For the readers on your Christmas gift list

Some books I've read over the last year-plus that stuck to my ribs

I’m not a very fast reader, and, if I’m going to be really confessional, I must admit that reading makes me sleepy, no matter the time of day or environment. Also, I devour a lot of Internet content on a daily basis - essays, blog posts, news - so I have to fit books into that.

I did up my book-reading game during the COVID hunker-down, though, and have maintained the volume I’d established.

Now that the holiday season is nearly here, consider my suggestions for those in your life who tend to think in terms of cultural observation and the impact of the past on our current moment.

The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism and the Road to Sexual Revolution by Carl R. Trueman examines the process over the last few centuries by which sexuality became the overriding factor in summing up an individual human being’s identity. Throughout the work, he reminds the reader that this has not always been the case.

The first major figure in his lineage of thinkers who brought us to our present juncture is Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose essential contribution was the focus on the inward psychological life, as opposed to presumptions, norms and institutions developed over the course of a society’s evolution. From Rousseau we get the notion that the individual can decide for himself or herself what will best enhance well-being.

He puts together three figures from the Romantic period of English literature - Wordsworth, Shelley and Blake - as having given us the view of “feelings and instinct as lying at the heart of moral action and what it means to be truly free and truly human.” Shelley, in particular, was pretty radical in embracing this position, asserting that monogamous man-woman relations was harmful to expressions of the way people naturally are.

He puts together in one chapter another trio, this one from a few decades later. There are important distinctions to be made between Nietzsche, Marx and Darwin, but together they did much to point Western civilization in a materialistic direction. Their common basis was viewing the world as having no significance or meaning beyond that imparted by human action.

Next up, Trueman discusses Freud, with particular interest in Freud’s concept of happiness as being rooted in genital pleasure, and what that has meant for the whole field of psychoanalysis.

He then looks at the roles played by Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse in bringing together the lineage of thinkers, in particular Marx and Engels, who put the power dynamics between society’s classes front and center, and the primacy of sexuality in the search for a stable society that Freud brought to the table.

Trueman does a great job of presenting the case that the surrealist movement in art moved the entire impetus along. Ditto his look at how Hugh Hefner’s putting the sheen of sophistication over the commercialization of erotic arousal has had ramifications up to the present day.

Trueman’s meticulous. You may find yourself going back to previous chapters to reread something that seemed arcane at the time, but that you now see as having planted the seeds of future developments. By the time you get to the chapters on how eroticism and a therapeutic framework triumphed in our culture, and, finally, how transgenderism came to be mainstreamed in an alarmingly short time, you can see the thread tying it all together with unsettling clarity.

Along the way, I was introduced to some minds I had at best only a glancing acquaintance with who have informed Trueman’s thinking. Now I’m inspired to further investigate Philip Reiff, Augusto Del Noce, Alasdair McIntyre and Charles Taylor.

I’m recommending The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties by Christopher Caldwell, even though I find its shortcomings frustrating indeed. In it, Caldwell gives us a bracingly original look at what factors have shaped American culture and society over the last 60 years. Its main strength is in juxtaposing certain cultural developments it might not have occurred to one to juxtapose. Its main weakness is Caldwell’s frequent search for some explanation for the setting of a trend beyond the explanation that Occam’s razor would suggest.

I think Caldwell is spot on in his assertion that the changes America has seen over the last six decades have occurred in three broad categories of our collective life: race, sex and war.

When looking at race, he draws a conclusion that, while discomfiting to take in, has more validity than gets discussed. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, by making, to a substantial degree, its case for doing away with discriminatory state laws in areas such as lodging, hospitality, college admission and employment on the basis of a public accommodation argument necessarily ate away at the Constitutional right to freedom of association, and that the American people were okay with this, given the magnitude of the wrong being righted by the legislation. However, even among those who concur with this justification for it are those who can see, and are disturbed by, the way judicial activism became the chief mode of its enforcement, leading to its application in other demographic distinctions, up to and including the idea that homosexuals can be married and that restroom accommodations need to be made for those with gender dysphoria.

The chapter on sex covers a lot of the same area as Trueman’s examination of it. He looks at such phenomena as Playboy magazine, contraception, feminism, homosexuality and abortion, but concludes the chapter by citing polls from the 1970s to support his assertion that the American people by and large didn’t think women had any shortage of rights, as if feminism had run out of gas by that point.

The chapter on war provides the first glaring disagreement I have with Caldwell’s overall case.

For starters, he is rather dismissive of Ho Chi Minh’s monstrousness as the leader of the Viet Minh, the broad-based coalition of political forces that drove first the Japanese and then the French out of Vietnam. This is in marked contrast to Mary Grabar’s take in the next book I’m recommending, Debunking Howard Zinn. Grabar makes clear that Ho, having spent much of the 1930s being personally mentored by the USSR’s Stalinist regime, was using purges of non-Communist Viet Minh leaders as well as indoctrination classes in villages to pave the way for a revolutionary environment. Caldwell, by contrast, speculates that Ho would have won a presidential election in a unified Vietnam if the 1954 peace accords had permitted one. Caldwell frames Ho’s stature as drawing on “broad nationalist and anti-colonial sentiment, however big the eventual role of the Soviet Union in supplying weaponry.”

The war chapter is where Caldwell takes the opportunity to examine the American counterculture of the 1960s, and he draws some conclusions on that front that I take exception to as well. For instance, he asserts that public fascination with psychedelic drugs had petered out within a couple of decades. I think the proliferation of microdosing and renewed investigation into such substances’ therapeutic uses - not to mention the draw of Tulum in Mexico for tourists interested in smoking hallucinogenic toad venom - might suggest another conclusion.

The above-mentioned avoidance of the obvious conclusion is exemplified most egregiously in the way Caldwell deals with Ronald Reagan. This passage, for instance, is downright weird:

Reagan’s followers agreed with his enemies in calling his movement “conservative.” In retrospect, that was the wrong word for it. Reaganism shared certain of the counterculture’s deepest aspirations. The hippie agenda, as its most eloquent champions tended to lay it out, was often conservative. It defended tradition against progress.

Huh?

Caldwell also says that Reagan undercut has own zeal for returning power to local communities by being so supportive of big corporations - or something. Then he gets into Reagan’s tax cuts, pretty much calling them a bad idea, since the Democrat-majority Congress wouldn’t cut spending. Caldwell might want to revisit all that Reagan had had to say about taxation in various writings and in the radio spots he did in the years between his California governorship and his presidency. This was a matter of principle with Reagan, but Caldwell seems to harbor a certain cynicism about anybody ever having been driven by principle.

Even Caldwell’s final point, that, by 2015 any astute observer should have been able to see the Trump phenomenon coming, strikes me as specious. It’s not really original. The idea that a populist groundswell was fed up with not being heard by a ruling elite is something lots to Trumpists base their justification on. But the flimsiness of Trumpism’s attempt to cultivate a coherent purpose for being, and the continued existence of an actual conservatism resistant to Trumpism, need to be part of that movement’s story.

So why am I including this book in my list of recommendations? For one thing, it’s provocative no matter the mindset with which one approaches it. There’s something to stick in everyone’s craw. It’s iconoclastic, and therefore a good thing to include in any discussion of just what the hell has happened to us. Also, his powers of juxtaposition serve him well when he’s pairing what was happening in the pop-culture world with world-stage developments. For instance, he notes that “[t]he top-selling single of 1966, according to Billboard magazine, was neither ‘You Can’t Hurry Love’ by the Supremes . . nor the Troggs’ ‘Wild Thing’ . . . or the Beach Boys’ ‘Good Vibrations’ . . ., nor anything by Simon and Garfunkel, the Rolling Stones, the Beatles of Bob Dylan. It was Barry Sadler’s ‘Ballad of the Green Berets.’”

In short, it’s good for checking to see if one’s confirmation bias has been clouding one’s view of just how the 1960s left a legacy.

Mary Grabar’s Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation Against America definitely delivers on the title’s promise. If you’ve ever bristled at someone’s enthusiasm for this “historian” but felt you lacked sufficient specifics to set the record straight, you can now have an overwhelming arsenal of arrows in your quiver.

She handles the big lies in Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States with thoroughness, shining the light of truth on such claims as that Christopher Columbus was one of history’s darkest figures while the Arawak people he encountered in Jamaica were uniformly gentle and noble, or that the Allies in World War II were morally equivalent to the Axis powers.

I found interesting the section on Zinn’s stint teaching at Spelman College, a Christian school for young black women:

In the August 1960 [issue of] The Nation, he observed, “You can always tell a ‘Spelman girl’ alumni and friends of the college have boasted for years. The ‘Spelman girl’ walked gracefully, talked properly, went to church every Sunday, poured tea elegantly and, in general, had all of the attributes of the product of a fine finishing school.” . . . Zinn set out to transform the “finishing school” into a school for protest.

He thereby ran afoul of Spelman’s president Albert E. Manley and was eventually let go.

There was similarly bad blood a few years later between Zinn and Boston University president John Silber, who didn’t have exactly favorable views of Zinn’s standards of scholarship.

Zinn co-edited, with Noam Chomsky, the definitive edition of the Pentagon Papers. It conveniently leaves out justifications for the Vietnam war and portions of the peace negotiations.

Finally, I re-read The Diary of Samuel Pepys in late winter/early spring 2020, just as the pandemic lockdown was getting underway. I got to thinking that he’d been an eyewitness to the Great London Plague of 1665 and the Great London Fire of 1666. I’d originally read it for a class on Restoration literature in college and remembered that. It’s a colorful account of daily life in one decade of English history, ranging from Pepys’s duties as a civilian officer in the Royal Navy to his occasionally getting caught by his wife in the embrace of young women they hosted in their home. He colorfully brings to life the inns, taverns, gardens, chapels and streets of 1660s London. He was among the group that heard Charles II’s account of his years in exile when Charles returned and boarded an English ship in preparation for assuming the crown. There are many stories about going to dinner and plays with such luminaries of the day as William Penn.

See if there’s not something there for the bibliophile on your Christmas list.