The Los Angeles Times Book Prize, 1987 : CURRENT INTEREST PRIZE

On Nov. 6, The Times will award its annual Book Prizes in five categories--biography, history, fiction, poetry and current interest--along with the Robert Kirsch Award for a body of work by a writer living in or writing on the West. This week we publish excerpts from the books nominated in the category of current interest. LETTERS FROM PRISON AND OTHER ESSAYS

by Adam Michnik, translated by Maya Latynski. Foreword by Czeslaw Milosz. Introduction by Jonathan Schell (University of California Press) Adam Michnik, imprisoned for his involvement with Poland’s KOR (the Workers’ Defense Committee) and with Solidarity, writes, in this collection of letters and essays, of Poland’s past struggles for independence and of his own current nonviolent opposition.

The point is, General (Czeslaw Kiszczak, Minister of Internal Affairs), that for me, the value of our struggle lies not in its chances of victory but rather in the value of the cause. Let my little gesture of denial (his refusal to emigrate from Poland) be a small contribution to the sense of honor and dignity in this country that is being made more miserable every day. For you, traders in other people’s freedom, let it be a slap in the face.

For me, General, prison is not such painful punishment. On that December night it was not I who was condemned but freedom; it is not I who am being held prisoner today but Poland.

For me, General, real punishment would be if on your orders I had to spy, wave a truncheon, shoot workers, interrogate prisoners, and issue disgraceful sentences. I am happy to find myself on the right side, among the victims and not among the victimizers. But of course you cannot comprehend this; otherwise you would not be making such foolish and wicked proposals.

In the life of every honorable man there comes a difficult moment, General, when the simple statement this is black and that is white requires paying a high price. It may cost one one’s life on the slopes of the Citadel, behind the wire fence of Sachsenhausen, behind the bars of Mokotow prison. At such a time, General, a decent man’s concern is not the price he will have to pay but the certainty that white is white and black is black. One needs a conscience to determine this. Paraphrasing the saying of one of the great writers of our continent, I would like to suggest that the first thing you need to know, General, is what it is to have a human conscience . . . .

I am certain that this letter will seem to you yet another proof of my stupidity. You are accustomed to servile begging, to police reports on informers’ denunciations. And yet here you have a man who is entirely in your hands, who is being harassed by your prosecutors, who will be sentenced by your judges, and who dares to preach to you about conscience.

What impertinence!

However, you can no longer astonish me. I know that I will have to pay dearly for this letter, that your subordinates will now attempt to enlighten me about the full range of possibilities of the prison system in a country that is in the process of building communism. But I also know that I am bound by truth.

MORTAL SPLENDOR

The American Empire in

Transition

by Walter Russell Mead (Houghton Mifflin) Mead traces the decline of America’s liberal world empire and eloquently reasons that its post-imperial future must recognize America’s social and economic interdependence with the Third World.

We have already seen that the crux of the contemporary economic crisis lies in the blocked political development of the Third World countries; that the democratic and working-class forces are unable to forge the kind of social compromise there that brought stability to the developing West. Only the active support of the powerful democratic forces in the advanced countries can resolve the impasse in the Third World; only a resolution of the Third World’s political problems can protect the social compromise in the advanced countries.

Once again, interest and morality coincide, and enlightened American statesmanship has the opportunity to advance the interests of the American people by making the world a safer and more humane place for all its peoples. The weight of the American government and of the allied industrial countries must be thrown into the scales on the side of social compromise in the developing world--minimum wage, health care, education, pollution control, and other programs that increase consumption in the Third World countries. The world has grown too small to contain the extremes of wealth and poverty now found in it, just as the United States once grew too small for slavery and free labor to coexist any longer.

THE BLIND WATCHMAKER

by Richard Dawkins (W.W. Norton) Dawkins refutes critics of Darwin’s theory of evolution, arguing that there is no divine watchmaker in nature beyond the blind forces of physics, and building a lucid, cogent case supporting the idea of cumulative natural selection.

The essence of life is statistical improbability on a colossal scale. Whatever is the explanation for life, therefore, it cannot be chance. The true explanation for the existence of life must embody the very antithesis of chance. The antithesis of chance is nonrandom survival, properly understood. . . . Cumulative selection , by slow and gradual degrees, is the explanation, the only workable explanation that has ever been proposed, for the existence of life’s complex design.

The whole book has been dominated by the idea of chance, by the astronomically long odds against the spontaneous arising of order, complexity and apparent design. We have sought a way of taming chance, of drawing its fangs. ‘Untamed chance,’ pure, naked chance, means ordered design springing into existence from nothing, in a single leap. It would be untamed chance if once there was no eye, and then, suddenly, in the twinkling of a generation, an eye appeared, fully fashioned, perfect and whole. . . .

To ‘tame’ chance means to break down the very improbable into less improbable small components arranged in series. No matter how improbable it is that an X could have arisen from a Y in a single step, it is always possible to conceive of a series of infinitesimally graded intermediates between them. However improbable a large-scale change may be, smaller changes are less improbable. And provided we postulate a sufficiently large series of sufficiently finely graded intermediates, we shall be able to derive anything from anything else, without invoking astronomical improbabilities. We are allowed to do this only if there has been sufficient time to fit all the intermediates in. And also only if there is a mechanism for guiding each step in some particular direction, otherwise the sequence of steps will career off in an endless random walk.

It is the contention of the Darwinian world-view that both these provisos are met, and that slow, gradual, cumulative natural selection is the ultimate explanation for our existence.

THE SONGLINES

by Bruce Chatwin (Viking) Chatwin, with the Russian Arkady Volchok as his companion, journeys through Central Australia as the two seek to understand the native Aboriginals’ primitive beliefs and nomadic way of life.

It was during his time as a school-teacher that Arkady learned of the labyrinth of invisible pathways which meander all over Australia and are known to Europeans as “Dreaming-tracks” or “Songlines”; to the Aboriginals as the “Footprints of the Ancestors” or the “Way of the Law.”

Aboriginal Creation myths tell of the legendary totemic beings who had wandered over the continent in the Dreamtime, singing out the name of everything that crossed their path--birds, animals, plants, rocks, waterholes--and so singing the world into existence.

Arkady was so struck by the beauty of this concept that he began to take notes of everything he saw or heard, not for publication, but to satisfy his own curiosity. At first, the Walbiri Elders mistrusted him, and their answers to his questions were evasive. With time, once he had won their confidence, they invited him to witness their most secret ceremonies and encouraged him to learn their songs.

One year, an anthropologist from Canberra came to study Walbiri systems of land tenure: an envious academic who resented Arkady’s friendship with the song-men, pumped him for information and promptly betrayed a secret he had promised to keep. Disgusted by the row that followed, the “Russian” threw in his job and went abroad.

He saw the Buddhist temples of Java, sat with saddhus on the ghats of Benares, smoked hashish in Kabul and worked on a kibbutz. . . . Having been brought up in a country where there was “nothing,” Arkady had longed all his life to see the monuments of Western civilisation. . . . Europe should have been wonderful. It left him, to his disappointment, feeling flat.

Often, in Australia, he had had to defend the Aboriginals from people who dismissed them as drunken and incompetent savages; yet there were times, in the flyblown squalor of a Walbiri camp, when he suspected they might be right and that his vocation to help the blacks was either wilful self-indulgence or a waste of time.

Now, in a Europe of mindless materialism, his “old men” seemed wiser and more thoughtful than ever.

THE CLOSING OF THE AMERICAN MIND

by Allan Bloom (Simon & Schuster) A bold and sweeping essay on the failure of American higher education and the consequences of that failure on our intellectual, moral and spiritual life.

Students cannot imagine that the old literature could teach them anything about the relations they want to have or will be permitted to have. So they are indifferent.

Having heard over a period of years the same kinds of responses to my question about favorite books, I began to ask students who their heroes are. Again, there is usually silence, and most frequently nothing follows. Why should anyone have heroes? One should be oneself and not form oneself in an alien mold. . . . In us the contempt for the heroic is only an extension of the perversion of the democratic principle that denies greatness and wants everyone to feel comfortable in his skin without having to suffer unpleasant comparisons. Students have not the slightest notion of what an achievement it is to free oneself from public guidance and find resources for guidance within oneself. From what source within themselves would they draw the goals they think they set for themselves? Liberation from the heroic only means that they have no resource whatsoever against conformity to the current “role models.” They are constantly thinking of themselves in terms of fixed standards that they did not make. Instead of being overwhelmed by Cyrus, Theseus, Moses or Romulus, they unconsciously act out the roles of the doctors, lawyers, businessmen or TV personalities around them. One can only pity young people without admirations they can respect or avow, who are artificially restrained from the enthusiasm for great virtue.