Hello all! Sorry this is a little late. I have a cold (covid negative!). I have two reviews and a cat pic for you. I ALSO have a short story that should be ready in a few days, tonight at the earliest! It’s called “The Time I Was Right” and is about an old scifi writer coming to grips with a post-revolutionary world stranger to him than many of the ones he made (for those keeping score, this is in the same setting as “War Baby”). And this one is a short story that will STAY short- fewer than 10k words! Probably a lot fewer! If you want to read it, upgrade your subscription to Citizen level and show the love, except for some of you “grandfathered” into the system. Anyway. Enjoy!
CONTENTS
Reviews
Hazony, The Virtue of Nationalism
Le Carré, A Murder of Quality
Lagniappe
Mithra Pic: Back in the Yurt
REVIEWS
Yoram Hazony, “The Virtue of Nationalism” (2018) - I should probably stop reading books on the idea that the contemporary twerp-right is reading them, all on a throwaway line in a half-remembered article in the Atlantic or the New Republic or somewhere, shouldn’t I? I doubt this Hazony guy is really hot stuff on the right, at least the part of it I should pay attention to. Whatever nonsense is in here, Hazony is too moderate, too polisci, and let’s not forget too Jewish for an increasingly bloodthirsty and openly antisemitic right. The kid name-checking him in that article probably just liked the title. I’ve seen a lot of that. You can’t tell me all these idiots on goodreads, or the morons on the other side of the line when we deal with local Nazis, have actually read Evola’s “Revolt Against the Modern World.” They just like the title, and stick with it despite Evola having written numerous books that are also fascist nonsense but are pitched more at their level. This is not a thoughtful time on the right.
Anyway- Hazony plays the usual polisci calvinball of making up whatever categories he wants and foisting them on the entirety of history to make some dumb presentist point. There’s three ways of arranging sovereignty, he informs us: “tribes and clans,” where no one has loyalty beyond an immediate in-group and it’s a war of all against all; nation-states, little culturally-bound units with discrete borders and governments; and empires, which swallow up nationalities and subject all to the rule of some overarching sovereign. The real choice in front of us, Hazony informs us, is between nationalism and imperialism, these days, the imperialism of super-national bodies and ideologies: the EU, global liberalism, Islam, Marxism comes in but more as an example from the past.
Well, this is obviously stupid, and moreover, Hazony seems to get that, does so much hand-waving he could probably fly from his home in Israel to Brussels to tell the eurocrats how naughty they are. One big hand wave is that you only get nation-state status if you’re “strong enough.” Ahh! Well, ok then. That sorts that. He hand-waves the imperialism practiced by more or less every nation-state on earth, sometime in its history and usually in its present. That’s different, and basically ok (“hear that, Palestinians!!”). You get to do that when you’re a political scientist! There’s a huffing and puffing appeal to the “common sense” of people who have grown up with national sovereignty as a basic principle, and pretty gratuitously whacky claims, like that the Old Testament enshrines the nation-state form specifically.
What all this adds up to is one of two things: I think Hazony might have meant it as an appeal to the center; or, part of an intellectual fig leaf for the right, like that boy in the article would have in mind. But the center is shrinking and paralyzed, and increasingly, the right, from the “national conservatives” to open Nazis to Zionism, dispenses with fig leaves altogether. Among other things, they can’t make up their mind between Hazony’s three categories. They say they like nationalism, and some of them do, but seemingly on the basis that nation-states are the playable factions of the 4x or miniature battle game they think life either is or should be. But many of those same people clearly prefer tribal/clan models, or imperial models, or… it’s almost like sovereignty isn’t a “solved problem” with discrete categories but rather a set of techniques and priorities!
I give Hazony a little credit, but just a little, because sovereignty really isn’t a solved problem. Every now and again, a leftist looking to make a point, and they can come from the heights of the academy or the dregs of the Internet, crops up to crow about our lack of grounds on this issue, like a fat house cat bringing you a rubber band it caught but generally not cute. Well, they’re not wrong, though their solutions, which usually amount to “embrace nationalism, it’s fine,” generally are. At the same time, slapping one category on top of another like a trump — “class beats nationality, haha!” — clearly doesn’t do either. We might want it to be that way but in practice it doesn’t work. Hazony won’t help anyone clarify anything. But, unlike a lot of my readings on the right, especially contemporary ones, he’s at least in the neighborhood of an actual question, and in this category, I take the consolations I can get. **
John le Carré, “A Murder of Quality” (1962) - A little while back I read “The Spy Who Came In From The Cold” and it was outstanding, so I decided to read all of John le Carré’s Smiley novels, and maybe more of his work after that if I wasn’t sick of it by then. “The Spy Who…” was Le Carré’s third Smiley book. I read his first novel, “Call for the Dead,” a little while later, and that one was pretty good, and now I’ve filled in the gap with “A Murder of Quality” which, when you get down to it, isn’t really a spy novel but a crime novel.
George Smiley, Le Carré’s rumpled, diffident master spy, gets called in for a domestic job by one of his secretaries from the war. This secretary had gotten a job managing a Christian magazine. I assume the Anglican Church probably has a magazine, too, but I knew straightaway it would be a “chapel” magazine, that is, a publication for non-Anglican English Protestants. The secretary wrote the magazine’s advice column, and she got a creepy letter from a subscriber saying she was about to be murdered… then she was! Fuck!!
Naturally, given how weird it all is, she calls on her former boss Smiley, who hasn’t got a lot to do these days so decides to lend a hand. When you’re in the British spy biz you usually have all kinds of hoity-toity connections, and that comes in handy here. Stella, the murdered woman, was the wife of an instructor at Carne, an extremely fancy boarding school, where the brother of one of Smiley’s war friends also works, giving him an in to go investigate.
Le Carré said this novel was partially inspired by his brief time teaching at Eton. I guess he didn’t like it! He makes Cold War East Germany sound a lot more pleasant than British boarding school. While international intrigue doesn’t really figure into this whodunnit, in a way, it is more of a spy novel than a crime novel. A spy, Smile, attempts to infiltrate an alien and sinister society and manipulate its ways in order to learn its secrets. He only barely invokes the specter of the rape of minors — the main thing I think of when I think of British boarding schools — to get across how terrible it is! Mainly, everyone there seems to operate on some sick combination of self-loathing and self-love, propelled by institutional inertia and the miracle of compound interest on a foundation started four hundred years before.
I don’t want to spoil it, but what at first seemed like a murder (then murders!) based on class spite come to be based more on individual sociopathy. This was a little disappointing, truth be told. There were some decent exposition-switchbacks in the end but the real story seemed to come out of nowhere. I don’t think whodunnit was Le Carré’s thing, really. But he’s such a master of language, characterization, and pacing, it was still a respectable read, and I look forward to picking up the next Smiley. ****
LAGNIAPPE
Mithra Pic: Back in the Yurt
It’s been a while since I’ve seen Mithra in her little yurt!
John Le Carre is great, always cynical towards the motives of "intelligence" (in both its political and everyday meaning). Cold War and post Cold-War novels, both are good, although the 1990s/2000s ones can be a little airport thriller-ish. The Honourable Schoolboy is my favorite.