The Golden House: A Novel Hardcover – September 5, 2017 by Salman Rushdie ( Random House ); ( Jonathan Cape)

Salman Rushdie: ‘A lot of what Trump unleashed was there anyway’

Beginning with the inauguration of Obama and ending with the election of Trump, Rushdie’s latest novel is an intimate portrait of New York. The author talks about the journey from hope to despair and always feeling an outsider

The image that came to Salman Rushdie, around which he would build his new novel, was an enclosed garden in downtown Manhattan. It is a space that exists in real life (although, as one of the characters in The Golden House observes, real life is a category from which it is increasingly hard to distinguish less reliable entities) and with which Rushdie is familiar; old friends inhabit one of the houses backing on to the garden. “The idea of there being a secret space inside this noisy public space,” he says. “I had this lightbulb moment that it was like a theatre – with a Greek tragedy, amphitheatre quality – where the characters could enact their stories. It also had a Rear Window quality, of being able to spy on everybody else’s lives. At that point, the Golden family decided they wanted to move in.”

We are in the offices of Andrew Wylie, Rushdie’s agent of 30 years – “my longest relationship!” he says gleefully – a mile north of Rushdie’s apartment in lower Manhattan. He is looking particularly Rushdie-esque today: part rumpled intellectual, part something less sober. At 70, Rushdie has had more public incarnations than most writers of literary fiction – brilliant novelist, man on the run, subject of tabloid scorn and government dismay, social butterfly, and, in that singularly British designation, man lambasted for being altogether too Up Himself – but it is often overlooked what good company he is. His humour this morning is not caustic, nor ironised, nor filtered through any of the more protected modes of engagement, but is a kind of jolliness – a giggly delight – that simply makes him a good laugh to hang out with.


The Golden family are transplants to New York from Mumbai (or “Bombay” as the author continues to call it in conversation, with what feels like particularly Rushdian obstinacy), an outlandishly wealthy father and his three dysfunctional sons in flight from a personal tragedy; the loss of their mother during the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks. We never discover their “real” names; on arriving in the US, the patriarch renames himself Nero Golden – Rushdie, anticipating a collective eye-roll perhaps, points out in the novel this is no more ridiculous a name than Huckleberry Finn or Ichabod Crane – and tests the principle that the US is a place where one can leave one’s past at the door. It is an issue with which Rushdie is intimately familiar; the split in identity, the ability to shed one’s skin after a trauma and potentially skip off scot-free, and he explores both the impossibility and, ultimately, the undesirability of this. That the novel opens with the inauguration of Barack Obama and closes with the election of President Trump, “the Joker” as Rushdie brands him, is the novelist’s reminder there is no progress in history that can’t be undone.

The biggest news of the day used to be that Charlie Sheen did cocaine. Now there are 10 colossal news stories a day

The week of our meeting last month, reverberations from the fascist march in Charlottesville are still being felt, along with myriad other stories from Trump’s White House. “I remember when there wasn’t that much news,” says Rushdie, “when the biggest news of the day used to be that Charlie Sheen did cocaine. Now there are 10 colossal news stories a day.” It would seem to be a bad time to be a novelist and if Rushdie’s new novel seeks to compete with real life, it is by retreating from the polemicism of so much news and social media to get inside a non-partisan reality.

There are a lot of topical references in The Golden House – from “no-platforming” and illiberal campus activism to the transgender debate and other iterations of identity politics, which Rushdie approaches as symptoms of a broader cultural change. “In America when you talk about identity issues, at the moment a lot of that is gender identity. If you’re in England, there’s this other argument about national identity, which was behind the Brexit catastrophe; and in India, when people talk about identity, they’re really talking about religious sectarianism. In all three places, the identity subject is colossal but it is understood completely differently. I was thinking about that, too.”

Although Rushdie is of a vintage inclined to get grumpy about aspects of the gender identity debate – the suggested replacement of he/she with a spectrum of alternative gender markers – he tried to remain open-minded. “I wanted to approach the subject completely not judgmentally, just get into it. What is it? All this language stuff. The 73 pronouns, all of that. I’m a writer, I should know this. The point was to enter into it as seriously as I could and present it without preachiness. And I think in real life that’s what’s happening; people are wrestling with it. And they don’t always resolve it properly for themselves.”

One of the novel’s protagonists works at the “Museum of Identity”, a mildly satirical invention that “I was very happy to have come up with”, says Rushdie, “and that I’m sure will exist in the next five years”. Meanwhile, Nero Golden’s youngest son, D, struggles to suppress his transgender leanings. “This modern obsession with identity revolts me,” says D. “It is a way of narrowing us until we are like aliens to one another. Have you read Arthur Schlesinger? He opposes perpetuating marginalisation through affirmations of difference.” This sounds less like the talk of the 20-something fictional character and more like the novelist addressing the reader.
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Rushdie isn’t persuaded that solipsism on the left contributed to the rise of Trump, nor that economic disparity was the only cause. “I had a lecture gig in a city called Vero Beach in Florida: big audience, older people, quite affluent, very well educated, and almost all Trump voters,” he says. “Not at all the cliche of the ignorant blue-collar Trump voter. These were people with college degrees who’d had highly paid jobs, many retired, readers.” When the author mentioned climate change, he says, “this gentleman – they were all very courteous – disagreed with me and he said: ‘When you say that all the scientists agree on this, that’s not true.’ And I said: ‘Yeah, it is true actually.’ And he said: ‘No it’s not.’ And I said: ‘Sir, we can’t go on like this, it’s silly. But let me put it to you this way: if you say the world is flat, it doesn’t make the world flat. The world doesn’t need you to agree that it’s round in order to be round, because there’s this thing called evidence.’”

Did he get the impression these positions were held partly as a way to punish condescending liberals? “Well, I do think there’s some of that; this idea that the elite is now the educated class, rather than the wealthy class, so you’ve got a government with more billionaires in it than ever in history, but we’re the elite – journalists and college professors and novelists, not the ones with private planes and beach front properties in the Bahamas. It’s a weird time.”


I once sat next to the Trumps at a Crosby, Stills & Nash gig. Donald Trump knows all the words to ‘Woodstock’!

Rushdie has been in the US for more than 15 years, but he is still on the outside, a survivor, or beneficiary depending on your view, of a double displacement, first as a child moving from India to England to attend boarding school and then as an adult, when he left London for New York in 2000. It is a gift, he says, “to feel really connected to three places”, and it has nourished his fiction. The 70th anniversary of partition this year reminded one of the startling effect of Midnight’s Children when it was published in 1981, Rushdie’s second novel that is still unmatched for exuberance and a sense of talent unleashed. His third novel, Shame, cemented his reputation, since when he has produced novels ranging wildly across the spectrum between here and there, now and then, fantasy and reality. Fury, Rushdie’s 2001 novel, was a less intimate portrait of New York than The Golden House, his panoramic social novel of the city. While his two sons, Zafar, who is in his late 30s, and 20-year-old Milan, both live in London, Rushdie feels his roots in the US have deepened enough to get inside the city with something like the assurance with which he tackles London and Mumbai. (His youngest son, meanwhile, is threatening to move in with him in New York, as 20-year-olds will, reminding Rushdie that “children take up a lot of time and brain space”. He smiles. “But on the other hand, there are rewards.” )
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And of course Trump came as a great shock. Rushdie recalls sitting next to him in Madison Square Garden many years ago, at a Crosby, Stills & Nash concert, accompanied by “the then much younger Ivanka and the disgusting boys. And the thing that surprised me was that he was on his feet and knew all the words to all the songs. Donald Trump knows the words to “Woodstock”?!”

Setting the novel against the backdrop of the years preceding Trump’s election was not only a way of creating an elegy to the Obama era, but of suggesting that Trump didn’t emerge from a vacuum. “One of the reasons why I think it was possible to write the book is that a lot of what Trump represents and unleashed was there anyway, if you were looking properly, and would not have been destroyed by his defeat. Once you take the cork out of the bottle, things fly out.”

And while the rise and fall of Obama’s US – “the journey from that moment of optimism to its antithesis” – gave the novel a structural symmetry that has, says Rushdie, “horrible to say it, but a formally pleasing quality”, he is clear of the connection between then and now. “A big chunk of white America has been unable to stand the fact that for eight years there was a black man in the White House. Couldn’t stand it. And unfortunately Hillary was a bad candidate, and I think everybody underestimated, including me, the incredible hatred for her, including among leftwing people, young people and women.”

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All successful people are status aware, but it is a rather endearing quality in Rushdie, who is either disinclined or unable to disguise it. It was there in Joseph Anton, his 2012 memoir (the title is the pseudonym he assumed while living for 10 years under the fatwa) and in which his willingness to appear in less than flattering light – going on bitchily about his ex-wives, grumbling about protection officers calling him “Joe”, documenting the end of his marriage to Elizabeth West and the infatuation that led to his marriage to Padma Lakshmi – made it a more revealing memoir than most, although it was hard to know, at times, whether this was due to a surfeit of self-awareness or its opposite.

When he first joined Twitter, he says, “one and a quarter million people rushed in my direction. Which sounds like a lot until you look at people who really have a lot – Stephen Fry, Neil Gaiman, and so on, and that’s before you get to the real aristocrats, Justin Bieber, Kim Kardashian, the gods.” He giggles. “Even down here among writers a million people is a lot, so that was nice, to feel that you were having a conversation with a lot of people who were interested in you and your work, because it’s a self-selecting group.”

Twitter suited Rushdie, his belligerence and his sense of fun. He rolled up his sleeves and got stuck into fights and responded to people with puny numbers of followers. He was funny and generous and not at all like the popular view of him as pompous, plaintive, pain-in-the-arse Rushdie. Then, as has happened with many early fans of the platform, “I began to really dislike the tone of voice of Twitter. This kind of snarky, discourteous, increasingly aggressive tone of voice. I just thought I don’t like this. These people would not speak like this if they were sitting in a room with you. I had planned to stop earlier and then it was the election campaign and I got into it, and the last thing I tweeted was this pathetic tweet, having just voted: ‘Looking forward to President Hillary’.” He laughs. “After which total silence. And I thought, just stop, and I did and I haven’t missed it for one second.”

Too much exposure to strangers online can collapse one’s faith in humanity. In the novel, Rushdie refers to “synderesis”, the philosophical principle that people are born with an innate moral consciousness directing them towards good. Does he believe that? “I think there is an ethical sense,” he says. “I do believe that we’re born with a need to know what is right and wrong, which is why children accept the instruction of parents on the subject. We need to know what are the boundaries of good and bad behaviour in order to function in the world. I don’t think we automatically know what is right or wrong, but I think we have the desire to know.”

The Golden House by Salman Rushdie – from Nero to Obama, via The Godfather
The veteran novelist blends ancient history and myth with popular culture, crime caper and film techniques to fashion a morality tale for today

These are hard calls at the moment, when the very nature of reality and the meaning of “facts” are in dispute, long before one gets to the big existential questions. In the wake of Charlottesville, the issue for the left has been to what extent should one tolerate the intolerant and defend their right to freedom of speech. “I think the great boundary is to not tolerate people who would destroy the world that makes it able to tolerate people,” says Rushdie. “That’s the great mistake made in Germany during the rise of nazism, which was to allow it to rise through the ballot box and then abolish the ballot box. Something similar happened in Algeria, where the old administration thought that they would defeat the insurgent FIS [Islamic Salvation Front] and GIA [Armed Islamic Group] by letting them run for election and defeating them. Instead they ran for election and won and then abolished elections. There is a limiting point. If the thing that is happening would destroy the system that allows it to happen, that’s a deal breaker. I’m a huge admirer of and supporter of the ACLU [the American Civil Liberties Union, which defended the marchers’ right to protest] and I give them money and so on, but I think they might have been wrong about Charlottesville. I think when people are running over other people with motor cars, that’s not legitimate free speech. And they went there for a fight. And got it.”

This is, of course, the “provocation” argument which was directed at Rushdie during the years of the fatwa; “oh, well, he brought it on himself, he went looking for a fight and found it”. “Provocation” was also the word used by Francine Proseabout the offence caused by some of the cartoons in Charlie Hebdo, the satirical French magazine. Along with other high profile members of PEN, she withdrew from a PEN event at which the magazine was to be honoured in 2015. “Provocation is simply not the same as heroism,” wrote Prose, a statement for which Rushdie attacked her on Twitter.

These weren’t just fellow writers, but old friends: Peter Carey, Michael Ondaatjeand Prose herself, who had been Rushdie’s vice-president when he was president of PEN. “Those people were wrong,” he says now. “In light of what’s happened in France subsequently, I hope they’re embarrassed. Because it’s quite clear that people can get killed for anything. Get killed for going out to a club on Friday night. The idea that that particular group of people in some way called down their own damnation is not even tenable. It was a terrible division inside PEN and it’s left some very bad wounds; Francine and I don’t talk any more – and we go back.”
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Rushdie won’t hold with the argument that the cartoons were racist. “There was a problem of taking up positions before they really looked for information. For instance, Le Monde had done a survey of Charlie Hebdo covers over a 10‑year period: 520 covers. And the number of covers that dealt with Islam was six. The number of covers dealing with Catholicism, or Israel, was much higher. But then hundreds and hundreds attacking the Front National and Sarkozy. So here you have this anti-racist, anti-state little paper, which is being accused of being an organ of the establishment and racist. The exact opposite of what it is. And I said: ‘Just look at this. And think again.’ And nobody thought again. I’d met one or two of the people who were killed and they were just these … sweethearts. These old, soixante-huitard lefties. And nobody read the fucking magazine.” He laughs. “Another big French survey showed that a very substantial majority of French Muslims identifies as primarily secular, and only a small minority identifies as religious. I thought: ‘Look at this; they don’t care. They have real issues of employment and racism and this isn’t the thing that’s attacking them.’ Anyway it was a horrible fight and it has left damage. I did patch it up with Michael O. I’ve been friends with Michael since 1980.” But no other fences were mended.

I hate it when the liberal progressive left become stupid. We are supposed to be smarter, they are supposed to be stupid

There is an assumption that Rushdie has been pushed to a more extreme position on Islam because of the years of the fatwa, something he finds irritating and belittling. He does react very strongly against bullying, but along with everything else at the moment, who is the bully and who the victim is a question on which no one can agree. Trump, he says, “is someone who has successfully bullied the country”, and there is bullying elsewhere on the political spectrum. Did it, I wonder, give Rushdie any satisfaction to see Germaine Greer, who was unsupportive of him during the years of the fatwa, be “no-platformed” for her remarks about transgenderism? “No, I felt sad for her. I felt it’s so stupid. I hate it when the liberal progressive left becomes stupid. Because we’re supposed to be smarter and they’re supposed to be stupid. I’ve known Germaine since the dawn of time, and we’re not close, but I thought that was stupid.”

Brexit has been depressing him, too. “It made me think I’ve been wrong about this place all this time. And I know, anecdotally, that rudeness towards people with brown skin and eastern European accents has exploded. People going up to people on the bus and saying: ‘We’ve voted now so when are you leaving?’ In the same way as Trump here has enabled the far right.”

Rushdie thinks he might like to write about the Other Side next; the part of the US that is, to those living in downtown New York, completely alien. “I have an itch to get outside the bubble. There’s such a rift in this country. Maybe you have to go to the other side of the rift.”

The Golden House, viewed as representative of a social class and wealth category rather than characters moving around a fictional space, may attract the remark “check your privilege”, which Rushdie responds to by saying of course that’s what people said about The Great Gatsby; “who cares about these rich people?”

They’ll still say it, I suggest. “Well,” says Rushdie, momentarily eliding into his image as impossibly grand, “read another book.” And he bursts into laughter.

Gentrifier. John Joe Schlichtman, Jason Patch and Marc Lamont Hill. University of Toronto Press. 2017.

The term ‘gentrification’ has become something of a buzzword in recent years. Endless newspaper articles report changes to neighbourhoods across the globe. Developments like the Cereal Killer cereal café, located in the gentrified Shoreditch area of London, have become a focus for debate and even attacked by protesters. As an adjective, ‘gentrified’ has detached from its roots in urban studies to describe clothing choices, food and art. The figure of the ‘hipster’ has become a target of pillory for their seemingly unthinking contradictory consumer behaviour that ultimately destroys what they claim to love.

These ‘pop’ narratives of gentrification are useful in raising awareness of issues of neighbourhood and urban change as well as its costs and consequences for the most marginal groups in our cities. However, they often lack detailed and nuanced understanding of how urban change has happened. ‘Gentrification’ becomes an amorphous blob, charging through our cities, wrecking our neighbourhoods. This very accessible book, Gentrifier, provides a welcome corrective to this.

The book begins by setting out how gentrification, as a term, has become extremely popular and used both widely and indiscriminately. Immediately, in presenting their ‘multi-tool’ to unpack gentrification narratives, authors John Joe Schlichtman, Jason Patch and Marc Lamont Hill provoke insight by focusing on structure, agency and the self. The title of the book – Gentrifier – instantly provokes the question that makes this book so interesting: who, me? (Particularly pertinent as the author of this review is writing in their flat in a converted warehouse in an up-and-coming area of a city).

All the authors of Gentrifier self-identify as gentrifiers from their experiences of living in various cities in the USA. While understanding the urban processes they have lived in from analytical and critical perspectives, they also present the acute moral ambiguities they faced in making the same choices as many prospective residents of a neighbourhood. It is this interlacing of personal stories with critical commentary on gentrification scholarship that makes the book so readable.

Image Credit: (MsSaraKelly CC BY 2.0)

The stories of the authors are predominantly outlined in the second chapter – ‘Dispatches’ – where the neighbourhoods listed are a roll call of gentrification stories in New York – Fort Greene, Park Slope, Harlem – as well as places like inner-city San Diego; and more unexpected ones, such as Providence, Rhode Island, where one of the authors bought a nineteenth-century house in an up-and-coming area, and amusingly recounts the story of a tour bus going past while the book was being written to show quite how gentrified the neighbourhood had become.

In focusing on their own experiences, the authors highlight the rationale behind decisions many urban scholars will have made settling into a new city and link these to the life course: for example, moving to a neighbourhood that would become gentrified as a ‘first-wave’ gentrifier when you are a student looking for somewhere affordable to stay; or seeking to move to a vibrant, ethnically and socially diverse neighbourhood when forming your first household for all the interest it will bring to your life. For the authors, this residential mobility is both a fact of their own lives and also recognised as ‘affecting the fabric of urban life around the world’ (86).

In Chapter Three, ‘Invasions’, the authors focus on this fabric of urban life, taking on the key critical issue for gentrification: displacement. Here, they place the micro-level decisions of the gentrifier into the meso- and macro-levels of the economy and policy impacting on neighbourhoods. In particular, they highlight that, for gentrification to occur, a neighbourhood must have ‘de’-somethinged to ‘re’-something. That is, they explain how planning policies (suburbanisation), economic changes (the location of industry) and social practices (racial redlining) have produced neighbourhoods that then have a rent-gap that could be exploited. This is a useful corrective to popular narratives that often assume that neighbourhoods that are gentrifying were always the way they were prior to gentrification. This ignores the waxing and waning of neighbourhood fortunes over time.

The criticism the chapter builds to is that in the popular gentrification literature and some scholarship, gentrification has become the causal factor in displacement. Subsequently:

gentrification-related displacement has become a cat-and-mouse empirical game where people are forever being displaced and gentrification comes to explain all movement (120).

The authors do not underplay the damage displacement does – particularly the way less socio-economically advantaged residents are removed from neighbourhoods – but they do add breadth to help the reader understand the myriad processes that lead to this occurring.

By setting out this macro- and meso-level of analysis, the authors imbue gentrifiers with agency: they are not (all) inherently evil people out to displace everyone in a neighbourhood, but people making positive choices in a constrained context. This analysis is then extended in Chapter Four with a Bourdieusian typology of gentrifiers. This chapter is ironically entitled ‘Columbus’, and aims to move us away from the notion that all people moving into a gentrifying neighbourhood are invaders. The types of gentrifiers identified are: conqueror; colonizer/connector; consumer; competitor; capitalist; and curator. The names of the types summarise them well, but by bringing in their own personal experiences and how they identify with these categories, the authors highlight how they all have some positive and negative characteristics. The classic one – and one this reviewer identifies as – is the ‘curator’ who feels ‘that it is […] the gentrifier’s responsibility […] to keep the sociocultural fabric of the neighbourhood as it was when the gentrifier entered’. Yet, as the authors outline, who is to say what ‘authentic’ character is when neighbourhoods change extensively over time? There are no absolutes.

A more obvious negative type of gentrifier would be the capitalist – this might conjure images of global property developers seeking to wipe out neighbourhoods to produce a return to profit. Again, by focusing the analysis on ‘who, me?’, the authors bring nuance to this account. They tell the story of how one of them became a property owner with sitting tenants, and thus became this capitalist – they had to pay the rent. The owners renovated the property and the tenants eventually left after the rent was increased. This might seem a classic case of economic displacement, and the authors are guilty-as-charged. Actually, what they recount is a story of tenants-from-hell who were creating problems. This changes what could be interpreted as simple economic behaviour into a more complex ethical conundrum.

I came to this book with a background in urban planning and urban policy. I have engaged with gentrification literature from this perspective and am often left with the question: so what? In the final chapter – ‘Collisions’ – the authors tackle this issue, describing urban studies conferences where you can get one room listening to narratives of gentrification, displacement and symbolic violence, and down the corridor another room having an entirely parallel debate on regeneration and neighbourhood upgrading.

As a scholar who is committed to delivering good quality neighbourhoods for all people (something I do in my voluntary work alongside my academic job), I struggle with some criticism from gentrification scholarship and how it is assumed all neighbourhood improvements are gentrification. Poor quality neighbourhoods are often very bad places for people to live: housing can be barely habitable; levels of crime can be high; communal areas can be poorly maintained. We know from the extensive research in public health that these qualities increase stress levels, increase levels of depression and mean that people die younger because of where they live. Yet policy interventions that seek to improve neighbourhood conditions are ceaselessly subject to criticism. This is not to say much of this is unwarranted – the reductions in the supply of affordable housing to rent in London’s regeneration schemes are state-led displacement. But demolition of high-rise flats riddled with damp to be replaced by new homes for affordable rent and new, higher quality neighbourhood environments should not be stopped for fear of gentrification. This should be welcomed as needed investment.

This book will provoke outrage among many gentrification scholars. But it provides a welcome corrective to the slap-dash way ‘gentrification’ is used an explanatory force in popular narratives and some scholarship. The £20 cover price puts it just within reach of the interested general reader, who I would encourage to read it. It would also be a valuable addition to reading lists on urban studies, urban geography and urban planning.

Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime. Bruno Latour (trans. by Catherine Porter). Polity Press. 2017.

Hesiod’s Theogony recounts the genesis of Gaia as the Earth, a feminised primordial deity who simultaneously emerges with Eros and Tartarus out of the antecedent void of Chaos to become ‘the ever-sure foundations of the deathless ones who hold the peaks of snowy Olympus’. Gaia proceeds to create her equal, the ‘starry Heaven’, and from their consummation are descended numerous other deities. From thence is made possible the proliferation of mortal life on her surface.

As the progenitor of that which exists, Gaia is unmistakably active and dangerous. Indeed, James Lovelock resurrected the concept of Gaia to illustrate, contrary to the original myth, not a gigantic organism or compassionate deity, but rather a self-regulating system composed of a multiplicity of indivisible elements that evolve through mutual modification. Hardly a passive incubator for the technological fancies of the human intellect, the earth transformed by the human mind, as Paul Valéry once pointed out, is today ‘repaying us in kind’. It reciprocates with disaster.

Climatic catastrophe — along with the planetary depletion of resources to fuel it — shatters the dream of continual progress supposedly vouchsafed by liberal humanism. The anthropogenic world has already betrayed the ideational ineptitude of the human mind, its moral sightlessness. Some have even managed to turn climate change into a ‘debate’ that conveniently postulates the existence of two ‘sides’ whose voices must both, for the sake of fair-mindedness, be heard. The victory of the denialists is ensured as soon as they convince people that there is a scientific ‘debate’ still to be had, which suggests the inexistence of sufficient evidence either way. The realisation of our insecurity, our planetary precariousness, is clearly incongruous with our modern, narcissistic distemper. Only through denial can the mind discern a ‘rational’ design in what it has produced.

Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime constitutes an extended reworking of Bruno Latour’s 2013 Gifford lectures delivered at Edinburgh University. Latour’s intention is to take up this conception in pursuit of a new way of thinking about our critical moment. He expressly emphasises that Gaia is a secular figure for the earth: a ‘name proposed for all the intermingled and unpredictable consequences of the agents, each of which is pursuing its own interest’. It is, as he termed it in his original lectures, ‘an entity composed of multiple, reciprocally linked, but ungoverned self-advancing processes’. Not ‘a kindly figure of unification’, it does not denote the existence of a ‘higher system than the life forms it manipulates’ since it isn’t itself something unified. It doesn’t offer the possibility of a global view, but a partial, terrestrial one. As opposed to the ‘old nature’, Gaia ‘does not play either the role of inert object that could be appropriated or the role of higher arbiter’.
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‘Gaia’ seems a misty notion — a nominal non-entity, if you will — that verges not only towards the obvious, but also, in its vast generality, towards the erroneous. Its content is so variegated, so heterogeneous, so interconnected, so inextricable, that one wonders if it offers anything beyond the further ‘post-human’ redistribution of agency it entails. The desire for complete submersion — ‘to slip into, envelop ourselves within, a large number of loops’ — perhaps explains Latour’s meandering prose. Frequently suffering from word bloat, one often longs for him to get to the point; although, in a resolutely flat ontology, there cannot be any ‘point’, ‘whole’, or ‘centre’ that one could scale. Everything reduces to an endless loop. Hence, Latour’s philosophy of the pretzel offers only the conundrum of entanglement without exit, especially given that critique has apparently ‘run out of steam’. There is no way to escape the network in which one is forced to play a part.

Latour has perhaps belaboured Gaia more than it warrants, especially if it amounts only to a ‘signal telling us to come back to Earth’. On the other hand, we surely need such signals since the Kantian need for thinking to orient itself has rarely been more urgent. The difficulty of this task is today increased all the more since we occupy not an inert, unobtrusive backdrop in which or against which we may orient ourselves, as we thought we did with Nature, but instead partake in a shared life on a volatile earth that confounds our attempts to manage it. Hence the recent invention of mind-altering conceptions (the Anthropocene, Gaia, the Chthulucene, etc) of varying merit to which we now have recourse in order to understand this ‘new climatic regime’ without resorting to the usual dichotomies.

Whether this intellectual labour will help avert environmental cataclysm remains to be seen. For the ecological catastrophe is clearly contiguous with a human crisis: a profound perturbation of our politics, of our epistemology, of our ethics. This global technosphere powered by the fossil economy has proven perversely inimical to life. It may finally prove fatal, since the actions undertaken to ameliorate planetary exploitation are belated, and will now likely prove insufficient. It is only sensible to wonder whether Latour’s ‘Earthbound’ can ever prevail against the recalcitrant convictions of the ‘Moderns’, or the political connivance of their most devout apologists, the climate sceptics: those whose continued occupation of Nature leaves them all too dangerously Human.

In Defense ( Again) of Free Speech.....The Kellyanne Conway Technique: Perfecting the Ancient Art of Delivering Half-Truths, Fake News, and Obfuscation―With a Smile Paperback – August 22, 2017 by Jarret Berenstein (Racehouse Publishing) ; Free Speech Beyond Words: The Surprising Reach of the First AmendmentFeb 14, 2017 by Mark V. Tushnet and Alan K. Chen,Hardcover,NYU Press; The Intimidation Game: How the Left Is Silencing Free SpeechJun 27, 2017 by Kimberley Strassel Paperback, Twelve;Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World Paperback – May 4, 2017 by Timothy Garton Ash , Atlantic Books;The Complete Infidel's Guide to Free Speech (and Its Enemies) (Complete Infidel's Guides) Paperback – July 24, 2017 by Robert Spencer , Regnery Books;Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World Paperback – March 28, 2017 by Timothy Garton Ash, Yale university Press; Free Speech on Campus Hardcover – July 28, 2017 by Sigal R. Ben-Porath ) ,University of Pennsylvania Press; The War Against Free Speech Paperback – March 9, 2017 by Jordan B Peterson (Books on Demand); Free Speech and the State: An Unprincipled Approach 1st ed. 2017 Edition by David van Mill (Palgrave MacMillan) ;Free Speech and Censorship Around the Globe Paperback – January, 2017 by Peter Molnar (Central European University Press)

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White nationalists marching on the University of Virginia campus, Charlottesville, August 2017

Does the First Amendment need a rewrite in the era of Donald Trump? Should the rise of white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups lead us to cut back the protection afforded to speech that expresses hatred and advocates violence, or otherwise undermines equality? If free speech exacerbates inequality, why doesn’t equality, also protected by the Constitution, take precedence?

After the tragic violence at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, on August 12, these questions take on renewed urgency. Many have asked in particular why the ACLU, of which I am national legal director, represented Jason Kessler, the organizer of the rally, in challenging Charlottesville’s last-minute effort to revoke his permit. The city proposed to move his rally a mile from its originally approved site—Emancipation Park, the location of the Robert E. Lee monument whose removal Kessler sought to protest—but offered no reason why the protest would be any easier to manage a mile away. As ACLU offices across the country have done for thousands of marchers for almost a century, the ACLU of Virginia gave Kessler legal help to preserve his permit. Should the fatal violence that followed prompt recalibration of the scope of free speech?

The future of the First Amendment may be at issue. A 2015 Pew Research Center poll reported that 40 percent of millennials think the government should be able to suppress speech deemed offensive to minority groups, as compared to only 12 percent of those born between 1928 and 1945. Young people today voice far less faith in free speech than do their grandparents. And Europe, where racist speech is not protected, has shown that democracies can reasonably differ about this issue.

People who oppose the protection of racist speech make several arguments, all ultimately resting on a claim that speech rights conflict with equality, and that equality should prevail in the balance.* They contend that the “marketplace of ideas” assumes a mythical level playing field. If some speakers drown out or silence others, the marketplace cannot function in the interests of all. They argue that the history of mob and state violence targeting African-Americans makes racist speech directed at them especially indefensible. Tolerating such speech reinforces harms that this nation has done to African-Americans from slavery through Jim Crow to today’s de facto segregation, implicit bias, and structural discrimination. And still others argue that while it might have made sense to tolerate Nazis marching in Skokie in 1978, now, when white supremacists have a friend in the president himself, the power and influence they wield justify a different approach.

There is truth in each of these propositions. The United States is a profoundly unequal society. Our nation’s historical mistreatment of African-Americans has been shameful and the scourge of racism persists to this day. Racist speech causes real harm. It can inspire violence and intimidate people from freely exercising their own rights. There is no doubt that Donald Trump’s appeals to white resentment and his reluctance to condemn white supremacists after Charlottesville have emboldened many racists. But at least in the public arena, none of these unfortunate truths supports authorizing the state to suppress speech that advocates ideas antithetical to egalitarian values.

The argument that free speech should not be protected in conditions of inequality is misguided. The right to free speech does not rest on the presumption of a level playing field. Virtually all rights—speech included—are enjoyed unequally, and can reinforce inequality. The right to property most obviously protects the billionaire more than it does the poor. Homeowners have greater privacy rights than apartment dwellers, who in turn have more privacy than the homeless. The fundamental right to choose how to educate one’s children means little to parents who cannot afford private schools, and contributes to the resilience of segregated schools and the reproduction of privilege. Criminal defendants’ rights are enjoyed much more robustly by those who can afford to hire an expensive lawyer than by those dependent on the meager resources that states dedicate to the defense of the indigent, thereby contributing to the endemic disparities that plague our criminal justice system.

Critics argue that the First Amendment is different, because if the weak are silenced while the strong speak, or if some have more to spend on speech than others, the outcomes of the “marketplace of ideas” will be skewed. But the marketplace is a metaphor; it describes not a scientific method for identifying truth but a choice among realistic options. It maintains only that it is better for the state to remain neutral than to dictate what is true and suppress the rest. One can be justifiably skeptical of a debate in which Charles Koch or George Soros has outsized advantages over everyone else, but still prefer it to one in which the Trump—or indeed Obama—administration can control what can be said. If free speech is critical to democracy and to holding our representatives accountable—and it is—we cannot allow our representatives to suppress views they think are wrong, false, or disruptive.


Should our nation’s shameful history of racism change the equation? There is no doubt that African-Americans have suffered unique mistreatment, and that our country has yet to reckon adequately with that fact. But to treat speech targeting African-Americans differently from speech targeting anyone else cannot be squared with the first principle of free speech: the state must be neutral with regard to speakers’ viewpoints. Moreover, what about other groups? While each group’s experiences are distinct, many have suffered grave discrimination, including Native Americans, Asian-Americans, LGBT people, women, Jews, Latinos, Muslims, and immigrants generally. Should government officials be free to censor speech that offends or targets any of these groups? If not all, which groups get special protection?

And even if we could somehow answer that question, how would we define what speech to suppress? Should the government be able to silence all arguments against affirmative action or about genetic differences between men and women, or just uneducated racist and sexist rants? It is easy to recognize inequality; it is virtually impossible to articulate a standard for suppression of speech that would not afford government officials dangerously broad discretion and invite discrimination against particular viewpoints.

But are these challenges perhaps worth taking on because Donald Trump is president, and his victory has given new voice to white supremacists? That is exactly the wrong conclusion. After all, if we were to authorize government officials to suppress speech they find contrary to American values, it would be Donald Trump—and his allies in state and local governments—who would use that power. Here is the ultimate contradiction in the argument for state suppression of speech in the name of equality: it demands protection of disadvantaged minorities’ interests, but in a democracy, the state acts in the name of the majority, not the minority. Why would disadvantaged minorities trust representatives of the majority to decide whose speech should be censored? At one time, most Americans embraced “separate but equal” for the races and separate spheres for the sexes as defining equality. It was the freedom to contest those views, safeguarded by the principle of free speech, that allowed us to reject them.

As Frederick Douglass reminded us, “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” Throughout our history, disadvantaged minority groups have effectively used the First Amendment to speak, associate, and assemble for the purpose of demanding their rights—and the ACLU has defended their right to do so. Where would the movements for racial justice, women’s rights, and LGBT equality be without a muscular First Amendment?

In some limited but important settings, equality norms do trump free speech. At schools and in the workplace, for example, antidiscrimination law forbids harassment and hostile working conditions based on race or sex, and those rules limit what people can say there. The courts have recognized that in situations involving formal hierarchy and captive audiences, speech can be limited to ensure equal access and treatment. But those exceptions do not extend to the public sphere, where ideas must be open to full and free contestation, and those who disagree can turn away or talk back.

The response to Charlottesville showed the power of talking back. When Donald Trump implied a kind of moral equivalence between the white supremacist protesters and their counter-protesters, he quickly found himself isolated. Prominent Republicans, military leaders, business executives, and conservative, moderate, and liberal commentators alike condemned the ideology of white supremacy, Trump himself, or both.

When white supremacists called a rally the following week in Boston, they mustered only a handful of supporters. They were vastly outnumbered by tens of thousands of counterprotesters who peacefully marched through the streets to condemn white supremacy, racism, and hate. Boston proved yet again that the most powerful response to speech that we hate is not suppression but more speech. Even Stephen Bannon, until recently Trump’s chief strategist and now once again executive chairman of Breitbart News, denounced white supremacists as “losers” and “a collection of clowns.” Free speech, in short, is exposing white supremacists’ ideas to the condemnation they deserve. Moral condemnation, not legal suppression, is the appropriate response to these despicable ideas.

Some white supremacists advocate not only hate but violence. They want to purge the country of nonwhites, non-Christians, and other “undesirables,” and return us to a racial caste society—and the only way to do that is through force. The First Amendment protects speech but not violence. So what possible value is there in protecting speech advocating violence? Our history illustrates that unless very narrowly constrained, the power to restrict the advocacy of violence is an invitation to punish political dissent. A. Mitchell Palmer, J. Edgar Hoover, and Joseph McCarthy all used the advocacy of violence as a justification to punish people who associated with Communists, socialists, or civil rights groups.

Those lessons led the Supreme Court, in a 1969 ACLU case involving a Ku Klux Klan rally, to rule that speech advocating violence or other criminal conduct is protected unless it is intended and likely to produce imminent lawless action, a highly speech-protective rule. In addition to incitement, thus narrowly defined, a “true threat” against specific individuals is also not protected. But aside from these instances in which speech and violence are inextricably intertwined, speech advocating violence gets full First Amendment protection.

In Charlottesville, the ACLU’s client swore under oath that he intended only a peaceful protest. The city cited general concerns about managing the crowd in seeking to move the marchers a mile from the originally approved site. But as the district court found, the city offered no reason why there wouldn’t be just as many protesters and counterprotesters at the alternative site. Violence did break out in Charlottesville, but that appears to have been at least in part because the police utterly failed to keep the protesters separated or to break up the fights.

What about speech and weapons? The ACLU’s executive director, Anthony Romero, explained that, in light of Charlottesville and the risk of violence at future protests, the ACLU will not represent marchers who seek to brandish weapons while protesting. (This is not a new position. In a pamphlet signed by Roger Baldwin, Arthur Garfield Hays, Morris Ernst, and others, the ACLU took a similar stance in 1934, explaining that we defended the Nazis’ right to speak, but not to march while armed.) This is a content-neutral policy; it applies to all armed marchers, regardless of their views. And it is driven by the twin concerns of avoiding violence and the impairment of many rights, speech included, that violence so often occasions. Free speech allows us to resolve our differences through public reason; violence is its antithesis. The First Amendment protects the exchange of views, not the exchange of bullets. Just as it is reasonable to exclude weapons from courthouses, airports, schools, and Fourth of July celebrations on the National Mall, so it is reasonable to exclude them from public protests.

Some ACLU staff and supporters have made a more limited argument. They don’t directly question whether the First Amendment should protect white supremacist groups. Instead, they ask why the ACLU as an organization represents them. In most cases, the protesters should be able to find lawyers elsewhere. Many ACLU staff members understandably find representing these groups repugnant; their views are directly contrary to many of the values we fight for. And representing right-wing extremists makes it more difficult for the ACLU to work with its allies on a wide range of issues, from racial justice to LGBT equality to immigrants’ rights. As a matter of resources, the ACLU spends far more on claims to equality by marginalized groups than it does on First Amendment claims. If the First Amendment work is undermining our other efforts, why do it?

These are real costs, and deserve consideration as ACLU lawyers make case-by-case decisions about how to deploy our resources. But they cannot be a bar to doing such work. The truth is that both internally and externally, it would be much easier for the ACLU to represent only those with whom we agree. But the power of our First Amendment advocacy turns on our commitment to a principle of viewpoint neutrality that requires protection for proponents and opponents of our own best view of racial justice. If we defended speech only when we agreed with it, on what ground would we ask others to tolerate speech they oppose?

In a fundamental sense, the First Amendment safeguards not only the American experiment in democratic pluralism, but everything the ACLU does. In the pursuit of liberty and justice, we associate, advocate, and petition the government. We protect the First Amendment not only because it is the lifeblood of democracy and an indispensable element of freedom, but because it is the guarantor of civil society itself. It protects the press, the academy, religion, political parties, and nonprofit associations like ours. In the era of Donald Trump, the importance of preserving these avenues for advancing justice and preserving democracy should be more evident than ever.

Henry David Thoreau: A Life by Laura Dassow Walls University of Chicago Press, 615 pp., $35.00; Walden by Henry David Thoreau, with an introduction and annotations by Bill McKibben Beacon, 312 pp., $10.95 (paper); Expect Great Things: The Life and Search of Henry David Thoreau by Kevin Dann TarcherPerigee, 387 pp., $30.00; Thoreau’s Animals by Henry David Thoreau, edited by Geoff Wisner and illustrated by Debby Cotter Kaspari Yale University Press, 256 pp., $30.00; Thoreau and the Language of Trees by Richard Higgins, with a foreword by Robert D. Richardson and photographs by Richard Higgins University of California Press, 230 pp., $24.95; The Boatman: Henry David Thoreau’s River Years by Robert M. Thorson Harvard University Press, 315 pp., $29.95; When I Came to Die: Process and Prophecy in Thoreau’s Vision of Dyingby Audrey Raden University of Massachusetts Press, 156 pp., $90.00; $27.95 (paper); Bird Relics: Grief and Vitalism in Thoreau by Branka Arsić Harvard Universtiy Press, 455 pp., $51.50; Thoreau’s Wildflowers by Henry David Thoreau, edited by Geoff Wisner and illustrated by Barry Moser Henry ThoreauYale University Press, 300 pp., $30.00;

This year America celebrates the bicentennial birthday of Henry David Thoreau with many excellent publications about his life, legacy, and love of the natural world. Only his fellow citizens are likely to lend an ear to them. Unlike his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thoreau hardly makes it onto the list of notable American authors outside his home country. His peculiar brand of American nativism has little international appeal, for as Emerson wrote in his funeral eulogy of May 9, 1862:


No truer American existed than Thoreau. His preference of his country and condition was genuine, and his aversation from English and European manners and tastes almost reached contempt.

These days the question of what it means to be a “true” American resists rational analysis. Whatever one can say about Americans that is true, the opposite is equally true. We are the most godless and most religious, the most puritanical and most libertine, the most charitable and most heartless of societies. We espouse the maxim “that government is best which governs least,” yet look to government to address our every problem. Our environmental conscientiousness is outmatched only by our environmental recklessness. We are outlaws obsessed by the rule of law, individualists devoted to communitarian values, a nation of fat people with anorexic standards of beauty. The only things we love more than nature’s wilderness are our cars, malls, and digital technology. The paradoxes of the American psyche go back at least as far as our Declaration of Independence, in which slave owners proclaimed that all men are endowed by their creator with an unalienable right to liberty.

In this sense Thoreau was truly American. In her splendid new biography, Henry David Thoreau: A Life, Laura Dassow Walls, a professor of English literature at the University of Notre Dame, offers a multifaceted view of the many contradictions of his personality.

Thoreau has come “down to us in ice, chilled into a misanthrope, prickly with spines, isolated as a hermit and nag,” she writes, acknowledging that he did his fair share to earn that reputation. He was prickly enough that their friend Elizabeth Hoar confided to Emerson, “I love Henry, but do not like him; and as for taking his arm, I should as soon take the arm of an elm tree.” From early on people accused him of hypocrisy, censuring him for championing self-sufficiency while he occasionally returned home for dinner during the years he lived at Walden Pond. (“No other male American writer has been so discredited for enjoying a meal with loved ones or for not doing his own laundry,” writes Walls.)1

Walls does not deny that Thoreau was “occasionally hermitous, and even a nag,” yet in her full-bodied portrait he comes alive also as “a loving son, a devoted friend, a lively and charismatic presence who filled the room, laughed and danced, sang and teased and wept.” The citizens of Concord loved him dearly because, in addition to being nettlesome, he was genuine and kind.

In a finely tuned discussion of his ambivalent sexuality—one that avoids excessive speculation without avoiding the topic altogether, as many scholars tend to do—Walls concludes that Thoreau, who probably died a virgin, was drawn to men and women equally. With Aristophanic flair, he noted in his journal: “I love men with the same distinction that I love woman—as if my friend were of some third sex.”

Thoreau’s friendship with Margaret Fuller—editor of the Transcendentalist journal The Dial—reveals the extent to which he was free of resentment, vanity, or sexism. In 1840, when he submitted an ambitious essay and a poem to The Dial, Fuller sent him a rejection letter that would have unhinged most other nineteenth-century American men with a Harvard degree, saying of the essay that its thoughts were “so out of their natural order, that I cannot read it through without pain…but seem to hear the grating of tools on the mosaic.” As for the poem, she objected to its “want of fluent music,” comparing it to a “bare hill which the warm gales of spring have not visited.” Thoreau took her criticisms to heart and learned from them. They subsequently became good friends.

Was Thoreau egotistical? Surely, yet as Walls writes, “injustice to another made him storm with the passionate and sleepless rage that powered his great writings of political protest”—writings like “Civil Disobedience” and his fiery defense of the abolitionist John Brown.

His protests were not only political. Like Emerson, Thoreau believed that education was democracy’s highest calling. Upon graduating from Harvard in 1837, he was offered a dream job at Concord’s Center Grammar School, with a lofty salary of $500 a year. He made it clear when he accepted the teaching position that he did not believe in flogging students, yet after the deacon insisted that he administer “corporeal chastisement, the corner-stone of a sound education,” Thoreau disciplined some of his students with a ferule (he did not own a cowhide for flogging). He felt so stained by his act of “uncivil obedience” that he went to the deacon that same evening and resigned, ending his career as a public school teacher ten days after it had begun.




If Thoreau was a hermit, he had a strange way of expressing it. In 1842, three years before building his cabin at Walden Pond, he wrote in his journal: “I have no private good—unless it be my peculiar ability to serve the public—this is the only individual property.” By “public” Thoreau meant many things: the human community of Concord where he spent most of his life, rooted like a tree; the surrounding woods, waters, and wildlife that community shared in common; and the country at large. In everything he did and wrote, Thoreau identified himself first and foremost as a citizen, not only of his hometown and the American republic, but of the natural world that provided them with their material foundations.

Walls suggests that Frederick Douglass and the radical abolitionist Wendell Phillips played a decisive part in Thoreau’s decision to build a cabin at Walden and sojourn there for two years and two months. These abolitionists, each in his own way, convinced Thoreau that “a million men are of no importance compared with one man…[who is prepared] to do right.” Like them, Thoreau wanted to stand as a majority of one. “Any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one already,” he wrote in “Civil Disobedience.”

It was as a citizen of Concord, hence of America, that Thoreau took up residence at Walden on Independence Day 1845.2 He went there not to isolate himself but to situate himself “a mile from any neighbor”—distant enough for independence, yet close enough to remain within earshot. Walden addresses itself to “you…who are said to live in New England,” and its epigraph declares its intention “to wake my neighbors up.”

Wake them up to what? To the fact that America was still waiting to be discovered, that his neighbors had given up prematurely on its promise of freedom, independence, and God’s heaven on earth. The Puritan pilgrims had brought with them to the New World an infinite expectation, only to succumb to disappointment after setting foot on a continent they saw as wild and harsh, not at all the Eden they had hoped for. Thoreau went to Walden to discover for himself whether America—“this new yet unapproachable America,” as Emerson called it—amounted to a false promise, or whether it did indeed contain a paradise that was not only approachable but touchable.

What he found is that “we occupy the heaven of the gods without knowing it.” Paradise exists all around us, in America’s “wildness,” the natural environment of the continent. In the contact between his own body and America’s forests, meadows, lakes, rivers, mountains, and animals, Thoreau discovered what he called “hard matter in its home.” That home was the “hard bottom” or “reality” that we crave. “I stand in awe of my body, this matter to which I am bound,” he wrote in his journal. “Daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it,—rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks!… Contact! Contact!”

The tactile transcendence of America’s wildness opens its prospects to those who would wake up to it. One need not travel to sublime mountain ranges or remote wilderness areas to access it. It lies before us, in what Thoreau called the day’s dawning. “We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn.” Only such expectation brings forth that heightening of the senses that allows America to appear in its dawning ecstasies; and lest we take the notion of dawn too literally, Thoreau declares: “Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me.”

It is impossible to overstate the importance of anticipation in Thoreau’s philosophy of sense perception and spiritual elevation. In another bicentennial biography, Expect Great Things, Kevin Dann lays great stress on the fact that for Thoreau “anticipation precedes discovery.” Dann’s biography concentrates more on Thoreau’s rich psychic life than on his multidimensional life as friend, family member, Concord citizen, political activist, and writer. Through a sympathetic reading of his journal above all, Dann seeks to gain access to the inward paradise of perception that Thoreau inhabited during the last decade or two of his life.

Dann argues that Thoreau cultivated the “thrilled and expectant mood” (Thoreau’s words) because he believed that we only see what we are prepared to see. According to Thoreau:


Objects are concealed from our view not so much because they are out of the course of our visual ray as because there is no intention of the mind and eye toward them…. There is just as much beauty visible to us in the landscape as we are prepared to appreciate, not a grain more.

Thoreau believed in the shamanistic power of expectation. Dann’s biography in fact gets its title from what it takes to be a doctrinal statement that Thoreau recorded in his journal: “In the long run, we find what we expect. We shall be fortunate then if we expect great things.”

Yet it is not enough merely to expect. To deepen and expand the horizon of perception, one must acquire an exacting empirical knowledge of the natural world in its endless particularities, for the intention of the eye follows the intention of the mind. That is why, after graduating from Harvard, Thoreau spent a great deal of time studying the geology and ecology of New England, reading as many accounts as he could of its native species, whether by contemporaries or earlier generations of American naturalists, botanists, farmers, and explorers. In time he became a first-rate naturalist himself, adding his own discoveries to the archival record.Concord Museum
Henry David Thoreau, 1861; ambrotype by Edward Sidney Dunshee

Thoreau’s Animals, edited and introduced by Geoff Wisner, offers an engaging and often entertaining selection of Thoreau’s writings about the wild and domestic animal species he came upon in the forests, farms, and wetlands in and around Concord. It is a companion volume to Thoreau’s Wildflowers, and together the two volumes throw into relief the degree to which Thoreau was almost superhumanly awake to the flora and fauna of his surrounding environment. There is more here than testimony of Thoreau’s much-vaunted “powers of observation.” The volumes offer clear evidence that in his later adult life Thoreau had thoroughly cleansed the doors of perception, and that the world appeared to him as infinite in its local manifestations.

The same holds true for the enchanting book Thoreau and the Language of Trees, by Richard Higgins. In lucid and elegant prose, Higgins traces Thoreau’s deep love affair with various arboreal species, like the white pine of Maine, which, in a formulation that unsettled an editor, he claimed was “as immortal as I am, and perchance will go to as high a heaven, there to tower above me still.” Each of Higgins’s ten chapters contains an essay, followed by pertinent passages from Thoreau. One gets to the end of this book fully persuaded by Higgins’s claim that Thoreau was captivated by trees, and that “they played a significant role in his creativity as a writer, his work as a naturalist, his philosophical thought, and even his inner life.” In a beautiful touch, Higgins adds: “It sometimes seems that he could see the sap flowing beneath their bark.”

Walden—republished by Beacon Press this year with an inspired introduction by Bill McKibben about Thoreau’s relevance to our own spiritually impoverished reality—is arguably the most important work of literary nonfiction in the American canon. Thanks to that book, subtitled “A Life in the Woods,” the image of Thoreau as a lover of woods and trees is entrenched in the American imagination. Yet in The Boatman, Robert M. Thorson reminds us that in the last decade of his life Thoreau devoted a great deal more attention to rivers, especially the three main rivers around Concord (the Sudbury, Assabet, and Concord, known to the seventeenth-century Puritans who settled the valley as the South, North, and Great Rivers). Thorson’s book offers the reader an in-depth account of Thoreau’s lifelong love of boats, his skill as a navigator, his intimate knowledge of the waterways around Concord, and his extensive survey of the Concord River.

“Henry’s unheralded river book is his journal,” writes Thorson. Thoreau’s Journal contains some two million words written over twenty years.3 The Journal is the main focus of an exhibition at the Morgan Library and Museum, “This Ever New Self: Thoreau and His Journal,” which brings together nearly one hundred relics of this American saint, including the small green desk on which he wrote most of his life work, the flute with which he enchanted Margaret Fuller and other humans and nonhumans alike, as well as more than twenty of his Journal notebooks, many of his letters, books from his personal library, the only two photographs for which he ever sat, and even some pressed plants from his herbarium. Those many readers and scholars who have increasingly come to consider Thoreau’s Journal his main literary achievement will want to make a pilgrimage this summer to the Morgan.

Both Thorson and Walls make a point of stressing that Thoreau was fully cognizant of what today we call the “anthropocene,” or the era when most of the planet has been touched or altered by human beings. When Thoreau embarked on an excursion to Mount Katahdin in Maine, for example, he imagined he would be venturing into pristine territory, only to find that humans had left their mark in even the state’s most remote regions. In his introduction to Walden, McKibben writes that Thoreau’s expedition “took him through the heart of that then-mighty wilderness,” yet as Walls remarks in a moving passage:


Even where the road ended, the houses did not, and even after the last house, there were logging camps and blacksmith forges, dams and log booms, trails rutted with use, even a billboard. The untouched forest had been logged, each tree cut and branded, its destiny not to reach for the heavens but to drop downstream through the falls to the sawmills.

Or as Thoreau noted in his journal: “It is vain to dream of a wildness distant from ourselves. There is none such.”

Thoreau was either resigned to or remarkably sanguine about humanity’s transformative as well as destructive impact on nature. He did not approve of the way “human activity was now the dominant agency driving landscape change,” as Thorson puts it, yet he quietly accepted it as part of the ongoing, ever-changing history of the earth.

What saved Thoreau from a gnashing of teeth was his awareness of how much wildness still surrounded him. One can’t help but marvel at the rapture that the sight of things like huckleberries, turtles, or wildflowers would inspire in him. There was clearly a sublimated libidinal surplus within him—nourished by his lifelong chastity—that rendered his relation to nature thoroughly erotic and ecstatic, even in the midst of the anthropocene spectacle in its most demoralizing forms.

Kevin Dann claims that “throughout his life, Thoreau was certain that his ‘property’—his soul—was immortal, destined to go to God again when he died.” That may or may not be true, yet it is certain that Thoreau believed there was more than enough heaven in this world to go around. For all his personal contradictions, he saw none between his immortal soul and the “hard matter” of his body, or between a transcendent heaven and a mortal earth.

Thoreau declared that he went to the Walden woods “to front only the essential facts of life,” for he did not want, when it came time for him to die, to “discover that I had not lived.” In her poignant and eloquent book, When I Came to Die, Audrey Raden shows how, for Thoreau, death and dying were among the most essential facts of life, and that to live life to the fullest meant to live it in full awareness of its mortality.

In Bird Relics, Branka Arsić delves into Thoreau’s writings, with particular attention to the Indian Notebooks and unpublished bird notebooks, to trace the way his thinking about nature developed over the years into a kind of pan-vitalism, which sees the generative forces of life at work in death, disease, and natural decay. For Thoreau the latter are not opposed to, but are part of, life. Arsić gives due emphasis to the crucial part that the death of his brother John played in Thoreau’s understanding of the all-encompassing force of life. Thoreau was so deeply bonded with his brother that, in a psychic if not physical sense, he died with John in 1842. His grief was as intense as it was prolonged and, as Arsić suggests, it helped incubate his philosophy of life. He emerged from it believing that whatever was alive in John lived on in the regenerative nature of the surrounding landscape. Thoreau’s grief lies behind his calm acceptance of death, which life absorbs back into itself and from which it engenders new life.

It is no doubt because he lived a life of daily contact with the real—with nature in its everyday miracles—that Thoreau died a “beautiful death,” as it was called in those days. It was beautiful not because it was painless (he died of tuberculosis in his family home at forty-four) but because he faced his approaching death with remarkable serenity and even cheerfulness, convinced that death was not so much the termination as the consummation of life.

When Thoreau’s abolitionist friend Parker Pillsbury visited him shortly before he died and found him “deathly weak and pale,” he took his hand and remarked to Thoreau, “I suppose this is the best you can do now.” Thoreau smiled and “gasped a faint assent.” When Pillsbury then said, “The outworks seem almost ready to give way,” Thoreau whispered, “Yes,—but as long as she cracks she holds.” This was a saying common among boys skating on the thinning ice of lakes and ponds, meaning that as long as the ice cracks, winter still holds.

By his own account Pillsbury then remarked to Thoreau, “You seem so near the dark river, that I almost wonder how the opposite shore may appear to you.” Thoreau’s answer remains, for all intents and purposes, his last word: “One world at a time.”

Thoreau had an almost mystical reverence for facts, above all the fact of death. In Walden he wrote:


If you stand right fronting and face to face to a fact, you will see the sun glimmer on both its surfaces, as if it were a cimeter, and feel its sweet edge dividing you through the heart and marrow, and so you will happily conclude your mortal career. Be it life or death, we crave only reality.

Among Americans nothing has more authority than facts. Of course the contrary is also true (a quarter of Americans believe the sun revolves around the earth; more than three quarters believe there is indisputable evidence that aliens have visited our planet). Is it true that we crave reality? Yes, but we crave irreality just as much if not more. Our addiction to our television, computer, and cell phone screens confirms as much. As for death, it does not seem that today we have a knack for concluding our mortal careers “happily.”

I believe there are two immensely important Thoreauvian legacies that call out for retrieval among his fellow citizens today. One is learning to live deliberately, fronting “only the essential facts of life,” so that death may be lived for what it is—the natural, and not tragic, outcome of life.

The other equally important lesson is how to touch the hard matter of the world, how to see the world again in its full range of detail, diversity, and infinite reach. Nothing has suffered greater impoverishment in our era than our ability to see the visible world. It has become increasingly invisible to us as we succumb to the sorcery of our digital screens. It will take the likes of Henry David Thoreau, the most keen-sighted American of all, to teach us how to discover America again and see it for what it is.

Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law. James Q. Whitman. Princeton University Press. 2017.

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After the full horrors of Nazism were exposed at the end of World War II, eugenics – in Francis Galton’s words, the ‘science which deals with all influences that improve the inborn qualities of a race’ – as a social and scientific movement slowly faded from public view. The fact that Ronald Fisher, the founder of the modern discipline of genetics, and John Maynard Keynes, the economist whose ideas underpinned the New Deal, were active members of the Eugenics Society is now rarely discussed at Cambridge University, where they spent much of their academic careers. In 1954, the name of scientific journal the Annals of Eugenics was changed to the Annals of Human Genetics, and in 1965 the incoming recipient of the Chair of Eugenics at UCL, Harry Harris, became instead the Galton Professor of Human Genetics.

However, two groups of people have worked hard to keep memories of this great enthusiasm for a ‘scientific’ approach to institutionalised racism alive. The first are those who see understanding the history of the twentieth century as important, in order that we do not make the same mistakes again. They argue that whilst Nazism was the extreme end of the spectrum, it espoused views on nationality and race that were, if not mainstream, definitely recognised as acceptable by many sectors of society in Europe and the Americas. James Q. Whitman, author of Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law, falls into this camp.

A legal scholar, Whitman identifies many commonalities between Nazi legislation in the early 1930s, which sought to exclude Jews from German public life, and the ‘Jim Crow’ laws enacted to exclude African Americans in the United States. Moving beyond commonalities, he argues that Nazi lawyers and the German public had a keen interest in US race law. As an example, he cites a 1936 article on racial policy in Neues Volk (New Volk), a propaganda newsletter from the National Socialist Office, which included a US map labelled ‘Statutory Restrictions on Negro Rights’, detailing disenfranchisement and anti-miscegenation laws in the 48 mainland US states.

The second group is the far-right movements arguably edging into the mainstream in the United States and Europe (in Hungary or Holland, for example). The chants of ‘Blood and Soil’ from the recent white supremacist rallies in Charlottesville, Virginia were an explicit reference to the Nazi ideal of ‘Blut und Boden’, and those gathered there are united by their fascination with fascist ideology and rhetoric. Vanguard America argues in its manifesto for an economy ‘free from the influence of international corporations, led by a rootless group of international Jews, which place profit beyond the interests of our people’. Membership of the Nationalist Socialist Movement (described on their website as ‘America’s Premier White Civil Rights Organization’) is ‘open to non-Semitic heterosexuals of European descent’, and a popular blogger for the alt-right, Mike Peinovich, who spoke at Charlottesville, hosts a chatshow entitled ‘The Daily Shoah’.

Hitler’s American Model is therefore a timely and sobering outline of how racist ideology can make its way into the political fabric of a country. It focuses on the changes introduced by Nazi lawyers post-1933, but we also learn much about how this developed in the United States. Whilst in the latter the case law excluding non-whites from public life developed over decades, in Nazi Germany the Nuremberg Laws were drafted and introduced in 1935, just two years after Hitler became Chancellor. Whitman’s main premise is that in this accelerated process, German lawyers and officials took inspiration and concrete guidance from legal practice across the Atlantic.

Image Credit: Crescent Theatre in Belzoni, Mississippi, 1939 (Wikipedia Public Domain)

Reading the book, two sets of records stand out, one for their presence, and the other for their absence. The first is the stenographic report of a 5 June 1934 meeting of the Commission on Criminal Law Reform. Whitman’s twenty-page description of this transcript makes for gripping reading, and is the highlight of the book (94-113). The second is the lack of documentation regarding a September 1935 US study tour by 45 German lawyers (132). The trip was apparently a reward for their success in finalising the Nuremberg Race Laws, laid out by Hermann Göring at a rally only a few weeks earlier. As Dr. Heubner, chief of the Nazi Jurists’ Association, told the tour group before they left: ‘through this study trip the upholder of German law [will] gain the necessary compensation for an entire year of work’ (133). According to Whitman, historical record tells us that on arrival in New York at a reception organised by the New York City Bar Association, the group were met by a noisy demonstration lasting six hours and requiring police presence. However, in Whitman’s words: ‘sadly it does not seem possible to learn more about how […] the group fared on their study trip’. From the first set of records we learn much about how German lawyers saw their American counterparts; from the second (missing) set, we might have learnt more about how the American establishment viewed legal developments in the Third Reich.

Assembled at the 1934 meeting were seventeen lawyers and officials, and their brief was to respond to the demands of the Prussian Memorandum of September 1933. This document argued that the ‘task of the National Socialist State is to check the race-mixing that has been underway in Germany over the course of the centuries, and strive towards the goal of guaranteeing that Nordic blood, which is still determinative in the German people, should put its distinctive stamp on our life again’ (85). The final outcome of such meetings was the Nuremberg Laws, which consisted of three parts. The first, the Flag Law for the Reich, declared the swastika to be the only German national flag. The second, the Citizenship Laws, created a difference between German nationals – ‘any person who belongs to the mutual protection association of the German Reich’ – and the citizen – ‘a national of German blood’ who was the ‘sole bearer of full political rights’ (29). The third, the Nuremberg Blood Laws, made a criminal offence of marriage or extramarital sex between ‘Jews and nationals of German blood’ (31).

Whitman’s description of the 1934 meeting is gripping for a number of reasons. Firstly, it allows the opportunity to witness the mechanics of discrimination at work. We learn how a group of highly educated professionals – civil servants, legal academics, medical doctors – came together to formulate a set of profoundly exclusionary and undemocratic laws. The committee was faced with a number of questions. How could one define race in legal terms? Could it be possible to criminalise an act (in this case, sexual relations between a German and a Jew) to which two competent parties had consented? Secondly, as a non-American, it further underscores the deeply institutionalised discrimination within US law at this time, belying the idea that a supposedly independent judiciary can act to protect the rights of all citizens.

In Whitman’s interpretation, two groups were pitted against each other at the 1934 meeting. The first were juristic moderates, who felt that a policy of criminalising German and Jewish sexual relations was not in keeping with the German legal tradition. German criminal law, they argued, was based on clear and unambiguous concepts (105). Race, and in particular Jewishness, was difficult to ‘scientifically’ define (105); judges could not be expected to convict on the basis of vague concepts. Their adversaries were Nazi radicals, who argued that a new Criminal Code should be drawn up using the ‘fundamental principles of National Socialism’ (96). According to Whitman, it was these radicals who championed American law, already touched on in the Prussian Memorandum.

As it turns out, the American approach to defining race was not greatly troubled by the absence of a scientific conceptualisation. For the Nazi radicals, this was a heartening example. Roland Freisler, a State Secretary attached to the Ministry of Justice, pointed out: ‘How have they gone about doing this [defining race]? They have used different means. Several states have simply employed geographical concepts […] others have conflated matters, combining geographical origin with their conception of a particular circle of blood relatedness’ (107). Freisler continued:

they name the races in some more primitive way […] and therefore I am of the opinion that we can proceed with the same primitivity that is used by these American states (109).

Contrary to established German tradition, Nazi radicals believed that judges should be given freedom to institute racist legislation, without the need to come up with a scientifically satisfactory definition of race.

Image Credit: ‘German Passengers Only’, Krakow train, 1941 (Wikipedia Public Domain)

It is hard to argue with Whitman’s assertion that Nazi jurists and policymakers took a sustained interest in American race law, and that this helped shape the legal and political climate that led to the promulgation of the Nuremberg Laws. What Whitman moves on to in his conclusion is the extent to which the American legal and political system as a whole, beyond Jim Crow, was permeated with racism: laws related to race-based immigration, race-based citizenship and race-based anti-miscegenation. He makes the unsettling argument that America and Nazi Germany were united by a strong egalitarian, if not libertarian (in the Nazi case), ethos. This ethos, he argues, is that of all white men being equal, and thus it was not surprising that Nazism – in Whitman’s view an egalitarian social revolution for those self-defining as of German origin – turned to America for inspiration. As Whitman points out, white supremacy has a long history in the US, from 1691 when Virginia adopted the first anti-miscegenation statute, to 1790, when the First Congress opened naturalisation to ‘any alien, being a free white person’ (145), to the anti-immigration laws that followed the San Francisco Gold Rush and the segregation laws that followed the Civil War. In the wake of the Charlottesville protests, he would probably argue against Senator John McCain’s assertion that ‘white supremacists and neo-Nazis are, by definition, opposed to American patriotism and the ideals that define us as a people and make our nation special’.

Whitman also questions whether the US common law system really serves to protect the freedom of individuals against an over-reaching state. He points out that the Nazis, rather than taking over the pre-existing German civil law system, reformed it according to a common law model. Nazi officials were given discretion to act in what they believed to be the ‘spirit of Hitler’ (149), brushing aside the legal scientific tradition of the moderates of the 1934 meeting. He argues that when it came to race, American ‘legal science’ tended to yield to American politics and left much racist legislation untouched.

So where does that leave the ‘science’ of eugenics, and the ‘legal science’ of the jurists working in a civil code system? Does a logically consistent approach of any kind protect individual liberties, or rather open up a way to discriminate based on supposedly objective measures? An important point, not explicitly made by Whitman but implicit throughout the book, is that the supposed objectivity of a scientific approach (whether in biology or the law) can easily be misused by those whose aims are clearly undemocratic and unegalitarian. On ‘The Daily Shoah’ and other racist websites, substantial discussion is devoted to ‘metrics’ related to, for example, race and IQ or sexual orientation and the chance of conviction for paedophile offences.

The Charlottesville protests were sparked by the decision to remove a statue of Robert E. Lee, a Confederate General in the Civil War: proponents of the removal argued that it served as a monument to white supremacy. Conversely, in the United Kingdom, a similar controversy surrounding a petition to remove Cecil Rhodes’s statue in Oriel College Oxford failed to lead to its removal, and the Galton Institute in London (which acknowledges its founding as the Eugenics Education Society in 1907, but disassociates itself from any interest in the theory and practice of eugenics) continues to fund research and award essay prizes on genetics for A Level students. Clearly retaining the material legacy of historical figures runs the risk of allowing their glorification (as in Charlottesville), whitewashing or suggesting implicit sanction of their actions.

However, in Whitman’s view, to try to forget or ignore these figures and their ongoing influence on society today is the more dangerous option. Hitler’s American Model is a thoughtful and carefully researched account of how the legal community in the US and Germany proved ‘incapable of staving off the dangers of the politicization of criminal law’ (159). He worries that:

the story in this book […] is not done yet […] what Roland Freisler saw, and admired, in American race law eighty years ago is still with us in the politics of American criminal justice (160).

Given recent developments in American politics, this should perhaps give us all pause for thought.