do.  Not only is it fairly redundant given the more recent spate of books and documentaries on animal farming, but Foer’s argument isn’t very consistent.  Kolbert writes:

For much of “Eating Animals,” it appears that Foer is arguing for vegetarianism as the only moral course.  Then, it turns out, he isn’t – or, at least, not quite.  In the middle of the book, Foer becomes friendly with a farmer named Frank Reese, who raises what are known as “heritage” turnkeys…  “I have placed my wager on a vegetarian diet and I have enough respect for people like Frank, who have bet on a more humane animal agriculutre, to support their kind of farming, ” Foer writes.  “This is not in the end a complicated position.”  But it is, or least it’s too complicated to parse.  If the problem with nonfactory chicken is that there isn’t enough of it, how can heritage birds represent a solution?… And what does it mean for Foer to “support” Reese’s kind of farming while urging his readers to boycott his product?

Williams writes:

Early on, Foer writes, “A straightforward case for vegetarianism is worth writing, but it’s not what I’ve written here.”

He certainly hasn’t. When the time comes to secure the locks on his own beliefs, Foer may as well have titled the book Everything is Equivocated….

“For me to conclude firmly that I will not eat animals does not mean I oppose, or even have mixed feelings about, eating animals in general.”

He does not have mixed feelings about eating animals in general? Much of the book would seem to contradict that. At moments like this, one yearns for Singer’s forcefulness and clarity of purpose, even if you don’t agree with his more extreme conclusions.

“The relative importance of ethical eating and table fellowship,” Foer writes, “will be different in different situations (declining my grandmother’s chicken with carrots is different from passing on microwaved buffalo wings).” Why? If something is wrong, isn’t it wrong? Something unethical doesn’t become ethical just because it’s homespun. The courage of his convictions might have required Foer to say something like, “Just because my grandmother says murder is cozy doesn’t make it right.” But he does the opposite, implying that the issue is a thorny one for him partly because his grandmother is admirable in so many ways.

Finally, there’s “Rap Sheet” by Jill Lapore which explores, through the examination of several recent books published on the subject, why the United States has the highest homicide rate of any affluent democracy.  The numbers are shocking: the rate of homicide in the US is four times higher than France and the United Kingdom, and six times higher than Germany.  Additionally, while the rate of homicide has fallen in the last hundred years in Europe, with a few exceptions here and there, the rate has actually risen in the U.S.  What accounts for this remarkable difference? Lepore asks.

The short answer is that no one really knows, though a few folks have ideas.  Eric Monkkonen, a historian who died in 2005 before he could finish his research, hypothesized in an article entitled, “Homicide: Explaining America’s Exceptionalism,” that the high rate of homicide was attributable to four factors: “mobility, federalism, slavery, and tolerance.”  Lepore explains:

Mobility breaks social ties; federalism is a weak form of government; slavery not only rationalized a culture of violence among white Southerners (where the murder rate has been disproportionately high, as it has, and remains, in many of the so-called law-and-order states) but also infected American culture; and American judges and juries have historically proved less willing than their European counter-parts to convict murderers, tolerating, among other crimes, racial murders and killings by jealous spouses.

Monkkonen’s argument is provocative but, of course, highly debatable.  What isn’t debatable is that, not only does the U.S. have a homicide problem but, as many of us already know, it has an incarceration problem.  We have the highest rate of incarceration than any other place in the world.  Lepore points out that, “Although the crime rate today is fifteen per cent lower than it was twenty-five years ago, the incarceration rate is four time as high.”  Mark A.R. Kleiman, the author of When Brute Force Fails attributes this fact to big cases and bad laws.  Lepore writes:

Exceptional, high-profile crimes often lead to legislative action driven by citizen initiative.  California’s controversial three-strikes law, a ballot measure, was proposed by a Fresno photographer whose daughter was murdered.  Last year, after the Petit murders [a particularly gruesome murder case], the Connecticut legislature doubled and tripled mandatory penaltis for second- and third-time offenders.

Mandatory sentencing is a big reason why the US incarceration rate is so high; it’s also because sentencing for some crimes is disproportionately severe.  A few weeks ago, BiblioGuy completed When Brute Force Fails and, in his words, it was excellent.  This is a subject I find incredibly interesting on many levels since it touches on so many aspects of our society, not to mention how we differentiate between justice and revenge, punishment and social reform.  I may, in short, have to borrow When Brute Force Fails from BiblioGuy, if he’ll ever part with it.

Now, that I’ve talked your ear off, I guess I’ll stop here, though the articles I’ve discussed here on only half of what’s in this issue of The New Yorker. I’ll save the rest of them for another day, however.  In the meantime, happy reading everyone.

* Unfortunately, the online version of this article requires a magazine subscription in order to read it.

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