LOS ANGELES TIMES 1985 BOOK PRIZE NOMINEES

The sixth annual Los Angeles Times Book Prize program takes place this year on Nov. 1.

Today we publish excerpts from the five books nominated for the current interest prize.

JUDITH N. SHKLAR,

Ordinary Vices (Harvard/Belknap: $7.95)

Eager to appear enlightened and open-minded, liberals have become increasingly tolerant of daily, commonplace inhumanity, argues Shklar, a professor of government at Harvard. Drawing upon examples from novels and plays, she explores these “ordinary vices”: cruelty, hypocrisy, betrayal, misanthropy and snobbery.

The word snob has had many meanings since it surfaced in the late Middle Ages, none of them good. It began as an all-purpose insult, used to express contempt. By now, it has certainly earned its evil reputation. For us, snobbery means the habit of making inequality hurt. The snob fawns on his superiors and rejects his inferiors. And while he annoys and insults those who have to live with him, he injures himself as well, because he has lost the very possibility of self-respect. To be afraid of the taint of associations from below is to court ignorance of the world. And to yearn for those above one is to be always ashamed not only of one’s actual situation, but of one’s family, one’s available friends, and oneself. . . .

The defenders of snobbery have not been numerous. Indeed, the only claim on its behalf is that it can be useful. At best it is forgiven as a side effect of more noble ambitions. Aldous Huxley warned us that without culture snobs, such as the tone-deaf patrons who pretend to elevated musical taste, artists could not survive and real music lovers would be without operas and symphonies. Snobbery does much to support such unproductive and nonutilitarian pursuits as the arts and humanities. Indeed, Huxley went on to say, “a society with plenty of snobberies is like a dog with plenty of fleas: It is not likely to become comatose.” . . . If anything favorable can be said about snobbery, it is in the realm of literary imagination, not in action. Our memories of the ways of the old gentry and aristocracy are woven into our dreams of the past, and they can still enchant us. Whether in laughter or tears, the greatest novels, from Jane Austen to Marcel Proust, have been nourished by them. Snobbery may well be a private and a social menace, but like misanthropy it does nourish the creative imagination. That is a feeble recommendation perhaps, but it is the only possible one.

THOMAS SOWELL,

Marxism: Philosophy and Economics (Morrow: $15.95)

Convinced that “ Marxism is not inherently difficult to understand” if one looks closely at its philosophical roots, Sowell, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, offers this guide, “ neither an uncritical exposition of Marxism nor a continuous sniping at the Marxian ideas in the process of explaining them.”

Some of Marx’s thinking, especially as regards economic and social factors in history, is in fact now so much a part of our general intellectual tradition that it makes interpretation of the original Marxian theory of history more difficult. The normal tendency to view any theory in contrast to what we already believe is here misleading, for much of what we already believe contains insights contributed by Marx. For example, Marx’s emphasis on the economic factor in history--in his peculiar, sociological conception of “economics”--often seems an overemphasis or a monistic explanation, simply because we already give it considerable weight vis-a-vis ideas or great men, or other factors.

Marx’s legacy is not merely an intellectual legacy, however. It is also a legacy of behavior not only in content but in style. Much as Marx may have explicitly advocated the idea of a democratic workers’ government, his own personal style was dictatorial, manipulative, and intolerant.

Those who complain that the Soviet Union has betrayed Marx have in mind the intellectual theories rather than Marx the man. Whether Marx would have gone as far as Lenin or Stalin or Pol Pot is one of the great unanswerable questions of history. But Marx’s own behavior already pointed in that direction, however much his words proclaimed a proletarian democracy. Moreover, even in the intellectual realm, the long Marxian tradition of speaking boldly in the name of the workers--not only without their consent but in defiance of their contrary views and actions--made Marxism an instrument of elite domination, with a clear conscience, long before Lenin or Stalin.

OMAR CABEZAS,

Fire From the Mountain (Crown: $13.95)

“To be a revolutionary,” Cabezas said in a recent Los Angeles Times interview, “you have to love life. You have to have a little bit of craziness, a sense of humor, a lot of luck, a tremendous desire to live . . . (That’s why) in ‘Fire From the Mountain,’ I am talking about my emotions, not ideology.”

When you go into the mountains as we did, it’s a violent, even traumatic change. . . . You are leaving your present, which the moment you start marching is transformed into the past. You take that present with you when you leave for the mountains. But the closer you get, the farther behind that present is; it is becoming past.

In fact, what is really happening is that your head is full of the life you’ve been living all those years, and everything about that life, all incredibly fresh. Everything you used to do--how you stayed up late, made love, fought, slept, ate, what you did for fun--all this is fresh in your mind, in your brain. . . .

When you left for the mountains, you began the process of the forced shedding of your present. Against your will you were hurling that present back into the past, as if bits of your flesh were left behind. And that hurts. But you have no choice but to go forward in that process of deincarnation, of slowly dying. And each day you are deeper into the mountains. First you stop seeing the type of people you saw before. . . .

Before long you quit listening for the noise of cars, or of bicycles, or television or radios, or for the shouts of kids hawking newspapers or Chiclets. You quit listening for that typical city tone in the cries of the kids. . . .

Deeper in, you begin to detach yourself; as you penetrate deeper, you are more and more isolated. Finally the moment comes when nothing is left of your past, in terms of your experience, your senses--I’m not sure how to say it--your immediate, recent past, it no longer exists. You have to resign yourself to never seeing it again, unless someday you come out of there alive, if the revolution triumphs.

VINCENT CRAPANZANO,

Waiting: The Whites of South Africa (Random House: $19.95)

“‘Waiting’ is about the effects of domination on everyday life,” writes Crapanzano, a professor of anthropology and comparative literature at Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. In South Africa, “a people’s understanding of themselves, their world, their past, and their future limits their possibility.”

I did not come to South Africa as a neutral observer. I came morally and politically outraged at the brute, unmediated legislation of human inferiority. I was filled with horror by tales of arbitrary banning, detention and imprisonment, torture, forced suicide, and murder, of violent dispossession, banishment, and the splitting of families, that are familiar to anyone who reads the newspapers. I had an almost mythic image of the perpetrators of this inhumanity. I was horrified by the depths to which humans will sink to preserve their trivial privilege and disgusted by the accommodations that others, outsiders, make with such humans to preserve their privilege.

I indulged myself in my horror and disgust and learned later that my indulgence was itself a symptom of “the system.” I met many white South Africans who were equally horrified and disgusted. Paradoxically, their horror and disgust rendered their life in South Africa tolerable. It gave them the certainty that they were different. Tales of banning, detention and imprisonment, torture, forced suicide, and murder, of dispossession, banishment, and the breaking up of families, were common. They appeared daily--as scandals in the English-language press, with caution in the Black and Coloured press, and with moralistic pretension in the Afrikaans press. They were talked up, especially in the cities where in “liberal” circles they produced a sort of hysterical heat. They were loudly denied in conservative circles, or somehow justified, and as such acknowledged.

They were a sort of living folklore, genre tales really, which, like tales of war and terrorism, render the unsayable sayable, and, thereby, if not less real, then at least more manageable.

ROBERT N. BELLAH, RICHARD MADSEN, WILLIAM M. SULLIVAN, ANN SWIDLER and STEVEN M. TIPTON,

Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (University of California: $16.95)

“We are concerned that individualism may have grown cancerous,” write the authors in this study of public and private life in America, “that it may be destroying those social integuments that De Tocqueville saw as moderating its more destructive potentialities, that it may be threatening the survival of freedom itself.”

Clearly, the meaning of one’s life for most Americans is to become one’s own person, almost to give birth to oneself. Much of this process, as we have seen, is negative. It involves breaking free from family, community, and inherited ideas. Our culture does not give us much guidance as to how to fill the contours of this autonomous, self-responsible self, but it does point to two important areas. One of these is work, the realm, par excellence, of utilitarian individualism. Traditionally men, and today women as well, are supposed to show that in the occupational world they can stand on their own two feet and be self-supporting. The other area is the life-style enclave, the realm, par excellence, of expressive individualism. We are supposed to be able to find a group of sympathetic people, or at least one such person, with whom we can spend our leisure time in an atmosphere of acceptance, happiness and love.

There is no question that many Americans find this combination of work and private life style satisfying. For people who have worked hard all their lives, life in a “retirement community” composed of highly similar people doing highly similar things may be gratifying. As a woman who had lived 14 years in Sun City, Fla., told Frances Fitzgerald, “It’s the long vacation we wished we’d always had.”

On the other hand, a life composed mainly of work that lacks much intrinsic meaning and leisure devoted to golf and bridge does have limitations. It is hard to find in it the kind of story or narrative, as of a pilgrimage or quest, that many cultures have used to link private and public; present, past, and future; and the life of the individual to the life of the society, and the meaning of the cosmos.