The Burden of Synthesizing: Reflections on Two Masterworks
It’s hard to come up with any kind of statement or product that is NOT some kind of synthesis. Indeed, even the previous sentence would qualify as an example, if a very miniature, perhaps even trivial one. Accordingly, it makes sense to move quickly to the issue of what makes an adequate synthesis, a good one, a flawed one, an outstanding one.
When I first wrote about scholarly works that are syntheses, I gave a sharp critique of a well-known commentator on the psychology of human development. (I don’t mean to pick on him, but if you are curious, you can look on page 60 of my book, Five Minds for the Future). In that particular case, I felt that the synthesis was indiscriminate—it included every conceivable reference, authority, term, and sought, indeed strove, to find a place for each and every one of them. I prefer syntheses that are more disciplined—ones where one can see which elements, themes, points have been left out and perhaps even learn or infer why that is so.
Recently I read two lengthy books—each clearly intended to be a synthesis. (Hard to imagine an ambitious non-fiction book that is not in some sense a synthesis.) Both of these books are well written–I learned a lot about the respective topics. Each also raises questions: for whom the synthesis has been written, how explicit it should be, how much context to provide, what the reader might “take away” from many hours of reading.
Exhibit 1
The Enlightenment: The Pursuit of Happiness, 1680-1790 by British historian (principally of German history), Ritchie Robinson, (who teaches at Oxford). This wide-ranging book (981 pages) covers the waterfront of persons, events, and themes of that period throughout Europe. There are chapters devoted to science, medicine, art, political systems, political leaders, philosophers, and philosophies. Except for experts on these times and events, I suspect that all readers will gain a lot—and will sound well informed the next time a person utters the phrase “The Enlightenment”—favorably or critically.
Exhibit 2
The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War by American literary critic and historian, Louis Menand, (who teaches at Harvard). Almost as lengthy and wide-ranging (it weighs in at 802 pages), this book covers a variety of individuals, creations, spheres of knowledge, and production throughout Europe and the United States. There are chapters or lengthy sections devoted to such individuals as diplomat and scholar, George Kennan, political theorist Hannah Arendt, anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, beat poet Alan Ginsberg, beat novelist Jack Kerouac, as well as individuals who need no descriptors—Elvis, Dylan, the Beatles. Like Menand (I am a decade older), I lived through this period, but I also learned a great deal about individuals with whom I had little familiarity, ones I thought I knew well, and even ones that I’d written about in this series!
Yet, despite the superficial similarity between the two books, as a student of synthesis, I was more struck by a major difference. Robertson puts forth and defends a specific view of the Enlightenment. He describes the Enlightenment as a constructive period of human experience, in which men (and a few women) put forth positive ideas about what human beings could be like and what the world—or at least the parts of the world that they knew—could be like.
In so doing, Robertson critiques alternative points of view: the Enlightenment as a single entity with a single message; the Enlightenment as pollyannaish; the Enlightenment as a misguided and flailing period; the Enlightenment as a forerunner (and possibly even the cause) of less happy sequels—fascism, totalitarianism, communism, hyper-rationality, hyper-irrationality. He even names names—he critiques the German-American analysts, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, British intellectual historian, Isaiah Berlin, and other well-known and well-regarded students of intellectual history.
In sharp contrast, Menand’s book is almost entirely descriptive. The descriptions are thorough, often deep, and in my view, quite balanced. One covers the waterfront of art and ideas, as promised in the subtitle. But despite the alluring subtitle, Menand neither attempts to describe the period as a whole, nor to contrast it with other characterizations of the post-war period in the West.
Menand is a brilliant essayist and regular contributor to the weekly magazine The New Yorker. As I perused the book, I felt that I was reading a set of New Yorker columns, of generous length and capacious coverage. And in the preface, Menand candidly reveals his motivation for writing the book—he wanted to understand the period of his own life for himself, and—he hopes—that we, his readers, will do so as well.
In defense of Menand’s approach, as compared to Robertson’s, we have had two hundred years in which to reflect on the Enlightenment; and of course, scores of writers across the ages have attempted to characterize it in one way or the other. In contrast, the period about which Menand writes has only recently passed; he might well claim (as a historian) that it is premature to attempt a synopsis, even less to counter the account of other authorities.
And yet. Both authors provide a telltale clue to their enterprise: Robertson ends his book in 1790, at the start of the French Revolution; Menand ends his book in 1965, at the start of the American build-up in Vietnam. Clearly, whatever the beginnings, the causes, and the contours of The Enlightenment and the Free World, these sagas do have an ending—in both cases, the reader infers, for the worse.
Stepping back, what do these two books reveal about the enterprise of synthesizing—particularly about periods of history? One has to decide:
What period to cover—when to start and when to stop
Which issues, trends, individuals, and group to cover—and, by inference, which to ignore or to touch on very lightly
Whether to make a set of strong claims about the period—and then, by inference
Whether to respond and if so, how—to others who purport to cover and characterize the same or related periods
On my reading, Menand has decided to go very lightly on the third and fourth mission and has invited readers—many of whom will have lived through the period that he has described—to come to their own conclusions, their own syntheses. In contrast, Robertson has thrown down the gauntlet to future students of the Enlightenment. They can ill afford to ignore this masterwork.