Enlightened Librarian: Books and heartsickness

Books and heartsickness · 25 November 2004

For the past three nights, and continuing tonight and tomorrow, CBC Radio One has aired its 43rd annual Massey Lecture, a thrillingly anachronistic event in which a major thinker presents a thesis over five nights for the cause of public edification. For those without the Methodist dedication to sit through five straight evenings of radio listening, the essay series accompanying the lectures, published by House of Anansi Press, have become relatively big sellers. Big, that is, when you factor the admittedly rarified market for what are essentially Victorian-era handbills attempting to contribute to the public good.

Occasionally, though, the lectures seem to break out of their nouveau fustiness and get people talking. To my recollection this happened last in 1998, when Jean Vanier’s Becoming Human expanded his discussion of the founding principles of L’Arche, an organization that cares for people with developmental disabilities, into a book about satisfying spiritual hunger, which became a runaway bestseller. I have high hopes that this year’s incarnation, Ronald Wright’s A Short History of Progress, will have a similarly explosive effect. Be warned, however, that this very short book may well have the opposite effect of Vanier’s, in that I, for one, finished it feeling heartsick and scared out of my mind.

With carefully marshalled arguments, convincing evidence and preternatural calm, Wright says humankind will do well to last to mid-century. Yes, that’s exactly what he means. Drawing on collapses of civilizations past, including Easter Island, Sumeria, ancient Rome and the Maya, Wright says the social inequities and resource gluttony of those societies are two of the primary hallmarks of our own. And not only do we have barbarians blowing up our gates—the fact that we’re on the verge of environmental collapse promises to make ours a “best of” in the illustrious series of societal snuffing-outs. But not to worry, civilization itself, a mere sliver of time in the course of human evolution, has always been an enormously risky experiment in over-consumption that was anything but a sure bet in the first place. And, even colder comfort, humans have probably been exterminating each other since Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons started fighting over the same caves. So the patterns run deep, he says, and it’s not that surprising that we’re sprinting fast toward the brink. Wright, himself an archeologist, novelist and polymath in the Victorian mold, offers laser-like focus and, under the circumstances, beautiful understatement in making his case:

The great advantage we have, our best chance for avoiding the fate of past societies, is that we know about those past societies. We can see how and why they went wrong. Homo sapiens has the information to know itself for what it is: an Ice Age hunter only half-evolved toward intelligence; clever but seldom wise.

Another book, another variety of heartsickness. And another warning: there are passages in Roméo Dallaire’s Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda that may turn your stomach to the point of nausea. I bought and read the book after chancing across Dallaire—the retired Canadian general who lead the UN’s halfhearted mercy mission in Rwanda—delivering a brilliant and harrowing off-the-cuff lecture on CPAC. This was the first time I had encountered him since stories of his suicide attempts and personal collapse that circulated in 2000. And it’s clear that the book is partly his own writing cure, but also, it must be said, an utter triumph of clear thinking. Between passages, tactfully spaced, describing scenes and acts that make the imagination shut down for safety, Dallaire brilliantly dissects a case study of bureaucratic failure and societal indifference that easily weighs as heavily as the visceral impact of the murders themselves. Like Wright, Dallaire’s rational even-handedness is magnificent, making his accounts of his own spriritual disembowelment and waning sanity all the more powerful. I’ve never read a book that conveys so vividly the day-to-day edginess and relentlessness of army life in a war zone, nor so exactingly the exercise in unwieldiness that the UN has become. Tragically, in addition to the 800,000 victims the book commemorates, the writing itself took one more; Dallaire’s own ghost writer, Sian Cansfield, did not have his emotional defences—or scars—to withstand the retelling of the story and committed suicide before the book’s completion.

Deservingly, Dallaire was awarded a Governor General’s literary award for non-fiction two weeks ago, although the book resonates far beyond its current run since publication last fall. Like A Short History of Progress this book is another weathervane of the time—precise and unwavering.

Ronald Wright. A Short History of Progress. Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2004

Read more about the book at the publisher’s web site here.

Roméo Dallaire. Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda. Toronto: Random House Canada, 2003.

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