Now what? Tony Judt helps us understand our 21st-century world
Published just before his death earlier this year, Ill Fares the Land is Tony Judt’s great parting gift to us denizens of the anxious, perilous 21st century. There is more to come – a book titled Thinking the Twentieth Century and a collection of his remarkable series of personal essay will be published posthumously – but this short manifesto reads like Judt’s urgent statement. Judt insisted in interviews that the urgency was external, not a function of his final illness, and we would do well to take him at his word.
Over what turned out to be the final two years of his life, as he raced to tell the world what he thought it needed to hear, Judt deservedly came to be recognized as one of the great intellectuals of our time, indeed as a thinker of a relevance rarely seen anymore. Unapologetically, he does the work of a European-style “public intellectual” in an American context and argues that, urgent though it is for us to act, we must first relearn how to understand and converse. “This book was written for young people on both sides of the Atlantic,” he writes.
American readers may be struck by the frequent references to social democracy. … One of my goals is to suggest that government can play an enhanced role in our lives without threatening our liberties – and to argue that, since the state is going to be with us for the foreseeable future, we would do well to think about what sort of a state we want. … Our problem is not what to do; it is how to talk about it.
I remember the fall of the Berlin Wall as if it had just happened, but for the young readers Judt hopes to influence, it’s a historical event. Before it recedes entirely from our rear view, it’s important to articulate its meaning. “The real problem facing us in the aftermath of 1989 is not what to think of communism,” Judt writes. “The vision of total social organization – the fantasy which animated utopians from Sydney Webb to Lenin, from Robespierre to Le Corbusier – lies in ruins. But the question of how to organize ourselves for the common benefit remains as important as ever. Our challenge is to recover it from the rubble.”
“We shall have to ask the perennial questions again, but be open to different answers,” he writes.
… If 1989 was about re-discovering liberty, what limits are we now willing to place upon it? Even in the most “freedom-loving” societies, freedom comes with constraints. But if we accept some limitations – and we always do – why not others? Why are we so sure that some planning, or progressive taxation, or the collective ownership of public goods, are intolerable restrictions on liberty; whereas closed-circuit television cameras, state bailouts for banks “too big to fail,” tapped telephones and expensive foreign wars are acceptable burdens for a free people to bear?
There may be good answers to these questions; but how can we know unless we pose them? We need to rediscover how to talk about change: how to imagine very different arrangements for ourselves, free of the dangerous cant of “revolution.”
I’ve long felt that, for better or worse, Detroit is the most American of American cities. There’s much more that I’d like to say about that, elsewhere. In the context of this review, suffice it to say that Judt’s seemingly eccenctric but quite persuasive enthusiasm for railroads and argument for their importance strikes an especially poignant note to anyone who, like me, has looked out over the city that lived and died by the automobile from the roof of its once-magnificent, never-completed, long-abandoned train station. “If we throw away the railway stations,” Judt writes, “… we shall be throwing away our memory of how to live the confident civic life. It is not by chance that Margaret Thatcher made a point of never traveling by train.”
Ill Fares the Land is above all a plea for historical memory, and a call for retrieval of both a necessary confidence and a becoming modest in the face of the daunting problems of our profoundly uncertain time:
The best reason for hoping that we shall not recycle the errors of the 1930s is that we have been there before. However inadequately we recall the past, it is unlikely that we shall neglect all the lessons that it has taught. More plausibly, we shall make unprecedented mistakes of our own – with perverse political consequences. … We take for granted the institutions, legislation, services and rights that we have inherited from the great age of 20th century reform. It is time to remind ourselves that all of these were utterly inconceivable as recently as 1929. … Incremental improvements upon unsatisfactory circumstances are the best that we can hope for, and probably all we should seek.
Read the New York Times obituary of Tony Judt
New York magazine: “The Liveliest Mind in New York”
Purchase the book here: Ill Fares the Land
Why are Muslims annoyed with the West?
I’ve just gotten around to reading this good “Letter from Karachi” by freelance journalist Madiha Tahir published in Foreign Affairs in May. Occasioned by the embarrassing ban on Facebook in Pakistan, which in turn was occasioned by an ill-judged “Everybody Draw Mohammad Day” Facebook page set up by an artist right here in Seattle named Molly Norris, it offers a helpfully vivid glimpse of some of the fractures within Pakistani society. It also states the obvious about the larger global context succinctly and well:
“Like the defenders of the ban in Pakistan, many in the West also imagine a monolithic Islamic community. Incendiary Facebook pages, the French burka ban, and the anti-Islam advertisements placed on New York City buses by the right-wing blogger Pamela Geller and the Stop the Islamization of America campaign are just some of the West’s reactions to that community. All of this – combined with wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and drone attacks in Pakistan – has led many young Pakistanis to understand that they are being attacked because they are Muslims.”
A Mosque Maligned
A very good, thoughtful essay by Robert Wright of the New America Foundation, someone I’d love to meet and recommend Pakistani-Americans seek out and cultivate:
“No doubt Osama bin Laden, if apprised of the situation, would hope that Rauf will cave in to these demands and ritually denounce Hamas. Because the Muslims who are most vulnerable to bin Laden’s recruiting pitch are, it’s safe to say, at least somewhat sympathetic to Hamas. And if moderate Muslims like Rauf can be pressured into adopting Israel’s position, and thus be depicted by truly radical Muslims as Zionist tools, that will make them less effective in their tug of war with bin Laden for the hearts and minds of the vulnerable.”
Ahmadiyyas and the Lahore mosque attacks, by Tahmena Bokhari
Click here to read the full comment from a friend of mine in Toronto, currently serving as Mrs. Pakistan World:
“As a social worker I have worked with hundreds of members of the Ahmadiyya community in Toronto to help them seek asylum and settle in Canada along with other social work issues. I was extremely passionate about this work but it did come with some criticism from a few members of the wider Muslim community. This criticism was mainly that Sunnis (dominant Muslim sect) should not be helping the ‘anti-Islamic’ Ahmadiyyas. My specific faith label is not the issue here, my values of social justice are, and I would claim that social justice are the very values my personal faith has taught me.”
Obama’s misplaced trust in elites
New York Times columnist Frank Rich is one of my regular weekly reads:
“It’s this misplaced trust in elites both outside the White House and within it that seems to prevent Obama from realizing the moment that history has handed to him. Americans are still seething at the bonus-grabbing titans of the bubble and at the public and private institutions that failed to police them. But rather than embrace a unifying vision that could ignite his presidency, Obama shies away from connecting the dots as forcefully and relentlessly as the facts and Americans’ anger demand.”
