Unsettling

In 2001 Michel Houellebecq published Platform, about a Western-owned sex resort in Asia which is brutally attacked by a Muslim fundamentalist group. Timing is everything.  The book was written and published just before 9/11/2001, and it eerily anticipated some of the main themes and the brutality that was seared into our consciousness that month.

Now we have Submission, a 2015 Houellebecq novel about France in 2022, the fictional year in which France, in a political crisis engendered by large-scale Muslim immigration, adopts a limited version of Sharia law.  Yes, it seems entirely implausible.  But reading this book during the recent Paris attacks was very unsettling.  Some of the novel’s political figures are taken from real life, and to be reading about them in the book and hearing them on the news the same day is very strange. I’m not sure of much, but I am pretty sure that we really don’t know where all this is headed.  Fear mongering abounds, and it seems that just about anything can happen now, be it a swing far to the left or to the right.

Accidental oracle?

First, let’s acknowledge that Houellebecq is a French intellectual, and as such just about everything he produces is cloaked in abstraction and intellectual tradition.  The protagonist in the novel is a scholar specializing in Huysmans, hardly an everyday writer for American readers.  And much of the cleverness of the book relies on that conceptual underpinning.  The bored protagonist at the beginning of the novel struggles for sexual and existential fulfillment.  By submitting to Islam at the end, he ends up exactly where he wants to be, except without the struggle.  In certain ways this parallels Huysmans life, and that’s the intellectual conceit here.  It’s very clever, it’s contrived, it’s intricately planned, it’s annoyingly abstract.

But how does Houellebecq seemingly anticipate current events with uncanny accuracy?  I’m sure he’s not happy that Paris was attacked, but he can’t be discontent that sales of his book will undoubtedly skyrocket as a result.  The book has a ‘look at me!’ smugness about it that is not attractive.  A bit too clever, too abstract, and also perhaps unsettlingly plausible.

Pikkety Lite

Pikkety’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century is one of those big books that I optimistically pick up just about every time I see it in a bookstore. I really would like to be someone who would read it cover to cover.  But when I leaf through it in the store I realize I’m not that reader.  It’s too technical for me.  I’d never make it halfway through.

So that being the case, what’s next best?  Perhaps Joseph Stiglitz. He falls into a similar camp and his writing is much more accessible.  I searched for the most popular Stiglitz and came up with The Great Divide.

My liberal leanings on inequality are pronounced, but I don’t have a wealth of technical knowledge to back them up.  The Great Divide provides some of that backup, but not a lot.  The book is a compilation of many short magazine and newspaper articles by Stiglitz, and it is fascinating to see what he was writing as our economic story has unfolded over the last twenty years.  So many of his predictions have come true (unfortunately). The pieces tend to be largely political and not technical.  And unfortunately so many of the pieces make the same points over and over.  It doesn’t really add up to a coherent and well organized book.

I find myself agreeing with Stiglitz at just about every point, but not much better armed to defend my position at a cocktail party.  Preaching to the choir, I guess.  And that’s part of the problem with political discourse today.  There are so many parallel channels, and if we keep our attention focused on a particular channel we miss out on real interchange of ideas.  If we only listen to those we already agree with, we don’t make much progress.

Nonetheless, I did find Stiglitz’s larger concept of ‘rent’ enlightening.  And the contrast that he draws between grabbing a larger piece of the pie and working to make the pie larger is also telling. To what degree inequality is an inevitable part of capitalism is something I'm not qualified to judge.  I was hoping for more enlightenment, but Stiglitz is light on theory, heavy on polemics.  I’m still looking for the economic guru who can explain our current plight and take into account opposing viewpoints.  Don’t just say trickle down doesn’t work, show the numbers and explain the underlying theory.

Well, Pikkety Lite is definitely less filling.  Doesn’t taste bad either.  But is there a full-bodied brew that is drinkable?