Drawing Life: Surviving the Unabomber

National Review, Sept 15, 1997 by Scott McConnell

Drawing Life: Surviving the Unabomber, by David Gelernter (Free Press, 160 pp., $20.50)

Mr. McConnell is editorial-page editor of the New York Post.

IN this sparkling small book, David Gelernter mixes a memoir of his long recovery from wounds inflicted in a Unabomber attack in 1993 with deeper cultural ruminations about America. He says that it is easier to smash things up than to put them back together -- true about his partially shattered body and also for the country he sees as still not healed from the social explosions of the 1960s.

Home from the hospital a few months after a bomb mailed to his Yale office mangled his right hand, ruined his right eye, and left him nearly dead, Gelernter found himself drawn almost unconsciously to the America of two generations ago -- a nation more optimistic, less violent, more comfortable with itself, in important ways more sophisticated (people read and listened to the radio instead of watching television). Mining clues from popular culture, Gelernter went on a quest to find out what went wrong. The first fruits of his exploration appeared in the acclaimed historical essay/novel 1939: The Lost World of the Fair, completed while he was undergoing a long regime of reconstructive surgery.

Drawing Life digs more deeply into the reasons why our society is worse off today in important ways than it was in 1940 or 1960. Gelernter is masterly at extracting sharp insights from small details. Typical is his mention of Marjorie Hollis's women's vacation guide to New York, published in 1939. She calmly dismisses the men-only McSorley's Tavern as "probably pretty dull" -- an attitude typical of an era when it was not yet desirable to present oneself as a victim. Or his reflection on the emergence of "judgmental" as a pejorative: there was a time when a society's (or an individual's) ability to make and enforce judgments was admired.

He argues at greater length that more women should remain home to nurture their children, while pointing out that in the 1950s and early 1960s any woman who wanted to focus on a career could do so without discouragement or discrimination. But modern feminism --cooked up by a coterie of intellectuals -- succeeded in so disparaging the role of housewife that many now think there is something wrong if a woman stays home. Gelernter notes drily that among current politicians only Pat Buchanan has ever expressed something like his own view on this subject, only to retract it under fire.

Gelernter regrets the passing of the time when headline writers could write un-self-consciously of "Uncle Sam" -- an indication that Americans of past generations felt a sense of intimacy and quasi-familial identity with their nation and its progress in the world.

He is respectful (who cannot be?) of the civil-rights movement, but not of its transformation into the new American civic religion. This is also the work of a new class of intellectuals, people who never had much use for Judaism or Christianity but were pleased to push forward a vision of a morally gross majority and an oppressed minority, evil whites and virtuous blacks, as a paradigm that could be replicated (evil men and virtuous women) and then deployed to hammer away at all the traditional arrangements of American life.

In Gelernter's view, these developments all flow from the same source: the silent, slow-motion coup that replaced one American elite with another. The old elite was largely commercial, practical-minded, distrustful of grand abstractions. In the world of letters, it produced a specifically American type of "low church" thinker, who was typically irreverent, fascinated by technique, distrustful of grand designs, traditionalist about family values.

The new elite, composed of intellectuals and those trained by them, is guided by reason and ideas rather than experience or common sense. It is notably lacking in respect for what in the Talmud is called derekh eretz, "the way of the world," a phrase that also means "deference" or "humility." For the new intellectuals in power, all of society can be remade to conform to abstract principles: for instance, universal tolerance (one of their favorites), enforceable by the courts.

The new group first began to taste power in Franklin Roosevelt's time: Gelernter quotes E. B. White, after encountering one of FDR's advisors: "It is always sobering to encounter the intellectual idealist at work . . . making [his] plans for the world in much the same way a common tyrant does." By the 1960s this type, long on the outside in American life, was well entrenched in the most prestigious universities, and it eventually transformed them. By the 1990s it was setting the tone of the nation.

In a key passage about the implications of this takeover, Gelernter writes:

The old elite used to get on fairly well with the nation it was set over. . . . Members of the old social upper-crust elite were richer and better educated than the public at large, but they approached life on basically the same terms. The public went to church and so did they. The public went into the army and so did they. The public staged simpler weddings and the elite put on fancier ones, but they mostly all used the same dignified words . . . the staff and the bosses were basically in accord.