I’ve been boning up on my revolutionary history lately with a great account of the wildest European year of the nineteenth century: 1848.

There were attempted revolutions nearly everywhere in Europe, from France to Romania. It was the year of the Communist Manifesto. It was the most important year in the abolition of serfdom.
And yet, most of the revolutions failed, with for the most part, after a “Springtime of Peoples” and riotous summers, the monarchs holding on to power and ultimately prevailing.

Author Peter Rapport does a really good job of holding the myriad simultaneous uprisings together in one unified narration. At first glance, the Parisian events have nothing to do with the Prussian war in Denmark, or the Neopolitan supression of Sicilian organized crime, or the Romanian peasant revolt against Hungarian landlords. But Rapport pulls it off.

Structuring the story in seasons—the Red Summer, the Counter-Revolutionary Autumn, etc.—Rapport can dart between hotspots in such a way that he can show commonalities across the continent, while returning to the same subplots and characters lets him go deeper in the particular places. It works.

Rapport expresses sadness that democracy by and large failed in 1848, a victim of popular (and justified) fears the revolutions would go too far (meaning Communist). Because although most of 1848’s revolutionaries were aware of simultaneous events around Europe, they were in the first instance local affairs. The common engine of revolution was consciousness-raising of local identities against distant and absolute rulers, with the exception of France—where a republic was replaced with a dictatorship.

It was this local consciousness, the Springtime of Peoples, that was certainly the most ominous development, as the communists at this point were bumbling idiots. But human flourishing was envisioned in ethnic terms, and the bloody wars and genocides of Europe’s awful 20th century are present here. Rapport never lets the spectre of genocide slip from view.

Halfway between exotic travelogue and economics field report, John Ghazvinian’s book Untapped: The Scramble for Africa's Oil is a terrific story about the next frontier in petroleum exploitation.

Africa has long been known to hold vast oil reserves in a few regions (principally along the western coast); but a mixture of obstacles have made these reserves unappealing (high population, at least compared to Arabia; powderkeg politics; fragile ecosystems; and very deep ocean floors for offshore drilling).

But long-term high oil prices, the spectre of terrorism, and increased competition for new leases from China and India—and the race is on for Africa’s Oil.

Ghazvinian travels from Nigeria to Angola to Sudan, among other places, visiting impoverished neighborhoods adjacent to compounds, skyscraper offices, and interviews people at all ends of the ladder.

Nigeria’s story was the most interesting—because it’s so wrapped up in all of Nigeria’s other problems. The gist of it is that the federal government and the local tribes have been quarrelling over the money for many years, with the most of the oil benefits accruing to the government, and disappearing in corruption.

Nigeria’s oil is concentrated in the delta of the Niger River, a singular patchwork of small waterways, jungles, and fishing villages on stilts. Transportation is by small boat in narrow creeks—which opens the door to guerilla attacks and vandalism.

Ghazvinian hires a boat into one of the villages, but has to travel in secret, because the government, the oil companies, and the rebel armies alike all take interest in foreign journalistic snooping.

The fishing villages are destitute, with their livelihood at stake whenever oil is spilled. Ghazvinian describes half-hearted public works projects sponsored by oil companies: foundations poured and never completed, and so on.

This is where the internet works best. Flickr user Justice In Nigeria Now! has published several images from the Delta (including both of these), which made me believe the stories a little more.

I've just read a graphic novel of the immediate aftermath of the Rwandan Genocide of 1994. Deogratias, a former employee of a Catholic mission station, is haunted, and tries to drown the memories in booze. But even this fragile crutch falls apart as he is forced to come to terms, not only with what he saw, but the decisions he made.

Written by Belgian J.P. Stassen, Deogratias is a difficult read for its intense imagery and storytelling. Alas, as is my usual experience with graphic novels, it left me wanting to get deeper into Deogratias’ mind. Oh well.

This is the place to go if you want a history of the events; to read the introduction is to get the sense that the editors assume readers have only encountered the Rwanda genocide through Hotel Rwanda.

That may be true, and if so it’s an insight into our human inhumanity: our refusal to remember the worst of ourselves.

I love finding life insights in unexpected places. I'm reading a book on Prussia, a now-extinct German kingdom. Don't ask me why. But Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947 is incredibly interesting and well-written.

Anyway, there is a section early in the book on pietism, the 18th century German Lutheran spiritual movement roughly analogous to Puritanism or evangelicalism. Looking at the remarkable achievements of one pietist leader, author Christopher Clark notes the strategy that outlasted other pietist projects:

Channeling the surplus spiritual energies of Lutheran non-conformism into a range of institutional projects.

What Clark means is: instead of endlessly criticizing the established church, this guy Hermann August Francke (and his followers) put enthusiastic young pietists to work in building universities, orphanages, Christian printing presses, various cross-cultural evangelizing projects, fund-raising networks, and more.

For a short generation, these people caught a vision of a remade society. They made a huge impact on the army’s chaplain corps, such that the officers’ swashbuckling style was replaced with sober dedication to excellence.

Surplus spiritual energies? I can see the point. It’s far easier to criticize than to build, and these people got it. Their children, it seems, didn’t. But we can learn from them. We can become builders instead of critics.

How? That’s the rub.

While trying to learn about what my interlocutor called the first genocide of the twentieth century—the German colonial war against the Herero people in today’s Namibia—I found "Exterminate All the Brutes": One Man's Odyssey into the Heart of Darkness and the Origins of European Genocide, by a Swedish author named Sven Lindqvist.

It’s already over a decade old, but still contemporary-feeling, because despite a few cracks in the ivory tower barracks discussed a few weeks ago, our deliberations over European/White guilt have by and large not progressed much beyond the level Lindqvist reaches here.

Which isn't very far.

Lindqvist tells the story of Joseph Conrad’s writing of Heart of Darkness, interspersing the history bits with a travelogue of his own, crossing the Sahara on buses from the Mediterranean coast to Chad, to the site of a French colonial massacre.

His whole point is that Conrad’s grotesque Belgian Congo was no exaggeration, and was not unique. Rather, genocide lies at the very heart of European civilization. It’s tiresome and heavy-handed, and very readable.

The problem is not the ascribing of guilt. Guilt is appropriate to talk about. Nor is the problem his Euro-centric vision of agency: even if all peoples are guilty of inhuman crimes, we can still talk about particular crimes. Still, there is always a risk of dehumanizing victims by writing them as objects of the perpetrators' agence, rather than full people, capable of their own moral actions. Lindqvist can’t seem to avoid the trap: Europeans alone know good and evil; Africans are simple creatures acted upon by outsiders.

That’s not the main problem. The main error of Lindqvist’s essay comes on the last page:

Everywhere in the world where knowledge is being suppressed, knowledge that, if it were made known, would shatter our image of the world and force us to question ourselves—everywhere there, Heart of Darkness is being enacted.

You already know that. So do I. It is not knowledge we lack. What is missing is the courage to understand what we know and draw conclusions.

And thus, capping a discussion of “the origins of European genocide,” we land on … drawing conclusions.

And accordingly, an undermining of evil. If genocide can be prevented by drawing conclusions, it’s a matter of error, not evil.

In the end, genocide is far too important for us to allow enlightenment humanism a monopoly of action. Genocide is evil, and must be stopped by a stronger force than telling stories.

[photo credit: flickr user AKFudge]

Here's a great book I've enjoyed this winter: Somebody Scream!: Rap Music's Rise to Prominence in the Aftershock of Black Power

It's a book I could have used while writing Blessed Are the Uncool: It’s a missing link, of sorts. Author Marcus Reeves explores the history of hip hop’s uncomfortable relationship with the black power movement.

As he tells the story, black power ran out of steam in the mid 1970s, and for a variety of reasons: persistent legal troubles; incessant internecine squabbling; and perhaps most importantly, success.

Courtesy of pop culture, black people began to see their tastes on TV, and hear their music on the radio. Meanwhile, Civil Rights victories made the need for change feel less pressing for a new generation of African Americans.

But at the same time, our inner cities were failing. In the late seventies in the South Bronx, New York, ghetto hopelessness rose in tandem with the end of the black power movement. It was at this time that rap music began to appear.

Initially nothing more than party music, rap music began to become a vehicle for communication about inner city life beyond the party. And over the ensuing decades, from Public Enemy to Tupac Shakur, several of hip hop’s leaders were also children of the black power movement, steeped in its ideas from a young age.

Others, however, like Snoop Dog and the Notorious BIG, took the muscular aesthetic from Black Power, stripped it of its message, and went for a nihilistic, violent, and hedonistic expressiveness, glorying in guns, booze, licentiousness and—above all—respect from other blacks. This was gangsta rap.

Eventually a balance would come to hip hop, as the unsustainability of gangster lifestyles became apparent.

Still, there has always been an element of generational conflict in the relationship between hip hop and black power. Reeves’ key point lies in what he calls the post-black power generation: those who take black dignity for granted and live exclusively for the moment. With little historical education or interest, all they have is today. Progress is defined in weeks or months—certainly not in decades.

Somebody Scream! is an important contribution to African American history. We’re approaching the moment (rap’s 30th birthday has already passed) when historians—far better storytellers than most pop culture writers—will begin to get their hands on rap, so we can expect more in the coming years.

I have one complaint with Reeves’ treatment: his apparent blind spot to coolness itself. I know I wrote a book on the issue, so forgive the windiness. But from my vantage, hip hop’s revolutionary impotence appears entirely related to its foremost commitment to coolness.

Coolness—which I’ve defined as the performance of permanent rebellion—exists only in the moment. Revolutions (like Black Power) draw strength and humility from historical consciousness. Hip Hop’s cool insistence on living only in the moment condemns it to have no future and, accordingly, no consequence, despite its massive pop cultural weight.

Until Hip Hop grows beyond petty coolness, it will never grow up.

[photo credit: Bronx, by sxc.hu member bkeim]

Me-Ville? David Zimmerman is deadly serious in his new book on individualism, Deliver Us from Me-Ville. Yet he knows, as the best storytellers always do, that well-placed humor can add to the weight of the topic.

Why Me-Ville? It’s a bit corny of a joke, but, as Zimmerman points out repeatedly in this 360° portrait of Number One, individualism is nothing short of Evil itself. He means it, and has successfully convinced me: individualism is more than an annoying trait. It is a foretaste of hell.

And that’s why we need to be delivered from it: we can’t escape it. We need help.

This is a smart book, full of that quirky mix of ancient letters and pop culture that Zimmerman’s regular readers have come to expect. Be prepared to be impressed. But not with the author’s smarts: Zimmerman is not showy. He manages to write well while keep readers thinking about the problem at hand. 

Eternally deepening individualism is the direction we’re headed. That’s why Deliver Us from Me-Ville spends so much time on Jesus. Not Jesus the theological concept (as in Jesus just alright with me) but Jesus the person, the prophet—Jesus, the creator god who stood outside our sorry system and, rather than throwing in a life preserver, jumped into the flood as a flesh-and-blood human.

Our only hope for deliverance from Me-Ville is love, and the only love that can knock us out of the downward spiral from individualism to narcissism to solipsism to hell—our only hope is a love from outside the system.

How do you repent of individualism? By singing Just As I Am? Even our Christian language is faulty here. How do you grow in knowledge of Christ? Through “Loud Time,” Zimmerman suggests. There’s a cult of personal Bible study (“quiet time”) in the church, when we ought to spend more time listening to God together.

Escaping from Me-Ville is a long-term effort, one we’ll work on throughout our natural lives. When life happens, it’ll always be tempting to retreat into self-absorption. But following Jesus into a deeper love will be worth it in the long run. Zimmerman:

The farther Jesus leads us from Me-Ville to the place he has prepared for us, the less sensible it is to go back, and the less fulfilling each visit will be. (…) When you notice Jesus, especially where you weren’t expecting to see him, you notice that what he’s doing and saying are a lot more interesting, a lot more creative than what you’re doing and saying. (p.148)

True to his message, Zimmerman has added a group discussion guide to the end of the book, and inserts several practical “Escape Routes” throughout. If you’re not a book reader, try this one.

I knew this girl. Or at least people just like her. Or maybe that’s just a sign of a good story. Marjane Satrapi is the Iranian—now French—author of Persepolis, a series of delightful autobiographical graphic novels, that had me trying to remember and relate.

Satrapi lived through the fall of the Iranian monarchy, the rise of the ayatollahs, and the Iran-Iraq war—before her middle class parents sent her to a boarding school in Austria. After returning to Iran for college and a little beyond, she leaves for Europe, this time for good.

Her four comics, published in English translation as two volumes, were minor sensations a few years back, and have been recently adapted to film, now out on DVD. I am looking at the books today and the film tomorrow, because there is an important subjective difference between the two—worth a whole discussion of its own.

As to the books:

Satrapi’s story is cute and moving and quite smart, as she discusses global events though the eyes of a little girl: the revolution is initially interpreted for her by her liberal, Europe-vacationing, wine-drinking parents (see below).

As the years proceed, she gains more independent insight into the violent changes in society—witnessing Iraqi bombs; being scolded for immodesty by older women, and so on.

Eventually her big mouth gets her in trouble at school, and her parents decide to send her overseas for high school—for her own safety’s sake. At this point her story becomes part of my story.

Marjane Satrapi is six years older than me, and moved to Austria at just about the same year I moved to Switzerland: different stage of life, similar moment. My parents were working with the Swiss IFES movement, helping develop international student ministry. Especially in the early years, we met quite a few Iranians. By and large, the seemed a lot like Satrapi’s family: modern, far more stylish than my missionary family, polyglot and not at all like the mobs we saw on the evening news.

Satrapi struggles through years of high school in an Austria not inclined to view her as part of the modern world. She’s an exotic creature, even as she slowly adapts many Austrian ways of living.
When she returns, after reaching a crisis point, she has become a “third-culture kid,” belonging nowhere, with a unique culture of her own.

While Persepolis is Marjane Satrapi’s story, and a singular one at that, Satrapi tells the story in terms intensely familiar to anyone who has grown up between worlds. The search for home is probably the central unifying theme in the lives of thousands of such people, torn between cosmopolitan, child-of-all-nations tendencies, and a deep longing to have somewhere to fit in.

I’ve just finished Wellsprings, a collection of essays by Peruvian public intellectual Mario Vargas Llosa. Mostly transcriptions of lectures given over the years, the chapters have little collective coherence, save the author’s well-developed worldview. A few of these essays are well written and important, in particular Vargas Llosa’s discussion of nationalism.

Mostly looking at the specter of disintegration lurking over contemporary Spain, with Basque, Catalan and Galician regions gradually gaining autonomy, Vargas Llosa insists persuasively that nationalism is culturally stultifying and ultimately impoverishing. In its place he recommends some kind of open-ended multi-cultural cosmopolitanism.

Well-read, well-thought and yet unsatisfactory. Vargas Llosa rightly looks at the temptation to nationalisms of all kinds, and the contradiction between democracy and individual rights, on the one hand, and patriotic peer pressure on the other.

Nationalism is tempting because it promises a glue to our fractured world—but an exclusionary and oppressive glue, demanding we submit all our dreams to those of the collective whole.

Still, what are we left with? Tolerance, perhaps—but that’s a negative value, a refusal to distinguish. Not going to work. Cosmopolitanism? Vargas Llosa fails to give us a vision for universal human living worth living for. Religion? That’s as much a dead end as nationalism, he says, because all claims to read direction into history are threatening to human development.

Wellsprings feels like a field trip through Western intellectual history, with a well-read guide and master story-teller. That he leaves us with no clear answers, only problems, is hardly the point. Vargas Llosa wants to be a fox—a dilettante with many little ideas—instead of a hedgehog, who insists on imposing onto all of human experience a comprehensive ideology.

He also confesses that foxes, lacking in conviction, rarely build kingdoms. Accordingly, this is a book of little ideas. Vargas Llosa’s best insights are about how individual people are to live with each other. When it comes to how many peoples should live with many other peoples, he seems strangely empty of ideas.

Concluding my top ten list for 2008. Here's yesterday's part 1.

6. Wellsprings

Mario Vargas Llosa is a leading light of South American novelists. Apparently, that is, because I had never encountered him before stumblinng upon this marvelous collection of political and cultural essays (I don't read much fiction). It’s the fruit of a lifetime of letters, as he tackles Spanish regional nationalisms, Latin American political corruption, Borges, and more. Vargas Llosa here is developing a vision for multi-cultural democracy that can sustain the individual. He is profound without being pedantic. I plan on returning to this book in coming days in this blog.

7. Why the French Don't Like Headscarves: Islam, the State, and Public Space

The occasion is the ongoing battle in France over the Muslim female head-covering, a debate I’ve followed for years in English and French-language media. But John Bowen, an American anthropologist, has cracked the code, explaining to Anglo-Americans exactly why the “veil” is so troubling to the French. To do so, he has to explain some basic elements of the French world view, such as where freedom derives from, the importance of clothing as communication, and religion’s relationship to the public space. Very, very insightful.

8. Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line

Paul Gilroy desires to be a “planetary humanist”. An English sociologist of Caribbean ancestry, who was teaching at Yale when this book was written earlier in the decade, Gilroy is concerned to demonstrate that all ethnic politics point toward Auschwitz, from Black Power to flag-waving patriotism. His answer? To develop a cosmopolitanism that gives all of us enough belonging and vision to move beyond race. This is where he falls flat; I fail to be convinced that planetary humanism has enough of a center to hold the house he’s building upon it. But if the prescription is weak, Gilroy’s diagnosis is superior. Few thinkers are this competent across disciplinary hedgerows.

9. Missions, Nationalism, and the End of Empire (Studies in the History of Christian Missions)

What happens when Christian missions are entangled with imperialism and nationalism? This collection of essays, edited by Brian Stanley of Edinburgh, explores the problem through historical case studies. Hartmut Lehmann, for instance, looks at German missionaries after WWI, after their African colonies had been stripped from them by the victor nations. Stanley’s introductory essay is the most important, and can be read through Amazon’s preview function.

10. Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947

A history of Prussia. Not exciting to many people, I freely concede. I read this one for my own reasons, and enjoyed every page, when I should have skimmed it. Christopher Clark combines military, bureaucratic and dynastic history with societal change for a 360° vision of Germany’s foundations.