Thursday, June 14, 2018

180614 Readings & Comments



1. I suspect that the number of mocking parodies of the Trump movie trailer tailor-made for Kim Jun Un. But if you haven't watched it, do. Here's a considered take on it.





David Brooks

2. Dave Brooks captures the essence of what Trump & other authoritarians (listed) are up to and their effect. Take away quote (and I like wolves on the whole more than those humans who channel their ferocious instincts): 


Those who lost faith in this order began to elect wolves in order to destroy it. The wolves — whether Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orban, Rodrigo Duterte, Recep Tayyip Erdogan or any of the others — don’t so much have shared ideology as a shared mentality.
It begins with 1, some monumental sense of historic betrayal. This leads to 2, a general outlook that says the world is a nasty place, and 3, a scarcity mind-set that says politics is a zero-sum game in which groups must viciously scramble to survive. This causes 4, a pervasive sense of distrust and suspicion, and 5, the rupture of any relationship built on friendship or affection, and finally 6, the loss of any sense that there is such a thing as the common good.
Wolves perceive the world as a war of all against all and seek to create the world in which wolves thrive, which is a world without agreed-upon rules, without restraining institutions, norms and etiquette.
. . . . 
[T]he core divide in our politics is no longer the conventional left-right divide. The core issue in our politics is over how we establish relationship. You can either organize relationship at a high level — based on friendship, shared values, loyalty and affection — or you can organize relationship at a low level, based on mutual selfish interest and a brutal, ends-justify-the-means mentality.



Frank Bruni

3. Sound advice from Frank Bruni: don't vent your anger or try to get even. Get ahead. Take only constructive steps. Don't make your opponent's MO yours. Rise above, don't fall down to that level. Bring together, don't further the divide. 







Tuesday, June 12, 2018

180612 Readings, Viewings, and Comments

Stephen Greenleaf
The distinction between the two types of politics is one that I haven't heard made before, but this dichotomy has great value. In the end, politics is always about change and choice. Politics can't ever really be about "eternity " (timelessness) or inevitability--that 'economic laws or "History" will determine our future and resolve our problems. But my, such beliefs are popular.
YOUTUBE.COM
History is not just what happens in time, it is how we think about time. The present moment seems…



Stephen Greenleaf
12 mins
My last two posts about Romania meld in this article and the accompanying video. About 20K Romanians gathered here in Bucharest to honor Halep.
However, the mayor of Bucharest showed up, and as you can hear, roundly booed. (I think this embarrassed Halep, but fans do have concerns beyond sports.) Afterward, the mayor "blamed 'Soros’s propaganda machine' for compromising the event by infiltrating teams of 'venomous citizens', well organized and strategically placed among decent people." This statement reinforces my sense that the ruling Social Democrat Party is beginning to track the line of other authoritarian movements in Eastern Europe. In fact, the reference to Soros is right out of the playbook of Hungarian prime minister Victor Orban. Soros is a wealthy Hungarian financier and philanthropist and a strong proponent of democracy and classical liberalism (think Karl Popper). And, oh yes, it just happens that he's Jewish. Hmm, what a coincidence. #sarcasm.
Halep's victory was a great moment to share, but the victory of the rule of law, democracy, and constitutional government over corruption, authoritarianism, and anti-Semitism is an even greater contest and one that, if one & preserved, is a win for the entire nation. So, yes, hurray for Halep, and boo to anti-Semitism.
ROMANIA-INSIDER.COM
Some 20,000 Romanians went to Bucharest’s National Arena on Monday evening to cheer tennis star Simona Halep, who won her first Roland Garros title on Saturday.

Monday, June 11, 2018

180611 Readings & Comments


George Orwell
When you have Masha Gessen quoting and discussing George Orwell and Hannah Arendt, you can be sure of receiving some keen and sobering insights. And so it is in this article in which Gessen examines Orwell's conjectures about literature in totalitarian regimes. In the U.S., we don't have a totalitarian regime, but the attack on facts, on truth, is increasing and it begins with the current occupant of the White House. Read this and be forewarned. 

Orwell was right. The totalitarian regime rests on lies because they are lies. The subject of the totalitarian regime must accept them not as truth—must not, in fact, believe them—but accept them both as lies and as the only available reality. She must believe nothing. Just as Orwell predicted, over time the totalitarian regime destroys the very concept, the very possibility of truth. Hannah Arendt identified this as one of the effects of totalitarian propaganda: it makes everything conceivable because “nothing is true.”

Paul Scofield as Thomas More

And here is an excellent complementary article by Michael Shermer writing in Quillette about free speech (which is not exactly the same as our rights under the First Amendment, but that's for another occasion).  The article is a defense of free speech. Note that free speech isn't "free" in the sense of without cost--not at all! Allowing free expression of beliefs and opinions and statements of supposed facts means that error--the un-truth--whether intentional or the result of mere fallibility, will abound. We pay the price for free speech, and the only justification is that the suppression of free speech costs more than its allowance. Shermer argues the point well. And to close, this quote that Shermer includes from Robert Bolt's play about (St.) Thomas More, "A Man for All Seasons." It's a piece that I first encountered as an undergraduate assignment. This particular quote struck me even before I became a lawyer. It's something every lawyer ought to have at hand when someone complains about someone getting off because of "legal technicalities," the Ropers of our current age. Shermer writes:


In the play, a dialogue unfolds over the changing of the law between More and his future son-in-law Roper, who urges him to arrest a man whose testimony could condemn More to death, even though no laws were broken. “And go he should, if he were the Devil himself, until he broke the law!” More entices.
Roper: So now you’d give the Devil benefit of law!
More: Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
Roper: I’d cut down every law in England to do that.
More: Oh? And when the law was down, and the Devil turned round on you—where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws from coast to coast…and if you cut them down…do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake.
A great insight. 

Friday, June 8, 2018

180608 Readings and Comments

Some quotes for thought:

When Nietzsche's Zarathustra told the crowd about the last man, a clamor arose: "Give us this last man, O Zarathustra!" "turn us into these last men!" they shouted. The life of the last man is physical security and material plenty, precisely what Western politicians are fond of promising their electorates. Is this really what the human story has been "all about' these past few millennia? Should we fear that we will be both happy and satisfied with our situation, no longer human beings but animals of the genus homo sapiens? Or is the danger that we will be happy on one level, but still dis-satisfied with ourselves on another, and hence ready to drag the world back into history with all its wars, injustices, and revolution? 
. . . . 
[W]e can readily accept many of Nietzsche's acute psychological observations, even as we reject his morality. The way in which the desire for justice and punishment is all-too frequently anchored in the resentment of the weak against the strong, the potentially debilitating spiritual effects of compassion and equality, the fact that certain individuals deliberately do not seek comfort and security and are not satisfied with happiness as understood by the Anglo-Saxon utilitarian tradition, the way in which struggles and risk are constituent parts of the human soul, the relationship between the desire to be greater than others and the possibility of personal excellence and self-overcoming--all of these insights may be considered accurate reflections of the human condition, which we can accept without our having to break with the Christian-liberal traditions in which we live.

. . . .

But supposing that the world has become "filled up," so to speak, with liberal democracies, such that there exists no tyranny and oppression worthy of the name against which to struggle? Experience suggests that if men cannot struggles on behalf of a just cause because that just cause was victorious in an earlier generation, then they will struggle against the just cause. They will struggle for the sake of struggle. They will struggle, in other words, out of a certain boredom: they cannot imagine living in a world without struggles. And if the greater part of the world in which they live is characterized by peaceful and prosperous liberal democracy, then they will struggle against that peace and properity, and against democracy.  

All of the above was published over a quarter of a century ago. Is it still pertinent? Does it shed any insight on our current world? 

From a different work, another quote to ponder:

Secrecy is the original sin. Fig leaf in the Garden of Eden. The basic crime against love . . . The purpose of life is to receive, synthesize and transmit energy. Communication fusion is the goal of life. Any star can tell you that. Communication is love. Secrecy, withholding the signal, hoarding, hiding, covering up the light is motivated by shame and fear. As so often happens, the right wing is half right for the wrong reasons. They say primly: if you have done nothing wrong, you have no fear of being bugged. Exactly. But the logic goes both ways. Then FBI files, CIA dossiers, White House conversations should be open to all. Let everything hang open. Let government be totally visible. The last, the very last people to hide their actions should be the police and the government.
Good idea or bad? Feasible or no?

BTW, in a couple of days or so I'll provide attributions for the quotes. I sometimes think that we tend to judge a quote by the attribution (I know I do). Let's think first, attribute later, although if anyone thinks they recognize a source, please do so. You'll earn bonus points (towards what, I don't know).

Wednesday, June 6, 2018

180606 Readings & Comments

Just a couple of items today:


1. "Fascism is Back. Blame the Internet" by Timothy Snyder, WaPo 180521. Snyder is a go-to guy about the threat of authoritarianism. As a historian of 20th century Eastern Europe, you get plenty of opportunities to explore the subject of authoritarianism and tyranny on both the right and the left. Snyder adroitly applies his insights to contemporary America. I should note that the internet might be our downfall or our savior, but more on that some other time (in fact, it may be a race).



2. "On Sovereignty" by Jordan Greenhall. Medium 180219. This isn't about Hobbes or the International Criminal Court or the nation-state, it's about you and me. Greenhall is a fascinating young thinker, and he's building a case for changing (nay, saving) the world along with some other folks that are worth knowing about. This is one building-block in this project. Spoiler alert: it starts with addressing our own shortcomings first.



Tuesday, June 5, 2018

180605 Readings & Comments

Today I'm initiating an experiment. I'm going to share some readings (shorter) that I find worth commenting upon. Somewhat like Tyler Cowen does at Marginal Revolution, and a bit like Robert Wright's Mindful Resistance Newsletter and WTFJustHappenedToday, only with more comment. (And not in the least to presume that I'll replace or even compete with any of those sites.) I'll mostly cover current legal and political news (plenty of that even today) and foreign affairs, but also anything else that catches my fancy that I read or listen to (lots of podcasts are excellent sources of information). You know, basketball, meditation, sex (Hah! Just trolling!).  Anyway, here goes.

1. "Intellectuals, Politics and Bad Faithby Paul Krugman, NYT 180604. I usually agree with Krugman, but I'm not convinced of his argument here. Nor do I buy Niall Ferguson's assertion that "the campus left the “biggest threat to free speech in Donald Trump’s America." Sorry, Professor Ferguson, you can't take that away from #45--he's by far the greatest threat. But that being said, the campus left, so-called "social justice warriors," are a matter of concern. Authoritarianism on the left and on the right poses a threat. I used to pooh-pooh claims of alarm about leftists on campus, but a bit of investigation has led me to worry more, especially in these polarized times. Few people make a distinction between "free speech" and First Amendment rights (which limit only government regulation of "expression) and social coercion. And given the fact that we have a right to avoid and even boycott those with whom we vehemently disagree and to suggest that others join us in doing so, I don't support any claim of right that someone else can censor my right to any information I want to receive by preventing a speaker from speaking (and implicitly my ability to hear and experience this person). Ferguson's alarm and then Krugman's counter-alarm were set off by actions against Charles Murray, a social scientist and author of--as Krugman describes it--a "much-debunked book" about race and IQ. That book is quite old, I believe, and Murray, I think, has published much else since then. In short, if Murray needs further "de-bunking," that should occur by debate and evidence, not student protests. I have no opinion on the validity of Murray's works or arguments. I have only a passing acquaintance.  But if I should disagree with him--even strongly so--that doesn't give me the right to gag him. 

2. Trump and His Lawyers Embrace a Vision of VastExecutive Power  by Charlie Savage, NYT, 180604. Is anyone else alarmed that a president claims that he could pardon himself? I can't cite any chapter and verse off the top of my head, but isn't it fundamental that one can't be a judge of one's own case--assuming you're making a pretext of following the rule of law. This is an essential, deep-seated, beyond-question conflict-of-interest. Yes, kings and tyrants do it, but American presidents? The Founders must be rolling over in their graves--or they're screaming, "We told you so!"  And I must say that #45 makes Nixon seem like a royal piker for arguing so modestly for regal prerogatives. 

3. The Flaw in Trump's Obstruction-of-Justice Defense by Benjamin Wittes, The Atlantic, 180604. Wittes is a fellow lawyer and go-to guy on issues of #45's legal antics and arguments (and he writes for the Lawfare blog). Anyway, he cools the jets on obstruction of justice issues. He doesn't address a royal pardon of the royal person. 

4. On the topic of tyrants and scoundrels, but not our current batch necessarily, Peter Turchin, an evolutionary biologist and originator of Cliodynamics, the study of historical trends, offers this piece in his blog. Entitled "The New Machiavelli," Turchin critiques rational choice theory (from its heyday) as promoted by Bruce Bueno de Mosquita and Alastair Smith in a recent book that applies the theory tout court to national political rulers. In brief, Turchin rejects outright a theory of power based only on self-regarding behavior. Turchin, the biologist and historian, notes the reality of altruistic leadership as well. These traits lie on a spectrum, not on an either/or switch. In fact, I would add the Machiavelli realized this. I believe its a mistake to consider Machiavelli only from the viewpoint of "The Prince." To understand Machiavelli and his values, one must also explore his republican side. And much of what is attributed to The Prince is a caricature of Machiavelli's beliefs and values. 



Monday, June 4, 2018

The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics by Mark Lilla

Published in 2001, new 2016 afterword
I'm going to do what a good reviewer probably shouldn't do, but life is short and sometimes its good to cut to the nub. Below you'll find the concluding paragraphs of this book by Mark Lilla, and if you read nothing else beyond these paragraphs, you'll have gained a significant value from the book--or at least I did. The topic of the book, generally speaking, is about political thinking by intellectuals in the 20th century, and more specifically, those who in the author's opinion (and mine), took a wrong term. But without further palaver, Lilla's concluding paragraphs:

There is certainly no reason to be nostalgic for the old ideologies and their Jesuits. But that is not to say that the problems they addressed were imaginary or beyond human reckoning. The grand systems were to be resisted because in the end they were inadequate to the task they took up, not because their ambition was wholly misguided. Their failures revealed the need for a more demanding ambition: to understand the present without self-deception. They did not signify the will to make sense of it is futile.

Yet that will has unmistakeably withered since this book was first published [2001]. It has been replaced by a soft dogma for which we have no adequate name. This dogma begins with basic liberal principles like the sanctity of the individual, the priority of freedom, and the distrust of public authority, and advances no further. It is politically democratic but lacks awareness of democracy's weaknesses and how they can provoke hostility and resentment. It promotes economic growth with unreflective faith in the cost-free benefits of free trade, deregulation, and foreign investment. Since it presumes that individuals are all that count, it has next to nothing to say about collectivities and their enterprises, and the duties that come with them. It has a vocabulary for discussing rights and identities and feelings, but not class or other social realities. (The fact that race is now largely conceived as a problem of individual identity and not one of collective destiny requiring sacrifices to reach a common goal, as it was by the American civil rights movement, is significant.) 
This dogma is at once anti-political and anti-intellectual. It cultivates no taste for reality, no curiosity about how we got here or where we are going. It has no use for sociology or psychology or history, not to mention political theory, since it has no interest in institutions and has nothing to say about the necessary and productive tension between individual and collective purposes. It is simplicity itself. This explains why people who otherwise share little can subscribe to it yet draw very different conclusions from it. Small-government fundamentalists on the American right and anarchists on the European left, absolutist civil libertarians and neoliberal evangelists of free markets—the differences between them are superficial. What they share is a mentality, a mood, a presumption—what used to be called, nonpejoratively, a prejudice.

Ideologies inspire lies. But what is a lie? It is a pretense to speaking truth about the world—and thus betrays a recognition that people are after it. Dogmas inspire instead ignorance and indifference. They convince people that a single idea or principle is sacred and all they need to know in order to act in the world. Maintaining an ideology requires work because political developments always threaten its plausibility. Theories must be tweaked, revisions must be revised, evidence must be accounted for or explained away. Because ideology makes a claim about the way the world actually works, it invites and resists refutation. A dogma does not. It kills curiosity and intellectual ambition by rendering them pointless. Our unreflective creed is little different from Luther’s sola fide [by faith alone]: give individuals maximum freedom in every aspect of their lives and all will be well. And if not, then pereat mundus [perish the world].

An ideology gives people the illusion of understanding more than they do. Today we seem to have renounced trying to understand as much as we can. We suffer from a new kind of hubris unlike that of the old master thinkers. Our hubris is to think that we no longer have to think hard or pay attention to look for connections, that all we have to do is stick to our “democratic values” and economic models and faith in the individual and all will be well. The end of the cold war destroyed whatever confidence in the great modern ideologies still remained in the West. But it also left us incurious and self-absorbed. We have abdicated.

And so we need reminding, of many things. Reminding that the problems of capitalist democracies today—the hollowing out of the middle class, the erosion of family and community, the rage against the elites, the eclipse of political parties, widespread indifference to the public interest— cannot be grasped or addressed by focusing single-mindedly on individuals and their rights. Reminding that dealing with people outside our enchanted garden requires more than toleration and concerns with individual human rights. Reminding that we need a much deeper understanding of their histories and psychologies, free from idealization and fear and attentive to the explosive political power of pride and resentment. Reminding, finally, that the lure of tyranny is not the only force that pulls intellectuals off course. Self-deception has countless forms. Today, a decade and a half after its publication, my hope is that The Reckless Mind still serves as just such a reminder.

                                                                                                                --Paris, June 2016 
The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics (with a New Afterword) pp. 225-227

Mark Lilla's book is a collection of essays about 20th-century intellectuals who ventured into writing and thinking about politics, often with distressing implications. Each chapter was written as a review of the works of the chapter subjects (the first chapter involves three thinkers, the rest address only a single thinker), but the collection works thematically. In brief, some very prominent European thinkers were either very wrong (or ineffective) about politics. Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt made camp with the Nazis (although Heidegger backed away, he never recanted his venture). Walter Benjamin and Alexandre Kojeve both skirted with radical politics and with unorthodox thinking. Although Kojeve held significant posts in the French government after his time as a lecturer on Hegel, he never acted overtly to implement a particular program consistent with his more radical thinking. Lilla also discusses the work of Michael Foucault and Jacques Derrida, neither of whom contributed directly to political theory, although became influential about political thinking indirectly. But both followed the French intellectual fashion of commenting on contemporary politics, with sometimes embarrassing conclusions (the same may be said of Sartre, by the way).

I write none of the above to necessarily denigrate some aspects of the thinkers that Lilla discusses. With all thinkers, one gets both wheat and chaff (although too many are long on the latter). The fact that Hannah Arendt championed Heidegger (even late in life) and Benjamin gives us an indication of the value of their thought even as she would remain hostile to some of their political thought and action.

Lilla's essays provide an effective inoculation against taking in the speculations of philosophers-- especially politically naive philosophers--without a lot of critical judgment. Politics is informed by thought, but it consists of innumerable calculations of interest and belief that will continually defy easy schemes or remedies. As Lilla points out in the quote at the beginning of this review, it's easy to slip into either dogma or ideology when considering politics. I think he would agree with Hannah Arendt (and me) that political thought and action requires thinking--making judgments in the midst of the nitty-gritty stuff of everyday reality as experienced in the public sphere.

An excellent book.