(The salad plates were collected and immediately followed by soup. The soup was cream of walnut with a pear puree. You could hear the clink of the spoons against the glass and Dwight MacDonald had a slurping noise that would make a mild misophone lose his appetite.)
Dwight MacDonald: As I was starting to say, I'm reading this new anti-colonialist who's the rage among my students: an Arab Algerian named Fanon.
Daniel Bell: Ochen vey.
Lionel Trilling: He's not Algerian, he's Caribbean.
Dwight: You know him?
Jacques Barzun: Another fashionablist who thinks building a civilization will be as easy as destroying it.
Diana Trilling: He has some interesting things to say about Algeria.
Lionel: They all have interesting things to say!
Seymour Martin Lipset: All of them?
Lionel: Of course!
Danny: So you, Lionel Trilling, who made America think Princess Cassamassima is a readable book, think Peanuts has interesting things to say?
Diana: Careful Danny, you'll have to explain to him what Peanuts comics are.
(Everyone laughed. I suppose it's relieving: any laugh at a dinner hosted by Jacques Barzun is as unlikely as a mention of The Rolling Stones. The food is inevitably delectable, but Allah forbid any of us use the wrong salad fork or Barzun may remind us of it in eighteen months. Lionel told me that my presence at this dinner would be much appreciated, Arendt would be there and wants to talk to me about my new Conrad book. Of course, this means 'your presence is mandatory.' It seemed fairly innocuous, Arendt wrote about Conrad in Origins of Totalitarianism, but I have a feeling of dread that something more purposeful is afoot.)
Lionel: I've read the Peanuts.
Marty: If Lionel's read them he probably has them memorized from the first column to last week.
(everyone laughed again)
Lionel: They're not without entertainment value either!
Jacques: I agree.
Danny: My god, the Columbia common core is praising Peanuts!
Dwight: Next Jacques will be telling us The Beatles are a cultural achievement to place next to Wagner.
Lionel: I've come to realize that there isn't a single cultural artifact from which one can't gain insight.
Jacques: I would not go so far Lionel.
Dwight: What sort of insight?
Lionel: Human, cultural...
Dwight: I hope you don't mean aesthetic.
Lionel: Of course there's aesthetic insight!
Danny: This is the most shocking historical moment since Molotov-Ribbentrop.
Diana: Then you don't know Lionel.
Lionel: Popular mediums are completely new mediums. We can't dismiss them simply because they have no precedent.
Danny: No precedent? Newspaper cartoons have been around for three generations!
Lionel: All I'm saying is that there are all sorts of mediums our generation will never be able to understand and we'll have to leave them for new generations to sort out.
Marty: Suit yourself. But I'm twenty years younger than you and I don't understand them.
Diana: Edward, you're the strapping youngling here, what do you think of newspaper cartoons.
(all eyes turned towards me)
Edward Said: I never had much use for them.
Marty: You see?
Lionel: There are so many sources from which one can gain enlightenment, more and more I believe we vastly underestimate it.
Jacques: So what do we do about the transcendent sources? Do we just file them away under no better than Family Circus?
Lionel: Not at all, there is still aesthetic/intellectual hierarchy, but one should not dismiss the value of popular sources.
Dwight: Alright, well Lionel, since until Peanuts I was under the impression that you thought nothing transcendent's been done since 1930, whom do you think is writing actual transcendent work in our time?
Lionel: Isaiah Berlin?
Marty: Isaiah Berlin?
Lionel: You object?
Marty: Who would know?
Diana: Everyone knows about Isaiah!
Marty: He doesn't publish!
Dwight: He's published!
Marty: His whole reputation is based on how good he is at dinners like this!
Lionel: Nonsense! Have you read his Marx biography?
Marty: It's a small one volume thing from the thirties! What's he done since then?
Lionel: He wrote those briefs about America for the British foreign office during World War II. They amount to a new Federalist Papers!
Danny: Lionel I think Berlin's as good as it gets but that's pushing it...
Lionel: And he wrote that book on 18th century thinkers.
Marty: Come on, Lionel, those are obviously lecture transcriptions from some graduate student. And at the speed he talks who knows if that's actually what he said?
Diana: Then he must be even better than his lectures if not everything was taken down.
Marty: Who would know?
Danny: So you think Isaiah Berlin's overrated? The greatest liberal philosopher of our time save Hannah?
Hannah Arendt: I think he's the most overrated philosopher of our time.
Jacques Barzun: He thinks the same of you.
(again everyone laughed, including Arendt)
Marty: My point is just that his reputation is as much based on word of mouth and how well he talks, not on anything he's written. Who knows if we even remember correctly what he has to say?
Lionel: Fair. Well, whom do you all think is doing transcendent work today?
Dwight: Well I'd say Saul.
Danny: Let's put some guidelines here. I think he means who's doing intellectual work with political implications. Saul is not a political writer, and I think if you talked to Saul about politics these days you'd be appalled.
Marty: He's gone back to Trotsky?
Diana: Quite the opposite. He makes Irving Kristol sound like Stalin.
Marty: Oy...
Dwight: Alright, who's a transcendent figure who affects political discourse? Lionel says Isaiah Berlin, I'll say Marshall McLuhan.
Marty: Raymond Aron.
Danny: Can I say Orwell or Camus?
Diana: Unfortunately not, we're in a different era now.
Danny: Alright, I'll say Gershom Scholem.
Marty: Not political enough.
Lionel: I think we ought to allow it. Hannah?
Hannah: You know I'll say myself.
(again, everyone laughed)
Hannah: Very well. Karl Popper.
Marty: Diana?
Diana: ...I'm going to go with Arthur Koestler.
Danny: How unenlightened of you...
(everyone laughed again)
Marty: Jacques?
Jacques: No one.
Hannah: Quelle surprise...
(everyone laughed again)
Lionel: Please don't forget Edward. I'm sorry my boy...
Edward...: Frantz Fanon?
(everyone went quiet)
Danny: Well that was a much bigger surprise than Jacques.
(everyone laughed again)
Diana: Well, it makes perfect sense that Edward would find resonance in him.
Marty: I agree, but that doesn't make him the greatest thinker of our time.
Lionel: I was saying, his work has some fascinating insights. He says that racism forces the colonized and men of color to adapt the thoughts and manners of the colonizer.
Jacques: That's hardly an original insight. The idea that people rebel using the language of people against whom they rebel goes back through Nietzsche, goes back to Hegel and Marx in the dialectic,
Diana: It goes back to Shakespeare in Caliban.
Danny: It goes back to the Talmud!
Jacques: It goes back to Heraclitus.
Edward: But there is no guarantee that the oppressed can ever rebel.
Dwight: Can you elaborate Edward?
Edward: There is always a chance that the oppressed will remain oppressed in perpetuity.
(everyone froze in that moment)
Jacques: That's very bleak, and a little unfair I believe, but sound. There is not a single achievement in early man that could have been achieved without slave labor.
Edward: It's not just about achievements. The condition of mankind has doubtless been slave and master for literal thousands of years before there was any achievement of which to speak, and continued for thousands of years after there were.
Diana: Well if you're going to bring Hegel into this we should concede that he was a bit more optimistic than you're portraying him.
Edward: It's not necessarily Hegel that I mean.
Diana: Well Hannah is obviously the expert here but if I understand Hegel correctly, he believes that in spite of the master-slave dialectic, history is a means toward a well-defined end, and the end is self-understanding and freedom.
(Jacques's valet collected the soup bowls, they were followed by oysters and pearls and salmon tartare cornet. One would assume it unthinkable that Jacques Barzun would serve something so like a soup as oysters and pearls after a soup, but one can't complain about the dish's quality. The salmon was fascinating and must have taken hours: a small ice cream-like cone covered with sesame seeds and filled with sweet red onion creme fraiche. It was topped with salmon tartare, chives and a quenelle of caviar. Doubtless Jacques measured every roe to get a precise number on every plate.)
Edward: Well as I said, I mostly wasn't speaking of Hegel, but Hegel believes the Oriental is the primitive condition of man that only one master is free and everyone else is his slave.
Diana: Well Edward, surely you have to concede that with the exceptions of certain centuries conditions in the West were just a little bit freer than they were in the East.
Edward: Why should we generalize in that way?
Danny: Generalizing is all there is. You do the best you can to collect a sample set but the conditions are always incomplete.
Edward: I don't accept that.
Marty: Why not?
Edward: We can aspire to better.
Marty: Edward, please, show your work.
Edward: (I grew a bit flustered) I have no work of which to show on this matter, but it is only when people aspire to better that there is any chance for improvement of conditions.
Jacques: I utterly disagree with that. Respectfully, of course.
Edward: Is it so objectionable to ask for higher ethical standards?
Jacques: I completely agree with you that generalizations are to be avoided in all situations and possibilities, but if one looks at the trajectory of history: to say there is paltry evidence that higher standards are effective would be an understatement.
Edward: What about the line from Martin Luther King? 'The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice.'
Marty: You don't really believe that, do you?
Edward: Why not?
Marty: You just said the oppressed remain oppressed in perpetuity! Why would you then think the moral arc bends toward justice?
Edward: It only bends when we choose to bend it.
Danny: Edward I think you're getting a bit sentimental about human capacities.
Edward: Why?
Danny: Because if people have been slaves for thousands of years without a change in their circumstances, why would the future be any different than the past?
Edward: Because we can choose to create better circumstances.
Hannah: He's right.
(everyone froze for a split-second, much shorter than when they froze for me but still noticeable)
Hannah: The entire point of political life is to change circumstances.
Lionel: Elaborate Hannah please.
Hannah: One cannot change circumstances without political engagement, and it is in the interests of citizens to use politics to improve their circumstances.
Danny: But don't people disagree savagely on what the circumstances are?
Dwight: You're the one who wrote ideology was over Danny.
Marty: I'll agree with Danny here. Bad actors fight all the time to change circumstances for the worse.
Hannah: That is why change happens at such a slow pace.
Danny: I'm sorry, I can't accept those circumstances.
Marty: I agree.
Diana: I'm with Hannah and Edward.
Danny: Change does not happen because powerless actors insist on it, it happens when unpredictable circumstances allow for it.
Hannah: One more thought about Hegel. Yes, he specifies a master/slave dialectic, but (and she turned to me), it is the slave who comes to understanding first and thereby attains freedom. Not the master.
(there was another pause, I was shocked and for the first time that night, I breathed.)
Dwight: Can we get back to Fanon?
Danny: You were saying he's an Arab...
Marty: Seriously Dwight? All that stuff about the West being anti-Black didn't clue you in that he isn't Arab?
Lionel: He's from Martinique.
Dwight: I'm sorry, I was too focused on the substance of his arguments.
Marty: What substance?
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