I picked this book up in a charity shop in the UK, and having read a couple of his history books, and knowing of his work with the so-called “grand strategy“ undergraduate program at Yale University, I was interested to see what he would do here. But it was not good.
There’s a lot here to sniff at, legitimately or no. First of all, he relies on something called dictionary.com for his word definitions. This reminds me of course of nothing so much as an ignorant undergraduate, who starts a paper with a quotation from some dictionary. On the other hand, most of the ignorant undergraduates who do this have the decency to appeal to a printed dictionary. In this case Gaddis couldn’t even be bothered to get his lazy ass out of his computer chair and go look at an actual, you know, dictionary. I assume that there are some books in his office or his house (it’s a hopeful assumption, I grant you, but I’m feeling cheerful today), and that most people who want to look superficially educated will have a print dictionary around. (My favorite moment like this is when he uses dictionary.com to define the word "irony." Yes, yes indeed.) That Gaddis is so blithely unaware of even this minimal scholarly decorum speaks volumes. This isn’t a little thing; it reveals a fundamental incuriosity towards the complicated histories and layered meanings of words, and a complete tone-deafness to how he comes across to audience members who might actually know something concerning the topics about what he purports to mean to educate us.
Secondly, his selection of secondary resources to rely on is astonishingly embarrassing. Both the Republican hack Lynne Cheney, and the Canadian newspaper magnate (and now convict) Conrad Black, show up as authoritative sources on James Madison and FDR. At another point, he uses John Williams, the novelist, to explain the figure of the first Roman emperor Augustus, presumably because Williams wrote a novel about Augustus – – a good novel, by the way – – that was published in 1971. In a way I can respect a person who has read Williams (though reading Augustus and not Stoner is so perfect for Gaddis I can’t even say). But Cheney?!?!?!?
Thirdly, his reading of the figures he discusses is astonishingly secondhand. I mean this in several ways. Most basically, again like your typical undergraduate, he often simply hasn’t done the reading, in the sense literally of reading the stuff that he purports to talk about; he is completely blind, for example, about his incomplete reading of The City of God and his reliance on other people’s summaries of it. It’s not clear that he has actually managed to make his way not only through Machiavelli’s book The Prince—the work of an easy afternoon, after a late lunch and before cocktail hour--but also his Discourses on Livy, though to be honest most of the scholarship on Machiavelli is deeply gripped with the relationship between those two books, and most scholars I know what argue is very hard to understand what Machiavelli is trying to do without having a view on both of them. Much the same is true about Clausewitz, whose On War he groups with Augustine’s City as suitable for “flyover reading” (p. 192). That metaphor is more apt than it may at first appear, in fact, for this book bears all the relationship to reality that is borne by the “in case of emergency” cards in the seatbacks of airliners: brightly colored visuals meant really to reassure you that nothing will happen that you cannot be prepared for, when—if anything actually does happen—it is far more likely that the reverse will be true.
It's clear, though, that none of this bothers him. He can’t be bothered to be bothered. His job is not to make his readers want to read the books for themselves, much less to respect their authors as minds; rather his job is to provide his readers with just enough information to make it possible for them to interject a line or two of something that looks like intelligence (at least as long as it needs to, to other uneducated people) into their cocktail party badinage. This isn’t about learning, or education. about pablum.
Now, having said that (and being about to say more), I should say he has a couple good lines. He nicely called the City of God “a Moby Dick of theology” on page 99. And he has learned from the popular writer A.N. Wilson the word “hendiadys,” meaning “a complex idea expressed by two words connected by a copulative conjunction.” (Wilson is not, by the way, an “historian” as Gaddis says on p. 147—or perhaps I should say he’s an “historian” in the same way Gaddis is a “thinker,” and that every large book of prose for a certain kind of undergraduate is a "novel.") This is useful for his politics, I imagine, but it’s more useful to understand one of the basic structures of Anglican theological and spiritual writing, and I suspect it may have power to explain something about—so far as I can tell—the way English uses counterpoint words in its syntactical structure moreso than Romance languages or German; it is in fact a faint echo of Ciceronian "concinnity" (look it up! and not online!) communicated not only through the Book of Common Prayer but also through the early 17th century divines and also in Hooker’s Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity. So I’m grateful for a few things like these in the book.
The kind of learning this book manifests is broad rather than deep. He voyages far to find examples to illustrate the points he already knows he wants to make, out of the conceptual scheme and worldview that he already possesses; but at no time does he find that conceptual scheme, or that worldview, to be challenged in any real way by anything he uncovers in his voyaging. It’s not that he refuses or resists such challenges; it simply never occurs to him that such challenges could exist. This is the real definition of a provincial: someone who doesn’t even know there is an "elsewhere," or an "otherwise."
In this way is a very technological book: It means to show people what to do. The ultimate aim of the book is to convince its readers that they go away from it with some greater confidence in their own capacity to master and enact political order. I suppose that’s what “grand strategy” is all about, to people like Gaddis. His fundamentally frenetic attention to doing, however, obscures the way that human agency, never more than in world-historical events, is always caught up in patterns and dynamics far beyond itself. And so, Gaddis never thinks about Augustine on providence, or Machiavelli on fortuna, or Tolstoy on the complicated relationship between individual agency and the larger patterns of history which, like an avalanche, drive humans before it, or Lincoln on irony in Providence, and his repeated insistence that he was driven by history not that he was driving it—oh sure, Gaddis quotes that last line, how could he not, it’s too famous to be avoided, even by a channel-surfer like him; but he fails to understand how it counteracts the entire tendency of the snake-oil he’s trying to sell.
But more deeply still, the book leaves me with a depressed feeling. This guy had a chair at Yale, and an unobstructed, unmonitored route into several decades of Yale undergraduates’ amour propre. What kind of damage has he done to our world? The mind shudders. And all of the estimable journalists or glowing reviews in major newspapers and magazines—all their praise of Gaddis’s “learning,” or his “wisdom,” or his “judgment”: all of it makes me despair that anyone believes any of these people. I already knew Victor Davis Hanson was a fraud, and Roger Kimball too; but Max Hastings? John Nagl? How depressing. If Gaddis is what such journalists understand a “scholar” to be, no wonder so many journalists are fundamentally contemptuous of higher education.
You might think all of this is just sour grapes. I am completely certain that that’s part of it. How much of it, I am unable to own. But at one moment, I think Gaddis reveals an acceptable standard whereby to judge this work. He notes that Machiavelli dedicated his book The Prince to Lorenzo de Medici. He goes on to say “Lorenzo probably never read The Prince – – he wasn’t his age’s brightest lightbulb.“
This book, too, is written for the Lorenzos of our age. In fact the comparison is better (or, rather, worse) than that: for while Machiavelli dedicated the book to Lorenzo, he never expected his primary reader to be that pompous buffoon. He knew the difference between real thinking and stuffed shirts; he cared much more for the take of friends like Guicciardini, for instance. But there is another disanalogy that ought not go unnoticed. For this book is not written by a Machiavelli, but by a Polonius – an intellectual poltroon, capable of no rigorous thought, an unthreatening, complimentary companion while you channel-surf the higher platitudes.
And that there are Lorenzos in our age is the ultimate point of my using this analogy here. There are always more than enough Lorenzos to go around. In fact most of our world is Lorenzos, all the way down; certainly, Gaddis’s book is designed for them, and has been reviewed by them, and sold to them.
As a Medici, Lorenzo wasn’t the worst, by far; but there was only one Machiavelli, and serious people are still reading him, still learning from him, still struggling with him. Gaddis knows, in some sense, that Machiavelli’s value has far outlasted Lorenzo’s, so that the significance of the latter is far more dependent, nowadays, on his relevance to the former, whereas five hundred years ago that ratio was reversed. But Gaddis’s “knowledge” of that fact evidences no inner acquaintance of why that is true, why Machiavelli is worthwhile and why the “great men” of the age are so unimportant. And so Gaddis too, and all his friends, are with the Lorenzos.
By recognizing—if only unconsciously, and accidentally, in that one glorious moment in the book—that the mainstream of self-regarding, self-important people in any age will eventually be seen, by future eras, for the nullities which they truly were, Gaddis admits a small truth to be told: The Lorenzos of our world might buy this book, to be sure; but the most appropriate, and most likely, response to it on their part will be just the sort of “flyover reading” that Gaddis offers of others himself. Gaddis pretended to write a book, and his audience will pretend to read it, and life will go on, pretty much as it did before.