Horizon

David Westbrook on BHL

In the March issue of First Things, David Westbrook takes Bernard Henri Lévy to task for American Vertigo. The book is a disconnected series of vignettes, suitable for light reading, but unworthy of Tocqueville. Journalism, but not a book, one might say.

I can't disagree, although I enjoyed it for precisely that reason. Then again, I enjoyed reading de Tocqueville's journals better than I did Democracy in America, so maybe I'm the wrong person to ask. Certainly BHL's run-ons and sentence fragments work better when he's paraphrasing a conversation or describing what he sees than, say, when he's philosophizing on memory.

Along the way, Westbrook points out American Vertigo's omissions by suggesting alternative subject matter for the book. This is worth quoting; especially the bit about the flags:

Lévy could write a book on America that would be far more challenging for his French and American audiences than these articles. He could, for example, write much more deeply about how multiple political identities work in America. American identity happens on another plane from cultural identity—hence the conflicts that Lévy expects between American and Mexican, or even American and Arab, identity are rare. One is Mexican or Jewish or Arab, or something non-national like gay or Asian, as well as American. Thus it is subtly wrong to understand flags, or the military, in the sense of competition among nations in a European sense. Most Americans have little serious cognizance of other nations; there is no competition. This is, of course, beyond arrogant. It is an echo of the revolutionary presumptions of the United States (and one of the things Tocqueville was trying to capture); an analogy might be drawn to the French tendency to speak for civilization itself.

Then, too, in paying attention to traditional cities, Lévy misses one of the largest migrations in human history. Millions upon millions of people have been moving to lower density living and working environments. Not merely to suburbia, but moving to places where there is no city, or the city is functionally irrelevant. Much of America is booming, and has been for decades. Very small towns are undergoing a renaissance of sorts, but as pleasant places to live while working in the new economy, rather than as autonomous economic units. Suppose cities, instead of being the site of civilized life, are just an arrangement dictated by the needs of commerce at the level of transportation technology? Suppose Atlanta, hundreds of kilometers of trees and traffic with no discernible center, a highly populated forest, represents the future of cities? What would this mean for the United States? For France?

Posted by Ben Brumfield at June 7, 2006 07:28 AM