Dionne on Obama & Realism

E.J. Dionne, on the website Truthdig (quite a good site, with Chris Hedges weekly) offers his take on the Obama speech and realism. Dionne makes some good points. Worth reading: "Squaring Idealism with Realism".

Ostrem Nobel Acceptance

The political scientist who shared the Nobel Prize for Economics this year was Eleanor Ostrem. I viewed her talk. What a gas! This lady sounds like (and probably is) someone's grandma. She seems jolly, nice, and very hard working. She does what anyone ought to do: think, test, and think some more! Unlike arm-chair economists, she apparently goes out into the field in search of real world examples of problems (the commons, property and resources) and sees how things really work. She then refines her theory. How novel! Well, anyway, I enjoyed her talk.

Obama’s Nobel Speech

If you have not done so, I highly recommend reading or viewing President Obama's acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize. While reading Doonesbury that last couple of days, I get the sense that some found it shockingly bellicose, a paean in favor war and not a song of peace. (Of course, I suspect that Doonesbury mocks those thoughts, but in any event, some must hold them.) Didn't anyone pay attention to Obama during the campaign when he reported that Reinhold Niebuhr was a favorite "philosopher"? (BTW, John McCain said the same thing; however, having heard McCain, I have some doubt that he actually read Niebuhr, and certainly he did not grasp Niebuhr's message.) Obama obviously had read his Niebuhr, perhaps even some of the fountainhead of Niebuhr's Christian realism, St. Augustine. In any event, what Obama set forth seems very Niebuhr-esque to me.

To get a further sense of Obama's thinking, read David Brooks on Obama and Niebuhr. As usual, he has insightful things to say about the two. His most recent column on this subjec calls Obama's speech the most important of Obama's life. In an earlier column (in 2007), Brooks asked Obama if Obama had read Niebuhr, and Obama enthusiastically replied that Niebuhr "was one of his favorite philosophers." Brooks goes on to report that Obama provided a succinct summary of Niebuhr's thought that Brooks identified as pretty much the thesis of Niebuhr's The Irony of American History (1952). This sent me back to read this book, as I've owned it for years but I had never read it. Shame on me! It proved vintage Niebuhr, and given that Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932)is one of my favorites, this should not surprise me. I highly recommend both, and more to come on Irony.

Two quick points while doing some of the research for this post:

1. Brooks, and others, often mention George Kennan when discussing Niebuhr, and I see a strong connection. I also consider Kennan a hero.
   
2. The late John Patrick Diggins, one of my favorite historians, nearly had completed a work on Niebuhr before his death. I hope it gets published, as Diggins would prove as good a commentator on Niebuhr as anyone that I can imagine.

Churchill Quote

I came across this quote from WSC today doing some professional reading. It's about life as a journey:

"Every day you may make progress. Every step may be fruitful. Yet there may stretch out before you an ever-lengthening, ever-ascending, ever-improving path. You know you will never get to the end of the journey. But this, so far from discouraging, only adds to the joy and glory of the climb."

Quoted in Zaltman & Zaltman, Marketing Metaphoria: What Deep Metaphors Reveal About the Mind of Consumers (2008), p. 94. (For anyone wondering how this amounts to "professional reading" by a lawyer, replace "consumers" with "jurors", and you'll see. The book was recommended by a continuing legal education speaker.)

Historians of the Middle Ages

Just before Thanksgiving, I finished Inventing the Middle Ages: The Lives, Works, and Ideas of the Great Medievalists of the Twentieth Century by Norman Cantor (1991). Why I pick up a particular book at some particular time quite often puzzles me, but this book, which I've owned since buying it second-hand in 2006, got its call in November, and it proved quite a fascinating read. I picked up my pace reading through it like in order to finish before Thanksgiving (it's hard cover and wouldn't travel easily). Now why on earth would I find such a work fascinating? Several reasons. First, Cantor writes well, and he's covering two topics at once: twentieth century writers, as well as medieval history. For instance, the English legal theorist Frederick Maitland was a member of the Bloomsbury group, consisting of such persons as Virginia Woolf and John Maynard Keynes. Interesting company for him (Maitland), as well as the reader. Cantor handles both subjects quite well. The intrigues, interests, biases, and obstacles of twentieth century historians of the medieval period prove quite interesting in themselves (there's more than just a little academic gossip here). Indeed, one of the intriguing aspects of the books addresses how the needs and interests of the present effect researches into the past. For instance, two German scholars who began during the Weimar Period were interested in German leadership. One, Kantorwicz, a Jew, was forced to flee Germany because of a "strong" German leader, while the other, Schramm, was close to Hitler as historian of the Wehrmacht.

The two most famous medievalists considered made their names outside of their scholarly area, but their scholarly interest in the Middle Ages shown through much of the popular work. C. S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien allowed their sense of this lost world to shine through their very popular works.

These are only of few of the historians discussed, and even those whom we'd never heard of before become quite fascinating in Cantor's consideration. In addition, I realize that I was quite fortunate as an undergraduate to have been exposed to medieval and Renaissance history from some capable teachers. My first semester as an undergraduate, taking a course in Western Civ, introduced me to Phillip the Fair and Boniface VIII. A course in Medieval History from John Bell Henneman gave me a wide-ranging introduction to this strange world, and one can't appreciate the Renaissance without some sense of it roots.

I'm now casually working my way through Cantor's Civilization of the Middle Ages (1994), a comprehensive survey. Cantor provides good bibliographies and his book has prompted me to go back and explore some of these historians as well as this period. I've also started Huizinga's The Autumn of the Middle Ages. (Note: not The Waning of the Middle Ages—a different translation—but more on that later.)

Wills and Obama & Afghanistan

I just read a new NYRB blog entry by Garry Wills really laying into President Obama for Obama's decision to send more troops to Afghanistan. http://blogs.nybooks.com/post/265874686/afghanistan-the-betrayal. The piece is painful to read. I fear greatly that Wills is correct in thinking that further efforts in Afghanistan will remain futile, wasting lives and resources. However, most troubling, is the sense of betrayal. To some extent I'm not sympathetic, in that Obama emphasized the need to take care of business in Afghanistan during the campaign. Yet, the situation only looks worse and worse. Worse yet, Wills reaction—and he's certainly not alone in this— looks like a reaction that could divide Obama supporters and give an opening to the Right—and the only Right remaining is the kooky right. Thoughts of LBJ and Viet Nam haunt me and many like me. This is not good. I will give Obama the benefit of the doubt, hoping that my fears will not be realized and that we will be on track to leave sooner rather than later, with a minimal loss of life. At this point, I can only hope. I cannot pull the plug on supporting Obama, his intentions and abilities are not those of Bush, but I do fear. I do fear.