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It was no longer the case, as it was for Marx, that poverty — as well as idiocy — was the natural condition of man living in an agricultural mode of production. Rather, poverty had been introduced into the Third World by the capitalist system. The colonies no longer served the purpose of consuming overstocked inventories, but were now the positive victims of capitalism.


Not even Orwell ever dared to suggest that the reason why so many professional intellectuals sympathised with totalitarian regimes was that they themselves were born totalitarians, but looking back from the end of the century, there seems reason to think that the state of mind all too often goes with the territory. In 1936 Stefan Zweig, characteristically employing his wide cultural range to focus an acute political perception, traced the tendency back to 16th-century Geneva. In his book, Castellio gegen Calvin oder Ein Gewissen gegen die Gewalt (Castellio against Calvin, or a Conscience against Power) he convincingly demonstrated why Calvin’s natural mode of argument against a preacher of religious tolerance was to burn him. Clearly Zweig had aimed his book at Hitler, although it would also have fitted Stalin, whose own mode of assertive philosophical discourse was already well in train, with the death toll running far into the millions. More disturbing, in the long term — more disturbing because less immediately obvious — is the way it fits generations of modern thinkers. Comfortably domiciled in academic institutions or on the heights of literary prestige, they never actually killed anyone, but didn’t seem to mind much when other people did. It is perhaps not my place to make too much of this (there is always a chance that my view of 20th-century history is not only dark, it is neurotically so), but I do sometimes wonder why, in the continuing discussion about, say, Heidegger, the possibility is more often entertained that he actually liked the idea of helpless people being kicked in the mouth. As I go on reading deeper into our era’s mental background, more and more often I find myself needled by the unsettling suspicion that there is an intellectual’s version of “If Only the Führer Knew” and “Someone Must Tell Stalin”. It is the consoling assumption that if Sartre, for example, could have been brought to imagine what the gulag system was really like, he would never have granted the Soviet Union the prestige of his loftily withheld condemnation. But what (whisper it) if he did imagine it? It’s a dreadful thought, and I wouldn’t want to try erecting it into a principle. For one thing, as Raymond Aron suggested in his calling-card booklet Le Spectateur Engagé, it is always a mistake to underestimate the role of sheer obtuseness in human affairs.

 
Don Quixote’s misreadings — his determination to read fiction as reality — license our millions of readings of him, because Cervantes kept the ambition of Don Quixote’s journeying as wide and unspecific as possible. We know what Don Quixote thinks he is doing, but what is he really doing? What do his strivings represent? Do his misreadings of the world represent the comic battle of the unsullied Idea doing its best to exist in the brute world of Reality? Or for Idea and Reality should we read Spirit and Flesh? (Poor Sancho, in this scheme, is always seen as Flesh.) Or Literature and Reality? Or is Don Quixote an absolutist artist, striving to shape the recalcitrant world into his vision of it? That Don Quixote’s adventures have been so idealized, not to say Christianized, says more about the idealizing tendencies of Christianity than about Cervantes’s novel. It is as if those determined to see Don Quixote as some kind of saint or missionary of the spirit had simply closed their eyes to the mayhem and suffering he causes. Andrés, the flogged boy, is right: Don Quixote’s good intentions have perverse consequences. Perhaps Cervantes was interested, then, not only in the pious triumphs of his Knight but also in his pious defeats? And perhaps this interest, despite what may be said about Cervantes’s own Catholicism, has a secular, even blasphemous bent? Dostoyevsky, who was very interested in Don Quixote, surely saw this when he created the figure of Prince Myshkin, the Idiot, whose Christlike actions have a way of contaminating the world around him.


In short, Reagan, unlike Nixon and Kissinger, had refused to learn, refused to travel down the same path away from confidence, refused to understand, much less accept, the limits on power and responsibility. Both wings of the establishment believed that Reagan’s confidence about American strength and moral superiority, and his belief in eventual victory in the Cold War, would lead to disaster, perhaps even to thermonuclear holocaust. In his first term, Reagan stonewalled arms control talks, abandoned the SALT process, abandoned detente, abandoned even the idea that good relations with the Soviet Union were vitally important. Instead he conducted a massive arms build-up, regularly assailed the Soviet Union in moral terms, supplied arms to anti-Communist guerrillas in Central America, Africa, Southeast Asia, and Afghanistan, deployed new nuclear weapons in Europe, started the Strategic Defense Initiative, created “situations of strength” around the globe. Reagan’s policies violated every post-Vietnam tenet of both wings of the establishment. In Reagan’s second term, however, the Soviets, led by Mikhail Gorbachev, began to sue for peace. Within months after Reagan left office, the Soviet empire began to collapse. Within three years, the Soviet Union broke up. The connection between Reagan’s more confrontational approach and this unimaginably peaceful and successful conclusion to the Cold War was unmistakable. In the course of the coming decade, former Soviet officials and former dissidents, as well as many scholars from both the United States and the Soviet Union, offered compelling evidence that Reagan’s arms build-up, his threat to build a missile defense shield, and his ideological challenge to Soviet communism had played an important role in compelling Soviet leaders to abandon strategies that had seemed so successful during the 1970s but had been made wanting by Reagan’s late Cold War policies. If this was even partly true, where did the end of the Cold War leave the establishment? The establishment had taught itself that American power was limited, that the United States could not have “saved” China or Vietnam. So how could it possibly have brought down the Soviet Union? The establishment had called upon Americans to accept perpetual co-existence with the Soviet Union, which meant restraining their messianic ambitions. But now co-existence was unnecessary, and so, it seemed, was self-restraint. The establishment had reconciled itself to the fact that the United States could not be “number one,” as Reagan liked to say, and had positively celebrated the impossibility. Yet here was the United States, suddenly the “sole superpower,” the uncontested global hegemon. The establishment had taught itself that American pretensions to be the bearer of universal principles and a superior morality were an arrogant “myth,” no less arrogant than the pretensions of Soviet Communists to be the vanguard of global revolution — but here were American principles being celebrated in Warsaw and Berlin, and in Tiananmen Square. How would the establishment square this momentous historical achievement with its own transformed post-Vietnam worldview? David Halberstam spent the quarter of a century between the Republican convention in 1976 and the publication of War in a Time of Peace writing about other things. The Best and the Brightest made him a famous and rich writer and gave him the chance to apply his impressive skills more broadly. In 1981, the year Ronald Reagan took office, Halberstam published a book about the Portland Trailblazers. In 1985, the year Mikhail Gorbachev emerged on the world scene, he published a book about rowing. In 1986, the year of the dramatic Reagan-Gorbachev summit at Reykjavik, Halberstam published a book about the American automobile industry. In 1989, the year the Berlin Wall fell, he published a book about the 1949 pennant race, and five years later he published a book about the 1964 pennant race.

 
Nietzsche wrote that “lying is a necessity of life” and that it was “a part of the terrifying and problematic character of existence.” And Goethe asserted that truth is “contrary to our nature,” for truth, he wrote, “demands that we should recognize ourselves as limited.” Error, though “flatters us,” suggesting that we are without limits, that anything is possible. Lying, he suggests, is part of human nature; truth is not.

 
In the half century since the foundation of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), the world economy has grown sixfold, in part because trade has expanded 16-fold. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development calculates that nations that are relatively open to trade grow about twice as fast as those that are relatively closed. Despite the Asian crisis, the World Bank calculates that some 800 million people moved out of absolute poverty in the past decade. And the people left behind still tend to suffer from too little globalization (be it trade barriers to the goods that they produce or restraints on the information they can get at home) rather than too much.


“The main fuel to speed the world’s progress,” wrote Simon in the introduction to the 1995 collection The State of Humanity, “is our stock of knowledge; the brakes are our lack of imagination and unsound social regulations of these activities. The ultimate resource is people — especially skilled, spirited, and hopeful young people endowed with liberty — who will exert their wills and imaginations for their own benefit, and so inevitably they will benefit the rest of us as well.” The mass of data he accumulated told the story: It showed infant mortality falling, life expectancy rising, agricultural prices falling, arable land rising, the number of people fated to agricultural toil falling, air quality improving. There can and will be temporary and local bumps, but the long-term universal trends are positive. In a world where doomsayers make bestsellers out of predictions of manmade horror that always proved untrue, this was a courageous and lonely stance. But Simon was not afraid to put his money where his mouth was. He made a famous bet with archdoomsayer Paul Ehrlich that a cohort of five natural resources of Ehrlich’s choosing would be cheaper in inflation-adjusted terms at the end of the ’80s than at the beginning. Simon won the bet. Ehrlich won the MacArthur “genius grant.”