Book Review: The Idiocy of Perfection

Reviewed by Greg Walklin

The Idiocy of Perfection
Essays by Jesús Silva-Herzog Márquez
Translated by Tanya Huntington
Literal Publishing, April 2017
$19.95; 205 pp.
ISBN-13: 978-1942307136

The essays in Jesús Silva-Herzog Márquez’s The Idiocy of Perfection provide a warning: be wary of a political theory or system that offers a panacea. Whether it is Marxism or laissez-faire capitalism, or some other solution offered by a political party or movement claiming to cure all of society’s ills, some of the writers profiled here came to the conclusion—either through their academic or creative work or with firsthand experience—that pursuant of a perfect system is a folly, while others fell victim to it.

Originally published in Spanish in 2006 as La idiotez de lo perfecto: Miradas a la política and now appearing in English in a translation by Tanya Huntington, the book is composed of five essays. Each is rich and often insightful, if occasionally dense, in a style reminiscent of Bertrand Russell’s The History of Western Philosophy; Márquez mixes biography with a deft and wry summary of his subject’s work and ideas. As an academic, he writes essays that are surprisingly accessible but not intended to be primers. This clarity is probably a credit, too, to the translation—which finely renders Márquez’s often metaphorical language—and to Márquez’s ability to succinctly summarize complex ideas, perhaps a skill sharpened by his regular newspaper column in the Mexico City-based Reforma.

Márquez lists the subjects of his essays as “a jurist, a biographer, a professor, a historian, and a poet,” although all could be said to be students of, in Aristotle’s famous words, man as “a political animal.” In the two essays on Michael Oakeshott and Isaiah Berlin—despite the two being famously at odds politically—Márquez focuses on their commonalities instead of their differences: both were exquisite conversationalists and lecturers, and both understood the pragmatic dimensions of politics, the way adherence to ideology paves a path to perdition. Oakeshott wrote in The Politics of Faith and the Politics of Skepticism that only “through trial and error” can the state be run. Berlin despised what he called “the tyranny of the concept,” or the dominance of ideology and rigid, philosophical modes of thinking, like Marxism, which he wrote about at length. Márquez writes, “He believed…that man can only observe the world freely when he is not compelled to accommodate the fronds of his gaze within the diagram of a theory.” Even though Oakeshott favored “restricted, closely supervised government,” and Berlin was a famous liberal, both were driven by pragmatic thinking.

Both, too, led novelistic lives. Oakeshott had numerous romances and a two-month affair with Iris Murdoch; he perhaps served as the inspiration for her character Hugh Belfounder in Under the Net. Berlin, on assignment in Moscow, befriended Anna Akhmatova (whose poems he heard in private recitations) and Boris Pasternak (from whom he received a manuscript copy of Dr. Zhivago). Perhaps in Berlin’s case, Márquez says, he fell too deeply into the lives of others: “The source of his own ideas empties into the spring from which those of others emerge.” The intersection of rich lives with rich ideas makes these two essays essential for anyone interested in either man, and this is where Márquez’s lapidary mix of exposition and anecdote shines the brightest.

If the Berlin and Oakeshott pieces were pithy and enjoyable, the essay on Octavio Paz, while partially insightful, ends up being an impenetrable dive into the politics of Paz’s poetry. Márquez finds fault in Paz’s concern with identity and nationality, two crutches, he might say, to assess our world. “Identity, no matter the packaging, locks us up in a cage,” he writes. “That was the problem: Paz never stopped asking himself which body we inhabit.” These notions are often systems themselves, inflexible and impermeable. Another folly, another failure, it would seem to Márquez—another prison. Yet it also seems troubling the extent to which systems of control—Marxist or fascist governments, religious institutions, or large corporations—erase identity and bodily autonomy. Surely, in his time as a diplomat, this was something Paz witnessed. An essay on a female philosopher or historian would have perhaps provided someone to address these concerns; it would have added more breadth to the collection, too. If there is fault to find in this overall excellent book, it is in the homogeneity of the thinkers profiled, as four of its five subjects are European men.

Tempting though it always is to read into any historical criticism and cherry-pick parallels with current events, it’s hard not to see shades of the current American ideological stalemate and political chaos in these critiques, even though none of these writers were writing about the United States. It all makes for relevant reading for the current “resistance” against the Trump Administration. Indeed, it’s hard not to see the current administration as kakistocratic—a concept explored in the essay on the Italian philosopher Norberto Bobbio. Márquez describes a kakistocracy as “a government that combines the despotic power of a charismatic leader, the privilege of potentates, and media manipulation of the masses.” The German political theorist Carl Schmitt’s ideas, Márquez says in a critical if empathetic essay, underpinned unitary executive theory, a substantial underpinning to the Bush Administration’s legal justification for the War on Terror. And Berlin’s insistence, perhaps borne from his significant time in Russia, Britain, and the United States, that we read our opponents and engage their ideas—stepping out of the echo chamber—would be sage advice to those of us who cloister ourselves in talk radio or our curated social media.

Perhaps the only system, imperfect though it is, that ultimately passes muster to the thinkers profiled here is democracy. Bobbio, and Márquez, too (echoing Churchill) suggest that we don’t have any choice but democracy, the least of all political evils. Oakeshott provides some practical insight as to why democracy remains the best worst option: “[T]he individual is foolish; the multitude, for the moment, is foolish, when they act without deliberation; but the species is wise, and, when the time is given to it, as a species, it almost always acts right.” The key to this, of course, is the proper allowance of time. Will the wisdom of the species arise when one push of a button would send nuclear warhead across the globe? Will it arise when we can’t stop the sea levels from consuming the coasts? Will we have the chance, ultimately, to repay the true cost of our imperfections? Márquez doesn’t answer these questions, but he does note that politics won’t provide the answers, either. “[P]olitics as outlined by these authors,” he says in the introduction, “are one way of dealing with human imperfections.” It’s only conjecture as to whether it will ultimately help us push closer to perfection or pull us farther from it.

Greg Walklin is an attorney living in Lincoln, Nebraska. He has published more than 40 book reviews in various publications, including The Millions, Ploughshares Blog, The Colorado Review, Necessary Fiction, and the Lincoln Journal-Star, among other publications. His fiction has appeared in numerous publications as well, including Palooka, Midwestern Gothic, and Anomaly Lit.