(Roughly) Daily

Dan Bouk (whom I knew primarily for his fascinating book on the census) on the challenge of fielding a carefully-grounded critique of power. He begins with Emerson on Napoleon…

I imagine Ralph Waldo Emerson (Waldo, to this friends) entering a lecture hall in the mid-nineteenth century. His listeners packed tightly against one another, the better to fend off the winter cold. The old sat alongside the young, “bald heads and flowing transcendental locks” abutting “misanthropists and lovers.” This would have been the sixth day and the sixth lecture on this leg of a five-year-long tour for Emerson. Those in the audience who had stuck it out this far would have already heard the great man Emerson explain PHILOSOPHY by explaining Plato, and MYSTICISM with the (now forgotten) Emanuel Swedenborg, and SKEPTICISM through Montaigne, and POETRY via Shakespeare. The critic Andrew Delbanco reports the crowds were “rapt and grateful,” and so we can presume that most in fact stuck it out to the end. Recall that there was no internet to distract them. And so on the final day of the lecture series, Emerson turned his audiences’ attention to the “man of the world,” the practical man, the person who could GET THINGS DONE. His subject was Napoleon Bonaparte, a subject he had every reason to believe would fascinate the entire auditorium…

… Emerson, in the late 1840s, could presume that his audience already knew a lot about Napoleon, that they were likely among the “million readers of anecdotes or memoirs or lives” of the great man. People in the mid-nineteenth century US read about Napoleon for many reasons, and yet it seems that many treated him as a hero. The great social thinker, activist, and feminist of the turn of the twentieth century, Jane Addams, also studied Napoleon’s life. According to her biographer, Louise Knight, Addams spent much of her childhood reading from her father’s library. He paid her a nickel for every book she read and discussed with him. According to Knight, “Great men such as Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Cromwell, and Napoleon were heavily featured.” Napoleon sat alongside the American founders. These were the lives that Addams would later try to emulate. When she founded the settlement project Hull House in Chicago, she was seeking a way to overcome the limits society put on her because of her sex. She too could get things done. Knight says that the biographies of great men taught Addams that “her gender was irrelevant to heroic dreams.”

Emerson’s or Addams’ contemporaries read about the life of Napoleon the way that people today read biographies of Steve Jobs or Elon Musk, and, well,…Napoleon, I guess…

[Bouk then provides a close reading of Emerson’s account of the Le Petit Caporal…]

… I have, over the last fourteen years, assigned this lecture to students many times. I give it to them because it is fascinating, and also because it is confounding. As I seek to get them to think about how and why an author might lead an audience in a strange or unexpected direction, there is no better text, nor a more frustrating one. Because the reader sticks with Emerson for 30 pages; we are pummeled by story upon story and assertion atop assertion of Napoleon’s greatness; then, in the last five pages, Emerson takes it all away from us, and makes the sudden forceful case for the opposite of everything we’ve just been reading.

Early in the lecture, Emerson explained that Napoleon “wrought, in common with that great class he represented, for power and wealth.” His advantage was always that he cared nothing for feelings or morals: “all the sentiments which embarrass men’s pursuit of these objects, he set aside.” And yet, it is still shocking when Emerson turns on Napoleon with full force and asks us to sit with exactly what it meant to be untroubled by sentiment:

He is a boundless liar.

His doctrine of immortality is simply fame.

He was thoroughly unscrupulous.

He would steal, slander, assassinate, drown and poison, as his interest dictated.

For thirty pages, Napoleon surpassed all in his abilities and powers.

For the final five pages, he is revealed to surpass all in sociopathy.

What does it all mean?

Here was an experiment, under the most favorable conditions, of the powers of intellect without conscience…And what was the result of this vast talent and power, of these immense armies, burned cities, squandered treasures, immolated millions of men, of this demoralized Europe? It came to no result.

Here is a recapitulation of the entire lecture: an accounting of unbelievable effects, and then somehow the assertion that NONE OF IT MATTERED…

[Bouk analyzes similar trajectories in Robert Caro’s account of Robert Moses, The Power Broker, and in Jack London’s fictional account of a similar character, Burning Daylight, observing that in each case, as with Napoleon, the vivacity of the portrayal of the subjects actions can overshadow the summary critique…]

… This is the fundamental problem of a well-constructed critical expose. The act of exposure can attract at the same time that it condemns. (See also, every book or film about Wall Street. I’m thinking especially of Michael Lewis’ Liar’s Poker, which asserted the emptiness of investment banking and still drove masses of its readers to seek out jobs on the street.)

When we swim in the sea, who is prepared to condemn the water?

The dilemma of critique is that it requires using the values of a society to win and keep the attention of readers. But having used those values, what effect can the exposure of their limits really have?…

Eminently worth reading in full: “Oceans of Power and a Tincture of Reproof,” from Bouk’s terrific newsletter Shrouded and Cloaked.

[Image above: source]

* “There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys, how’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?” -David Foster Wallace (source)

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As we draw conclusions, we might that it was on this date in 1815 that Napoleon boarded the “Bellerophon” and was officially informed that he was being deported to St. Helena.

… At 10.30 am, Admiral Lord Keith, accompanied by Sir Henry Bunbury, Under Secretary of State for War, boarded “Bellerophon” and asked to be received by the one which the English refuse to address as “Emperor” and that they refer to simply as “General Bonaparte”. Without preamble, the Admiral, with the help of General Bertrand, the Grand Marshal of the Palace who acted as interpreter, communicated the decision by the British government to deport him to the island of St Helena so as, he said, “not to allow him the opportunity again to disturb the peace of Europe.” Lord Keith added that the “General” could be accompanied by the three French officers who had accompanied him aboard “Bellerophon,”, as well as a surgeon and ten servants. He concluded by stating that the departure would take place in a few days.
Lord Keith, at the request of the French, then provided some details on the conditions under which the proscribed transportation to the place of their future residence would take place. Since “Bellerophon” was unfit to accomplish such a trip, the French would board “Northumberland” [a few days later]…
Napoleon, indignant, reminded them that he had boarded “Bellerophon” voluntarily; he was the host and not the prisoner of England; that that nation would be covered with opprobrium if it performed such action against him and in violation of its own laws. Both Englishmen remained unmoved. When Napoleon finally stopped talking, they simply replied that they would transmit this protest to the Prince Regent and insisted that “the General” swiftly make known to them the names of his future companions in exile.”

source