Convolutions

In his unfinished final novel, Bouvard and Pécuchet, Gustave Flaubert confronts his two eponymous clerks with the outraged priest of the village, while they are busy expounding a position of modern skepticism. In the course of the book, the two men have undertaken a study of the totality of human knowledge, passing from one subject to another until each has been thoroughly consumed and exhausted. 

At the time of their argument with the cleric, they have just finished with geology and biblical history, and the experience has turned them into village atheists. As they seek to confound the town notables with their new insights, one of the local aristocrats ventures to observe, "Take care [...] you know the saying, my dear sir; a little learning takes you away, a lot carries you back." (Krailsheimer trans.)

Flaubert did not think highly of this observation. He found it so odiously trite, in fact, that he included a version of it in his "Dictionary of Received Ideas"—a list of hackneyed ideas and expressions that is often published alongside the incomplete novel. The count's warning to the two clerks has become cliché—"received"—among us, however, precisely because it has an obvious element of truth, borne out by experience. 

I was taught as a child in school, for instance—or, who knows, I picked it up somewhere—that the United States never participated in a single conflict in which we were not fighting on the side of freedom and democracy. In the great showdown with the Soviet Union, meanwhile, it was evident enough that our adversary was authoritarian and aggressive. The lesson to take from all this was plain: we were the good ones; they the bad. 

As I acquired some learning and a viewpoint for myself as a teenager, then, this picture of the world became entirely subverted. In Guatemala, Iran, Indonesia, Chile, El Salvador, or any of the other countless places where U.S. funds or spies abetted undemocratic coups, military regimes, and outright atrocities, it seemed by no means clear anymore that our side of the Cold War was the one campaigning for democracy. It might be rather the opposite. 

When I found out about revisionist Cold War historiography, therefore, I knew that was where truth and sophistication must lie. I never quite read I.F. Stone and William Appleman Williams and Walter LaFeber, and so on, but I knew I would like to and that they corresponded roughly to my ideal intellectual position. And today, I have Picasso's Massacre in Korea (1951) hanging on my wall, in tribute to this heritage. 

Of course, by the time my twenties came around, another truth was starting to obtrude on top of the one I had just painstakingly excavated for myself. It began to occur to me that, even if all these things were true about Guatemala and Iran and Indonesia and so forth—and they were—not a single one of them was incompatible with at least one insight of my earlier position—namely, that the Soviet Union was aggressive and undemocratic. 

And lo, it turns out there is a school of historiography for this one too. Post-Revisionism, which looks back on the early Cold War, and doesn't dispute any of the specific assertions of the Revisionists, but merely points out that they don't negate other facts that weigh in the opposite direction: namely, that a Soviet client state was the aggressor in the Korean peninsula, Stalin was a genocidal megalomaniac, Khrushchev sent tanks into Hungary, and so on. 

And so we see that it is not only individuals for whom it is true that a little knowledge "takes them away," and a lot "carries them back." The same phenomenon happens with societies as a whole. The process is a bit like Malcolm Cowley's "theory of convolutions," set forth in his memoir Exile's Return: according to which one paradox is always superseded by another, contrary one, and very rapidly at that. 

In Cowley's version, these convolutions explain the whiplike motion of literary fashions: one writer is held up for a time for having propounded a contradiction of established wisdom; only to have this seeming paradox atrophy into a stale insight. So the fashion changes to favor the contradiction of the contradiction—and thus the second convolution of the process is reached. 

Tom Wolfe once deployed the theory with great success in discussing the changing etiquette around marijuana use in New York high society. The true pot smoker, as everyone was supposed to know, disdains the use of alcohol—thus contradicting the square's false assumption that all forms of vice must necessarily follow upon one another. 

At the time of his writing, however, Wolfe observed that the monde had already tired of this idea—the paradox had started to seem less striking—and were therefore starting to enter the second convolution of this fashion. Now, it seemed passé to hold too strictly to the prohibition against liquor. Thus, alcohol came back into favor among pot users. 

This example would seem to vindicate the count's "received idea" in full. A little pot use brought the fashionable set away from booze; a lot brought them back. 

If we pay closer attention, however, we see why the count's observation was a little tatty and flyblown, and why Flaubert thought it worthy of inclusion in his mausoleum of exhausted thoughts. For, it is not quite that the second convolution brings people back round to their first position in its original form. The pot users of the beau monde, Wolfe notes, did not take up alcohol again with the same self-annihilating brio of the Hemingway generation. Rather, they came back to it with a newfound sense of moderation. 

Likewise, post-Revisionist Cold War historiography is not simply the naive jingoism of my childhood reinvented. It does not lose or discard entirely the insights and knowledge of the intervening period. Rather, it incorporates them. If, broadly speaking, the pattern goes —USSR foreign policy was bad --> US foreign policy was bad --> USSR foreign policy was bad—we discover that not a single one of these thoughts contradicts any of the others. We can—and should—arrive at the conclusion that both were bad. 

And thus we see that what may appear at first a kind of boomerang arc—of the sort Flaubert's count describes—is actually a crablike forward movement. Put more grandly, it is a dialectic resulting in synthesis. This is how the side-to-side swaying of the whole process—the endless adversarialness of academic debate—the clerkly one-upsmanship of Cowley's "convolutions"—tiresome and open to Wolfe-ian satire as it all may be—is compatible nonetheless with the idea of intellectual progress. 

Of course, the difficulty lies in the fact that it is not merely society that engages in a pattern of convolutions, but each individual as well. People are born and come into this intellectual development at an intermediate stage, which they may well take for the only and final truth—not seeing that it came about as a reaction to the excesses of a still earlier position. Thus the hard-won insights of an earlier stage are forgotten, and we must begin again.