I am reading William Hazlitt’s Lectures on the English Comic Writers, in the old Oxford “World’s Classics” series—which I bought for £1.99 in a charity shop here in Oxford, which was quite a bargain for this amazing work—and I come across this:
Anything is sufficient to keep contempt upon an object; even the bare suggestion of a mischievous allusion to what is improper, dissolves the whole charm, and puts an end to our admiration of the sublime or beautiful…. The cavilling at, or invidiously pointing out, a few slips of the pen, will embitter the pleasure, or alter our opinion of a whole work, and make us throw it down in disgust. The critics are aware of this vice and infirmity in our nature, and play upon it with periodical success. The meanest weapons are strong enough for this kind of warfare, and the meanest hands can wield them spleen can subsist on any kind of food. (p. 26)
Hazlitt knew whereof he spoke; one of his most amazing essays is “On the Pleasures of Hating,” and it’s one of the most amazing phenomenologies of vituperation that is out there. And his insight here seems to me spot-on.
The critics are aware of this vice and infirmity in our nature, and play upon it with periodical success. I assume the pun is intended. Today our "periodicals" have begun to be mostly digital in nature, but the fundamental dynamics seem to have altered not at all. As you may have noted, we live in a nasty, mean, unforgiving age, particularly in public discourse, even more particularly (but not only) on social media. And that is terrible; we can all agree on that. Then again, it is also the case that we live in an age where unconscious or indifferent prejudice, casually expressed, is getting less and less of a free pass, and its advocates, who are also its addicts, are being held to account. And that is good; we can also all agree on that. Both of these things can be true, and in fact both are true.
I suspect it is the job of an interlocutor in these spaces to try to see the breadth of the person they’re engaging. Maybe just to model a way of taking their charges seriously in a manner that we would otherwise not see enough examples of, in this world. It is a kind of charity to the objects or subjects under scrutiny, to see them fully, faults and insights together, and not to flinch from either of them. Knowing someone makes it harder simply to condemn them, or to adulate them, as well.
I think of this today because there’s a really rich review essay by Thomas Laquer of Susan Neiman’s excellent book Learning from the Germans. Laquer really dismisses the suggestion at the heart of Neiman’s book, that America can learn from the Germans’ response over the past seventy years to their manifold crimes during World War Two. He suggests the disparity between the two problems is so vast as to make any analogy impossible, and he implies that Neiman hasn’t thought about these differences nearly enough.
In a way, this is a good review of Neiman’s book, in the sense that it contextualizes her suggestions in terms of a much larger scale the problem of American racism when compared to Nazi Germany. But in another way, this is a very bad review of Neiman’s book, too, because it distorts that she is trying to argue and implies that she thinks that America can photocopy the German response. That is absurd and it’s hard for me to think the author of this piece--Laquer--doesn’t know that. Why then did he write it? I'm actually at a loss to explain it.
Today reviewing seems to be replaced by hooting for one's own team and disparaging those who aren't on it. (In this way, blanket adulation is just as poor an example of public discourse as is demonization.) I don't know if that's at play in this review, and if it is, Laquer is a very bad example of this kind of reductionism; his thoughtfulness about the history, his awareness of the complexity of the evidence, comes through in every line. But I don't think it comes through, to me at least, in his treatment of the book under review. It's curious.
In reviewing something, I want to try to remember to try to take its author seriously as a human who is thinking. Very few people who write books do so in a fundamentally un-serious endeavor; very few write them, as it were, to bullshit. (There are occasional such, and I have one that I will be speaking about on this blog in a few days. But most of the time, that doesn’t happen.) People who write serious books are typically committing themselves to an arduous process of composition, with extensive display of themselves to public scrutiny, all in the service of trying to say something of value that will not be monetarily recompensed. They’re not heroes, but they’re deserving of some real attention and respect.
I highly recommend reading Laquer’s review. I also highly recommend reading Neiman’s book. And I also, if you couldn’t guess, highly recommend reading Hazlitt.