The light that failed, again
What two books with the same title say about change, a century apart
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The Big Story:
The Trump era formally begins two months from Nov 20, and many are predicting it will mark the beginning of the end of political, cultural and economic liberalism in America and the wider world.
That may be too sweeping a judgement but this sentence in our first book pick is worth noting:
“Attempts to salvage the good name of liberal democracy by contrasting it favourably with non-Western autocracy have been undercut by the feckless violation of liberal norms…The very ideal of ‘an open society’, too, has lost its once-fêted lustre”.
This Week, Those Books:
This week’s books are unusual in that both have the same title.
One is non-fiction, the other fiction.
The Backstory:
Though published nearly 120 years apart, both books reveal the same genetic trace – systemic resistance to change.
This Week’s Books:
The Light That Failed : Why the West Is Losing the Fight for Democracy
By: Stephen Holmes and Ivan Krastev
Publisher: Pegasus Books
Year: 2020
This brilliant read, originally subtitled ‘A Reckoning’ , dissects the West’s failed efforts to export its model of liberal politics to central and eastern Europe. In essence, the authors (both respected political scientists) ask the key question that arises as Donald Trump prepares to take power in the United States and populism, nationalism and faux democracy gain ground elsewhere. Why is western liberalism losing ground even on home turf, having already failed to root itself in new territory after the 1989 collapse of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War?
Their analysis makes for necessary, if unpleasant reading for those who passionately believe in liberalism, as political creed or philosophical construct.
Basically, they argue that 1989 “heralded the onset of a thirty-year Age of Imitation” in former Communist countries. Imitation meaning that with western-dominated liberalism seeming “unchallengable in the realm of moral ideals”, everyone who would was urged to get in line and embrace the one true way. The imitators had to do the following: acknowledge the “moral superiority of the imitated”, ie the West; fulfil expectations that their reform-by-imitation would be copycat rather than adapted to local traditions, and submit to regular monitoring of their progress down the new path. Even the concept of human rights became a cudgel of sorts – and contested.1
This caused a backlash. A number of factors accelerated the resistance to western liberalism. China rose on the world stage with few concessions to western liberalism; the 2008 economic crisis showed the hollowness of western claims to competently manage American-style capitalism; Russia declared war on the liberal project, and western liberal democracies themselves were seen to violate their stated values. On this last point, the authors cite the fact that the US allowed prison torture, but any updated reckoning would probably include this tragic reality: the unceasing supply of American weapons to Israel has caused the deaths of more than 40,000 people in Gaza.
The authors also contextualise Trump’s ascendance among American voters as the triumph of “provincial resentment against a cosmopolitan world”. They write that Americans themselves accept their country’s declining influence and no longer believe they must improve the value systems and freedoms of their competitors (primarily China).
Choice quotes:
“Populists are rebelling not only against a specific (liberal) type of politics but also as against the replacement of communist orthodoxy by liberal orthodoxy”.
“Liberalism’s reputation in the region never recovered from 2008…Confidence that the political economy of the West was a model for the future of mankind had been linked to the belief that Western elites knew what they were doing. Suddenly it was obvious that they didn’t. This is why 2008 had such a shattering ideological, not merely economic, effect both regionally and worldwide”.
The Light that Failed
By: Rudyard Kipling
Publisher: Lippincott's Monthly Magazine
Year: 1891
Rudyard Kipling won the Nobel Prize for literature but this, his first novel, remains arguably his least well known and least well received. Yet, it has stayed in print for more than a century, perhaps because it points to a deep truth about inherent resistance to social change.
Kipling wrote this novel when he was just 26, reprising events from his own life to create the melancholic manly man world of Dick Heldar. A youth of savage beatings at the hands of his foster-carer, Mrs Jennet, meant “Dick shambled through the days unkempt in body and savage in soul…” He becomes a war correspondent in “the Soudan”. An artist of some talent, he earns his living sketching the action on the battlefield, later going on to success as a painter. But he remains miserable because Maisie, his childhood sweetheart, is odd enough to shun marriage for life with another woman. Maisie, who’s a passionate artist, prefers to live with a “red-haired girl”, someone Dick learns to hate.
Maisie’s dedication to her work and decided independence (she has money of her own) positions her as the “new woman” of the 19th century. “Unfortunately, everybody must be either a man or a woman,” Dick tells Maisie, adding that she is not a woman.
It’s clear that Kipling is rather horrified by modern womanhood. He himself was tormented by unrequited love for Flo Garrard, an artist whose family owned the jeweller Garrard & Co. She rejected Kipling’s offer of marriage in favour of life with the daughter of an Oxford don.
The only real emotional connection in the novel is between men. Dick and his friend, another war correspondent, show "the austere love that springs up between men who have tugged the same oar together".
Though this novel has been criticised for its misogynist attitude, it could be said to convey the confusion that ensues when there is a shift in the tectonic plates of culture. The title refers to Dick – and Kipling’s – failing eyesight as well as the fading glow of love lost.
Choice quote:
“Dick’s eyes were full of joy when he made his appearance next morning and saw Maisie, gray-ulstered and black-velvet-hatted, standing in the hallway. Palaces of marble, and not sordid imitation of grained wood, were surely the fittest background for such a divinity. The red-haired girl drew her into the studio for a moment and kissed her hurriedly. Maisie’s eyebrows climbed to the top of her forehead; she was altogether unused to these demonstrations”.
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Very true.