SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY by Elliot Perlman and BEFORE YOU KNOW KINDNESS by Chris Bohjalian both deal with the conflict between idealism and pragmatism; Perlman's book comes down for the individual and Bohjalian strikes his blow for the joiners.

They also both feature a scene in which a father brings home a dog for his daughter and gets chewed out for it by his wife.

That's too facile.  I'm just trying to write a thesis sentence.  Perlman critiques "the prevailing culture of every man for himself... the demise of liberalism and its concern with the common good."  Bohjalian presents an entire family of good liberals at risk of being torn apart by one single, stubborn individual, whose concern for animal rights places him at odds with his tribe.

I read these on a trip to visit my own tribe.  The Bohjalian book was a recommendation from my dear mother, and it contains some lovely writing.  Bohjalian can turn a fine sentence, but the book was edited with too much indulgence.  I estimated it at two hundred thousand words, fifty thousand of which were superfluous.  The prose and the narrative conceits can occasionally be a bit precious, and the author doesn't hesitate to whack the reader over the head repeatedly with his point.

One of the main characters gets his arm shot off.  Bohjalian spends a lot of time explaining how hard it is to do things with the left hand.  I tried putting toothpaste on my toothbrush with my left hand only, and it was a cinch.  No problem.  Did Bohjalian try it, or just imagine it?  Or is he just a klutz?  Why would anyone try to hold the toothbrush in his teeth while squeezing the toothpaste onto it?  No counter space?

Like so many of the literary novels that manage to see print these days at a major house, Bohjalian's book concerns itself with the travails of wealthy people.  They would call themselves upper middle class, of course.  The Sutton family consists of two tidy nuclear units and an elderly but vigorous matriarch.  The husband of her second child, the daughter, is the communications director for FERAL, an animal-rights group.  I'm not going to carry any water for animal rights activists, who in my opinion are fighting a rather fuzzy-headed sort of crusade, and Bohjalian counts on his audience to stay on his side while he takes potshots at their mission.

Perlman's book, on the other hand, takes on the moral crisis at the center of our civilization; a sort of voluntary blindness, an ardent desire for fuzzy thinking, a refusal to look at the moral rot, no, the throbbing evil that pulsates at the very center of our human universe.  The result is that those who are pragmatic, who get along, do so at the expense of their ability to see clearly what's going on, and that those who refuse to close their eyes are judged insane.  "This madness," he writes in the voice of one of his charatcers, "was, in part, the cost of so much time seeing things too clearly... So most of us get by by not seeing things too clearly.  Everything is a little blurred but, being always this way, people don't notice it and we say that each of them is a picture of mental health."

In SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY, Simon, an intelligent, idealistic young man, can't get over a beautiful woman who left him to marry a stockbroker.  His principles, his desire to do no harm, and his passion for integrity in act and language lead him into alcoholism and unemployment-- a situation that is all too familiar to this writer.  (Bohjalian, and most liberals, have no time for such a character-- they're too busy supporting their families and being realistic to even understand what motivates such a person.  Simon is, in American parlance, a "slacker.")

The object of Simon's obsessive love is Anna, a thoroughly pragmatic woman.  When they were together, she was inspired by Simon's eloquence, his vision, his passion for truth-- but she wanted other things for herself-- she wanted to be part of the group, not an outsider living a critique of the group.

It brought to mind Terry Allen's exquisite discourse on Southern Men and Southern Women in "The Glass-Bottomed Cadillac," in which he explains that steretypes nonwithstanding, it tends to be men who are hopeless romantics and idealists, and the women are hard-nosed pragmatists, believing in nothing but cold hard cash and "land in clear title."

I, for one, grew up with my nose in a book and my ears tuned into the Minutemen and Jimi Hendrix, so while everyone else was learning to kiss ass, test the wind, and talk the prevailing cant, I was insistently sabotaging my own chances of any career with extremist leanings and the constant critique of my social superiors.

What interest does your neighbor have in the Truth?  Chances are, if your neighbors are like mine, or your common intellectual, they'll find that capital "t" downright adolescent.  Postmodernism as a whole is founded on the idea there is no such thing-- and what positions itself as a critique of Truth as handed down by a dominant elite ends up being a great way to accomodate the desires of that elite.  If there is no Truth there isn't really anything but getting along.  You may as well stop worrying about what's going on or which way is up or what's right-- just get with the team that will take you-- hopefully it's the team with the best chance of winning-- and start conforming your lips to the shape of  whatever rear end belongs to the people who can help you the most.

I ruminated on this while in the company of putative Christians.  I'm very curious about this group; they are said to be a majority in the United States.  I know several of them quite well, and I can never tell exactly what they believe.  Sometimes I think that most of them are pretending for someone else's benefit.  Some of them think everyone else believes, so they'd best get with the program if they want to belong.  Some of them think they're putting one over on the sheep who believe; yea, the "wolves in sheep's clothing" referred to in Scripture.  Some kind of believe; or want to believe; or think they should believe and feel guilty about it.  Many, I think, just go along and try not to think about it.

As Perlman says, "The Enlightenment is over.  It doesn't take a genius to see this.  I am not, by any means, the best of the ones who used to believe.  I am just the last.  Fundamentalism, be it religious or of the market variety, is everywhere and everywhere there is a reaction to complexity, an attempt to ignore the contradictions and conundrums of our existence.  People crave the simplicity of easily assimilable black-and-white paradigms and any blurring, any ambiguity, is viewed with hostility."

While I was in the airport that offical and neutral female voice came on periodically reminding us that the official Threat Level was Orange.  For there to be an Us, there must be a Them, and They are a threat.  Again, like Christianity and capitalism (by the way, C. D. Jackson made it mandatory that the word "capitalism" be replaced by the phrase "free market" in official pronuncimientos) this War on Terror is one of those internally contradictory, completely fantastic and unbelievable contrivances that people seem perfectly willing to swallow in order to get along, to belong.

It's hard to argue with the logic that Bohjalian advances in BEFORE YOU KNOW KINDNESS-- that family comes first.  Any sacrifice is worthwhile when it comes to protecting and nurturing the young.  Even if it's a sacrifice of mental clarity.  Mass media-- especially TV and glossy magazines, but also the dying newspapers, most radio, and the overwhelming majority of book publishers-- exist, in large part, to maintain the collective myths.  They need a lot of maintaining.  Postmodern theory helps the intelligent work in these dark satantic grist mills-- after all, there is no Truth.  (Never mind that you'll never hear this supposed truth about Truth on NBC.)  As I sat there in the airport I saw the various businessmen going somewhere to sell something, the families, parents slightly harried, all dressed the same, all with the same haircuts, and I wondered if for all these years that I've been thrashing about, trying to tell people what's REALLY going on, what they were thinking.  Sure, some of them thought I was just crazy and walked slowly away, trying not to be noticed.  But how many silently chuckled at me for drawing attention to myself when everyone knows it's a big game?  How many realized I was just tagging myself for isolation and later take-down?

And then there's the group that's inbetween.  Many of them are perfectly lovely people.  They need to believe in something, and they need to believe in something that a lot of other people believe in, so they choose Christianity, or they become Republicans or Democrats, conservatives or liberals.  These ones actually get angry when you try to wake them up.  These are the ones that, until November 4, 2008, would get a little bit of a crazy look in their eyes when I mentioned that I voted for Nader.  These are the ones that dismissed me as a nutjob if I mentioned that the U.S. Government hardly supported "freedom" in Guatemala, Chile or Iran in the 20th century.  These are the ones who would rather eat broken glass than read Seymour Hersch's THE DARK SIDE OF CAMELOT or Richard Cummings' THE PIED PIPER.

There's some level at which they know that they have chosen to invest their lives in a big ol' lie.  That's why they get so angry, whether they're self-styled liberals or smug conservatives, when confronted with the obvious contradictions in the doctrines they've chosen.

But after my trip I wonder how many there are in the main camps that know better, but who have pragmatically chosen the price they'll pay for comfort and belonging.  I suspect that there are more than I suspect there are.  I recently spoke with one of my fellow malcontents who passed on a comment, made in confidence, by a friend who worked for the New York Times.  The Times reporter's description of his coveted journalistic job?  "I'm just shoveling coal for the Devil."

If any of this rings true with you-- you should probably read SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY.  If you find it irritating, read BEFORE YOU KNOW KINDNESS.