Emmanuel Todd's After the Empire, which was a bestseller in France, is a somewhat worrying tract. Not that its message that the United States faces an inevitable decline, dragged down by economic profligacy and imperial overstretch, is particularly new or shocking. No, what is disturbing about this book is less its chronicling of American dysfunction than its insight into the slightly unhinged mindset of one member of the French intellectual elite (Todd is a researcher at the French National Institute for Demographic Studies).

Todd does have some credibility to attack. His La Chute finale (The Final Fall, 1979) predicted the end of the Soviet Union* by analysing demographic statistics that indicated rising levels of infant mortality--a leading indicator of societal decline. His latest screed does have some statistical backbone--tables charting burgeoning U.S. trade deficits and concomitant levels of foreign investment in America. However, behind the sober display of figures lies a frankly loony argument.

The leftish reader may be inclined to nod her head in agreement when Todd argues that recent U.S. military adventures represent "theatrical micromilitarism," in which weak, minor nations are defeated in swift displays of imperial might. (The nightmarish situation in Iraq is beginning to undermine such a strategy, if it existed.) Likewise, although Todd's attempt to yoke the U.S.'s intimations of empire with the financing of its trade deficit is somewhat vague at least it remains within the bounds of rationality. (Todd seems to argue that by creating an unstable world, the U.S. sets itself up as the only safe harbour for the cautious investor. Whether Japanese or Chinese central bankers buying U.S. Treasury bonds by the truckload share this perspective is another matter.)

However, it's when Todd starts to use his recent interest in kinship relationships to widen the debate that he seems to lose the plot. OK (deep breath), Todd argues that the traditional pre-modern family structure will shape society as it makes the turbulent transition to modernity. So, for example, the Russian family structure, which featured a powerful father and lacked the features of primogeniture (thus placing brothers on an equal footing), is responsible for Soviet Communism:

"The single part, the centralized economy, and most of all the KGB all reproduced at the level of the Russian state the totalitarian role of the traditional peasant family"

Come on! This is the purest anti-materialist claptrap! What about the inherited structure of Tsardom (which directed almost all significant economic activity as well as supervised a police state), the legacy of serfdom, and (maybe most importantly) the ruthlessness of the Bolsheviks? Surely all that matters a bit more than the fact the Russian daddies tend to be domineering. (Todd, disappointingly, doesn't argue that Israel (not his favourite nation) has been moulded by the pressure of that most famous family figure, the Jewish mother).

But it's when Todd applies his addled theory to Anglo-Saxon societies (a somewhat generalized Gallic term for any country, including America, in which English is the principal language) that he moves from the merely outlandish to the fantasical.

More tomorrow...

*In contrast, I think the CIA prophesised the collapse of the USSR sometime around 1990.

Did I somehow imply that I would resume my argument contra Todd on Friday? I meant Sunday—Friday was not a convenient day for critiquing the Weltanschauung of a leading French intellectual.

To recap: Emmanuel Todd in After the Empire has introduced us to this strange little device for predicting the shape of societies as they enter modernity—as goes the family, so goes the state. I quote from pages 102-103 of the paperback:

“Peoples with an egalitarian conception of family relations, as is the case for Rome, China, the Arab world, Russia, and northern France, tend to perceive men and peoples as equal. […] Peoples whose traditional family structures do not include a strict definition concerning the equality of brothers, as was the case in Athens and even more clearly in Germany, do not succeed in developing an egalitarian attitude toward other men and peoples”

As pointed out in the previous post, I don’t think this kind of sweeping anthropological gimmick can simultaneously explain both the Athens of Pericles and the Germany of Hitler.

And apparently the Anglo-Saxon mindset hovers between the Universalism* of France & Russia and the exclusionary attitudes of Athens/Germany—with it tilting toward the latter in recent decades.

To back up his arguments that Universalism is ebbing away, Todd deploys statistics that apparently show that the rates of mixed marriages, which had been increasing up until the mid-1990s, have been static ever since. Todd takes a rigid statist line in explaining this failure:

“In a society that has replaced the glorification of equal rights with the worship of “diversity”—of origins, cultures, races—known as “multiculturalism,” is it really surprising to witness a failure of integration?”

I can think of plenty of reasons why ethic groups in the United States may not be mingling as freely as they might—most of them economic—but I wouldn’t have reached for a worship of diversity as one of them.

And in passing, France’s “Universalist” approach doesn’t seem to be paying off handsomely in the simmering banlieux. As for Russia's egalitarian approach in Chechnya...

As well a retreat of the Universalist generosity to other races in the heart of the empire, the exclusionary perspective now applies to the “subjects” of the empire. This, in Todd’s view, explains the growing criticism of Islam in the West. And guess what? American women are to blame:

“In the United States, feminism has become over the years increasingly dogmatic and aggressive, and genuine tolerance for the real diversity is forever waning. Thus it was in a sense destined to come into conflict with the Arab world and the rest of the Muslim world where family structures resemble those in the Arab world[…] On one side America, the country of castrating women…on the other Bin Laden, a polygamous terrorist with countless half-brothers and half-sisters.” [Pages 136-137]

One can imagine Todd queasily crossing his legs in the seminar room of some American University as a shrill female whines on about, say, honour killings in Pakistan.

To cut to the chase, Todd goes someway in the right direction in identifying the symptoms of whatever might be ailing the United States (although the country still seems to be heartily defying the sceptics who wait impatiently for it to keel over). Yet, to extend the metaphor, his etiology is all over the place. His deep causes, aside from the economic reasons that can be found in any recent copy of The Economist or Business Week, can be found in kinship relations, a worship of diversity, and radical feminism—but does this hotchpotch of theories, stats, and prejudices actually cut it in French academe?

*Todd is sane enough to point out that Universalism is not an automatic good. Bolshevik Russia or the France of 1790 was willing to accept others, so long as you fully lived up to the Platonic ideals of the Revolution. If you failed, then it was off to the Gulag or guillotine. Indeed, as Anne Applebaum in Gulag has shown, the treatment of indigenous Russians in the camps was as bad if not worse than that doled out to those from the periphery of the empire.

The following comment was received in response to last week's post:

Knowing that this particular blogger is not preoccupied with political correctness, I'm curious as to why he decided to assign the feminine gender to the "leftish reader"? Is it because this blogger believes that the "leftish reader" is happy to complacently identify with any criticism of the U.S. without questioning the validity of individual arguments, perhaps as he believes women just nod in 'knowing' agreement - without having any opinions of their own?

Now, I'm not going to emulate Monsieur Todd and accuse my correspondent of being a "castrating female." (I wouldn't dream of it!) Rather than assuming that women readers nod their head like toy dogs, I merely thought that it was a form a syntactical politesse to use the female impersonal pronoun whenever possible.

Maybe it's a kind of linguistic affirmative action, to counteract the usual assumptions that all writers, doctors, etc. are male. Doubtless my commentator will perceive this gesture as mere condescension.

And perhaps such clumsy PC displays will soon be no longer required. As scientists such as Steve Jones tell us, men are on the way out:

“Males are wilting away. From sperm count to social status, and from fertilization to death, as civilization advances those who bear the Y chromosome are in relative decline.”

Of course, "relative decline" is a open to interpretation...

It seems President Bush is living up to his promise to spend the "political capital" he believed he earned by winning last November's election. Today's New York Times reported that the controversial Republican-championed Bankruptcy Bill is set to pass.

In the current situation, if someone declares personal bankruptcy in the United States, banks and credit card companies have to stand at the back of the line of creditors as the individual tries to sort out their financial affairs. If this bill becomes law, a bankrupt will be obliged to continue making payments on their credit card debt, regardless of the fact that studies show that most personal bankruptcies are caused by job losses or medical emergencies.

One of the most vehement lobbyist for this bill has been MBNA, which, according the blogger Daily Kos, is the largest single contributor to the Republican Party.

This is the same MBNA, whose Operations Centre in Carrick-on-Shannon, was voted in 2004 as No. 1 in "The 100 Best Workplaces in Europe" survey by Fortune.

That these can be two facets of the same company--the unforgiving pursuer of the financially distressed and the (apparently) caring employer of its content operatives--appears to confirm the theory proposed by Joel Bakan: If the corporation were a person, it would be diagnosed as a psychopath.

By the way, does anybody out there know what exactly the situation is in Ireland in regards to personal bankruptcy and servicing creditors?

I had the chance to interview David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas, yesterday. Despite the fact by this stage he's probably sick to the back teeth of talking about his novel (this very entertaining book has just been released in paperback), he was still willing to seriously engage with the questions.

Hope to have the interview posted to the main ThreeMonkeysOnline site reasonably soon.

I was hoping to post the following (very) roundabout appreciation of Updike's latest novel a few days ago, but I've been kinda busy the last few days clearing the decks before tomorrow's trip to Bologna. I'll be meeting up with some fellow Three Monkeys scribes and college friends. Nothing out of the normal, just your usual meeting of coevals in their mid-thirties as they come to terms with their thwarted ambitions over several carafes of inexpensive plonk. Or at least that's the plan...

The news that Electronic Arts is going to start paying its employees overtime pay could be a watershed for the software industry. Traditionally, working insane hours were considered part-and-parcel of so-called "crunch time": the period of intense toil, often lasting months, in the run-up to release. Developers tolerated the unsocial shifts in exchange for cold pizza, free soft drinks, and the prospect of stock options. Now, more than five years after the Nasdaq bubble popped, EA workers have decided to lobby for some remuneration now rather than wait for jam tomorrow.

To segue rather drastically into a peripherally connected theme, this latest development in the software industry wouldn't surprise Owen Mackenzie, hero of John Updike's latest (his 21st!) novel: Villages. Mackenzie, whose education and subsequent career -- spanning from the 1950s to the near present -- encompassed both the technical and the sexual (rather more of the later than the former), looks back over his life from the vantage of affluent retirement and impending mortality. He does not seem to hanker after his renounced vocation:

"Owen arrived in his new village as a mysteriously comfortable stranger, who had filched a little fortune from the early stages of an increasingly less exotic business. He was superstitiously viewed as a kind of alchemist, but he knew that the alchemy of Babbage and Turing, Eckert and Mauchly and Von Neumann had long since become mere chemistry, a province of dronelike quantifiers and disagreeable smells[...]

In engineering as in the arts, the dawn time, before all but a few are still asleep to the possibilities, is the time for leaps of creation. The computer's engineering marvels, like those of the automobile earlier in the departed century, are buried in a landslide of common use: any bank teller can summon up currency quotations from Hong Kong, just as any auto driver can push on the pedal for more gas."

Although this particular drone works (or at least hopes to work again!) in the IT industry, the languid survey above seems to strike a chord. Despite the increasingly shrill advocates who claim that the revolution is just beginning, there is a sneaking suspicion that work in "computers" may soon be seen as being as humdrum and blue-collar as that of assembly-line worker. Then again, car workers used to have unions (and actually, the pay isn't bad.) But this is probably not the kind of future someone like Paul Graham would envision.

Updike's latest opus has received a critical kicking from the usual quarters (surprise, surprise, the NYT's Michiko Kakutani hated it!). Yet whether it was the fluidity of his writing that lulled me, or that the sort of detached pessimism displayed above struck me as a kind of weary wisdom, I shamelessly enjoyed this book. The Economist denounced it by huffing "...it is hard to say whether the world of letters has been changed in the slightest by its publication."

I'd counter that occasionally (quite often perhaps) you're quite happy to consume a work that does not shake the establishment to the core. There's something to be said, after all, for a slickly constructed bourgeois entertainment. Furthermore, if you choose to heap such opprobrium on a writer of Updike's stature, what ammunition have you left to take down the Dan Browns or James Pattersons of this world?

It's not the most original of behaviours for a visitor just returned from Italy to trill arias of enthusiasm for the lifestyle of the peninsula. However, what struck me, despite my friend (who actually lives there) confirming the stories that the economy is in the pits, was the seeming unshakeable prosperity of the place. Of course, Bologna is probably one the richest cities in Europe, never mind Italy. But then again, Dublin is also supposed to be one of the most affluent metropolises in the EU, yet it can't help but seem somewhat shabby in comparison.

But as another friend concisely observed, we were basically peasants in Ireland until the last ten years. There is no legacy of centuries of affluence to draw upon or admire at this chill latitude. But even in the present day, there still feels like a there's a gap in the day-to-day matter of commerce. Because if you gaze into the upmarket shop windows of any Italian city, you're likely to see many of the same things you would if you were to do the same outside similar establishments in Dublin, London, or New York: Italian products. Regardless of the enduring stereotypes, Italy is one of the great manufacturers and exporters. This can be seen in the hinterland of the medieval cities of the north: hundreds of hectares of co-ops, plants, and factories hedging the Autostrade.

Now the point of what I'm kind of getting at is to question whether the value of the earnings generated by companies in Italy that actually make something are worth more in some socially beneficial way than those of companies that peddle nebulous services (like so many in Ireland, Britain, and the United States*)? An economist would dismiss out of hand such a tentative query: a euro earned is a euro earned, whether it was made from banking or selling shoes. Yet doesn't it feel to the consumer that the realm of making and selling actual things is much less of a zero-sum game than the intangible world of offering and using services? A consumer can choose whether to buy a new jacket or motorbike--there's an upfront, one-off exchange of cash for a concrete reward. With services, there is often an element of obligation (how many of us ever want to see a lawyer?). And the pricing and the level of service seem impossible to envision or quantify. The former scenario is a win-win situation for both seller and buyer. The latter one looks like a win-lose outcome, with the buyer coming off worse.

The network of financial outfits, law firms, and consultancies that occupy the commanding heights of the Irish economy are clearly raking it in. But do any of their customers like them in the slightest? (Their brands, although ubiquitous, certainly don't attract the same sort of covetousness as say, Gucci or Bugatti would.) And though their profits bolster the nation's GDP, GNP, and PPP, isn't there the widespread feeling that their activities add almost nothing to the real prosperity of its people?

*A recent article in Business Week discussed how major non-financial companies are increasingly relying on their financing divisions to bolster profits. For example, almost 49% of the earnings of General Electric, a symbol of U.S. manufacturing, derived from its finance and insurance units. This makes it unclear how the American trade deficit will ever decline, regardless of how low the dollar goes: It's a lot harder to export mortgages than jet engines.

Having spotted some samples on sale in Waterstones today, I recalled that there seems to be quite a cult of the Moleskine notebook on the Web. The company's site boasts that mere mortals can avail of the same products "used by Van Gogh, Chatwin*, Hemingway, Matisse and Céline" (the writer, not to be confused with the Franco-Canadian singer). I can see the point of this marketing hook: some dreamy illiterate hopes that a little of the magic might rub off if they scribble on the same type of paper that absorbed Hemingway's curt prose. ("The paper was white. It was good paper...etc.")

For me, however, nothing is more intimidating than the sight of expensive, blank paper. And if I ever happen to be holding, let's say, a hefty Mont Blanc pen I'm not sure if I could bring myself to write my name. Give me a biro and an A4 pad any day: What I end up writing may be rubbish but at least I won't feel as though I'm defacing a precious work of art.

*The Moleskine site mentions "Chatwin used to buy his moleskine at a Paris stationery shop in Rue de l’Ancienne Comédie." Ah yes, he would, wouldn't he? No WH Smiths for Chatwin.

For a while I've been mystified by the political cartoons of Steve Bell that regularly appear in The Guardian. Because I simply don't get them, I was inclined to think that they operated on the level of a private joke with the more enlightened readership of that esteemed organ. Recently, however (mainly because I'm reluctant to acknowledge any theory that might put me at fault), I've come to the conclusion that this guy is simply chancing his arm and nobody has called him on it. Sure, he can draw but he doesn't appear to have anything in the way of satirical gifts.

Take this most recent example, available online. Oh, I see, President Bush is a big, lumbering lunk of a war-mongering chimpanzee. Now, you can blather on about the great tradition of caricature practiced by Daumier and Gillray, but shouldn't a modern political cartoon offer something more? Such as...I dunno...insight?

Ian McEwan's latest has been exhaustively reviewed in both Ireland and Britain since its release and it's now getting fairly respectful notices in the U.S. I don't have much too add, except two, related things that struck me when I read an interview with McEwan by Adam Begley, which appeared in the insiderish New York Observer.

Begley writes "when I mentioned Virginia Woolf’s novel [Mrs. Dalloway] to him, Mr. McEwan said he’d been thinking, rather, about Saul Bellow’s “mastery of digression” in Herzog (“always within reach when I was writing this novel”) and John Updike’s “hypnotic” use of the present tense in the Rabbit novels. “There’s a certain kind of novel, at which Americans excelled in the second half of the 20th century, which sets out to capture a man, a city, a century.” A similar ambition prompted Mr. McEwan to put a 24-hour slice of Henry Perowne’s enviable existence under the microscope"

But I think a key difference between McEwan and the Americans he mentions is that the latter are, for want of a better description, funny. Whereas McEwan is (at least intentionally*) not. The comic is not, I think, a supernumerary garnish that's added to the main plate in these kinds of novels but an essential tactic that makes the protagonists bearable. Updike's Rabbit is boorish and Bellow's Herzog is mawkishly self-obsessed, but we tolerate their flaws for several hundred pages because they make us laugh with their idiosyncratic monologues. And because laughter is an act of empathy, we begin to become complicit in their worldview. (Admittedly, this might be easier for male readers as both characters' worldview encompasses fairly bitter observations about the women in their lives.) In contrast, McEwan's Perowne is everything Rabbit or Herzog is not: uxorious, patient, a good father, a measured observer of the world around him. He is also rather boring--nowhere in the book did I chuckle, even guiltily, even inwardly, at Perowne's articulated thoughts. And that's a major hurdle. Part of the reason might be McEwan's fairly static prose. In place of Updike's brilliant act of ventriloquism or Bellow's febrile philosophy, we have in Saturday a voice that sometimes comes uncomfortably close to Sunday paper journalism. As Perowne peregrinates across London, his thoughts on terrorism, food, and family relationships occasionally seem like a superior brand of the stuff that columnists often churn out on auto-pilot.

The second thing I thought about was triggered by McEwan saying that Herzog was "always within reach" during the writing of the novel. Of course, a passage from Herzog provides Saturday's epigraph. But there's another scene, a minor one, in which I detected a buried homage to Herzog. Both scenes oddly involve fish and crustaceans and perhaps illuminate some of the points I've made above.

From Saturday:

He turns the corner into Paddington Street and stoops in front of the open-air display of fish on a steeply raked slab of white marble. He sees at a glance that everything he needs is here. Such abundance from the emptying sees. On the tiled floor by the open doorway, piled in two wooden crates like rusting industrial rejects, are the crabs and lobsters, and in the tangle of warlike body parts there is discernable movement. On their pincers they're wearing black funereal black bands. It's fortunate for the fishmongers and his customers that sea creatures are not adapted to make use of sound waves and have no voice. Even the silence among the softly stirring crowd is troubling.

And from Herzog:

Herzog was loitering for a moment near the fish store, arrested by the odor. A thin muscular Negro was pitching buckets of ice into the deep window. The fish were packed together, backs arched as if they were swimming in the crushed, smoking ice, bloody bronze, slimy black-green, gray-gold--the lobsters were crowded to the glass, feelers bent. The morning was warm, gray, damp, fresh, smelling of the river. Pausing on the metal doors of the sidewalk elevator, Moses received the raised pattern of the steel through his thin sole shoes; like Braille. But he did not interpret a message.

What do we learn from the comparison? I'll leave it up to you.

* There is a scene when Perowne goes to see his son rehearse a blues song dedicated to the Perownes' affluent neighbourhood that comes perilously close to cringe inducing. A blues song about a Georgian square? I'll spare you the lyrics.

The long-awaited interview (well, long awaited by Andrew at ThreeMonkeysOnline) with David Mitchell is now available here. The issue has also achieved a bit of a coup in getting an interview with critics' darlings, Mercury Rev. There's plenty of more stuff, including an unusually insightful discussion with Nell McCafferty, that shows a different side from the combative bruiser who's wheeled out to provide a bit of friction on RTE's moribund chat shows.

Way back in the mists of time (December 2004 actually), I was using this very space to bitch about the Department of Transport for failing to reply to a blustering e-mail I had sent two weeks previously.* At the time I thought it was a particularly futile demand, asking someone in authority to explain how National Toll Roads could be allowed to create a roadblock (i.e. the Westlink bridge) to extract ever-higher levies from drivers. (I was nearly going to lapse into appropriate tabloidese there and write 'long-suffering motorist').

It seems I spoke too soon. Like something out of Borges story, a reply to my forgotten mail has just wandered out of the ether and into my inbox. Composed by a mandarin from the Road Policy Division, it contained nothing I hadn't read in a newspaper back in December. But I'm really intrigued by the process that could have somehow generated a lengthy reply four months after one was requested. Perhaps in the Department there is a communication system like something out of the film Brazil, with ducts and pipes carrying messages through the bowels of the building. Any maybe the canister containing a rolled-up printout of my question got stuck in a pipe, and has only just recently been dislodged.

Well, have you got a more reasonable explanation?

*As people who know me could tell you, I am slowly turning into Victor Meldrew.