Why Read Moby Dick?

Why Read Moby Dick, by Nathaniel Philbrick, who's done more than a dozen times what he recommends is a great little book for our time. I begin on Page1, sentence 1: <<Early in the afternoon of December 16, 1850, Herman Melville looked at his timepiece.>> We find out it was 1:15 PM. I looked down at my own watch. 1:09 PM. So close. But the rest of the book is more than close to our time. Published in 2011, it's nearly a commentary on our own day and hour.

Chapter 7 is entitled "Ahab." Chapter 8: "Anatomy of a Demagogue." Ahab, of course, had been hired to captain a whaling ship for the benefit and good of the owners. But he takes it over for his own selfish purposes. He starts off by gathering the crew for a rally, and for a bit just paces back and forth to create tension and anticipation and curiosity. Then he calls out an easy motivating question for those present, and they shout out the answer.

Philbrick comments: <<For a demagogue, it's the oldest trick in the book. With each question and response, the crowd cannot help but be wooed to the speaker's enthusiastic purpose.>> He goes on: <<This is the dynamic of the political rally>> and then explains that Melville's brother was a partisan political operative who had organized such events for candidates in their own day, the mid 1800s. The call and response. The slogans. The involvement of the crowd is soon their complicity in something they might never have agreed to if it had been proposed to them in a sober and straightforward way. But they're on their feet and shouting and soon carried into that zone where crowds can take people, by surprise. Ahab was a haunted, deeply wounded man who was going to lash out and get his revenge and prevail against all reason and logic, even if it killed him and those he was leading.

Philbrick takes his critique of Ahab into a surprising broader territory where all leadership at a certain scale is also characterized negatively, when he writes, in the first sentence of a chapter: <<To be in the presence of a great leader is to know a blighted soul who has managed to make the darkness work for him. Ishmael says it best: "For all men tragically great are made so though a certain morbidness. Be sure of this, O young ambition, all mortal greatness is but disease." In Chapter 36, "The Quarter Deck," Melville shows us how susceptible we ordinary people are to the seductive power of a great and demented man.>> Now, let's take the adjective 'great' in the phrase 'great leader' here not to mean exceptionally good or morally virtuous, but rather harness it back to its etymological roots of meaning simply 'big' or 'massive.' It's a matter of scale. And that presents us with a tough question: Will anyone fight to rise up into a position to lead others on a large, massive scale unless he or she is deeply blighted within, a wounded soul proving itself to the universe? It's not an easy thing to settle. I've known many leaders of companies and colleges who are wonderful balanced people. But the bigger the scale, the less likely such leaders are to be found.

Why do damaged people have followers on any scale, and especially on a massive scale? Our philosopher Ishmael reminds us that "there is no folly of the beasts of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men." (WRMD, 79)

One more quote from the beginning of chapter 23, entitled "Pulling Dictatorship Out of a Hat." Sentence 1: <<Just about anyone, it turns out, can be a demagogue or a dictator if he or she masters a few simple tricks, which Ishmael called "some sort of external arts and entrenchments, always, in themselves, more or less paltry or base." As a result, most leaders "become famous more through their infinite inferiority to the choice hidden handful of the Divine Inert, than through their undoubted superiority over the dead level of the mass.">> Our author continues: <<Dictators such as Adolf Hitler and Saddam Hussein are not geniuses; they are power hungry, paranoid, and expert manipulators of men. If you want to understand how these and other megalomaniacs pull it off, read the last third of Moby Dick and watch as Ahab tightens his stranglehold on the Pequod's crew through a series of magic tricks worthy of Las Vegas.>> (page 99)

I hope that these quotes give you a flavor for how insightful and provocative and pertinent to our moment this powerful little book of 127 pages is. I loved it.

For the book, click HERE.