Monday, March 22, 2010
Currently: #ToB judge Gutowski ( Wolf Hall vs. Logicomix: http://bit.ly/dfNuUK ) is holding a contest to win his books: http://bit.ly/cX416xabout 12 hours ago
Bookbag • The New Morality
Having recently noted Rebecca Solnit’s encouraging study of community responses to disasters (like Hurricane Katrina), I also availed myself of an opportunity to chat with Tracy Kidder (Mountains Beyond Mountains), whose new book, Strength in What Remains (Random House), vividly and honestly chronicles the truly extraordinary ordeal of Deogratias, a medical student who escapes the horrors of his homeland of Burundi and lands in New York City with $200, knowing no English and knowing no one.Through the kindness of an assortment of strangers, he leaves his sleeping place in Central Park and matriculates at Columbia University and then Harvard’s School of Public Health and becomes a United States citizen. And founds Village Health Works, an organization based on the principles he learned at Dr. Paul Farmer’s Partners in Health.
Given a prevailing miasma of cynicism, stories like Deo’s—and indeed the considerable aid directed to Farmer’s efforts—are a glimmer of rebuttal to the notion that people are rotten and selfish and, as Thomas Hobbes intoned, that the normal state of nature was “the war of all against all,” thus leading to lives that are “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
In On Kindness (FSG), psychiatrist Adam Phillips (Side Effects) and historian Barbara Taylor (Eve and the New Jerusalem) argue that kindness has become imperiled: “This is a historical story—about how and why people have been talked out of their kindness—but also a psychological one, a story about how vulnerability becomes traumatic to people.”Quoting On the Genealogy of Morality by Nietzsche, who “regarded the inexorable progress of the morality of compassion which afflicted even the philosophers with its illness, as the most sinister symptom of the most sinister development of our European culture,” the authors of this slender tome assert that the morality of compassion has not made progress, and has indeed shied away from its shrewdest insights—and that this is the truly sinister symptom of modern life. Amen. —Robert Birnbaum
» Read an excerpt from Strength in What Remains.
1 Comment • Tweet this • Post to Facebook • FILE UNDER: Adam Phillips, Barbara Taylor, Bookbag, Hurricane Katrina, New York City, Partners in Health, Philosophy, Rebecca Solnit, Tracy Kidder, Village Health Works
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1 Comment • Add Yours
The only cavil I would make (take? what's your personal stylistic predisposition?) is with the place in the review of Kidder's book that you advert to Hobbes, and more particularly Leviathan, though he uses some of the same phraseology in the run-up to it, his De Cive.
As most of us have not, clearly you have not actually read Leviathan (I know; it's there somewhere on your bedside table cum bookshelves, and you like to dip into it now and again as a soporific, on those occasions when Morpheus is taking a well-deserved break) as you make the same mistake everyone does quoting that most quotable of his most quoted remarks.
So in lock step with Thoreau's "lives of quiet desperation"--reserved as it turns out not for us all, but for only the "mass of men"--you doom us, by your allusion, to a life that is not only merely tragically short, or in McEwan's phrase, a "brief privilege of consciousness," but also, of course, "nasty, brutish and short" and to admit to having a life that is otherwise is almost infra dig in the entire contrariness of it (like Jews and their habit of never trumpeting their good fortune: "I make a nice living").
Hobbes's message, of course, was that the natural bellicosity of man must be tempered, and it is only in the absence of civil society, to which we must consciously subscribe as members, that there is a constant war against all, the result of which is that life that is n, b, & s...
So stay civil, and remember your piece of the social contract, and stop misquoting Hobbes by omission.
That everyone else does, that is, ignores the social contract, acts purely out of self-interest, remains resolutely inconsiderate (if not recklessly and stupidly unheeding and thoughtless, but especially in public; who knows how people truly behave on their own in the privacy of their own homes?) is not an excuse for you to deviate yourself.
—Howard Dinin, Oct. 15, 2009, at 4:17 PMAdd Your Comment