The Remains of the Day, by Kazuo Ishiguro

Winner of the 1989 Booker Prize for English Literature

Its 1993 film adaptation by Merchant-Ivory was nominated for eight Oscars (trailer) - starring Anthony Hopkins, Emma Thompson, Christopher Reeve and Hugh Grant

How did the elite intellectual class of the 1930s fall for the underlying philosophies of Hitler and the Nazi party? These were not stupid people, nor were they uncurious or unworldly. Ishiguro uses fiction to examine the calibration of emotion, restraint, honesty and intellectualism to tell a complex story of a well-intentioned English aristocrat and his butler who both cling to ideals of logic and restraint, and of an American Senator and country housekeeper who urge both to see how emotion brings greater truth to their observations and conclusions.

Stevens, the butler, is proud to serve Lord Darlington and his grand traditional country estate: fox hunts, coats and tails for formal dinners, patrician manners, received pronunciation. Lord Darlington believes that it is the duty of his privileged class to lead with clear minds, and he seeks to act against a world that he sees as rejecting Nazism based on kneejerk emotional reaction, rather than engaging with its intellectual precepts with an open mind. He rejects confrontations by his nephew and a visiting American Senator who urge him to consider instinctual moral abhorrence as valid. At the same time – rejecting human emotions as unhelpful, untoward and uncomfortable – the butler Stevens cannot admit his elderly father’s physical decline, nor his potential for romance and companionship with the capable, confrontational housekeeper, Miss Kenton.

The philosopher Barry Schwartz writes about how all virtues become vices when under- or over-expressed: consider “persistence,” which is “wishy-washy-ness” when under-expressed, or “pig-headedness” when over-expressed. Similarly, “generosity” is “selfishness” when under-expressed and “fecklessness” when over-expressed. The Rationalists live in a world where they primarily encounter the under-expression of, well, rationalism; this book uses fiction to explore its over-expression, no less grave a mistake for being less common.

Moreover, as broader Rationalism embraces genetic screening and optimization, it’s useful to understand how just a century ago, a similar intellectual movement led to mass forced sterilization and mechanized genocide. Surely, would we not be arrogant to assume ourselves so inherently distinct from forefathers, as to have nothing to learn from a study of their errors?

“Remains of the Day” is a short, beautiful, restrained book with a universal story, even more accessible via its excellent film adaption. I believe this would be a fair, worthy, nuanced, interesting and useful story to bring to the community’s attention.