by
Geoffrey R. StoneEdward H. Levi Distinguished Service Professor of Law at the University of Chicago
Submit this storydigg reddit stumble The Framers of the American Constitution were visionaries. They designed our Constitution to endure. They sought not only to address the specific challenges facing the nation during their lifetimes, but also to establish the foundational principles that would sustain and guide the new nation into an uncertain future.
The text of the Constitution reflects this vision. It defines our most fundamental freedoms in general terms: "freedom of speech," "due process of law," "free exercise" of religion, "equal protection of the laws." The Constitution sets forth governmental powers in similarly general terms: Congress may regulate "commerce . . . among the several states," the president will "take care that the laws be faithfully executed," the courts are authorized to decide "cases" and "controversies."
These phrases are not self-defining. The Framers understood that they were entrusting to future generations the responsibility to draw upon their intelligence, judgment, and experience to give concrete meaning to these broad principles over time. As Chief Justice John Marshall observed almost two centuries ago, "We must never forget that it is a constitution we are expounding . . . intended to endure for ages to come, and consequently to be adapted to the various crises of human affairs."
For the last half-century, conservatives have argued that the Supreme Court went too far in the 1950s and '60s in its efforts to preserve the vitality of self-governance and protect the rights of those most in need of judicial attention. They condemned what they derided as the "judicial activism" reflected in Warren Court decisions requiring one person/one vote, protecting the rights of people suspected of crime, holding unconstitutional laws forbidding mixed-race marriages, and prohibiting state-sponsored school prayer. They therefore demanded the appointment of judges committed to judicial restraint. But although judicial restraint is surely appropriate in appropriate circumstances, its sweeping, reflexive invocation would abdicate a fundamental responsibility that the Framers entrusted to the judiciary and therefore undermine a critical element of the American constitutional system. As Alexander Hamilton observed in the Federalist Papers, constitutional protections and limitations can "be preserved in practice no other way than through the medium of courts of justice."
Perhaps recognizing that a theory of unbounded judicial restraint is constitutionally irresponsible, conservatives next came up with the theory of "originalism." First popularized in the 1980s, originalism presumes that courts should exercise judicial restraint unless the "original meaning" of the text clearly mandates a more activist approach. Under this theory, for example, it is appropriate for courts to invoke the Equal Protection Clause to invalidate laws that deny African Americans the right to serve on juries, but not to invalidate laws that deny women that same right, because that was not the "original meaning" of the clause.
Originalism is fundamentally flawed. First, because those who enacted the broad foundational provisions of our Constitution often did not have any precise and agreed-upon understanding of their specific meanings, it is exceedingly difficult to know with any certainty what they did or did not think about concrete constitutional issues. As a consequence, judges purporting to engage in originalist analysis often project onto the Framers their own personal and political preferences. The result is an unprincipled and often patently disingenuous jurisprudence. There is no evidence for the claims advanced by originalists, for example, that the original meaning of the Equal Protection Clause prohibited affirmative action or that the original meaning of the First Amendment included the notion that corporations had a constitutional right to spend unlimited capital to influence political elections. Both of these claims, however, are central to today's conservative legal agenda.
The second problem with originalism is even more disqualifying, for it reveals the theory to be internally incoherent. Originalism asserts that those who crafted and ratified our Constitution intended the meaning and effect of their handiwork to be limited to the specific understandings of their time. But the notion that any particular moment's understanding of the meaning of the Constitution's open-ended provisions should be locked into place and taken as constitutionally definitive would have seemed completely wrongheaded to the Framers, who held a much bolder and more confident understanding of their own achievements and aspirations.
We have now entered a new and even more troubling phase of conservative constitutional jurisprudence. It is best characterized as "conservative activism." Justices who readily dismiss constitutional claims by women, political dissenters, and racial, ethnic, and religious minorities, but at the same time aggressively strike down restrictions on corporate political expenditures, laws regulating the sale and possession of handguns, affirmative-action programs, and the laws of Florida in the 2000 presidential election, are unmistakably using the power of judicial review in a highly selective manner that cannot credibly be justified by any principled theory of constitutional interpretation. Despite all of the conservative rhetoric about originalism, "strict construction," "judicial restraint," "applying rather than making the law," and "calling balls and strikes," this pattern of decisions raises grave questions about the considerations that actually drive the jurisprudence of our conservative justices.
Monday, June 6, 2011
Sunday, June 5, 2011
Curtis Wilkie - Dixie
This memoir, published in 2001, reminds me of Willie Morris and "North Toward Home." Curtis Wilkie, a journalist, is a Son of the South. He grew up in Mississippi in the 50's and 60's (about 10 years older than me)during the civil rights struggles, attended Ole Miss, left Mississippi and The South in disgust, but then returned and now lives in New Orleans.
He grew up in the conservative South, but became liberal. This is the kind of person of my time that I most identify with.
Curtis Wilkie was there in Oxford in October of 1962 when James Meredith became the first black student to enroll at Ole Miss. He gives a gripping first-hand account of the riots that resulted in injuries, property damage, and 2 deaths. In retrospect, it is hard to fathom how this came about 49 years ago. Hard to imagine.
He was a reporter in Clarkesdale in the 60's for that town's small newspaper, he went from there to Boston to work for that city's liberal paper, and he covered Jimmy Carter in his presidential run in 1976. He didn't like Carter at first, but grew to respect him later.
The book ends with the funeral of Willie Morris in 1999. Before reading "North Toward Home" last year I did not realize how big a Southern character was Willie Morris. Now I know.
This is my kind of story: the small-town Southern boy who goes to town and earns his liberal stripes.
He grew up in the conservative South, but became liberal. This is the kind of person of my time that I most identify with.
Curtis Wilkie was there in Oxford in October of 1962 when James Meredith became the first black student to enroll at Ole Miss. He gives a gripping first-hand account of the riots that resulted in injuries, property damage, and 2 deaths. In retrospect, it is hard to fathom how this came about 49 years ago. Hard to imagine.
He was a reporter in Clarkesdale in the 60's for that town's small newspaper, he went from there to Boston to work for that city's liberal paper, and he covered Jimmy Carter in his presidential run in 1976. He didn't like Carter at first, but grew to respect him later.
The book ends with the funeral of Willie Morris in 1999. Before reading "North Toward Home" last year I did not realize how big a Southern character was Willie Morris. Now I know.
This is my kind of story: the small-town Southern boy who goes to town and earns his liberal stripes.
Friday, June 3, 2011
The United States Doomed?
Friday, Jun 3, 2011 16:22 ET
How The World Works This is why the United States is doomed
The GOP response to the jobs report: The Earth is flat and two plus two equals five
By Andrew Leonard
Eric Cantor and John BoehnerThe Hill reports the House Republican response to Friday morning's distressing jobs report.
House Republicans pinned the blame for Friday's disappointing jobs report squarely on the White House, saying the Obama administration's "over-taxing, over-regulating and over-spending" has stifled economic growth.
"One look at the jobs report should be enough to show the White House it's time to get serious about cutting spending and dealing with our ailing economy," Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) said.
How many blatant untruths can a Republican speaker of the House stuff into one sentence? Quite a few!
1) President Obama has cut taxes. His stimulus bill included tax cuts for 95 percent of all American working families. He signed off on the extension of the Bush tax cuts, while throwing in a new payroll tax cut for good measure.
2) Over-regulating? Set aside, if you can, the fact that under-regulation clearly played a significant role in creating the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Let's just take a look at the two sectors of the economy that we might expect to have been affected by the two biggest signature pieces of legislation signed into law by Obama -- the Affordable Care Act and the Dodd-Frank bank reform act. According to this morning's jobs report, the healthcare sector has averaged 24,000 news jobs a month over the past year -- and accounted for almost a third of May's overall 54,000 gain. Meanwhile, Wall Street had its fourth most profitable year ever in 2010. If that's over-regulation, we need more of it!
3) Private economic forecasters, the kind of profit-minded companies that make their money by analyzing economic trends for business clients, generally agree that without Obama's stimulus spending, unemployment would be higher.
We could raise other issues. We could ask: What changed between May and the previous six months in which job growth was relatively strong? But that would require examining actual facts about what is going on the world, like Japan's recession or high gas prices or declining government spending, particularly at the state level.
I know, I know, it's not worth getting agitated when Washington politicians of either party spout blatant misrepresentations of reality. But as we accelerate towards a debt ceiling budget deal that is virtually guaranteed to accelerate negative economic trends, it does matter what House Republicans say, because it gives us a pretty darn good idea of what they're going do.
How The World Works This is why the United States is doomed
The GOP response to the jobs report: The Earth is flat and two plus two equals five
By Andrew Leonard
Eric Cantor and John BoehnerThe Hill reports the House Republican response to Friday morning's distressing jobs report.
House Republicans pinned the blame for Friday's disappointing jobs report squarely on the White House, saying the Obama administration's "over-taxing, over-regulating and over-spending" has stifled economic growth.
"One look at the jobs report should be enough to show the White House it's time to get serious about cutting spending and dealing with our ailing economy," Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) said.
How many blatant untruths can a Republican speaker of the House stuff into one sentence? Quite a few!
1) President Obama has cut taxes. His stimulus bill included tax cuts for 95 percent of all American working families. He signed off on the extension of the Bush tax cuts, while throwing in a new payroll tax cut for good measure.
2) Over-regulating? Set aside, if you can, the fact that under-regulation clearly played a significant role in creating the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Let's just take a look at the two sectors of the economy that we might expect to have been affected by the two biggest signature pieces of legislation signed into law by Obama -- the Affordable Care Act and the Dodd-Frank bank reform act. According to this morning's jobs report, the healthcare sector has averaged 24,000 news jobs a month over the past year -- and accounted for almost a third of May's overall 54,000 gain. Meanwhile, Wall Street had its fourth most profitable year ever in 2010. If that's over-regulation, we need more of it!
3) Private economic forecasters, the kind of profit-minded companies that make their money by analyzing economic trends for business clients, generally agree that without Obama's stimulus spending, unemployment would be higher.
We could raise other issues. We could ask: What changed between May and the previous six months in which job growth was relatively strong? But that would require examining actual facts about what is going on the world, like Japan's recession or high gas prices or declining government spending, particularly at the state level.
I know, I know, it's not worth getting agitated when Washington politicians of either party spout blatant misrepresentations of reality. But as we accelerate towards a debt ceiling budget deal that is virtually guaranteed to accelerate negative economic trends, it does matter what House Republicans say, because it gives us a pretty darn good idea of what they're going do.
No Matter What Anyone Says
the Republicans are trying to destroy Medicare.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
by Paul Krugman
June 3, 2011, 2:18 pm
What’s In A Name?
A lot, or at least that’s what Republicans think. Greg Sargent reports that they’re demanding that a TV station stop running ads saying that the GOP wants to end Medicare; the claim is that this is a lie, because the new program the GOP wants to impose in place of Medicare is still Medicare.
As Greg says, this is important — because if they can get away with this, it will amount to a serious infringement of free speech, preventing people from running truthful ads.
Because the fact is that Republicans are trying to end Medicare. The program we now call Medicare is one in which the government acts as your insurer, paying your major medical bills; coverage is guaranteed to all seniors. The program Republicans want gives you vouchers and tells you to go buy your own insurance, if you can. That’s not at all the same thing.
Oh, they’re also trying to stop anyone from calling it a voucher plan — but that’s what it is.
What about the claim that the Ryan plan actually does guarantee coverage, because it says that insurers can’t turn you down? That’s based on word games. What the plan says is that you can’t be turned down because of medical history — it imposes community rating. But it says nothing about requiring that insurers sell coverage at a price you can afford. And the Congressional Budget Office analysis of the Ryan plan makes it clear that it would put insurance coverage beyond the financial reach of many seniors.
So you can call the new thing Medicare; you could also call an onion a rose. But a non-rose by the same name does not smell as sweet.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
by Paul Krugman
June 3, 2011, 2:18 pm
What’s In A Name?
A lot, or at least that’s what Republicans think. Greg Sargent reports that they’re demanding that a TV station stop running ads saying that the GOP wants to end Medicare; the claim is that this is a lie, because the new program the GOP wants to impose in place of Medicare is still Medicare.
As Greg says, this is important — because if they can get away with this, it will amount to a serious infringement of free speech, preventing people from running truthful ads.
Because the fact is that Republicans are trying to end Medicare. The program we now call Medicare is one in which the government acts as your insurer, paying your major medical bills; coverage is guaranteed to all seniors. The program Republicans want gives you vouchers and tells you to go buy your own insurance, if you can. That’s not at all the same thing.
Oh, they’re also trying to stop anyone from calling it a voucher plan — but that’s what it is.
What about the claim that the Ryan plan actually does guarantee coverage, because it says that insurers can’t turn you down? That’s based on word games. What the plan says is that you can’t be turned down because of medical history — it imposes community rating. But it says nothing about requiring that insurers sell coverage at a price you can afford. And the Congressional Budget Office analysis of the Ryan plan makes it clear that it would put insurance coverage beyond the financial reach of many seniors.
So you can call the new thing Medicare; you could also call an onion a rose. But a non-rose by the same name does not smell as sweet.
President Obama Can Be Faulted
for not doing enough to change the unemployment picture. What needs to be done? What should have been done before now? Here is what progressive Robert Reich says.
Economics Friday, Jun 3, 2011 13:04 ET
War Room The double-dip threat returns
By Robert Reich
The May jobs report is a disaster -- the weakest reading since September. Non-farm payrolls grew only 54,000 last month, according to the Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics. Private employment rose only 83,000 -- the smallest growth since last June. Government payrolls dropped 29,000.
The overall jobless rate rose to 9.1 percent.
Together with plummeting housing prices, falling wages for non-supervisory workers, a paltry 1.8 percent growth in the first quarter, and a precipitous drop in consumer confidence, the picture should be clear to anyone able to see clearly.
The recovery has stalled.
We're not in a double dip yet, but the odds are increasing.
The question is whether all this will wake up Washington, and stop the monumental distraction of the games being played over the debt ceiling and long-term budget deficit. The Republican lie that the nation's long-term budget deficit is responsible for high unemployment would be laughable if it weren't so tragically irrelevant to the current situation.
The President cannot be reelected if the economy tanks. He may not even be reelected on an anemic recovery in which unemployment remains nearly this high. But all incumbents are endangered. Republican House members from swing districts are toast if they don't show voters they're actively working on the twin problems of jobs and wages.
Several steps need to be taken right away. Exempt the first $20,000 of income from payroll taxes for two years. Lend money to cash-starved state and local governments. Initiate a new WPA for the long-term unemployed. Amend bankruptcy laws to allow homeowners to include their prime residencies in personal bankruptcy (giving them more bargaining leverage with their lenders to renegotiate mortgage loans).
Above all: Washington needs to show Americans it's taking seriously the ferocious problem of jobs and wages, and the trend back toward a double dip.
Economics Friday, Jun 3, 2011 13:04 ET
War Room The double-dip threat returns
By Robert Reich
The May jobs report is a disaster -- the weakest reading since September. Non-farm payrolls grew only 54,000 last month, according to the Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics. Private employment rose only 83,000 -- the smallest growth since last June. Government payrolls dropped 29,000.
The overall jobless rate rose to 9.1 percent.
Together with plummeting housing prices, falling wages for non-supervisory workers, a paltry 1.8 percent growth in the first quarter, and a precipitous drop in consumer confidence, the picture should be clear to anyone able to see clearly.
The recovery has stalled.
We're not in a double dip yet, but the odds are increasing.
The question is whether all this will wake up Washington, and stop the monumental distraction of the games being played over the debt ceiling and long-term budget deficit. The Republican lie that the nation's long-term budget deficit is responsible for high unemployment would be laughable if it weren't so tragically irrelevant to the current situation.
The President cannot be reelected if the economy tanks. He may not even be reelected on an anemic recovery in which unemployment remains nearly this high. But all incumbents are endangered. Republican House members from swing districts are toast if they don't show voters they're actively working on the twin problems of jobs and wages.
Several steps need to be taken right away. Exempt the first $20,000 of income from payroll taxes for two years. Lend money to cash-starved state and local governments. Initiate a new WPA for the long-term unemployed. Amend bankruptcy laws to allow homeowners to include their prime residencies in personal bankruptcy (giving them more bargaining leverage with their lenders to renegotiate mortgage loans).
Above all: Washington needs to show Americans it's taking seriously the ferocious problem of jobs and wages, and the trend back toward a double dip.
We Can Only Hope
that if the Republicans go all in on destroying Medicare, then, indeed, we will be in 2013 congratulating Speaker Pelosi.
by Paul Krugman
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
June 3, 2011, 11:11 am
The Commentariat Candidate
Jonathan Chait thinks Paul Ryan will run for president, and that he might well be the Republican nominee. Interesting point. On the surface, it seems crazy: Ryan’s budget plan is, after all, both spectacularly bad policy and spectacularly bad politics. But Ryan may have a secret weapon: despite everything, much of the punditocracy (myself obviously not included) still has a crush on him.
As Jon Cohn points out, many of the pundits who gushed over the Ryan plan, after being rocked back a bit when the plan was exposed as the nonsense it is, have decided to double down. In particular, they are insisting that anyone who describes a plan to dismantle Medicare as a plan to dismantle Medicare is somehow engaged in disreputable scare tactics.
I’m of two minds about how much this matters. As Atrios says, the Very Serious People reaction to the Ryan plan is very similar to their reaction to the Bush plan to privatize Social Security:
Often I think like the Villagers only have a few scripts that they keep running through over and over again. The ZOMG WE HAVE TO DESTROY MEDICARE TO SAVE IT and WHERE’S YOUR PLAN? HUH? HUH? stuff is just the same as it was when Bush was trying to destroy Social Security.
I’d add that we’re playing the same word games: just as it was considered uncouth to call privatization privatization, it’s now uncouth to call a voucher system a voucher system.
The point here is that in the case of Social Security, the pundit consensus mattered not at all: the public hated the plan, and it went down in flames.
If it’s a presidential campaign, however, things might be different, because the pundit crush on Ryan might translate into the Goreing of Obama — even though it’s allegedly about policy, suddenly all sorts of alleged character flaws might be found in the Democrat.
On the other hand, if the Republicans really do go all in on destroying Medicare as the be-all and end-all of their campaign, we might be congratulating Speaker Pelosi in not too long.
by Paul Krugman
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
June 3, 2011, 11:11 am
The Commentariat Candidate
Jonathan Chait thinks Paul Ryan will run for president, and that he might well be the Republican nominee. Interesting point. On the surface, it seems crazy: Ryan’s budget plan is, after all, both spectacularly bad policy and spectacularly bad politics. But Ryan may have a secret weapon: despite everything, much of the punditocracy (myself obviously not included) still has a crush on him.
As Jon Cohn points out, many of the pundits who gushed over the Ryan plan, after being rocked back a bit when the plan was exposed as the nonsense it is, have decided to double down. In particular, they are insisting that anyone who describes a plan to dismantle Medicare as a plan to dismantle Medicare is somehow engaged in disreputable scare tactics.
I’m of two minds about how much this matters. As Atrios says, the Very Serious People reaction to the Ryan plan is very similar to their reaction to the Bush plan to privatize Social Security:
Often I think like the Villagers only have a few scripts that they keep running through over and over again. The ZOMG WE HAVE TO DESTROY MEDICARE TO SAVE IT and WHERE’S YOUR PLAN? HUH? HUH? stuff is just the same as it was when Bush was trying to destroy Social Security.
I’d add that we’re playing the same word games: just as it was considered uncouth to call privatization privatization, it’s now uncouth to call a voucher system a voucher system.
The point here is that in the case of Social Security, the pundit consensus mattered not at all: the public hated the plan, and it went down in flames.
If it’s a presidential campaign, however, things might be different, because the pundit crush on Ryan might translate into the Goreing of Obama — even though it’s allegedly about policy, suddenly all sorts of alleged character flaws might be found in the Democrat.
On the other hand, if the Republicans really do go all in on destroying Medicare as the be-all and end-all of their campaign, we might be congratulating Speaker Pelosi in not too long.
Wednesday, June 1, 2011
Does Reading Great Books Make You a Better Person
It can, but not necessarily.
Jane Austen Tuesday, May 31, 2011 20:28 ET
Laura Miller Does reading great books make you a better person?
A critic says Jane Austen taught him to be a more decent man, but the world is full of well-read jerks
By Laura Miller
Seeing a favorite critic expound at length on a favorite author is an undersung form of literary pleasure -- as close as you can get to reading two great writers at the same time. William Deresiewicz's "A Jane Austen Education: How Six Novels Taught Me About Love, Friendship and the Things That Really Matter" certainly achieves that effect for this particular reader. Like Austen, Deresiewicz is lucid, principled and knows how to think as well as how to feel, without ever sacrificing one to the other. He understands that most of us want more than just an exquisite aesthetic experience from a novel. His reviews are gratifying even when you feel inclined to quarrel with them, and (unlike a surprising number of esteemed critics) he has a sense of humor.
But I am going to quarrel, just a little, and not because "A Jane Austen Education" isn't a delightful and enlightening book. It is both of those things. Furthermore, Austen's reputation is sinking, quicksand-style, into that of a purveyor of romantic wish-fulfillment and empire-waist nostalgia; Deresiewicz offers it a gallant hand up. His book is a reminder of why she has long been regarded as among the greatest novelists of the English language, even by those who do not swoon for Colin Firth. The legendary prime minister Benjamin Disraeli (a man of the world if there ever was one), when asked if he found the time to read novels, replied that indeed he did: "All six of them, every year."
Deresiewicz would surely agree with Disraeli's prescription. In "A Jane Austen Education" he explains how his long engagement with "all six of them" helped convert him from a surly, preening grad student -- "about as dumb, in all human things, as any 26-year-old has a right to be" and grandiosely convinced that anything other than "complex, difficult, sophisticated" modernist fiction was beneath him -- into a decent, civilized man.
It began when a professor forced him to read "Emma." Balky at first, Deresiewicz was soon thunderstruck by the revelation that Austen had "not been writing about everyday things because she couldn't think of anything else to talk about. She had been writing about them because she wanted to show how important they really are."
Each chapter in this fusion of memoir and literary criticism reflects on how one Austen novel helped Deresiewicz reach a fuller understanding of some important aspect of life: common courtesy, learning, the importance of character over charm, social status, friendship and love. He makes a good case; Austen is a profoundly moral novelist and surely meant her readers to glean some insights on how best to live from reading her books. I do not doubt that Deresiewicz improved a lot while reading them. It's the causal relationship between the two phenomena that I doubt.
Does reading great literature make you a better person? I've not seen much evidence for this common belief. Some of the best-read people I know are thoroughgoing jerks, and some of the kindest and noblest verge on the illiterate -- which is admittedly an anecdotal argument, but then, when it comes to this topic, what isn't?
There's a theory, vaguely associated with evolutionary psychology, maintaining that fiction builds empathy, and therefore morality, by inviting us into the minds, hearts and experiences of others. This is what the British children's book author Michael Morpurgo implied recently in the Observer newspaper, when he claimed that "developing in young children a love of poems and stories" might someday render the human-rights organization Amnesty International obsolete.
While I'm all for cultivating such tastes in children, I also don't think the love of stories has to be taught. Most children are keenly interested in stories in all their forms. (Reading is a different matter.) They always have been. Yet there has always been a need for groups like Amnesty and it seems probable there always will be, no matter how many stories we pump into our youth.
Isn't it just as likely that many people who are already empathetic and moral will be drawn to literature because they're curious about and interested in how others think and feel? Of course, not everyone with a literary appetite is so motivated. Quite a few, like the youthful Deresiewicz, are driven by intellectual vanity. Perhaps Deresiewicz seized on Austen precisely because he was ready to become less self-involved and her novels spoke to this shift in his taste. If they had been forced on his (presumably even dumber) 22-year-old self, would they have had the same salutary effect, or would he just have dug in his heels and sneered?
So while I thoroughly enjoyed "A Jane Austen Education," I didn't entirely buy it. Its narrative seemed constrained by the very American (and fairly puritanical) notion that culture proves its worth by demonstrating that it leads to self-improvement. This approach, at its worst, can make literature seem like some dull but nutritious foodstuff that must be dutifully chewed and swallowed, however little pleasure it may give. That's not why I read Jane Austen -- it's not even why I read "A Jane Austen Education" -- and I suspect it's not why Deresiewicz reads her, either. Something tells me that he has gotten a lot more out of those six novels than life lessons, and I'd like to read about that, too.
Jane Austen Tuesday, May 31, 2011 20:28 ET
Laura Miller Does reading great books make you a better person?
A critic says Jane Austen taught him to be a more decent man, but the world is full of well-read jerks
By Laura Miller
Seeing a favorite critic expound at length on a favorite author is an undersung form of literary pleasure -- as close as you can get to reading two great writers at the same time. William Deresiewicz's "A Jane Austen Education: How Six Novels Taught Me About Love, Friendship and the Things That Really Matter" certainly achieves that effect for this particular reader. Like Austen, Deresiewicz is lucid, principled and knows how to think as well as how to feel, without ever sacrificing one to the other. He understands that most of us want more than just an exquisite aesthetic experience from a novel. His reviews are gratifying even when you feel inclined to quarrel with them, and (unlike a surprising number of esteemed critics) he has a sense of humor.
But I am going to quarrel, just a little, and not because "A Jane Austen Education" isn't a delightful and enlightening book. It is both of those things. Furthermore, Austen's reputation is sinking, quicksand-style, into that of a purveyor of romantic wish-fulfillment and empire-waist nostalgia; Deresiewicz offers it a gallant hand up. His book is a reminder of why she has long been regarded as among the greatest novelists of the English language, even by those who do not swoon for Colin Firth. The legendary prime minister Benjamin Disraeli (a man of the world if there ever was one), when asked if he found the time to read novels, replied that indeed he did: "All six of them, every year."
Deresiewicz would surely agree with Disraeli's prescription. In "A Jane Austen Education" he explains how his long engagement with "all six of them" helped convert him from a surly, preening grad student -- "about as dumb, in all human things, as any 26-year-old has a right to be" and grandiosely convinced that anything other than "complex, difficult, sophisticated" modernist fiction was beneath him -- into a decent, civilized man.
It began when a professor forced him to read "Emma." Balky at first, Deresiewicz was soon thunderstruck by the revelation that Austen had "not been writing about everyday things because she couldn't think of anything else to talk about. She had been writing about them because she wanted to show how important they really are."
Each chapter in this fusion of memoir and literary criticism reflects on how one Austen novel helped Deresiewicz reach a fuller understanding of some important aspect of life: common courtesy, learning, the importance of character over charm, social status, friendship and love. He makes a good case; Austen is a profoundly moral novelist and surely meant her readers to glean some insights on how best to live from reading her books. I do not doubt that Deresiewicz improved a lot while reading them. It's the causal relationship between the two phenomena that I doubt.
Does reading great literature make you a better person? I've not seen much evidence for this common belief. Some of the best-read people I know are thoroughgoing jerks, and some of the kindest and noblest verge on the illiterate -- which is admittedly an anecdotal argument, but then, when it comes to this topic, what isn't?
There's a theory, vaguely associated with evolutionary psychology, maintaining that fiction builds empathy, and therefore morality, by inviting us into the minds, hearts and experiences of others. This is what the British children's book author Michael Morpurgo implied recently in the Observer newspaper, when he claimed that "developing in young children a love of poems and stories" might someday render the human-rights organization Amnesty International obsolete.
While I'm all for cultivating such tastes in children, I also don't think the love of stories has to be taught. Most children are keenly interested in stories in all their forms. (Reading is a different matter.) They always have been. Yet there has always been a need for groups like Amnesty and it seems probable there always will be, no matter how many stories we pump into our youth.
Isn't it just as likely that many people who are already empathetic and moral will be drawn to literature because they're curious about and interested in how others think and feel? Of course, not everyone with a literary appetite is so motivated. Quite a few, like the youthful Deresiewicz, are driven by intellectual vanity. Perhaps Deresiewicz seized on Austen precisely because he was ready to become less self-involved and her novels spoke to this shift in his taste. If they had been forced on his (presumably even dumber) 22-year-old self, would they have had the same salutary effect, or would he just have dug in his heels and sneered?
So while I thoroughly enjoyed "A Jane Austen Education," I didn't entirely buy it. Its narrative seemed constrained by the very American (and fairly puritanical) notion that culture proves its worth by demonstrating that it leads to self-improvement. This approach, at its worst, can make literature seem like some dull but nutritious foodstuff that must be dutifully chewed and swallowed, however little pleasure it may give. That's not why I read Jane Austen -- it's not even why I read "A Jane Austen Education" -- and I suspect it's not why Deresiewicz reads her, either. Something tells me that he has gotten a lot more out of those six novels than life lessons, and I'd like to read about that, too.
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