New(ish) Books

Lan Samantha Chang and Raymond Geuss

LAN SAMANTHA CHANG’s The Family Chao (2022)

An odd, interesting novel, a bit off-kilter, a bit silly, but saying something smart and complicated about life as an immigrant in America. 

What’s perplexing about it is that Chang - a smart, skilled writer - makes almost no attempt to map her story on real reality: it’s a palimpsest placed over The Brothers Karamazov and its narrative cornerstone is the sometimes witty and sometimes unsettling way that its characters match up with an ur-narrative.

Lan Samantha Chang - smart and off-kilter

Most of the time this feels procedural and sort of tacky. I never completely buy the Dagou or James characters - which is a significant problem for the novel. James is just kind of a winking reprise of Alyosha - the born saint crossed with the virginal college student. Dagou is ok as a conflicted Dimitri Karamazov with his tangled hatreds for his father and his sense of self as an abject failure in need of radical solutions, but Chang never manages to make us feel his alleged charisma - which is discussed and which makes two beautiful women compete ferociously for him but is very rarely in evidence in the material presented to the reader. Nothing is made, for instance, of the fact that he’s a musician. And his behavior has no particular consistency to it - the skulking-around figure of the novel’s first half has little resemblance to the demented truth-teller in the courtroom, so dedicated to honesty that he is incapable of properly defending himself. 

 On the other hand, Leo, in his few appearances, is terrifically charismatic, if anything an improvement on Fyodor Karamazov. And Ming, like Ivan, is the star of the show. I really tuned every time he appeared - less because of what he contributed to the plot, which is a bit outlandish and random, than because of his ability to take the long view, to, as Chang writes, “know that in our outer lives lie success….the balance sheet is a fingerprint of one’s fortune.”

Basically, there are two terrific set pieces in The Family Chao. One is Ming holding forth to James, explaining the family. The other is his discovery of how O-Lan fits in. 

The sensibility here is of reading an x-ray. The characters aren’t driven so much by psychology as by a fate particular to their position in the family and the family’s position relative to the culture at large. Dagou must break down - as Ming says, “Youth is over at 34. By then you’ve lost the gleam and possibility of youth and most Americans couldn’t give a shit about you.” James must collapse into sweetness and ambivalence. Ming must collapse in his own way - through isolation, detachment, self-hatred. What’s being said isn’t exactly so convincing sociologically - the overt point is something about O-Lan being the true ‘marauder’ rather than her more blustering brothers - but it’s profound characterologically, that people are only themselves by reference to type and fictional counterpart. And what the characters have in mind is not just Karamazov but the racist children’s book The Five Chinese Brothers - the idea that, under duress, Chinese siblings will do anything to save one another and that in that process they become somehow merged. 

The Family Chao turns, in this way, into an epic of non-assimilation. The family has such a clear trajectory to the usual assimilationist narrative - the self-sacrificing yet very old world parents with the local store, the children who really are making it. But something goes very wrong - everybody finds themselves mapped into a much more difficult fate, the father in the grip of his sensualist appetites, the sons following each of their distinct archetypal patterns and at the same time unable to truly differentiate from each other. 

There is magic in writing in this x-rayish way but very rarely - pretty much only when Ming speaks. The majority of The Family Chao is absorbed in procedurals - all the romcommish steps leading to the great family dinner at the end of the first part (the mother almost perfectly forgotten in her hospital bed); and then the surprisingly verbatim transcript of the court proceedings that dominate the second part, complete with all the motions and objections. ‘Genre-bending’ is the word that reviewers come up with, trying to cover for Chang. The feeling is more that she set a trap for herself - trying to model a contemporary immigrant story exactly on The Brothers Karamazov - and finding that sometimes that rewarded her but that as often as not she simply was at a loss to know what to do with her characters. 

RAYMOND GEUSS’ Not Thinking Like A Liberal (2022)

I fell for a bit of a marketing trap here. The title - as I’m sure was the intention - made me think the book was going to be some sort of of-the-moment intellectual dark web riposte to Adam Gopnik, Steven Pinker, the New Yorker/New York Times crowd. What it is instead is pretty rosy-hued intellectual autobiography, the very, very rare story of a human being who seems genuinely to have enjoyed his high school education. As Geuss himself freely admits, the circumstances of his secondary school - run by whip-smart Hungarian priests marooned in suburban Pennsylvania - were so bizarre and idiosyncratic that there’s almost no conclusion to draw from the experience. 

But Geuss does what he can to align the story of his marvelous Latin classes to a narrative that his publisher can sell and he actually comes up with a reasonable-enough premise. “Growing up as a member of a subgroup can give one a cognitive advantage at least when it comes to resisting certain widespread illusions,” he writes.

Raymond Geuss - never happier than in high school

In other words, he only seems to be writing a glowing user review to his Piarist high school, while adding in some sparkling praise for a few Columbia professors of his. In fact, the high school stands in for any social entity that falls outside the liberal paradigm, that partakes of some sort of closed system of knowledge, that values the past at least as much as the utilitarian future, that has a conception of the self as being embedded in a community rather than as a completely free-floating sovereign individual. 

Geuss’ delight is, while taking it pretty much for granted that the Piarist school was an extraordinary place providing a top-notch intellectual education, to enumerate all of the ways in which the Piarists deviated from the tenets of liberalism. He names the ability to have tightly orchestrated structure without normative authority, to have humility as a guide in personal conduct rather than the sovereign dignity of pagans or liberals, to be bound by an ethic of collective shame rather than of individual guilt. 

This being the residue of a Catholic education, though, Geuss seems often to forget that he’s supposed to be focused on liberals and instead takes aim directly at Protestants. The really choice bits of Father Krigler‘s wisdom are a matter of distinguishing their school from Protestants - and Geuss digs up some interesting examples of how the Protestant and Catholic world view dramatically diverge, for instance in his latter-life acquaintanceship with a German Protestant aristocrat who attempted to participate in one of the plots against Hitler’s life and could never afterwards forgive himself, in spite of having no illusions about the Nazi regime, for having violated his oath of allegiance to the Führer. “I was flabbergasted by this and and really had the sense that I had encountered a man from Mars, but I think I had just met a proper Protestant” is Geuss’ summation of this episode.

Father Bela Krigler c.1960

It’s axiomatic in Geuss’ framework that Protestantism and liberalism are basically interchangeable - both represent a spirit of totalization, a set of apparently simple, apparently universal formulae (e.g. sola scriptura, negative liberties, the sovereign individual, etc) that tend to produce very different results from what their promulgators had in mind, but which, Geuss believes, can be anticipated by a discerning critic. In the case of Protestantism, that’s a sameness, a certain lack of texture and of context - the apparently simple ‘sola scriptura’ being actually a reductive mockery of how scripture was, in reality, composed. And in the case of liberalism, the emphasis on the sovereign individual, on discussion, on negative rights, all completely miss the easy-enough rejoinders that the sovereign individual is a fiction (everybody is intrinsically embedded in social structures); that discussion never really leads anywhere (human beings are not really rational enough for it, dialogue is not actually an effective means of governance, and the whole dialogic process on a society-wide level tilts inevitably towards corruption); and that negative rights are deeply unfulfilling (‘freedom from’ yields a person very little other than isolation). 

All of this - teased out gradually over the course of Geuss’ education - is very compelling. The culture-as-a-whole is so bathed in liberalism that it seems pointless even to define it let alone question it. “The vocabulary of liberalism is the dominant and virtually all-pervasive idiom of our thought and speech,” writes Geuss. But for those raised in any sort of closed culture - Geuss cites the Jewish upbringing of his Columbia mentor Sidney Morgenbesser as another example - the premises of liberalism start to seem just as parochial as Protestantism, far from self-evident or universal, and something that a person can mentally detach from even without being in a state of overt rebellion.

Dashing Sidney Morgenbesser

I’m very sympathetic to this train of thought. For me, the dissociation from liberalism and universalism comes not so much from upbringing as from travel. Simply put, the more cultures I saw and the more experiences I had, the less liberalism seemed like any kind of conceptual advance and more just a set of postulates that I had no particular issue with but were very far from being the endpoint of history. I had a series of inane-sounding mantras that I repeated to myself - “the world is a big place,” “there’s more out there than I realized,” “anything that anybody believes is true” - by all of which I was getting at a perspective like Geuss’, not so much trying to attack liberalism as to look behind it, to leave oneself a bit more open to genuine difference.

For most of my lifetime, and Geuss’, this perspective was practically meaningless. Liberalism was so clearly the only viable political philosophy both conducive to a moderate mindset and with society-wide appeal that that for those who were less-than-sold on liberalism’s pretensions to universality the only valid contrarian point to make was to pick at some of liberalism’s more zealous champions: intellectuals roundly condemned Fukuyama for closing the books on history in 1992; Geuss made a career as the intellectual nemesis of John Rawls, claiming that it really was a bit rich for liberalism to take on ‘universal justice’ as well as ‘liberty’ and ‘equality.’

John Rawls - the apple of discord

But, as Geuss writes, liberalism seems recently to have tipped its hand and proven to be something other than the benign custodian of toleration that everybody assumed it to be. “Liberalism has begun to show itself in an increasingly unmistakable way to be at best actively irrelevant and at worst actively deleterious to human well-being,” he writes.

What he has in mind, I assume, is liberalism’s unfortunate coupling to tech and to visions of the fully transparent society, the panopticon, with all problems submitted to technocratic managers perfectly unaware of their own biases. It’s been a bit puzzling even to liberalism’s critics how a set of postulates like Mill’s - so genial, respectful, inoffensive - could have led, apparently ineluctably, to the technocratic nightmare. A critic like Allan Bloom sees the problem as residing in Mill’s watery ‘negative liberty’ and advocates abandoning Mill and falling back to Locke and a somewhat tougher conception of how ‘rights’ come into being. Robert Paul Wolff, one of Geuss’ beloved college professors, locates the difficulty in a question of political legitimacy - and the inability of the ‘sovereign individual’ ever to form a body politic. Geuss, good Catholic schoolboy, is inclined to blame everything on the Protestants and the very idea of individual autonomy. Speaking personally, I’d put the blame on Francis Bacon and the neat trick of mixing apparently secular social values with an eschatological vision of technological utopia. 

In any case, what’s clear is that liberalism seems, perplexingly, to be pervasive and indispensable even as, at the same time, it loses contact with its core premises (it’s become obvious enough to everybody that the world is not, actually, advancing steadily towards ever-greater social justice and equality; and pretty clear as well that the mechanisms proposed by liberalism to continue its project, increased transparency, the never-ending spirit of innovation, have an unmistakably coercive aspect to them). Geuss clearly is not in the business of proposing sweeping alternatives - he’s not an anarchist like Wolff or even a Catholic diehard like his beloved priests; his business is to chip away at John Rawls’ ‘epicycles’ and at liberalism’s ideological overreach. But where he gets to seems like a good starting-place - a certain detachment; a skepticism not only of liberalism but of any system aspiring towards universality; a tendency to see society less as a problem in search of an ideal solution than as an interlocking set of divergent interests capable of finding harmony but not consensus.