On the Disenlightenment

I don’t like to be too critical of books, but I’ll make an exception for David Mamet’s The Disenlightenment. I picked it up because the title and subtitle interested me, with no idea who Mamet was; having read it, I now know he’s a prominent playwright and screenwriter behind work like The Untouchables, and a Pulitzer winner. His prose writing, though, leaves a great deal to be desired. There were sentences here where I had little idea what he was trying to say and had to reread them several times. His vocabulary is overly pretentious and adds little, and at times it seemed he was writing to impress rather than to present ideas with clarity and verve.

Worse, I found his arguments nonsensical and out of touch. Throughout the book he praises Donald Trump for heroically saving the American nation, set against the legislature; I have my own tendency to dismiss right-wing politics out of hand, but it’s strange to watch him cast congressional legislators as self-interested (which they are) while calling Trump selfless (he is not). There are stranger views too — in one essay he presents ancient Israel as a forerunner of democracy, and I can’t tell where the idea comes from. Even on the Biblical evidence, the territory was ruled by judges, unified under a three-king monarchy, split into two monarchies, and conquered by imperial powers; the Sanhedrin existed, but it was hardly a democratic body, and to call it a forerunner of democracy is like calling the Estates-General of Old Regime France one. It wasn’t. Mamet pulls no punches in accusing other Jewish people, especially those who advocate for Palestine, of anti-Semitic self-hatred, which I find altogether reprehensible. There’s no need for anyone to downplay their background or belief, but it’s a very different thing to accuse people fighting for justice of anti-Semitism.

The book is also laced with identity politics. Mamet laments the passing of an age when “men could be men,” trans people were kept out of sight, and the United States was the world’s prime power. I couldn’t disagree with him more, and the difference is fundamentally one of values: I value difference, complexity, the whole variety of human experience, and I think the traditional power structures were exactly that — power structures. To borrow the Gen Z phrase, Mamet needs to touch grass and unplug from the media ecosystems that amplify the worst voices of the day — which of course he can’t, since he’s necessarily plugged into that world. To be more charitable, his views on storytelling are genuinely compelling; he understands how important story is to our lived experience of the twenty-first century, and that’s a point worth keeping. But for all his fame as a playwright and filmmaker, his essays aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on.