Useful distinctions

In the course of writing the conclusion for my current project on Christian intellectuals in Britain in the 1930s and 1940s, I've run across a couple of useful and interesting texts.

One is Duncan Bell's extraordinarily enlightening and relatively recent article "What is Liberalism?", which appeared a few years ago in Political Theory. (The published version is here; a free download of a final draft for those without institutional library access is here.)

The short answer is, of course, "it's complicated". The longer answer is...well, you'll have to read it, as I don't have time to go into it.

However, briefly, it points to the remarkable historical variability of that term, but it also identifies a key shift in the mid-20th century, when "liberalism" came to be defined as the opposite of "totalitarianism". This gave it a broad definition and a (questionably) long and clear political pedigree (John Locke, you might be surprised to find, was only fully recognised as a liberal in the 20th century). And, of course, via the Cold War it became linked it to all sorts of questionable power politics.

Anyway, it's an excellent read -- if political theory were always this clearly written and jargon-free, I'd read a lot more of it -- and very enlightening for anyone interested in the history of this much-used, often-mythologised, and sometimes unfairly maligned term.

But, spoiler alert: you won't find a single, all-purpose definition to throw around at your next cocktail party. Sorry, them's the breaks. 

In further researching some things I found in Bell's article, I ran across Ernest Gellner's review of a book on the other term in that pair noted above: "totalitarianism". (Both "liberalism" and "totalitarianism" were commonly used terms in the group I've been researching, but both were used in a particular way that both shared in and departed from their broader usage. Hence my interest.)

Anyway, Gellner raises the question of whether "totalitarianism" and "civil society" are useful terms. He thinks that they are.

The two significant notions that have emerged from the cold war are totalitarianism and civil society. The first appeared quite early, the second arose from within the Communist world during the decades which preceded its collapse, and remains the best name for what its dissidents desired. The contrast between a society based on a serious monopoly of truth, incarnated in an all-embracing theory enforced by a single-power economy and ideology hierarchy and a pluralist society in which the state is concerned with the maintenance of order and the shared infrastructure, but with neither the details of the economy nor with the establishment of Righteousness on Earth, is supremely important. Civil society privatizes virtue, salvation and truth. (Ernest Gellner, "Coming to Terms", review of Totalitarianism: The Inner History of the Cold War by Abbott Gleason, The New Republic, 4 December 1995, 42-45, on p. 44)  

 Which also, to me, marks some useful distinctions.

What forces me to be on the Left?

Eric Rohmer on his political allegiances:

I don't know if I am on the Right, but in any case, one thing is certain: I'm not on the Left. Yes, why would I be on the Left? For what reason? What forces me to be on the Left? I'm free, it seems to me! But people aren't. Today, first you have to pronounce your act of faith in the Left, after which everything is permitted. So far as I know, the Left has no monopoly on truth and justice. I too am for peace, freedom, the eradication of poverty, respect for minorities - who isn't? But I don't call that being on the Left. Being on the Left means endorsing the politics of certain people, parties, or regimes that say they're on the Left and don't hesitate to practice, when it serves them, dictatorship, lying, violence, favoritism, oscurantism, terrorism, militarism, bellicism, racism, colonialism, genocide.

Why did I have to think of Labour under Corbyn when coming across this statement in Antoine de Baecque and Noel Herpe's biography of Eric Rohmer (Columbia UP 2014)?

UPDATE: And, as happens quite often, Harald Martenstein's thoughts go in the same direction:

Ergänzend muss ich anmerken, dass ich es für legitim halte, wenn es eine konservative, also rechte Partei gibt, ich denke selbst in mancher Hinsicht konservativ. Wer behauptet, "rechts" bedeute das Gleiche wie "Nazi", beweist damit Unbildung. Adenauer und Churchill waren rechts, Pol Pot und Stalin waren links. Noch Fragen? Allerdings muss ich gestehen, dass ich für Antisemitismus, Rassismus und dergleichen nie viel übrig hatte. 

"With peculiar severity"

Spotted in an issue of The Christian World from 1938:

“There was an ugly scene in the House of Commons on Monday when a Conservative member ‘was understood to say’ to a Labour member, ‘Go back to Poland’—and the insulted gentleman very regrettably, but not unnaturally, retorted with a blow. His action was particularly unfortunate in that it may have slightly lessened the resentment felt by the House against the original aggressor. Whether in Parliament or out of it, British public opinion will always express itself, we hope, with peculiar severity in respect of insinuations made against public men on grounds, real or imaginary, of race or religion. This is an un-English practice, and all decent Englishmen should be determined to keep our public life free of it.” 

"Not English" (leading article), The Christian World, 7 April 1938, 10. Emphasis added.

What do they know of breathing who only breathing know?

While going through issues of The Christian News-Letter from 1945, I ran across a positive review of Arthur Koestler's The Yogi and the Commissar. It quoted, rather inexactly, parts of the following passage, which I found elsewhere.

And which is quite striking.

The tragedy is that only those realize what oxygen means who have known the torture of suffocation; only those who have shared the life of the ordinary native in Nazi Germany or Stalinite Russia for at least a year know that disintegration of the human substance which befalls people deprived of their basic liberties. But how many of us are capable of drawing comparisons?

The English dock yard worker has not experienced the difference between risking, for the same negligence, a cut in pay or death as a saboteur. The English journalist does not know the difference between a limited freedom of expression and the status of a human teleprinter. The English highbrow, fed up with a statesman's cigar or a general's photo-mania, has no idea the abject idiocy of regimented Byzantine leader worship.

The English public, disgruntled but secure within the law, does not know the shivering insecurity, the naked horror of an autocratic police-state. They only know their own frustrations. The atmosphere of democracy has become a stale fog, and those who breathe it cannot be expected to be grateful for the air which it contains. The predicament of western civilization is that it use ceased to be aware of the values which it is in peril of losing. 

Arthur Koestler, "The End of an Illusion" 1944. Collected in The Yogi and the Commissar. (210)

"A precipice before which democracy stands"

Something I ran across today during project-relevant research that--given recent events--seemed somehow relevant:

“We must be determined to adapt the genuine principles of democracy to mass society, instead of regarding certain democratic devices as sacrosanct in themselves. If we consider the plebiscitary element in democracy, we are justified in saying, after the experiences of the last epoch, that of all democratic institutions, it has made the largest contribution to the destruction of the system. The plebiscitary principle drives people towards what we have described as crowd psychology.

This crowd psychology is one of the chief evils to be feared, a precipice before which democracy stands. The mobilization of the entire populace to hold a plebiscite in circumstances which are more characteristic of a farce than of a turning-point in the national destiny, is one of these democratic customs which are apt to become meaningless, once the social background and the social techniques have changed.

The referendum was only reasonable when it applied to the citizens of a small community. Now since it appears in the guise first given it by Napoleon III, that of a managed display of mass emotion, it no longer has an honest part to play in democratic society.  …

The purpose of democracy is not to play on the emotions of the masses, but to prevent the vacillating reactions of popular feeling from frustrating the rational and considered opinions of the nation. … It will then be obvious that the function of the plebiscite in the context of a mass society has been completely reversed. For it no longer interprets the general will as the expression of the considered intentions of the citizens, but is rather the result of skilful agitation and a powerful propaganda machine.” 

Karl Mannheim, Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction (London, 1940), pp. 356-57 (paragraph breaks added).

Fog in Channel, Continent cut off

There are some interesting figures from a new poll on attitudes to the European Union in four different countries (Germany, France, Poland and UK).

The survey of more than 2,000 people in the UK and over 1,000 in each of Germany, France and Poland, shows a clear parting of the ways. Just 26% of Britons think the EU is, overall, a "good thing" compared with 62% of Poles, 55% of Germans and 36% of French.

Accompanying this anti-EU feeling is an ingrained cultural resistance to the European ideal and the very idea of being European. Just 14% of UK people polled say they regard themselves as European, compared with 48% of Poles, 39% of Germans and 34% of French. Whereas most people in Germany, France and Poland name a fellow European country as their closest ally, the British name fellow English-speaking nations: 33% named the US, 31% Australia and 23% Canada.

Equally striking, in the context of Cameron's attempts to negotiate a new deal for the UK, attitudes to British membership are pretty negative among our partners, who will have to sign off on any future special terms of membership we may want to agree. When asked whether the UK is a positive force in the EU, just 9% of Germans, 15% of French and 33% of Poles say it is. Opposition to giving the UK special membership terms is strongest in Germany, where 44% are against and 16% in favour, with 26% of the French in favour and 36% against. In Poland there is more support, with 38% in favour and 23% against.

While the article in which these number are offered emphasises the apparently growing 'gulf' between the attitudes of Britons and those of their continental neighbours, arguably the most surprising result is the low level of French support for the EU and self-identification as 'European'.

The French also seem more positively disposed toward the British (at least with regard to questions related to the EU) than the Germans are. 

I wouldn't have expected that.

Shopping and praying

An interesting historical comparison at Blood & Treasure regarding the current unrest in Turkey:

Historically, the whole thing has a 19^th century French feel to it, in the sense of government dominated by a pious, provincial bourgeoisie wanting to tame the big city antinomians. But reading about this stuff it’s amazing how well a certain type of – in this case – Islamic piety dovetails with neoliberal concepts of modernization. Maybe that shouldn’t be so surprising when you look at places like Dubai, but it’s remarkable how exact the comparisons are. The same basic suspicion of ‘urbanity’ in the widest sense of the word, the dislike for forms of life, commerce and culture perceived to be messy or low prestige, the way in which a form of commercial standardization seems to complement or substitute for a repressive moral code and the way in which the only unthreatening secular activity that the economic, political and in this case religious establishment can imagine is shopping.

I am in no way competent to address the complicated political situation in Turkey (the list of various grievances cited in the above-linked post is pretty illuminating), but this makes it seem like something more immediately graspable.

The psephological calculus

The US presidential election now seems like ages ago, but this Guardian interview is a good reminder of why analysts like Nate Silver are important.

Political commentary could use a lot more cool-headed analysis and less tendentious windbaggery.

Or, as Silver puts it:

"Numbers aren't perfect, but for me, it's numbers with all their imperfections versus bullshit. You had people saying, 'You can't quantify people's feelings through numbers!' But what's the alternative? Me sitting at my Georgetown cocktail party saying that I know how people in Toledo, Ohio, are going to vote better than the actual people of Toledo, Ohio, who answered a survey? It's incredibly presumptuous. And truth is an absolute defence. So if they got it right it would be one thing, but they didn't. They're consistently quite wrong."

Quite remarkably, reading this interview makes me want to take a statistics class.

See no evil?

The German President, Christian Wulff announced today that he would resign, in the wake of accusations that he has, over the years, gotten just a little bit too much help from his friends.

This is not a surprise.

I'm wondering, though, whether this was really the best picture the Guardian could find to accompany its story:

Perhaps it was a wry commentary on the blindness of the powerful?

Nah.

Anyway, it would all be very exciting...if the scandal itself were not so boring: even the name for the alleged wrong, 'Vorteilsannahme im Amt' sort of puts you to sleep.

I bet Silvio Berlusconi is laughing his ass off...

Glengarry Get Lost

Reading a New York Times article on Christopher Hitchens's book criticism led me to something I'd missed over the summer: Hitch's review of David Mamet's The Secret Knowledge.

I haven't read Mamet's description of (or explanation for) his abandonment of left-liberalism for new-fangled right-wingery, and I don't think I will be.

It struck me that his book sounds very much like an expanded version of his 2008 Village Voice essay, "Why I Am No Longer a 'Brain-Dead Liberal'".

And that, though much shorter, was more than enough of a chore to read.

As I noted at the time (rather testily, I will admit).

It seems that, these days, Mamet's someone best ignored.

Random association re: G8

I couldn't help myself. Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy are in Deauville.

Together. Again.

This calls for an appropriate soundtrack.



But what will Carla say?

That's the Chicago way

Ah, I've just run across a reminder of the dulcet tones that characterise my native* city's political culture, which I have to say that I've gotten rather out of touch with.

From a recent debate in Chicago's mayoral election:

[Carol] Moseley Braun, who had hoped she would win over most of the city's African-American vote, was angered by a comment by one of the marginal contestants, the community activist Patricia Van Pelt-Watkins, who said she had not heard much from Moseley Braun in the past seven years.

Moseley Braun responded in the no-holds-barred way for which the city is notorious: "Patricia, just because you didn't know who I was for the last seven years is because you were on crack." Van Pelt-Watkins has been drug-free for at least two decades.

Sweet home Chicago.

*OK, so I grew up in the suburbs, but I took my first breaths in Cook County and always identified with the broader term 'Chicagoland'.

Is there a Muslim sisterhood, too?

In The Guardian today, popular Lacanian Slavoj Z. contemplates on the "miracle of Tahrir Square." To explain the revolutionary rupture that in his view accompanies the collapse of Mubarak's regime, he makes a troubling comparison:

In Shah of Shahs, a classic account of the Khomeini revolution, Ryszard Kapuscincki located the precise moment of this rupture: at a Tehran crossroads, a single demonstrator refused to budge when a policeman shouted at him to move, and the embarrassed policeman withdrew; within hours, all Tehran knew about this incident, and although street fights went on for weeks, everyone somehow knew the game was over.

I, too have been thinking a lot about "the Khomeini revolution" these past weeks, though I guess in a somewhat more defeatist way. Slavoj ends his piece by warning against the dangers of realpolitik, apparently choosing to forget how often in human history revolutionary enthusiasm has ended in slaughter. I kind of like realpolitik, especially if it is of the calm, pluralistic way of enlightened democracies. I'm an old-fashioned girl, as you know.

How long, I wonder, until the veil will become mandatory for Egyptian women, how long until women who refuse to obey it will be stuck in a bag and machine-gunned?

What's Greek for 'ruthless monomaniac'?

Whatever other problems our Greek friends are having with their economy, it seems -- but this is based only on initial indications -- they're cornering the market on parcel bombs.

(Although there is suddenly some stiff competition on that front, with better technology and a more ambitious distribution strategy.)

I fear we're going to be subjected to reading and hearing more than any reasonable person should possibly need to about the politics of Greek 'anarchism' in the coming days; in particular, (if suspicions are confirmed) this may involve an obscure sect with a bizarre absurdly pompous name that seems to think that trying to blow up politicians and diplomats from not only France and Germany but also Bulgaria, Switzerland, Chile and Mexico is a coherent response to to Greece's economic crisis.

I'll be intrigued (read: exasperated) to hear that explanation.

Somehow, I suspect it'll sound a bit familiar and its authors will somehow resemble those other, more famous urban hipsters of the apocalypse, the RAF. About whom our perceptive friend made some perceptive comments:

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.

It might turn out rather differently, of course. We'll see. I just hope nobody else gets hurt along the way.

It is seriously foolish to take the foolish seriously

It depresses me that I, along with much of the rest of the world, have had to bother with the mad rantings of a deranged pastor of a tiny congregation.

The situation is not a good one.

As things stand, a substantial collection of what are supposed to be the most powerful people in the world, from President Smartest Guy in the Room, through the country’s most senior soldier, the secretary of Defence and the head of the State Department have felt the need to cajole and plead with an individual with all the credibility of the protein man who used to parade up and down Oxford Street denouncing peanuts.

Pastor Jones is far from the only one of his ilk, and he's offered the rest of them an ideal model to follow.

I suspect we'll be hearing a lot more of this kind of thing.

Who reads the readers?

There are, off the top of my head, several hundred things I'd rather do than read Tony Blair's memoir.

This isn't out of any particular dislike for the man; indeed, I find it difficult generating any significant emotion toward him one way or another, at least one strong enough to make me want to wade through more than 600 pages of political prose and...yes, sex scenes.

But I've found it can be very enjoyable to read people who have been reading him, such as this post and ensuing discussion at Blood & Treasure.

In particular, I like the suggestion that the book may reveal Blair's 'hidden shallows'.

(Un)just desserts?

A front-page commentary from the current issue of Die Zeit refers to Joseph de Maistre's famous comment that 'every nation gets the government it deserves'.

This would be a rather cruel observation about Germany at the moment, where word has been making the rounds that the Conservative-Liberal coalition in power since late last year is doomed; however, the paper notes with some satisfaction, there is another side to this coin: 'every nation also has the national football team that it deserves'.

This, naturally, would go down rather better here, as -- despite having to settle for third place -- the German team played some surprisingly inspiring football.

Of course, this would be less pleasant, if true, for, say, England and France.

But I'm wondering whether this whole connection between national character and style of play actually holds up.

Just consider the top three teams -- Spain, the Netherlands and Germany -- who played, respectively, with almost inhuman efficiency, brutal thuggishness(*) and exuberant joie de vivre.

None of these, it seems to me, corresponds very well at all with their respective national stereotypes. (Certainly not with regard to Germany, where, say, a relaxed, graceful and easy-going Lebensfreude -- while not unheard of -- is not exactly overabundant. We have our virtues: this is not one of them.)

Which, to turn this back to Die Zeit's politics-football comparison, is, perhaps, comforting: maybe, after all, we don't deserve the government we have.

Nor, one might say at the moment, the trains we have.

But that is another issue altogether.


(*I'm referring here to the final: How does one sing 'everybody was kung-fu fighting' in Dutch?)

Pause for thought

Things have been rather quiet here recently, which we can only explain by the fact of having too much writing to do in the real world (i.e., in the jobs that pay us). And we'll be off the next week to darkest Belgium for a big social history conference, so things might remain a bit silent here for a while.

Still, given the events of recent days, we would like to express our sympathies to our Polish neighbours regarding the loss not only of their president but also a substantial number of their political, military and cultural elite.

I must confess to never being a fan of Lech Kaczynski--to say the least--but I would have much rather seen him voted out of office this year than killed in a symbolically significant accident like this plane crash near the site of one of the 20th century's most notable crimes.

The obliteration of so many prominent people from the Polish leadership is not only a difficult burden to bear but also a reminder of the power of contingency over the lives of even the most powerful.

Thus, to the extent that our small voice means anything, we would join Chancellor Merkel in offering sincere condolences to the Polish people.

Raising more questions than answers. Not that that's a bad thing at all.

There have been a couple of interesting (and brief) posts in recent days at Crooked Timber.

On America:

But there are clear senses in which it is not right that the U.S. is a center-right nation. For example, it’s at least odd to have a center-right nation that lacks a center-right. There aren’t that many Olympia Snowes around – not even Olympia Snowe herself, during this whole health care business. It’s not as though America is the country where, when you elect a guy like Obama, you have to beat the center-right off with a stick, compromise-wise, when the center-left is plainly crying out to meet somewhere in the middle.

On Europe:

Almost every state of any significance in history has aspired to dominate its known world. In the last century, Britain, Germany, Russia and even France aspired to this role, and right now Russia and China are keen to try. Religiosity, militarism, inequality, and governments that do little for their subjects are the norm rather than the exception. Long hours of hard work have been the lot of humankind at least since the arrival of agriculture.

The real exception to all of this is Europe. The largest economic aggregate in world history, it has enough military power to repel any invader, but is deeply uninterested in using this power to any more glorious end. It grows by a process of reluctant accretion, controlled by ever more onerous admission requirements. In all of history, it would be hard to find anything comparable in terms of pacifism, godlessness, equality, leisure for the masses or public provision of services.

... It’s for these reasons that American views of Europe resemble de Tocqueville in reverse. Something so unprecedented, and against the laws of nature, they think, cannot possibly survive, let alone prosper. And yet it does.

[Footnote references removed.]

I find both of these comments to be on target.

But a comprehensive explanation for either phenomenon eludes me.

But they're both worth thinking about.

Our week in Conservatism: From the age of Supermac to the era of...Dave and Boris

Our research trip to London last week happened to coincide with the Conservative Party conference in Manchester.

From what I can tell, it seems that David Cameron's Tories are indeed making progress in their main electoral strategy, i.e., hanging around long enough for voters to get sick of Labour while pretending that they've truly and genuinely changed and now really do care about poor people and, actually, quite like foreigners.

Whatever. The bits I saw left me underwhelmed, but, you know, I suppose I'm not really their target audience.

Anyway, coincidentally, while looking up information on a murder trial in 1959, I ran across a series of deeply creepy and Orwellian very charming newspaper adverts for Harold Macmillan's Conservative Party.

The worst best of them was the following (click image for a larger version):

(From: The News of the World, 30 August 1959, p. 7)

To avoid any misunderstanding: I've posted this out of purely historical interest and not as an endorsement of any kind.

In case you were wondering.

Quite incidentally: probably the most entertaining -- though not the most sane -- moments of the conference that I caught on television were offered right at its beginning by London mayor Boris Johnson.

Since the hotel where we were residing offers its guests free copies of the Daily Rage, I was able to read the following delightful paragraph over breakfast:

Boris was, according to a contemporary, an unmissable figure around Oxford, 'the silverback gorilla, the alpha male', who Cameron, as a socially gauche backroom boy with undeclared political ambitions, must have looked up to in awe.

Boris was also involved with the most beautiful girl at Oxford of the era, Allegra Mostyn-Owen, which increased his celebrity.

It was at about that point that said breakfast (full English, of course) nearly ended up all over our table.