Spotted in The Christian World in 1937 -- on a page devoted to “What Writers and Thinkers are Saying": a quote from George Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier:
“Probably we could do with a little less talk about ‘capitalists’ and ‘proletarian,’ and a little more about the robbers and the robbed. But at any rate we must drop that misleading habit of pretending that the only proletarians are manual labourers. It has got to be brought home to the clerk, the engineer, the commercial traveller, the middle-class man who has ‘come down in the world,’ the village grocer, the lower-grade civil servant and all other doubtful cases that they are the proletariat, and that Socialism means a fair deal for them as well as for the navvy and the factory hand. They must not be allowed to think that the battle is between those who pronounce their aitches and those who don’t; for if they think that, they will join in on the side of the aitches.” (Quoted in The Christian World, 1 April 1937, 13)
A curious spot to find Orwell, though it seems as relevant now as then (even if it should be taken to heart as much by those on the side of the missing aitches as on the other one).
I have finally gotten around to reading an essay by Tony Judt that was referenced in a recent (and rather harrowing) article about the New York University historian's ordeal with motor neurone disease.
The piece, 'What Is Living and What Is Dead in Social Democracy?' appears in the New York Review of Books.
I think it's well worth reading.
It's quite a lengthy excursion across the subject suggested by the title, and--among other topics--Judt considers differences between the political language of western Europe and the United States, the lingering relevance of nearly century-old economic debates and the difficult necessity of recovering a sense of common social purpose and belonging.
Much of it is not really earth-shattering, and there are some bits where I'm not really convinced.
But I was most struck positively by the parts of his essay in which he discusses, first, the past accomplishments of social democracy and, second, the need for it--if it wishes to maintain its success in the future--of reminding people about the reasons it emerged in the first place.
As to the past:
The welfare state had remarkable achievements to its credit. [...] The common theme and universal accomplishment of the neo-Keynesian governments of the postwar era was their remarkable success in curbing inequality. If you compare the gap separating rich and poor, whether by income or assets, in all continental European countries along with Great Britain and the US, you will see that it shrinks dramatically in the generation following 1945.
With greater equality there came other benefits. Over time, the fear of a return to extremist politics—the politics of desperation, the politics of envy, the politics of insecurity—abated. The Western industrialized world entered a halcyon era of prosperous security: a bubble, perhaps, but a comforting bubble in which most people did far better than they could ever have hoped in the past and had good reason to anticipate the future with confidence.
The paradox of the welfare state, and indeed of all the social democratic (and Christian Democratic) states of Europe, was quite simply that their success would over time undermine their appeal. The generation that remembered the 1930s was understandably the most committed to preserving institutions and systems of taxation, social service, and public provision that they saw as bulwarks against a return to the horrors of the past. But their successors—even in Sweden—began to forget why they had sought such security in the first place.
As to the future:
The left, to be quite blunt about it, has something to conserve. It is the right that has inherited the ambitious modernist urge to destroy and innovate in the name of a universal project. Social democrats, characteristically modest in style and ambition, need to speak more assertively of past gains. The rise of the social service state, the century-long construction of a public sector whose goods and services illustrate and promote our collective identity and common purposes, the institution of welfare as a matter of right and its provision as a social duty: these were no mean accomplishments.
That these accomplishments were no more than partial should not trouble us. If we have learned nothing else from the twentieth century, we should at least have grasped that the more perfect the answer, the more terrifying its consequences. Imperfect improvements upon unsatisfactory circumstances are the best that we can hope for, and probably all we should seek. Others have spent the last three decades methodically unraveling and destabilizing those same improvements: this should make us much angrier than we are. It ought also to worry us, if only on prudential grounds: Why have we been in such a hurry to tear down the dikes laboriously set in place by our predecessors? Are we so sure that there are no floods to come?
Well, are we?
I've spent a certain amount of time over recent years trying to figure out the processes that have made relatively decent societies and those that have seen them unravel.
I'm still not entirely sure; however, I think that being very aware that they can unravel is a healthy corrective to complacency.
Although it came out more than a year ago to much fanfare here in Germany, it wasn't until a couple of months ago that I finally got around to watching Der Baader Meinhof Komplex, one of the glossier and more internationally successful German films of recent years.
The film had an intensely mixed reception here (as, I think, do most films and books about Germany's past), and I think I was at the time put off the notion of seeing it by the suggestions that it romanticised its subject (a highly condensed and dramatised history of the Red Army Faction), which only seemed confirmed by the trailers, which seemed to presage a film heavy on retro-glamour and action and light on historical context, psychological complexity and moral judgement.
When I finally got around to seeing it, however, I was pleased to discover a far better film than the one I'd expected. Quite apart from its excellent production values and many strong performances, I thought that the film ultimately--and effectively--condemned its urban-guerrilla protagonists, despite (or perhaps because of) the many opportunities it gave them for grandiose political posturing.
On this note, Terry Glavin today points us to a recent Vanity Fairessay by Christopher Hitchens on the film, which expresses many of the things that occurred to me while watching it, only clearer than I probably could have myself. (And Terry's embedding of the godawful American trailer for the film might help to explain my initial reluctance...if anything, it's even more glamourising than the, in comparative retrospect, much more ambiguous German one.)
Among the film's strengths, I think, are its unflinching attention to the bloody consequences of the RAF's violence and its emphasis on the (often twisted) dynamics in the group members' psychology.
As Hitchens notes:
It doesn’t take long for the sinister ramifications of the “complex” to become plain. Consumerism is equated with Fascism so that the firebombing of department stores can be justified. Ecstatic violence and “action” become ends in themselves. One can perhaps picture Ulrike Meinhof as a “Red” resister of Nazism in the 1930s, but if the analogy to that decade is allowed, then it is very much easier to envisage her brutally handsome pal Andreas Baader as an enthusiastic member of the Brownshirts. (The gang bought its first consignment of weapons from a member of Germany’s neo-Nazi underworld: no need to be choosy when you are so obviously in the right.) There is, as with all such movements, an uneasy relationship between sexuality and cruelty, and between casual or cynical attitudes to both. As if curtain-raising a drama of brutality that has long since eclipsed their own, the young but hedonistic West German toughs take themselves off to the Middle East in search of the real thing and the real training camps, and discover to their dismay that their Arab hosts are somewhat … puritanical.
Later:
Researching this in the late 1970s in Germany, I became convinced that the Baader Meinhof phenomenon actually was a form of psychosis. One of the main recruiting grounds for the gang was an institution at the University of Heidelberg called the Sozialistisches Patienten Kollektiv, or Socialist Patients Collective, an outfit that sought to persuade the pitifully insane that they needed no treatment save social revolution. (Such a reading of the work of R. D. Laing and others was one of the major “disorders” of the 1960s.) Among the star pupils of this cuckoo’s nest was Ralf Reinders, who was arrested after several violent “actions” and who had once planned to destroy the Jewish House in Berlin—a restoration of the one gutted by the Brownshirts—“in order to get rid of this thing about the Jews that we’ve all had to have since the Nazi time.” Yes, “had to have” is very good. Perhaps such a liberating act, had he brought it off, would have made some of the noises in his head go away.
And its maybe an opportunity to reiterate the comments of our friend Andrew on the same topic:
The RAF itself is, as a subject of study, unedifying. Having spent some time researching them for a project, I came away feeling nothing but vague contempt for it, and complete mystification at the attention it still receives. Active RAF members fell, as near as I can tell, into two general groups: ruthless monomaniacs or deluded dupes. What united both camps was their second-rateness and insufferable pomposity. Their "manifestos" are dull and turgid; their personalities one-dimensional and unappealing. Once they began their RAF careers -- at the very latest -- most RAF cadres morphed into Godzillas of screechy self-righteous bitterness.
And more comments from Andrew on RAF-related topics are here.
OK, so it's a somewhat grim night here, election-wise.
But it's not without its humour, provided in this case by The Guardian:
The Greens secured 10%, an increase of 2.3%, and the extreme-left Links party took 12.5%, an increase of 3.8%.
Figures showed that 26% of Germany's jobless voted for Links, underlining the extent to which the two-year old party – a conglomeration of former communists and disillusioned Social Democrats – has won voters from the SPD.
Given the references to 'the Links party' you might be forgiven for thinking that a party of radical golfers had won a significant victory this evening. And you might be wondering just why they'd attracted so many unemployed votes.
If you want to stick with the original German, obviously, 'links' does mean 'left'. However, the party is actually called 'die Linke', but since none of the other party names remained in their original language (i.e., the Greens are not referred to as die Grünen or even more correctly, if somewhat more unwieldly, as Bündnis 90/Die Grünen) it would seem to be more correct to refer to them as 'The Left'. 'The Links party' makes no sense at all.
Not that this correction would make them any more worth voting for.
(For what it's worth: My first vote in a German election went to a different left-of-centre party with a more realistic programme and -- for all its imperfections -- more noble tradition reaching back to the nineteenth century.)
And this evening sees the beginning of a new campaign: that the Guardian makes me their chief Germany correspondent.
I'll at least avoid the most obvious mistakes.
And if that's not an honest campaign slogan you can get behind, then what is, nicht wahr? *Reference: DE/EN
[UPDATE]: I see that somebody has ensured that this mistake does not recur.
Ok, so one might want to downplay the self-proclaimed triumph of the organisers of yesterday's Neo-Nazi rally in Hamburg, which escalated into full-scale riots featuring levels of violence not seen for a long time. However, police reactions to the brown mob's sheer viciousness affirm the overall sense that what happened yesterday should give us serious pause.
According to Hamburg Police Superintendent Werner Jantosch, without the interference of the police, there might have been fatalities. The fascist mob not only engaged in a battle with the left-wing counter-demonstrators that took several hours, but also hounded journalists deemed "left-wing" and subsequently hijacked two commuter train cars on the line between Pinneberg and Hamburg, using the train's intercom to broadcast racist messages.
How come, then, that all the Bavarian President Günther Beckstein has to say about things is to repeat the old chestnut of the growing danger of "left-wing violence" and the need to "put a stop to their games" in advance (by keeping known "Gewalttäter" -- perpetrators of violence -- from travelling to demonstrations). The problem is: not only are many so-called "Autonome" of dubious political affiiliation -- more hooligan than radical ; he's also either not recognising, or deliberately avoiding the fact of the violence coming from the extreme right (not least in his own backyard).
I've been ruminating over the last couple of weeks on an article by Rebecca Solnit at Orion. In 'One Nation Under Elvis', she considers the seemingly unbridgeable divide between urban liberals (or progressives) and the rural communities where many of their issues lie (particularly for environmentalists) but whose residents, Solnit suggests, they consider with -- at best -- condescension and at worst outright hatred.
Solnit's essay is a very personal one (it may be that that is the mode best suited to this issue), but it touches on a tangled parcel of issues of broad relevance. After all, as she rightly points out, the electoral map that was much discussed in 2004 was only a north/south one on the surface: look below it and you'll find that one of the more crucial divides is that between urban and rural, with the suburbs often breaking one way or another based on their proximity to cities or local factors such as the presence of a university.
My home state of Illinois, for instance, is in the 'blue' column, but only because of the enormous electoral weight of Chicago (even if only the living vote only once, the city carries a lot of voting clout). Drive a couple of hours west and you're in a very different world.
The same kinds of divisions were apparent in my adopted home state of Maryland (one stop south of the Mason-Dixon line, don't forget) where the distance between, say, downtown Baltimore or the 'People's Republic of Tacoma Park' and a place like Taneytown was about more than merely geography.
(There were, though, as I recall, more than a few cowboys to be found at the gay bars around the corner from where I used to live in Mount Vernon...but that was Bawlmer, hon.)
Now, some kind of urban-rural cultural divide is probably a historical continuity or global commonality: the rhythms of life, the interpersonal networks, and perhaps many of the needs of living in a city are different than those of living in the country. However, there does appear to be something particularly virulent and odd about the contemporary American version of this conflict.
Odd, because it's not something that is entirely geographical. Solnit, not unfairly, identifies country music as one of the key cultural divisions. Building on her point, I suppose it's fair to say that 'country' is a serious cultural category in the land of my birth. And it's not all about geography.
I have a little bit of personal experience about this.
The town in which I grew up, for instance, was far from 'rural'. But while paying my way through college, I spent a couple of summer and winter breaks working at a steel lacing factory located there, and I came to realise something. (No, before that, I didn't know what 'steel lacing' was either.)
I was one of the few 'college boys' who worked there, which was the source of no small amount of ribbing -- most of it good natured -- but, still, at lunch time you sat and talked with whomever happened to be around. You get to know people.
A quite large percentage of my co-workers drove pickups, were extremely patriotic (I was there when the First Gulf War was under way, so that became hard to miss), loved country music and tended to drop the final 'g' from any 'ing' endings that they spoke. Quite a few were enthusiastic hunters -- or at least gun-owners.
But after work, 9 out of 10, I'm quite sure, did not drive home to a ranch or farm, but rather to a housing development off of some four-lane road chock-full of big box stores and strip malls. And, again, this was northern Illinois, less than an hour's drive from the Chicago Lakefront, when traffic was good. (Which it most often wasn't.)
So what I realised was this: 'country' is very much a state of mind.
Solnit refers to a variety of examples of what we might call urban middle-class disdain of 'rednecks' and assumptions that 'country' means racist. She observes:
So on the one hand we have white people who hate black people. On the other hand we have white people who hate other white people on the grounds that they hate black people. But that latter hatred accuses many wrongfully, and it serves as a convenient coverup for the racism that is all around us. The reason why it matters is because middle-class people despising poor people becomes your basic class war, and the ongoing insults seem to have been at least part of what has weakened the environmental movement in particular and progressive politics in general.
I'll leave you (no, urge you, in fact) to take a closer look at her article, since, as I said, it's full of the sort of personal anecdotes and nuances that are hard to summarise. What it comes down to, however, is more or less a plea to try to address this downward urban glance toward all things rural and twangy, with the argument that this is acting as a serious brake on progressive politics.
In general, I think there's a lot to her argument. The article provoked two quite positive -- and readable -- reactions at Dave Neiwert's Orcinus blog, one from Dave himself, and one from Sara Robinson. Each, in their own way, reiterate Solnit's basic point. Perusing the comments at each response, however, brings you to other perspectives (and to the depressing realisation that there are people who really do hate country music because they think it's 'right-wing'.)
One of the main objections that commenters raise -- one that I think carries some weight -- is that the cultural divide she rightly identifies is not one sided. There are, if you'll forgive the mangled physics of this observation, two sides that are mutually looking down on one another. In short, some of the commenters argue that 'rural communities' (for lack of a better or more neutral term) don't want any kind of alliance with liberals, no matter how much Johnny Cash those young city slickers might have on their I-Pods.
In a great number of cases, their rejection of Solnit's argument (and Neiwert and Robinson's agreement with it) are driven by personal experiences, often painful ones, with the kinds of environments with which she urges greater bridge-building efforts. (One of the more striking of which involves memories of a school bus driver named 'Skeeter'.)
Partly because those arguments are so personal (and so painful), they point to the difficulty of the project that Solnit suggests: if they can be taken as at least a partially valid sample of country folk (at least of the sort of formerly country folk who have turned into the sort to read Orion), then we're talking about more than a clash of grammar and musical tastes.
I don't, though, read Solnit as saying one has to necessarily overlook the urban-rural differences (or even conservative-liberal) that exist: she seems to be suggesting that both sides would have much to gain in trying to distinguish those areas where differences remain from those where commonalities exist.
This is not an easy thing.
I wonder whether this kind of cultural divide is quite so pronounced in other places. I know that in Britain the 'Countryside Alliance' has succeeded in making a lot of noise about representing rural interests in the face of an allegedly uncaring (or clueless) urban elite. On the other hand, I'm not so sure that this has had quite the significance of the urban-rural divide in the US (Britain is, after all, much smaller and more densely populated), and I wonder whether it has had quite the cultural impact. There are many ways in America in which a particular kind of cultural code (country music, NASCAR, traditional gender roles, hunting and fishing, perhaps a kind of casual racism -- the latter recalled by Dale here) has come to stand in for a particular set of political beliefs.
I have the sense that the British version of this is quite a different beast.
Here in Germany, you might be interested to note (and if you're not, just skip down a ways) there is a political drama that is in some way relevant. The Green Party is facing the possibility of forming coalition governments in two Bundesländer: Hesse, and the city-state of Hamburg.
That is not particularly unusual in itself, as Germany has a proportional voting system that has allowed smaller parties to have more influence. The more curious bit is their potential coalition partner: in Hamburg the CDU and in Hesse a combination of the CDU and the Free Democrats. (Reminder for Americans: 'liberal' in a European context very often refers to a predilection for small government and free markets 'As much state as necessary, as little state as possible', as the FDP puts it. It's confusing, I know, but it's the US that, for whatever reason, paints its conservative states red, which I've never understood.)
Considering that the Greens are often seen as a 'left' party (and probably in some important sense are) the possibility of the first black-green (or black, yellow, green...parties in Germany are known by their colours) coalitions at a state level have been causing no small amount of political soul searching within the party.
There are certainly what we could call 'cultural' barriers to overcome: the Green movement, after all, came of age in the era of Helmut Kohl, and as a movement that saw themselves in opposition to much of capitalism, militarism and consumerism, they can certainly be placed to the left on most conventional political spectra. However, their suspicion of statism, celebration of self-sufficiency, desire to preserve traditional ways of life and commitment to civil liberties suggest that there are points of agreement with at least some sections of mainstream conservative and liberal politics in this country.
As in America, it is hard not to notice, this is indeed more than a policy debate: it's partly cultural. Polling data shows that the Greens' most solid electoral base consists of well-educated and relatively well-off urbanites. In Germany, as in the US, there is a rural-urban divide of sorts. However, it is my theory -- and any German readers with more knowledge on this point are welcome to chip in if you wish -- that this division is not as stark as the one painted in Solnit's article in the USA.
There is a village not too far from here -- certainly 'rural' by any standard -- that we have the pleasure to have gotten to know through a friend of ours. On the roofs of its houses you would not be surprised to find solar panels, and in the gardens you'll likely find all of the paraphernalia of a conservationist lifestyle that most American (and German) environmentalists are expending so much effort to promote. (I commented on something similar in an earlier post.)
Nonetheless, I feel quite sure that its inhabitants tend rather toward the conservative side of the spectrum when it comes to the ballot box.
There are some Greens, it seems, for whom the idea of even working with Conservatives in a government is anathema. However, I think they have much to gain, not least since it would be the opportunity to gain some new voters while also freeing themselves from a left-wing camp that -- at least for the near future -- seems doomed to internal dissension and competition from a more radical left that seems rather far from electable. Times have changed. Conservatives wear sneakers too.
And, so far as I can tell, a love for Volksmusik has not quite taken on the political significance of country music in America (even if I imagine you'll find relatively few fans of it among Green voters...or among sane voters of any party for that matter....)
As someone who identifies -- though not uncritically -- with the Greens, I'm quite excited by the possibilities that the new alliances open up. Of course, this possibility requires that there are voters who are 'culturally' Liberal or Conservative who are willing to at least consider voting Green.
And that's not a foregone conclusion.
As a final note, I few personal memories about trying to bridge the divide that Solnit describes.
In a former and distant life as a campus activist, I recall that it took a relatively short time for me to become frustrated with the main vanguard of leftist politics at my university. There was a network of groups that tended to all have the same members and who sought to turn every campus issue into their own personal struggle. They were the reason that the Black Student Union for a time refused to work with any predominantly white left-wing group: they had experienced a few too many episodes where erstwhile revolutionaries (invariably white and middle-class) showed up to tell the BSU what real oppression was all about.
In any case, a few friends of mine and I decided to do our own thing and formed a new group that sought out contact with the local unions. One of the first issues we got involved in was the then prominent miners strike at the Pittston Coal company in western Virginia.
The strike was a drawn out and particularly difficult one. And it was clear that kind of people who were directly involved with it were the sort that, in Solnit's article, were the object of so much scorn from her well-educated environmentalist friends.
Along with raising attention to the strike on campus and organising a canned food drive, we called a meeting with local unions and (pro-union) religious groups at a church just off campus. And, indeed, you could sense a cultural divide of sorts in the room.
However, focusing on the commonalities and the issues at hand helped, though, as well as the fact as one of our co-organisers at the university was a history teacher who also happened to be the daughter of miners.
To make a long story short and to not belabour my own small part in these proceedings, our efforts culminated in a talk given by a United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) representative who came up from downstate (yes, there is mining in Illinois) to talk to a packed university auditorium about the strike.
Our contacts with local churches and unions ensured that the audience was about equally mixed between students, staff and non-university types. It turned into a rather remarkable evening, and I recall vividly the way that after the talk, one by one, the representatives of the locals that we had helped bring together stood up to pledge their members' support (and money) to support the UMWA. Campus groups chipped in as well, along with and a few local churches. It may not have been decisive. But I like to think that it helped.
The curious thing is that on many other issues we (the students, the churches and the unions) may not have had a lot to say to one another: indeed, we may have been at odds. And there were undoubtedly far more Hank Williams fans among the union members than among the students.
However, at least just for a short time, it didn't seem that that mattered. It was one of the finest evenings of my college years.
The following video is a 'mini-documentary' of the strike. It's quite good.
And I dare you to look down on the people involved.
(Warning: viewers may experience bluegrass music.)
It is with some fondness that I remember a day in late spring 1999 when I was accused of being an 'imperialist'.
It was after a reading by Christopher Hitchens at Bookmarks, a left-wing bookshop in London. He was officially promoting a book on Clinton, but most of the discussion -- and debate -- focused on the bombs then being dropped by NATO on Serbia to compel them to withdraw their forces from Kosovo. Hitchens was in favour of this policy, though the rest of the room was divided, so the debate was a rather fierce one.
Afterwards, the audience gathered outside (at least those of us who then smoked) to continue the discussion. I, too, supported the NATO action; a couple of my interlocutors did not. Hence the epithet noted above that they hurled at me. (I might have it wrong: I might simply have been labelled a 'tool of imperialism', and there is a dim memory of the phrase 'NATO lackey' falling more than once that day, as strangely retro as that may sound.)
So, it is perhaps appropriate that I use Hitchens's Slate article, 'The Serbs' Self-Inflicted Wounds', from last Friday as the occasion to offer somewhat belated congratulations to Europe's newest independent state. (Via Will)
A little more than three years after the Battle of Bookmarks, I watched Joschka Fischer -- then Germany's Foreign minister -- defend his decision to support the Nato bombing and the subsequent deployment of German troops to Kosovo, the first foreign military operations ever undertaken on the part of the Federal Republic's Bundeswehr.
As Fischer represented the largely pacifist Greens, this was a significant issue in the 2002 elections, and when he came to Trier, where we then lived, as part of the campaign, the calls of 'Kriegstreiber' ('war-monger') from some parts of the audience were almost constant. Fischer, no stranger to political street-fighting (both literally and figuratively) interrupted his prepared campaign rhetoric and engaged in the debate with gusto.
It was impressive, not least since I had a hard time imagining an American Secretary of State debating policy in a provincial market square with such knowledge and passion.
To round this off, the Süddeutsche Zeitung had an interesting article yesterday (in German) about the 'other Serbia', you know, the one that that is not demanding a new war, burning embassies, or carrying pictures of Radovan Karadzic through the streets. A more thoughtful, cosmopolitan nation certainly exists, which should be remembered while the raging nationalist thugs dominate the headlines.
In the last few weeks, I read Laura Silber and Allan Little's The Death of Yugoslavia (US/UK/D). It doesn't go up to the Kosovo war (at least the edition I have), but it is an excellent source of information about how this sad story began.
The Chronicle of Higher Education has an article on that perennial favourite: liberal bias in academia. (Via)
In my own experiences in the academic worlds of three different countries (the US, Britain and Germany) I have indeed found more 'liberals' amongst university teachers and researchers than there are 'conservatives'. However, those inverted commas should suggest to you that I think these are far from precise labels, especially across three different countries. (And I'm using 'liberal' to mean left(ish) of centre rather than talking about, say, 'classical liberals'.)
On the other hand, this general observation is more limited than it sounds.
First, by the faculties I've tended to be in -- humanities, languages -- which tend, I think, to be more liberal than, say, law, business and -- maybe -- science.
Second, by the fact that 'liberal' doesn't often mean that much these days and if you poke a liberal's opinions on many topics you may find that they're often what I would call quite 'conservative' about certain issues. Similarly, 'conservative' can mean anything from bug-eyed creationist wacko to moderate quasi-libertarian.
Third, by the fact that I think that whole discussion is often a very silly one: sure, the numbers might be skewed, but it has always been easy enough for me to find conservative scholars in any academic context I've been in. (They're usually pretty easy to identify, as they're the ones complaining loudly about how there aren't any conservative scholars). I'm not convinced that professorial indoctrination -- outside of some unfortunately very high profile exceptions -- is remotely as big a problem as is often made out.
In any case, the article at the Chronicle describes research by a husband and wife team of acadmics (he's conservative, she's liberal...I bet you can just feel the scorching Carville-Matalinesquefrisson crackling away simply by reading the titles of their articles...).
Now, there are a few further points to note. First, their research seems to confirm what we might call common sense:
What they found was that students who believed their professors had the same politics they did rated a course more highly than students who didn't. The Woessners also found that students were less interested in a course when they believed their professors' political views clashed with their own.
Yep, m'kay. Then, called before the Pennsylvania legislature to testify about their findings, they gave some startling advice:
Since their research showed that students were turned off when professors expressed views that were contrary to their own, the Woessners told lawmakers that professors should do their best to present both sides of a political argument and tread lightly when it comes to expressing their own views.
Mmmmm...hhmmmm. Ok, I hope we've all learned something new today.
I'm not saying, of course, that having hard research that backs up common sense positions is a bad thing. It just seems to be rolled out with such fanfare by the Chronicle that I found myself a bit underwhelmed.
But I think my favourite little nugget of information doesn't get enough attention. Buried in there somewhere toward the end we find:
The research led the Woessners to conclude that if higher education wants to attract more conservatives to the professoriate, it should smooth the way financially, offering subsidized health insurance and housing for graduate students, and adopting family-friendly policies for professors.
Yes: to attract conservatives to academia offer them subsidies and liberal family leave policies.
Wonderful.
Somehow I don't imagine that would make paranoid loon David Horowitz (sadly not a rare breed) quietly disappear.
Though it would be worth a shot.
And while all those conservative graduates are dazzled by the cheap housing and free child care, liberals can finally implement their long-term dream of taking over Wall Street.
Der Spiegel has an article (in German) on the work of photographer Gerda Taro.
If you click on one of the photos at the article, you should see a series of her photographs.
I had not previously been aware of her work (she appears to have been overshadowed by her colleague and companion Robert Capa), but a quick look around also brought up a slide show at the New York Times.
I particularly like this one:
Captioned by the Times:'A photograph of a woman in Barcelona, Spain training for a Republican militia in August 1936, taken by Gerda Taro. '
Ms. Taro’s celebrity was short-lived but outsize. Shortly after establishing herself independently of Mr. Capa, she was sideswiped by a tank after jumping onto the running board of a car transporting casualties during the battle of Brunete, and killed. Her funeral in Paris (on Aug. 1, 1937, which would have been her 27th birthday) drew thousands who hailed her as a martyr to anti-Fascism. The French writer Louis Aragon and the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda were among those in attendance. Alberto Giacometti, the sculptor, designed her memorial.
Andrew Hammel at the always interesting and readable German Joystackles the RAF...no, no, not the Battle of Britain version but rather the poster-friendly 1970s terrorist organisation (Wiki D/E) responsible for, among other things, the political tension and violence since referred to as the 'German Autumn' (D/E) some thirty years ago.
Andrew links to an interesting essay by Paul Hockenos. I need to spend some more time looking at it, but this passage immediately stood out:
For anyone who lived through the German Autumn, the images remain vivid: Schmidt’s grave television addresses to the nation; the “wanted” handbills with blurry black-and-white photos of the fugitives; the public spaces crawling with police; and the eerie high-tech maximum security Stammheim prison near Stuttgart, its seventh floor constructed specially for these political prisoners. The violence—part of a broader pattern in West Germany in the ’70s—shook the state and terrified ordinary Germans who had overwhelmingly backed the Schmidt government’s efforts to crush the militants and their networks. With the administration accused of illegal surveillance, torture, and murder, Germany’s young democracy, created from the ruins of the Third Reich, faced the deepest crisis of its existence.
I wasn't even in Germany then and was attending grade school in the American Midwest, but I can recall late 70s and early 80s news reports dealing with the group. 80s German politics (mainly via the Greens) played a formative role in my own development, and, there too, one always seemed to come up against the ghost of the RAF, and I swear that most of the arthouse German films I saw in college seemed to have something to do with that political milieu. Since I've lived here, I've been struck by how much alive that topic remains in the media, such as in award-winning films such as Volker Schlöndorff's Die Stille nach dem Schuss(the English title of which I have just discovered, to some dismay, is The Legend of Rita.)
In any case, though I need to spend more time with the article, I do agree with Andrew when he says the following:
The RAF itself is, as a subject of study, unedifying. Having spent some time researching them for a project, I came away feeling nothing but vague contempt for it, and complete mystification at the attention it still receives. Active RAF members fell, as near as I can tell, into two general groups: ruthless monomaniacs or deluded dupes. What united both camps was their second-rateness and insufferable pomposity. Their "manifestos" are dull and turgid; their personalities one-dimensional and unappealing. Once they began their RAF careers -- at the very latest -- most RAF cadres morphed into Godzillas of screechy self-righteous bitterness.
And they accomplished...well, nothing as far as I can tell.
Well, we're back, after a very good and productive research trip to London. Regular posting will resume shortly, after the blogging engines have been warmed up.
In the meantime, it is worth stopping by Der Spiegel to read an interview with historian Eric Hobsbawm. Born into a Austrian-British family in Egypt in 1917 and raised in Vienna and Berlin, young Eric was an active Communist during his teens and experienced the 'Weimar' period and the Nazi seizure of power before his family fled to Britain. There, he would become a prolific and renowned historian. (Just look at the picture: one of the most perfect images of 'the historian' I could imagine!)
As it turns out, he had a great influence on yours truly at university (though at one a few thousand miles distant from Hobsbawm's beloved Birkbeck). And, unlike E.P. Thompson and Christopher Hill, Hobsbawm is still very much alive and kicking.
The interview is in German (which seems to be the language that it was conducted in: at one point, Hobsbawm refers to his accent -- coloured by a youth spent in both Vienna and Berlin, with the Viennese remaining predominant) so those of you who don't speak it are out of luck. But even for you, the pictures may be of interest, featuring as they do images from 20s and 30s Berlin, along with a couple of the man himself. (One of the interesting facts is that the book department at the Kaufhaus des Westens in Berlin was influential on his intellectual development. How many department stores, one wonders, have generated Marxist intellectuals...)
Just briefly, three sections of the interview stood out, and I present them here in my own, humble translations.
The first refers to something I've written about: the power of contingencyin the development of an historical worldview:
The historian, quite deliberately, doesn't write about himself. But it's also important for a historian to know the extent to which he's a child of his time and how he's influenced by it. How different it could have been! For example, had my uncle accepted the position he was offered in France and not taken the one in Berlin, I wouldn't have experienced Berlin in the early 30s up to the [Nazi] takeover, and I would certainly have been a different historian.
And there's a nice bit on how a real witness of history views the presumed invention of hedonism in the 1960s:
Young people's sexuality is another example for the anachronisms that I mentioned. There are, after all, a lot of people who think that they invented sexual freedom in 1968. The historical witnesses know that this sexual freedom was there much earlier, even in the middle-class Viennese circles of my youth or even in those of my grandfather! On the other hand, the sexual freedom that young people have today didn't exist then.
When asked what rules a young historian must follow, Hobsbawm offers the following, sensible, response:
The first rule is that you have to abide by the facts. When something is established, it cannot be denied. You can't lie or keep things hidden. One of the reasons I'm not exactly thrilled about post-modernism is its relativism: the idea that there is no reality. History may not be determined by desirability.
I've never met him, but I was taught by people who did knew him, which seems a close enough relationship to feel glad that he's still around.
I would like to think that I'll be continuing to be so productive and insightful when I'm 90. Should I, of course, have the good fortune to make it that far.
There was quite a remarkable essay by George Monbiot at the Guardian a few days ago that manages to combine zoology, libertarianism and the near-collapse of Northern Rock Building Society.
In particular, he discusses one Matt Ridley, who was not only chair of Northern Rock but is also a well known author of several fascinating books on human nature.
Silly me, I've never made the connection before. (But, then again, I have a difficult enough time remember whether it's Matt Ridley or Mark Ridley, let alone checking on the political allegiances and possible bank chairmanships of the zoologists I read.)
Monbiot gives Ridley's (quite astoundingly radical) libertarian philosophising a good drubbing, but the more interesting bit is where he brings up evolutionary psychology:
I studied zoology in the same department [as Ridley], though a few years later. Like Ridley, I am a biological determinist: I believe that much of our behaviour is governed by our evolutionary history. I accept the evidence he puts forward, but draw completely different conclusions. He believes that modern humans are destined to behave well if left to their own devices; I believe that they are likely to behave badly. If you belong to a small group of intelligent hominids, all of whom are well known to each other, you will be rewarded for cooperation and generosity within the group. (Though this does not stop your group from attacking or exploiting another.) If, on the other hand, you can switch communities at will, travel freely, buy in one country and sell in another, hire strangers then fire them, you will gain more from acting only in your own interest. You'll have an even stronger incentive to act against the common good if you run a bank whose lending and borrowing are so complex that hardly anyone can understand what is happening.
Ridley and I have the same view of human nature: that we are inherently selfish. But the question is whether this nature is subject to the conditions that prevailed during our evolutionary history. I believe they have changed: we can no longer be scrutinised and held to account by a small community. We need governments to fill the regulatory role vacated when our tiny clans dissolved.
In general, I tend far more toward Mobiot's arguments on this issue, even if I think he should avoid the use of the word 'determinist', particularly since so many evolutionary psychologists have been struggling to free themselves of that label and have rightly emphasised interactions between genetics and environment in describing behaviour.
But the larger point that becomes clear is the utter diversity of political views that can emerge from taking human nature seriously.
I note this aspect of Monbiot's reply partly because I have more than once run up against an assertion that evolutionary psychology more or less automatically entails some version or other of radical laissez-faireism and/or the creation of social policy that is 'conservative' in all kinds of undesirable ways. ('Undesirable' from the perspective of the generally liberal people with whom I have had these discussions.)
This is, as I think Monbiot nicely demonstrates, not the case, and I think he is right that the bulk of the evidence on human nature does not lead us to the conclusion that people -- left to their own devices -- will necessarily act in ways that are good. He is right that, for instance:
Human welfare, just as it was a million years ago, is guaranteed only by mutual scrutiny and regulation.
Precisely what the parameters and means of 'mutual scrutiny and regulation' should be is, of course, the tricky bit. Nevertheless, I think there's enough evidence from enough quarters to suggest that what is arguably the most successful form of human social organisation so far (with all its faults and shortcomings) -- i.e., liberal social democracy -- is not Homo sapiens's default state.
There are a lot more things that could be said on that, of course, but just to be brief, Monbiot's article has gotten me thinking about libertarianism again since it's something, actually, with which I have a not entirely hostile but somewhat conflicted relationship.
On the one hand, there are many ways in which I find libertarian thinking and commentary to be very insightful. For a while, for instance, I became a regular reader of Reason, with which I typically found myself in, alternatively, nodding agreement and seething disagreement. (In many ways, they're interesting for asking the right questions if not necessarily coming up with the right answers.)
And there have been various other places where I've found some intriguing thinking from the libertarian corner, particularly by those who seek to develop that thought humbly and consistently (i.e., not just screeching about low taxes and free-enterprise but advocating the passing of liberal immigration laws, the ending of the intrusive legislation of morality and the increased protection of civil rights).
Indeed, I would say that, along with social democracy and naturalism (by which I mean recognising our animal natures and connection to the ecosystems in which we live), libertarian principles of freedom form an important source for my -- admittedly perhaps somewhat ramshackle -- worldview.
Unfortunately, many (though not all) of my personal encounters with real, existing libertarians have tended to be rather negative. They have often held strangely simplistic (ranging to naive and fundamentally ahistorical) perspectives on the world and a relentless (ranging to bug-eyed and ranting) distrust of any concept of social or community good beyond (typically very narrowly conceived) individual interests. Libertarianism in these cases seems to only be an ideology for successful entrepreneurs: what it offers for people don't fit that category -- either because they are not entrepreneurs or because they are not successful -- tends to remain either unclear or be quite obviously vicious.
These, furthermore, have often been accompanied by two things.
1) A tendency toward hyperbole (e.g., 'all taxation is theft', sensible gun control laws are 'oppression' and the UN/EU/WTO/IMF/ATF -- and their fleet of black helicopters -- are plotting a tyrannical world government) and a slightly shouty form of unpleasantness
and
2) Almost limitless self-aggrandisement (i.e., seeing themselves among an extraordinarily creative and productive self-sufficient elite that, obviously, would thrive in the radically privatised world they envision creating). (The latter I blame partly on excessive reading of Ayn Rand, but that's another topic for another time. Or, preferably, for never).
Strangely enough, I have also encountered precisely these same two characteristics in many discussions with the radical left (mainly Trotskyists for some reason I'm not interested enough to speculate about). So, rest assured, I'm quite capable of being equal opportunity with my scorn.
Oddly enough, just about all the libertarians I've met have identified themselves as right-wing, even though a lot of the things that dominate right-wing parties (whether in Europe or America) these days -- xenophobia, religion, militarism, a strong desire to regulate morals -- are anathema to what I would see as 'real' libertarian thinking.
There's not, of course, anything inherently 'right-wing' about the notion of 'freedom' or about being suspicious of the state, or of emphasising forms of voluntary self-organisation to provide mutual assistance. These have long been elements in anarchist and some socialist thought, and the European green movement ('neither Left nor Right: Green' being one of their early slogans) has also long had the libertarian notion of decentralising power as one its core principles as well, even if at times it has been emphasised rather less than more. (Just to note one of the more obvious practical examples: green thinking on energy focuses on decentralised, even household, power production, freeing people not only from the centralised power of the state but also from the concentrated power of large corporations.)
Of the two general strands of thought that emerged from the 60s (and which have in various ways been around for long, long before that of course) -- i.e., 1) making a new world and 2) being left alone to do your own thing -- my own emphasis has been shifting toward the latter: partly because it's increasingly clear to me that the first -- whether in its left or right-wing form -- generally leads to Very Bad Things. (NB: Making a better world is, I think, still on the table though.)
Now, I know there are a lot of reasonable and very insightful libertarian ideas out there. (And I know that the Left has its own ideological silliness to answer for.)
In response to what seems to be a rather unhinged critique of the science of global warming, the journal notes:
Actually, it is the AGW [Anthropogenic Global Warming]-deniers who are the collectivists. They support allowing wealthy individuals and corporations to keep engaging in practices that essentially levy a heavy tax-burden on the rest of us. By depleting natural capital, the extractive robber-barons are externalizing their costs to other citizens and future generations. A true individualist libertarian would insist that everyone pay their fair share in the present-day rather than sloughing it off on their children, right? If you want to refrain from sounding completely ignorant and backward on this subject, you need to read and understand the concepts of Natural Capitalism, Externalities, Sustainability, and the Tragedy of the Commons. If you don’t, you have no business claiming to be a true Capitalist.
This article follows another (here), which contained the following:
Let’s look at the nature of our situation: Aside from radiation coming from the sun and other parts of space or the occasional meteorite coming in, and whatever heat is reflected or re-radiated into space going out, Earth is a closed system. Each of the 6.5 billion people who live here therefore have the right (an inherent human right as opposed to an arbitrary legal right) to fully use 1/6,500,000,000th of its resources and atmosphere, which are decidedly finite. If Stelene or Matt Drudge or Michael [Crichton] want to use more than that share of atmosphere or non-renewable resource, they need to purchase it from the people whose share they are consuming. That’s the free-market, right? It’s a classic problem of the commons, and even smart libertarians recognize this.
I imagine there are a lot of things that the writers at Black Sun Journal and I would disagree about. (I'm far from a 'true Capitalist', and they have that Strange Affection for Ayn Rand that I mentioned before and that I Just Can't Comprehend....)
The longer I spend blogging, however, the more I find it is difficult to find anyone with whom I completely agree anyway. But I'm also coming increasingly to the conclusion that, given the enormous decline in the civility of political discourse on the internet (described well, if with a certain justified incivility, at Whiskey Fire here and here) that I have come to see even a reasonable disagreement as, somehow, something precious.
And I am pleased to see the folks at Black Sun Journal take on crackpot irrationalism masquerading as secular, rational and libertarian free-thinking.
There are enough serious discussions to be had, after all.
[Update:] Just after posting this I found (via Pharyngula) a link to China Miéville's recent critique of libertarianism in In These Times. Worth reading. (As is his science-fiction novel Perdido Street Station, which I read recently on vacation.)
Now, I must say that this is something I never expected: veteran left-wing singer-songwriter Billy Bragg pleasantly greeting the Queen at the re-opening of the refurbished Royal Festival Hall, a gala evening in which Beethoven's Ninth Symphony was performed with lyrics by Bragg.
I'm not sure which part of that sentence I find more unlikely: that Bragg exchanged pleasantries with the Queen or that he had freely interpreted the words of Friedrich Schiller that Beethoven had used in the fourth movement of the Ninth, better known to many as 'Ode to Joy'.
Woody Guthrie, sure...but...Friedrich Schiller? Unexpected, to say the least.
And it seems that he not only met the Queen, but found her to be quite charming.
Bragg, it seems, feels he has some explaining to do.
How could I - a life-long socialist who believes that God Save The Queen should be replaced as England's national anthem by Blake's Jerusalem - find myself shaking hands with Her Majesty?
After all, as a punk rocker during the Queen's Jubilee year back in 1977, I bought my copy of the Sex Pistols' anarchic God Save The Queen like all my mates.
Indeed, I woke up the morning after the performance to find columnists in the Mail wondering how a 'dyed-in-the-wool republican' like me could shake hands with the Queen.
His explanation is interesting and well worth reading, not least since I have no doubt that there are a lot of his fans who will find this to be some kind of heresy.
I'm not one of them, though, and actually I find his commentary on the event convincing--indeed, even moving--for reasons both political and personal.
Actually, my reasons are probably more on the personal side, which requires some background.
Bragg and I go back a ways...in the sense that even though he has no idea who I am, I have been a fan of his since my mid teens (so the mid '80s), have seen him in concert more than a dozen times and once even had the pleasure of speaking to him after a show (in Washington, DC).
When I was first learning to play guitar (way back then), I made my way though his early catalogue, and for a while I could probably do reasonably good versions of nearly all his songs. My interest has waned a bit after the Guthrie projects, but I still have followed him occasionally, and have noted with interest his new career as author and advocate of left-wing patriotism.
My relationship with the Queen, in a sense, goes back to some of my earliest memories.
My mother, you see, immigrated to America from England in 1948 to marry my father, whom she'd met during the war. (No, in my family, we didn't have to specify which war, it was just 'the war'.)
Now, in my experience, immigrants tend to go either one of two ways: they either adopt fully the culture of the society they've entered or they cling to the memory of their homeland.
My mother, somehow, managed to do both.
Though she felt enormously proud of being American (she gained citizenship before I was born), it was always England that remained her 'home'. A particular version of England of course, one consisting of one part Finest Hour nostalgia, one part monarchist devotion, one part working-class earthiness...and a healthy dollop of kitsch. As a northern Irish friend of mine put it after a visit to our family home once: there were more Union Jacks in our house than he'd seen anywhere outside of a Unionist parade.
Hers was an idiosyncratic form of national identity, perhaps, but a heartfelt one nonetheless, and she went back as often as she could.
And though, toward the end of her life, she began to lose patience for the rest of the royal pack, she continued in some way to admire Elizabeth, who was born in the same year as she. They had, in a sense, grown up together, at least via newspaper pictures, newsreels and radio broadcasts. And to some extent, I'm quite sure that my mother's identification with the Windsor matriarch had more to do with sympathies of one mother (and grandmother) to another than anything resembling political theory.
This was something we often talked about over the years, just as we spoke about the class system in which she grew up (and so resented), the sacrifices and terrors of the war (somewhat softened by time and nostalgia) and the left-wing politics her own father had tirelessly -- if good humouredly -- promoted. (He was, as she informed me once with great solemnity, 'a socialite'. It never occurred to me to correct her.)
For all these reasons, then, I find it somehow poignant when Bragg comments on her generation:
Once [the House of Lords is abolished], I don't have a problem with having a monarchy that is symbolic. After all, the Queen already plays that role, especially for the generation who lived through World War II. They do seem to revere her more than the rest of us.
So I believe that while there are still those among us whose loved ones fought and died for king and country in that conflict, then we owe them a debt of respect, not only for the sacrifices they made during the war, but for the legacy of the Welfare State, which they created and handed down to us. By respecting the Queen, we respect them.
I recognise, of course, that there is something soggy and soft and hopelessly sentimental about this, so there's no need to point that out.
I'm not, after all, trying to argue that he is necessarily right about the relative benignity of the monarchy in the grand scheme of things (though, to be honest, I think he's correct that there are more significant fights to be fought than republicanism as such...), but rather to get past the politics a bit into the personal.
My mother died earlier this year. Since it wasn't a surprise, she had had time to issue requests (well, orders really...) about what kind of music she wanted played at her funeral. Music was one of the most important things in her life.
Among her choices was Jerusalem. Now, there are different views on this song, but I have always found the combination of the music and Blake's poetry to be deeply moving. Played in a simple arrangement and without some of the bombast that sometimes accompanies it, it's a lovely, lovely song. And in some way inspirational.
Thus it didn't take me long to pick out the rendition of the song that Bragg had sung on one of his EPs to be played at her service. It actually fit in much better than you might have expected with the Vera Lynn and Bing Crosby versions of the other tunes she had requested.
In the end, apart from a few of the older bits of ceramic commemorating various coronations and jubilees, the vast collection of royalist memorabilia that my mother had accumulated over her long life went to other members of my family. Royalism's not my scene, really, and the whole idea of political sovereignty deriving from royal power (recall: it is, quite literally, still 'her majesty's government') is something that I find somehow perverse.
But, really, as long as it's not taken too seriously (and, really, for a long time, it hasn't been) then I think one would have to look elsewhere for urgent problems in British society.
Additionally, I have always found it difficult to dislike HRH herself. (This goodwill is not extended either to her husband or her children.)
And I can certainly think of a number of reasons not to begrudge Billy Bragg a nice night out with his family, his friends and...uh...his national figurehead.
As he puts it:
I could have been sniffy, I suppose, and refused to shake her hand, but she was good enough to come to my gig and follow my lyrics while they were sung. She even asked for my autograph.
Last Tuesday night was very special. I sat with my mother, my missus and my son while we listened to a great orchestra and a massive choir passionately sing my words to one of the greatest pieces of music ever written.
And afterwards, I got to shake hands with the woman who gave the World Cup to Bobby Moore. For a boy from Barking, it just doesn't get much better than that.
What can I say? The Queen charmed the pants off me.
A questionable idiom, perhaps...but a sweet sentiment.
Yesterday was the Tag der deutschen Einheit ('The Day of German Unity', or, as the Babel Fish web translator insists, 'Day of the German Unit') which once again passed us by here with relatively little fanfare.
The Germans, I have come to understand, keep the flag waving generally confined to sporting events (such as at the recent celebration of their world champion women's football team: Wir sind Weltmeisterinnen!) and many even still seem a bit uncertain about whether reunification was even a Very Good Idea in the first place.
But the discontents of German patriotism are a discussion for another time.
However, I'm pleased to see that the German army is so successfully spreading goodwill around the world, as noted in a report from Spiegel International and nicely summarised at Atlantic Review:
Ed H., a US soldier stationed in Kandahar from December 2001 onward (...): "Basically, the Germans were not allowed to do anything," he recalls. "They looked around for things to do. They were incredibly bored." (...) But then the Germans' reputation abruptly changed. A rumor spread among US troops that at least one thing was worthwhile in the German unit -- its supply of alcohol. "Beer was like a currency," says one US soldier, who stocked up on the beverages provided by the KSK troops. "To us, the German beer supplies were Big Rock Candy."
As I've previously mentioned, the (unsung) second verse of the poem that forms the basis of the national anthem might contain a certain recipe for national happiness: 'German women, German loyalty, German wine and German song, Shall retain in the world, Their old lovely ring, To inspire us to noble deeds, Our whole life long.'
Who knows, they just might.
2. Next week on 'Academic Idol'...
There was a point in this interview between David Thompson and Ophelia Benson where I thought it might be interesting to have a TV series that placed the leading lights of Theory on a desert island and posed them with real-world survival problems. At some point the discussion would turn to cannibalism as a 'textual practice' and then the fun might really begin.
David liked the postmodern propaganda party game that The Wife and I developed a few evenings ago and kindly linked to it. I ran across the interview by following the links in his post. The interview is largely concerned with addressing the relationship between the left and postmodernism, and contains a number of good points by both participants.
It seems blindingly obvious that any movement or political perspective that wants to change the world (even in minor ways) is going to have to have a firm grounding in reality (and should have no hesitation in using that term without ironic inverted commas...).
However, this doesn't seem to be at all the case for many.
There's a particularly good passage by Ophelia when it comes to academic idol worship:
But I think the academic hero-worship is a different kind of thing. But what kind of thing; that is the question. And I don't know. I think it's partly (or maybe mostly) to do with not having much (if any) real research or inquiry to do. I think the celebrity worship is in inverse proportion to the substantive heft of the discipline. 'Theory' has to be bigged up precisely because there's not much to it. But what I still have no idea about is what that has to do with the left, and I would still say pretty much nothing. In fact I would even say it's a kind of anti-left, and then I would wonder why that doesn't trouble putative leftists more than it does. Why doesn't the stink of prestige and sycophancy and mutual adulation put them off their food? Why are they happy to cite each other in print with obligatory gold-star adjectives? The brilliant Butler, the powerful Bhabha, the epochal Spivak - why don't they make themselves sick? It seems to me more than a little narcissistic and depraved, it seems stomach-turning - and it certainly drives a lot of people out of the field.
Well put.
3. Despite all our rage, are we still just rats in a cage?
Also worth your time is David Barash's article on 'redirected aggression' at the Chronicle of Higher Education (via A&L Daily). (He refers to responses to inflicted pain and suffering that involve taking them out on someone other than the person who wounded you--typically someone weaker and more vulnerable. If you spent much time on a playground as a child, you'll no doubt recognise the phenomenon.)
Redirected aggression does not simply derive from irrationality or human nastiness, but — along with retaliation and revenge — is entrenched in the very fabric of the natural world, part of a continuum involving nature's response to pain. The biology of redirected aggression goes a long way toward explaining not only its apparent senselessness but its universality as well. It shows up across the ages, as we've seen, across cultures, and across social units, from individuals to communities to nations.
It's not entirely convincing in bits (I'm sceptical that the US invasion of Iraq can be reduced to the collective pain of 9/11 in such a simple way), and it gets a but mushy at the end with regard to religion, but I think the principles it lays out are thought provoking.
It is, of course, difficult to transfer the relevance of other-animal experiments to human beings, but the findings Barash notes are certainly intriguing even just in terms of the behaviour of other animals:
Place a rat in a cage with an electrified floor and subject it to repeated shocks. Not surprisingly, the poor animal will show many signs of stress, at first flinging itself against the walls with each shock. But after a while, it just sits there apathetically, showing no inclination to escape from its painful prison. When autopsied, the animal will be found to have oversized adrenal glands and, frequently, stomach ulcers, both indicating serious stress.
Now repeat the experiment, but with a wooden stick in the cage alongside the rat. When shocked, the rat chews on the stick, and as a result, it can endure its experience much longer without burnout. Moreover, at autopsy, its adrenal glands are smaller, stomach ulcers fewer. The rat buffered itself against the stress merely by chewing on the stick, even though doing so does nothing to get it out of its predicament.
Finally, put two rats in the electrified cage. Shock them both. They snarl and fight. Do it again, and keep doing it; they keep fighting. Yet at autopsy, their adrenal glands are normal, and, moreover, even though they have experienced numerous shocks, they have no ulcers. When animals respond to stress and pain by redirecting their aggression outside themselves, whether biting a stick or, better yet, another individual, it appears that they are protecting themselves from stress. By passing their pain along, such animals minister to their own needs. Although a far cry from being ethically "good," it is definitely "natural."
4. Dulce et decorum est...
Finally, 'A Death in the Family' by Christopher Hitchens, at Vanity Fair (via here) is a remarkably personal and self-searching look at the consequences and responsibilities of writing.
Hitchens recently discovered that his writings in favour of the invasion of Iraq had been part of the inspiration for one soldier's enlistment. He found out after said soldier's death from a roadside bomb attack.
It is particularly interesting to read, as Hitchens appears to be increasingly pessimistic about the war, and -- having followed his impassioned and eloquent (though in my case ultimately unconvincing) arguments for the war -- it is striking to see him write something like the following:
As one who used to advocate strongly for the liberation of Iraq (perhaps more strongly than I knew), I have grown coarsened and sickened by the degeneration of the struggle: by the sordid news of corruption and brutality (Mark Daily told his father how dismayed he was by the failure of leadership at Abu Ghraib) and by the paltry politicians in Washington and Baghdad who squabble for precedence while lifeblood is spent and spilled by young people whose boots they are not fit to clean.
And even just the titles are sometimes fascinating. The above, for instance, is called 'Turn philosophy into a sharp weapon in the hands of the masses', a stirring message for any era. And note the philosophically inspiring mushroom cloud to the left. Oh, how it warms the heart.
Beware the anger of the legions, left too long in Iraq without enough help; of the unemployed; of the uninsured; of the million who were left without workers' comp; of those who have lost health insurance, overtime, the right to organize. Beware the anger of those whose pensions and savings are gone due to Bush pals like "Kenny Boy" Lay; beware the anger of middle class investors in mutual funds; the anger of those who see the big rich take their money offshore so they won't have to pay taxes, those who watch the corporations get special tax breaks for exporting jobs abroad; the anger of those who are shunted aside while the CEOs of their companies make over a hundred million.
You don't have to be hateful to have bad policies. You just have to be wrong.
So keep fightin' for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don't you forget to have fun doin' it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin' ass and celebratin' the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.
Another thing you get as a cancer patient is a lot of football-coach patter. "You can beat this; you can win; you're strong; you're tough; get psyched." I suspect that cancer doesn't give a rat's ass whether you have a positive mental attitude. It just sits in there multiplying away, whether you are admirably stoic or weeping and wailing. The only reason to have a positive mental attitude is that it makes life better. It doesn't cure cancer.
My friend Judy Curtis demanded totally uncritical support from everyone around her. "I smoked and drank through the whole thing," she says. "And I hated the lady from the American Cancer Society." My role model.
I've just finished reading Jack London's novel The Iron Heel. Written in 1908, the book is a dark dystopian vision of the creation of a brutal capitalist dictatorship - 'the Oligarchy' - and of the early, futile resistance to it by a dedicated band of revolutionaries. It is narrated from the point of view of an autobiography 'found' in some distant socialist utopia several centuries hence.
I'm sad to say (sad, since I do like some of London's other work) that it doesn't read very well and parts of it even reminded me of a left-wing version of Ayn Rand's fiction - which is a harsh judgement, I know - even if it is mercifully much shorter.
But it does have some redeeming qualities. The mixture of dystopia and utopia (which is hinted at in the 'footnotes' added to the main narrative) is intriguing and there are a few very harrowing and exciting passages (such as that recounting the doomed 'Chicago Commune').
I can't, in the end, improve on what Orwell said about it in 1940, in his essay 'Prophecies of Fascism', in which he compared it to H.G. Wells's The Sleeper Wakes (reprinted in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, vol. 2, pp. 45-49):
As a book, The Iron Heel is hugely inferior. It is clumsily written, it shows no grasp of scientific possibilites, and the hero is the kind of human gramophone who is now disappering even from Socialist tracts. But because of his own streak of savagery London could grasp something that Wells apparently could not, and that is that hedonistic societies do not endure.
In this essay (which is what originally inspired me to read the book), Orwell denies what seems to have been a common opinion of his time, that The Iron Heel was an accurate forecast of fascism. He does, however, credit London with having insight into the difficulties of promoting a transition to socialism (something that Orwell - like London - advocated) and also into the psychology of fascism.
In an intellectual way London accepted the conclusions of Marxism, and he imagined that the 'contradictions' of capitalism, the unconsumable surplus and so forth, would persist even after the capitalist class had organized themselves into a single corporate body.
(Incidentally: that London 'accepted the conclusions of Marxism' is something I definitely do not recall learning when we read 'Call of the Wild' back in high school...)
But temperamentally he was very different from the majority of Marxists. With his love of violence and physical strength, his belief in 'natural aristocracy', his animal-worship and exaltation of the primitive, he had in him what one might fairly call a Fascist strain. This probably helped him to understand just how the possessing class would behave once they were seriously menaced.
In any case, the book's 'footnotes' (added by an 'editor' writing from a post-Oligarchy socialist future) are full of references to real people, events and texts from London's time. My favourite has to be the following one, about a city which is very close to my heart:
Chicago was the industrial inferno of the nineteenth century A.D. A curious anecdote has come down to us of John Burns, a great English labor leader and one time member of the British Cabinet. In Chicago, while on a visit to the United States, he was asked by a newspaper reporter for his opinion of that city. 'Chicago,' he answered, 'is a pocket edition of hell.' Some time later, as he was going aboard his steamer to sail to England, he was approached by another reporter, who wanted to know if he had changed his opinion of Chicago. 'Yes I have,' was his reply 'My present opinion is that hell is a pocket edition of Chicago.' (The Iron Heel, Penguin, 2006 [1908], 221)
(If anyone can confirm the original source for this quote, I'd be grateful: the only thing I can find online is a reference to Ashley Montagu referring to it sometime later.)
It seems that at least some parts of the left are beginning to reconsider at least a few of the more wacky bits about their faith (and that seems a good term for it) in multiculturalism.
All I can say is: it's about bloody time.
Not that I'm claiming any particular powers of prescience...however, the following is an extract from an essay of mine written during that dimly remembered summer of 2001:
"Multiculturalism" is now a familiar narrative in all western post-industrial nations facing increased migration and globalisation. The term has many uses, but a popular and superficial version of multiculturalism argues both that it is "respectful" of other cultures and that it is "inclusive". In fact it diminishes other cultures by choosing what is emblematic of them -- alternatively celebrating or condemning isolated elements -- while at the same time failing to provide real assistance for people in actually living together. The events in Bradford, among other examples, raise serious questions about the worth of a vague and conflicted notion of multiculturalism that has been applied like a Band-Aid across the real social wounds which have been opened up by the frictions of cultural confrontation.
