Barack Obama has been creating headlines in one of the most strongly contested American Presidential nomination races of all time. His personal charm, his optimistic speeches and often high-flown rhetoric have all combined to create an attractive public personage.
My own interest is to investigate, from a largely literary perspective, how well Obama can write. His two published poems, composed when he was nineteen, seem to me highly impressive — pungent, expressive, and lyrical. I should add that one of my particular interests or obsessions is that style should follow content. Accordingly, I am not looking for the showy phrase or the crowd-appealing flight of rhetoric. What interests me is the way that a subject is investigated, expressed, summarised.
My own rapid conclusion, after reading only a few pages of his book The Audacity of Hope was that he writes beautifully, economically, with few signs of that occasionally showy high rhetorical style which seems to characterise some of his barnstorming election speeches. No doubt this is intentional and expected — the function of the speeches before enthusiastic crowds is to attract attention, cement loyalty and raise support; the function of Obama’s book is to provide a more considered framework for what may otherwise seem a mere concatenation of opinions.
Obama is something of a political theologian. The usual breeding ground for politicians in democracies is the law. This is for good reason. The law is the base of human action and the protector of rights of the common man. Even Gandhi was a barrister.
Obama was voted president of the Harvard Law Review, the first black president in its 104-year history. He holds high formal qualifications for intelligent discussion of legal matters. But there are surely very few who can express complex matters of religion or individual belief with such sureness and lightness.
It is a truism that we Americans are a religious people. According to the most recent surveys, 95 percent of Americans believe in God, more than two-thirds belong to a church, 37 percent call themselves committed Christians, and substantially more people believe in angels than believe in evolution. Nor is religion confined to places of worship. Books proclaiming the end of days sell millions of copies, Christian music fills the Billboard charts, and new megachurches seem to spring up daily on the outskirts of every major metropolis, providing everything form day care to singles mixers to yoga and Pilates classes. Our President routinely remarks on how Christ changed his heart, and football players point to the heavens after every touchdown, as if God were calling plays from the celestial sidelines.
The passage flows beautifully, building to its climax in the last sentence, one which encapsulates, humorously and ironically, the meaning of the previous sections. It is vivid and clear. Written from the perspective of a purportedly religious man, it contains a refreshing element of self-awareness and self-criticism about the degree of religious overzealousness he observes in many of his fellow Americans. At the same time it is affectionate and respectful. To bring all these things together, with such apparent effortlessness and ease, is the mark of a first-rate writer.
This is a relatively light passage. Where Obama is particularly impressive is the massing of argument, using language precisely. He discusses the multi-enthnicity of modern American society:
In a sense I have no choice but to believe in this vision of America. As the child of a black man and a white woman, someone who was born in the racial melting pot of Hawaii, with a sister who’s half Indonesian but who’s usually mistaken for Mexican or Puerto Rican, and a brother-in-law and niece of Chinese descent, with some blood relatives who resemble Margaret Thatcher and others who pass for Bernie Mac, so that family get-togethers over Christmas take on the appearance of a UN General Assembly meeting, I’ve never had the option of restricting my loyalties on the basis of race, or measuring my worth on the basis of tribe.
Another example of this easy vividness occurs when Obama expresses the apparently optimistic view that racial prejudices, though they may remain below the surface, are nevertheless loosening:
I maintain, however, that in today’s America such prejudices are far more loosely held than they once were — and hence are subject to refutation. A black teenage boy walking down the street may elicit fear in a white couple, but if he turns out to be their son’s friend from school he may be invited over for dinner. A black man may have trouble catching a cab late at night, but if he is a capable software engineer Microsoft will have no qualms about hiring him.
One of the virtues of his style is that he brings clarity to difficult subject matter through the evocation of individual examples.
I cannot prove these assertions; surveys of racial attitudes are notoriously unreliable. And even if I’m right, it’s cold comfort to many minorities. After all, spending one’s days refuting stereotypes can be a wearying business. It’s the added weight that many minorities, especially African Americans, so often describe in their daily round — the feeling that as a group we have no store of goodwill in America’s accounts, that as individuals we must prove ourselves anew every day, that we will rarely get the benefit of the doubt and will have little margin for error. Making a way through such a world requires the black child to fight off the additional hesitation that she may feel when she stands at the threshold of a mainly white classroom on the first day of school; it requires the Latina woman to fight off self-doubt as she prepares for a job interview at a mostly white company.
He is also able to write with a certain irony about the world seen from the perspective of privilege. As a US senator, Obama was allowed to travel by private jet. One of the most interesting passages occurs when he describes the seductions of private jet travel, the circumventing of all those trying times at airport arrival and departure — the crowds, the screaming children, the bureaucratic delays, the endless queuing, all supplanted by a private jet waiting for your arrival at an airport with the patience of a chauffeur-driven limousine. He evokes the sensual pleasure of being conveyed to one’s destination with luxurious ease and efficiency. The plane waiting for him is a Citation X, “a sleek, compact, shiny machine with wood panelling and leather seats that you could pull together to make a bed anytime you decided you wanted a nap”:
Then the plane took off, its Rolls-Royce engines gripping the air the way a well-made sports car grips the road. Shooting through the clouds, I turned on the small TV monitor in front of my seat. A map of the United States appeared, with the image of our plane tracking west, along with our speed, our altitude, our time to destination, and the temperature outside. At forty thousand feet, the plane levelled off, and I looked down at the curving horizon and the scattered clouds, the geography of the earth laid out before me — first the flat, checkerboard fields of western Illinois, then the python curves of the Mississippi, then more farmland and ranch land and eventually the jagged Rockies, still snow-peaked, until the sun went down and the orange sky narrowed to a thin red line that was finally consumed by night and stars and moon.
The prose functions as perfectly as the described plane, with a fine metaphor of “the python curves of the Mississippi” thrown in. We learn that the particular allowances which allow senators to travel by private jet are, however, in due course curtailed, and Obama realises with a strange relief that in certain respects he prefers to be mixed in with humanity, not least because his mind feeds most happily on the interaction with ordinary people, despite the fact at his next passage through an airport a child spills his orange juice copiously on the senator’s shoes.
But it is the abstractions of the constitution and law which most interest him, and which he obsessively attempts to interpret. He writes of the contributions that religious leaders have made to American democratic structures. He makes the profound point that the separation of church and state, the secularisation of the state, arose not only through the agency of intelligent Enlightenment intellectuals, but also through the fears of unorthodox or evangelical preachers that a state religion would persecute them and reduce their own freedom to propose their particular divergent form of faith. At the same time, Obama argues:
What our deliberative, pluralistic democracy does demand is that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values. It requires that their proposals must be subject to argument and amenable reason. If I am opposed to abortion for religious reasons and seek to pass a law banning the practice, I cannot simply point to the teachings of the church or invoke God’s will and expect that argument to carry the day. If I want others to listen to me, then I have to explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all.
Obama’s solution to the problem of the “conflict” between religious and scientific practice is not facile or simple, but it is carefully considered and clearly expressed.
For those who believe in the inerrancy of the Bible, as many evangelicals do, such rules of engagement may seem just one more example of the tyranny of the secular world over the sacred and eternal. But in a pluralistic democracy, we have no choice. Almost by definition, faith and reason operate in different domains and involve different paths to discerning truth. Reason — and science — involves the accumulation of knowledge based on realties that we can all apprehend. Religion, by contrast, is based on truths that are not provable through ordinary human understanding — the “belief in things not seen.” When science teachers insist on keeping creationism or intelligent design out of their classrooms, they are not asserting that scientific knowledge is superior to religious insight. They are simply insisting that each path to knowledge involves different rules and that these rules are not interchangeable.
If we are inclined to think this is easy to formulate or express, I would argue that it clarifies a truth that has eluded Richard Dawkins, for example, who believes that religion and science are in direct conflict, and that it is the sacred duty of scientists to keep creationism or intelligent design from the classroom precisely on the grounds that the two systems are indeed in perpetual confrontation.
Obama himself is highly aware of the dangers posed by religious extremism:
Politics is hardly a science, and it too frequently depends on reason. But in a pluralistic democracy, the same distinctions apply. Politics, like science, depends on our ability to persuade each other of common aims based on a common reality. Moreover, politics (unlike science) involves compromise, the art of the possible. At some fundamental level, religion does not allow for compromise. It insists on the impossible. If God has spoken, then followers are expected to live up to God’s edicts, regardless of the consequences. To base one’s life on such uncompromising commitments may be sublime; to base our policy making on such commitments would be a dangerous thing.
I hope the reader will forgive me for interpolating a personal political credo. For what it is worth, I loathe the worship of individual politicians, and the last thing I would wish to do is to hold up Obama as an example of yet another messianic leader. Progress, to my mind at least, consists of the decentralisation of power, the binding of Leviathan, the extension of individual choice. I hate the messianic, not least the form of populist messianism exemplified by the Kennedys and the Clintons, in which particular groups (“women”, “blacks”, “Latinos, “gays”) are identified, courted, and promised a combination of revenge and restitution in return for granting the would-be saviour wider powers. It would be a fine thing if that type of deeply divisive, rabble-raising politics were set aside. Obama gives every impression of doing precisely that. If these few pages convey any message at all, I hope it is the one I received from reading the book — one of a sharply refined perception and a capacity for moral persuasion, a highly pragmatic application of abstract truths, and a genuine interest in extending the power of individuals over their own lives. If Obama breaks any mould, it is that terrible and ancient one in which politicians deliberately patronise certain sections of the populace in return for exercising a range of increasingly arbitrary powers over people’s lives.
After finishing this piece, I noticed in the Independent newspaper today (11 February 2008) a reference to an article by Jonathan Raban on Clinton/Obama, entitled We are fighting the wrong battles. I have several reasons for admiring Raban. I think he is a brilliant essayist and a fine novelist, and though he has taken up residence in Seattle, he comes from Lymington, my own home town (what higher praise can there be?), where his father was the vicar. Raban begins his piece by reporting on a bitter dinner-table quarrel he witnessed between an admirable woman and an intelligent and usually self-effacing African-American retired professor on the relative importance of voting for a female or a black presidential candidate. It is Raban’s thesis that these differences, so widely touted in the media as central to the Clinton/Obama rivalry, are in fact superficial and even irrelevant. Instead, the important distinctions between the two presidential hopefuls are ones of character. Raban ends his piece by emphasising the profound contrasts in political style, and in particular Obama’s love of debate, his capacity to be influenced by argument. Compared with the centralising, micro-managing Hillary Clinton:
In Obama one sees — as one never sees in Clinton — a catholic, open-minded intellect working in real time, and he seems admirably unashamed of his own uncertainty … As a memoirist, he showed a remarkable capacity to comprehend imaginatively the lives of other people, in Africa and Indonesia as well as the US, and you can see that gift at work in his exchange with questioners. Obama offers the prospect of a first-among-equals administration, more flexible, more empiricist, more imaginative and less ideologically driven than any in recent history.
And, yes, Obama can write. His writing serves his evolving political views effectively and accurately. Long may he flourish.
My own interest is to investigate, from a largely literary perspective, how well Obama can write. His two published poems, composed when he was nineteen, seem to me highly impressive — pungent, expressive, and lyrical. I should add that one of my particular interests or obsessions is that style should follow content. Accordingly, I am not looking for the showy phrase or the crowd-appealing flight of rhetoric. What interests me is the way that a subject is investigated, expressed, summarised.
My own rapid conclusion, after reading only a few pages of his book The Audacity of Hope was that he writes beautifully, economically, with few signs of that occasionally showy high rhetorical style which seems to characterise some of his barnstorming election speeches. No doubt this is intentional and expected — the function of the speeches before enthusiastic crowds is to attract attention, cement loyalty and raise support; the function of Obama’s book is to provide a more considered framework for what may otherwise seem a mere concatenation of opinions.
Obama is something of a political theologian. The usual breeding ground for politicians in democracies is the law. This is for good reason. The law is the base of human action and the protector of rights of the common man. Even Gandhi was a barrister.
Obama was voted president of the Harvard Law Review, the first black president in its 104-year history. He holds high formal qualifications for intelligent discussion of legal matters. But there are surely very few who can express complex matters of religion or individual belief with such sureness and lightness.
It is a truism that we Americans are a religious people. According to the most recent surveys, 95 percent of Americans believe in God, more than two-thirds belong to a church, 37 percent call themselves committed Christians, and substantially more people believe in angels than believe in evolution. Nor is religion confined to places of worship. Books proclaiming the end of days sell millions of copies, Christian music fills the Billboard charts, and new megachurches seem to spring up daily on the outskirts of every major metropolis, providing everything form day care to singles mixers to yoga and Pilates classes. Our President routinely remarks on how Christ changed his heart, and football players point to the heavens after every touchdown, as if God were calling plays from the celestial sidelines.
The passage flows beautifully, building to its climax in the last sentence, one which encapsulates, humorously and ironically, the meaning of the previous sections. It is vivid and clear. Written from the perspective of a purportedly religious man, it contains a refreshing element of self-awareness and self-criticism about the degree of religious overzealousness he observes in many of his fellow Americans. At the same time it is affectionate and respectful. To bring all these things together, with such apparent effortlessness and ease, is the mark of a first-rate writer.
This is a relatively light passage. Where Obama is particularly impressive is the massing of argument, using language precisely. He discusses the multi-enthnicity of modern American society:
In a sense I have no choice but to believe in this vision of America. As the child of a black man and a white woman, someone who was born in the racial melting pot of Hawaii, with a sister who’s half Indonesian but who’s usually mistaken for Mexican or Puerto Rican, and a brother-in-law and niece of Chinese descent, with some blood relatives who resemble Margaret Thatcher and others who pass for Bernie Mac, so that family get-togethers over Christmas take on the appearance of a UN General Assembly meeting, I’ve never had the option of restricting my loyalties on the basis of race, or measuring my worth on the basis of tribe.
Another example of this easy vividness occurs when Obama expresses the apparently optimistic view that racial prejudices, though they may remain below the surface, are nevertheless loosening:
I maintain, however, that in today’s America such prejudices are far more loosely held than they once were — and hence are subject to refutation. A black teenage boy walking down the street may elicit fear in a white couple, but if he turns out to be their son’s friend from school he may be invited over for dinner. A black man may have trouble catching a cab late at night, but if he is a capable software engineer Microsoft will have no qualms about hiring him.
One of the virtues of his style is that he brings clarity to difficult subject matter through the evocation of individual examples.
I cannot prove these assertions; surveys of racial attitudes are notoriously unreliable. And even if I’m right, it’s cold comfort to many minorities. After all, spending one’s days refuting stereotypes can be a wearying business. It’s the added weight that many minorities, especially African Americans, so often describe in their daily round — the feeling that as a group we have no store of goodwill in America’s accounts, that as individuals we must prove ourselves anew every day, that we will rarely get the benefit of the doubt and will have little margin for error. Making a way through such a world requires the black child to fight off the additional hesitation that she may feel when she stands at the threshold of a mainly white classroom on the first day of school; it requires the Latina woman to fight off self-doubt as she prepares for a job interview at a mostly white company.
He is also able to write with a certain irony about the world seen from the perspective of privilege. As a US senator, Obama was allowed to travel by private jet. One of the most interesting passages occurs when he describes the seductions of private jet travel, the circumventing of all those trying times at airport arrival and departure — the crowds, the screaming children, the bureaucratic delays, the endless queuing, all supplanted by a private jet waiting for your arrival at an airport with the patience of a chauffeur-driven limousine. He evokes the sensual pleasure of being conveyed to one’s destination with luxurious ease and efficiency. The plane waiting for him is a Citation X, “a sleek, compact, shiny machine with wood panelling and leather seats that you could pull together to make a bed anytime you decided you wanted a nap”:
Then the plane took off, its Rolls-Royce engines gripping the air the way a well-made sports car grips the road. Shooting through the clouds, I turned on the small TV monitor in front of my seat. A map of the United States appeared, with the image of our plane tracking west, along with our speed, our altitude, our time to destination, and the temperature outside. At forty thousand feet, the plane levelled off, and I looked down at the curving horizon and the scattered clouds, the geography of the earth laid out before me — first the flat, checkerboard fields of western Illinois, then the python curves of the Mississippi, then more farmland and ranch land and eventually the jagged Rockies, still snow-peaked, until the sun went down and the orange sky narrowed to a thin red line that was finally consumed by night and stars and moon.
The prose functions as perfectly as the described plane, with a fine metaphor of “the python curves of the Mississippi” thrown in. We learn that the particular allowances which allow senators to travel by private jet are, however, in due course curtailed, and Obama realises with a strange relief that in certain respects he prefers to be mixed in with humanity, not least because his mind feeds most happily on the interaction with ordinary people, despite the fact at his next passage through an airport a child spills his orange juice copiously on the senator’s shoes.
But it is the abstractions of the constitution and law which most interest him, and which he obsessively attempts to interpret. He writes of the contributions that religious leaders have made to American democratic structures. He makes the profound point that the separation of church and state, the secularisation of the state, arose not only through the agency of intelligent Enlightenment intellectuals, but also through the fears of unorthodox or evangelical preachers that a state religion would persecute them and reduce their own freedom to propose their particular divergent form of faith. At the same time, Obama argues:
What our deliberative, pluralistic democracy does demand is that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values. It requires that their proposals must be subject to argument and amenable reason. If I am opposed to abortion for religious reasons and seek to pass a law banning the practice, I cannot simply point to the teachings of the church or invoke God’s will and expect that argument to carry the day. If I want others to listen to me, then I have to explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all.
Obama’s solution to the problem of the “conflict” between religious and scientific practice is not facile or simple, but it is carefully considered and clearly expressed.
For those who believe in the inerrancy of the Bible, as many evangelicals do, such rules of engagement may seem just one more example of the tyranny of the secular world over the sacred and eternal. But in a pluralistic democracy, we have no choice. Almost by definition, faith and reason operate in different domains and involve different paths to discerning truth. Reason — and science — involves the accumulation of knowledge based on realties that we can all apprehend. Religion, by contrast, is based on truths that are not provable through ordinary human understanding — the “belief in things not seen.” When science teachers insist on keeping creationism or intelligent design out of their classrooms, they are not asserting that scientific knowledge is superior to religious insight. They are simply insisting that each path to knowledge involves different rules and that these rules are not interchangeable.
If we are inclined to think this is easy to formulate or express, I would argue that it clarifies a truth that has eluded Richard Dawkins, for example, who believes that religion and science are in direct conflict, and that it is the sacred duty of scientists to keep creationism or intelligent design from the classroom precisely on the grounds that the two systems are indeed in perpetual confrontation.
Obama himself is highly aware of the dangers posed by religious extremism:
Politics is hardly a science, and it too frequently depends on reason. But in a pluralistic democracy, the same distinctions apply. Politics, like science, depends on our ability to persuade each other of common aims based on a common reality. Moreover, politics (unlike science) involves compromise, the art of the possible. At some fundamental level, religion does not allow for compromise. It insists on the impossible. If God has spoken, then followers are expected to live up to God’s edicts, regardless of the consequences. To base one’s life on such uncompromising commitments may be sublime; to base our policy making on such commitments would be a dangerous thing.
I hope the reader will forgive me for interpolating a personal political credo. For what it is worth, I loathe the worship of individual politicians, and the last thing I would wish to do is to hold up Obama as an example of yet another messianic leader. Progress, to my mind at least, consists of the decentralisation of power, the binding of Leviathan, the extension of individual choice. I hate the messianic, not least the form of populist messianism exemplified by the Kennedys and the Clintons, in which particular groups (“women”, “blacks”, “Latinos, “gays”) are identified, courted, and promised a combination of revenge and restitution in return for granting the would-be saviour wider powers. It would be a fine thing if that type of deeply divisive, rabble-raising politics were set aside. Obama gives every impression of doing precisely that. If these few pages convey any message at all, I hope it is the one I received from reading the book — one of a sharply refined perception and a capacity for moral persuasion, a highly pragmatic application of abstract truths, and a genuine interest in extending the power of individuals over their own lives. If Obama breaks any mould, it is that terrible and ancient one in which politicians deliberately patronise certain sections of the populace in return for exercising a range of increasingly arbitrary powers over people’s lives.
After finishing this piece, I noticed in the Independent newspaper today (11 February 2008) a reference to an article by Jonathan Raban on Clinton/Obama, entitled We are fighting the wrong battles. I have several reasons for admiring Raban. I think he is a brilliant essayist and a fine novelist, and though he has taken up residence in Seattle, he comes from Lymington, my own home town (what higher praise can there be?), where his father was the vicar. Raban begins his piece by reporting on a bitter dinner-table quarrel he witnessed between an admirable woman and an intelligent and usually self-effacing African-American retired professor on the relative importance of voting for a female or a black presidential candidate. It is Raban’s thesis that these differences, so widely touted in the media as central to the Clinton/Obama rivalry, are in fact superficial and even irrelevant. Instead, the important distinctions between the two presidential hopefuls are ones of character. Raban ends his piece by emphasising the profound contrasts in political style, and in particular Obama’s love of debate, his capacity to be influenced by argument. Compared with the centralising, micro-managing Hillary Clinton:
In Obama one sees — as one never sees in Clinton — a catholic, open-minded intellect working in real time, and he seems admirably unashamed of his own uncertainty … As a memoirist, he showed a remarkable capacity to comprehend imaginatively the lives of other people, in Africa and Indonesia as well as the US, and you can see that gift at work in his exchange with questioners. Obama offers the prospect of a first-among-equals administration, more flexible, more empiricist, more imaginative and less ideologically driven than any in recent history.
And, yes, Obama can write. His writing serves his evolving political views effectively and accurately. Long may he flourish.
No comments:
Post a Comment