five top things i’ve been reading (thirty-first edition)

the latest in a regular 'top 5' series

• What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?, Frederick Douglass

• Blue Ruin, Hari Kunzru

• Can Animals Sue?, Cass Sunstein

• Sixty years ago, a philosopher said Canada would be absorbed by America. He could still be right, Michael Ignatieff

• Mozart: Piano Sonatas K.457, 533, 545, 570 & 576, Angela Hewitt

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This is the thirty-first in a weekly series. As with previous editions, I’ll move beyond things I’ve been reading, toward the end.

1) On Saturday, I went to Frederick Douglass’s DC house to hear a community reading of the speech he gave to the Rochester Ladies Anti-Slavery Society on 5 July 1852. Apparently, Douglass agreed to speak to the society about the significance of Independence Day conditional on his speech taking place on the fifth. It’s telling, therefore, that he nonetheless opens the speech by claiming that “for the purpose of this celebration”, the date should be taken to be the fourth. The fourth is “the birthday of your National Independence, and of your political freedom”, he told his Rochester audience.

This phrase, “your political freedom”, is the focus of Douglass’s speech. From the start, Douglass doesn’t deny that independence furthered political freedom in America. Indeed, he makes clear he holds that: 1) “America was right, and England wrong”; that 2) the principles of the Declaration of Independence are “saving principles”, which Americans should uphold “at whatever cost”; and that 3) the Declaration’s signatories were men with whom “justice, liberty and humanity were final”.

Having accepted the historical accuracy and moral value of these premises, Douglass sets to work evaluating then-contemporary America against them. “This Fourth July is yours, not mine”, he famously states. He continues: “To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, [is] inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony”.

This two-fold criticism — that slavery offends against America’s political grounding in the equal freedom of all men, and also against the Christian religion boasted by the nation as a guiding light — underpins the rest of the speech. It’s not just that post-Declaration political and religious leaders had ignored the barbarous authoritarian inequality of slavery, Douglass emphasises. But that the American church had “made itself the bulwark of American slavery”, and that the “whole political power of the nation, as embodied in the two great political parties, [had] solemnly pledged to support and perpetuate the enslavement of three millions of your countrymen”.

Later on, Douglass clarifies that while his speech might help you to reach the “inevitable conclusion” that the Constitution and its signatories “guaranteed and sanctioned” slavery themselves, he believes this interpretation to be wrong. Rather, he extends his opening commitment about the goodness of the Declaration’s principles to the substance and aims of the Constitution, too. Taken on “plain reading”, Douglass says, the Constitution features no “single proslavery clause”, and its “principles and purposes” are “entirely hostile to the existence of slavery”. It is, he tells us, in capitals, a “GLORIOUS LIBERTY DOCUMENT”.

I haven’t read the Constitution right through, but now I shall. Douglass’s commitment and hope are infectious, and this speech — for all its detailed cataloguing of barbarism, and its excoriation of the time and place that traded on that barbarism — is ultimately a hopeful speech. It’s a speech by someone who believed unbreakably in equal freedom, and believed unbreakably that it would win out, even when its antithesis held strong around him.

2) Yesterday, I read Blue Ruin (2024) by Hari Kunzru. The only other of Kunzru’s novels I’ve read is Red Pill (2020), which I’d probably count as one of the top ten of all the novels I’ve read that were written in the past ten years.¹ Red Pill is a tripartite novel about an American novelist who has committed to spending several months at an academic retreat in Germany. The opening section, about the novelist’s life at this totally unbearable-sounding retreat, is pretty great. The second section, about the background of a character who works as a cleaner at the retreat is even better. The final section, which includes the novelist’s return to America, has its great and non-great moments.

So, my expectations were quite high for the new Kunzru novel. Blue Ruin is the story of Jay, a conceptual artist who’s been living off the grid; his sometime best friend Robert, a successful painter; and Alice, a sort-of art administrator who’s been romantically involved with both of them. As a novel about the inner lives of artists and the American art trade, Blue Ruin is less good than Siri Hustvedt’s What I Loved (still the best novel I’ve read in ages). And as a Kunzru novel, it’s the second best of the two I’ve read.² Nonetheless, it’s still one of the best new novels I’ve read in the past couple of years.

3) I’ve never bought into the coherence of libertarian paternalism, but this week I enjoyed reading Can Animals Sue?, a 2004 piece by its progenitor Cass Sunstein. It’s one of those law articles about which it’s really important to realise and accept that its focus is almost entirely on law. I mean, the central question here isn’t ‘are non-human animals capable of suing?’, and it isn’t ‘should animals be treated as the kind of things that can do things equivalent to suing?’. Rather, it’s a question about actual legal standing, as proved by case law and Sunstein’s interpretations of American legal provisions.

In this context, Sunstein provides three strong law-based arguments for the standing of human beings to bring suit in relation to animal welfare concerns — on the grounds of access to information, the pursuit of fair competition, and costs to aesthetic experience. It’s only near the end of the article that Sunstein tackles head on the idea of animal standing, itself. Here, amid what’s otherwise a largely constrained and conservative article, Sunstein makes the surprising claim that it “seems possible, however, that before long, Congress will grant standing to animals to protect their own rights and interests”.

It’s been over twenty years since Sunstein wrote this, and Congress still hasn’t followed suit! Nonetheless, he makes an interesting argument, which draws both on the practice of “creating juridical persons” (think corporations, for example), and the lack of need for plaintiffs to count legally as “persons” (think ships, and of course in America’s dark past, as Sunstein points out, horrifically, slaves).

4) I found much of interest in this recent Globe and Mail article by my friend Michael Ignatieff, the former leader of the Canadian Liberal Party. Resurrecting the claim, made in the 1960s by a Canadian theologian called George Grant, that Canada undertook an act of national submission by housing American nukes, Ignatieff considers the constraints that American geopolitical dominance places on Canadian sovereignty.

Echoing Grant, Ignatieff addresses the question: “What kind of national independence is possible for a country that shares an undefended border with the incorrigibly violent, expansionist and yet irresistibly attractive monster state to the south?” It’s a thoughtful, informative, and honest piece. And it’s amusingly enhanced by the revelation, late on, of Ignatieff’s relation to Grant.

5) The final disc of Angela Hewitt’s complete Mozart piano sonatas came out last month, and it’s really excellent. I particularly enjoyed a few unexpected ornaments in the C major sonata. Perhaps, however, their unexpectedness points up the only possible criticism: is Hewitt’s playing too perfect even for Mozart?

1. I tried Transmission (2004) a while back and wanted to like it, but didn’t get very far.

2. I’m still puzzling about its lack of relation to Red Pill: if you’d given me a copy of Blue Ruin with its author’s name deleted, I’m not sure I’d have guessed correctly. That said, in many ways, this counts in its favour. And what’s more, Blue Ruin is a Covid novel.. who’d have thought there could be a good Covid novel!?