Stephen Walt on Political Institutions

Stephen Walt on the importance of political institutions for addressing pressing problems, and some suggestions on changes needed. California provides a compelling example of how poorly designed or antiquated political institutions can really cripple a state. I'm thinking of their super-majority required for budgeting and their damned referendum system that compels the government to spend like socialists and tax like libertarians.

Brooks on Government

I often agree with Dave Brooks when it comes to his observations about social science and society. In this column, I'm immediately sympathetic with his position as a "Burkean conservative". I, too, question radical social change. I usually agree that incremental changes are most likely to prove successful. For instance, the health care reform bill passed by Congress is incremental change (although some think it portends the end of the world). However, Brooks makes a couple of mistakes in this column: First, Obama didn't opt of "big government". The train-wreck of an economy that Bush left him gave him only one real option: massive stimulus spending. Second, special interests, inimical to the broader public interest (the rest of us), should suffer attack. If anything, Obama has been too tepid in dealing with the forces of the status quo. The opening skit on SNL tonight, with Obama asking Wall Street to please allow reform, hits a widely held perception (one that Garry Wills has expressed a number of times on his recent book tour) that Obama places too much hope on successfully placating opposing interests. Sometimes you need to knock heads. Brooks decries the knee-jerk polarization that the current debates on government have taken, and I join him in this, but he fails to acknowledge that the right has really gone much further right (hysterically anti-government in some cases) than that left has gone left with any pro-big government attitude. Brooks, like Obama, seems to believe that even-handedness must provide an answer. Sometimes it does, sometimes it's just; but sometimes it's merely unjust and ineffective.

The Secret of Kells: Movie Review

C & I saw The Secret of Kells tonight at the Bijou (it's not yet out on DVD), and it was a delight. This animated feature combined realistic drama—Irish monasteries under attack by Vikings in the 8^th century—with Irish myth. We've seen stories of Irish myth combined with realism filmed with enchanting results in The Secret of Roan Inish and Into the West, but never by an animated film. The visuals were spectacular, unlike anything produced by the American studios. The figures were highly stylized and geometrical. (It reminded me of the art of Tommie de Paola, but my date differs with me on this.) The music, all manner of Irish music, worked well with the film, and the mythic and realistic portions of the story meshed to create a seamless narrative. At one point we see the main character battling an ouroboros. A film for the Jung at heart! I must say that this film is not for young children. The Northmen (Norsemen, Vikings) are scary, and the film portrays vividly the fear and destruction that these marauding warrior wrought. If you have children who can deal with these haunting images (also attacking wolves), I highly recommend this film for them as well as the adults in the family. Having seen Up! and The Fantastic Mr. Fox, I can say that this film presents the best visual fare, truly incredible, and probably the best entire package of an animated film (although I must say that I did like Mr. Fox and friends). Highly recommended.

Taleb Meets Erwan Le Corre

Taleb hooked-up with Erwan Le Corre, and here (127—"Learning From Erwan Le Corre & Robust Exercise") Taleb writes about his encounter. Mr. Wild Fitness meets Mr. Mathematical/Skeptical/Literate/Philosopher, and the later (Taleb) sings the praises of Le Corre's regime. This should come as no surprise, as Taleb came onto the idea of evolutionary (or paleo) fitness from Art Devany, one of the founders of the movement. Check out this Youtube and this one of Le Corre to get a sense of what he's about. It looks fun and makes a lot of sense. It provides some food for thought for us gym rats and perhaps even yogis.

 

Some quick notes on Le Corre:

1. From the fact that one shot shows him running across an aqueduct, the seashore shots, and that he's French, I'll be those scenes were shot in the south of France, Provence, perhaps. In any event, the countryside looks beautiful to me, one of the places I'd definitely like to go and hang. We drove through Provence once, but at about 100 mph, which detracted from my ability to enjoy the scenery.
   
2. Le Corre's MovNat seems a lot like parkour, only in the wild. Both look like a great deal of fun.
   
3. All this makes me eager for summer to come & perhaps some time to put on my Five Fingers and go out hiking. The res isn't Provence, but it has some good hiking opportunities.

Krugman: The Emperor Has Few Clothes

In his column today, Krugman discusses financial reform, and he makes a point worth repeating: the financial sector has become a huge portion of the economy without adding a great deal of real value. Krugman argues that the financial sector doesn't do nearly as much as they claim. Indeed, of late, they've mostly just gambled with our money. As someone who does not make widgets, and whose "product" is relationships (legal), I understand that our contemporary economy might be dubbed "beyond widgets". Somewhere, however, you have to make and sell stuff. It's great and crucial to allocate capital and make investments, but these activities have to amount to more than Ponzi schemes. Krugman's article reinforces my belief that measuring economic well-being by dollar signs, or even by the sheer amount of stuff that one has, doesn't provide an accurate portrayal of well-being; in fact, it creates a deceptive measure of well-being.

Wills, Brooks & Ferguson Quick Takes

Garry Wills is interviewed about his background (he started with William Buckley & National Review), his thoughts on Obama (too much placation), and his new book Bomb Power (the undermining of Constitutional restraints on government because of prerogatives claimed by the National Security State). Great listening (no reason to watch, little to see).

Dave Brooks culls social science again for insights, this time challenging some earlier work by Obama friend, appointee, and potential SCOTUS nominee, Cass Sunstein. Brooks suggests that the internet isn't as polarizing as Sunstein originally feared. Sunstein has written some very interesting things about group polarization.

Niall Ferguson writing for the Financial Times "Too much Hitler and the Henrys'" argues that teaching history in the UK needs the same type of attention that Jamie Oliver brought to school lunches (Jamie did it first in the UK, and has since taken in West Virginia). Ferguson finds the curriculum disjunct, with no over-arching narrative to bring cohesion to the curriculum. Let me include a few quotes from his article:

    Why is this downgrading of history a bad thing? Well, for one thing, the current world population makes up only about 7 per cent of all the human beings who have ever lived. The dead outnumber the living, and we ignore the accumulated experience of such a huge majority of mankind at our peril. Second, the Past is our only reliable guide to the Present and to the multiple futures that lie before us, only one of which will actually happen.

Ferguson, however, realizes that history has a bad rap as a school subject:

    Now, nobody wants a return to the kind of mind-numbing history that used to be taught a generation ago – those strings of facts and dates, one damned thing after another, half-memorised by comatose pupils and famously lampooned in WC Sellar and RJ Yeatman's 1930 classic, 1066 and All That.

It's no coincidence that the most boring teacher at Hogwarts in JKRowling's Harry Potter books is the history teacher, Mr Binns, whose lessons about the goblin wars are so tedious that he himself has died of boredom without noticing.

Ferguson goes on to comment on the smorgasbord courses in lower grades that are supposed to constitute the history curriculum:

    The excessive concentration of sixth-formers on learning about either Hitler or the Henrys – the Third Reich or the Tudors – was already a cause of concern when I was a college fellow and tutor in history at Oxford University in the 1990s. I shudder to think what it must be like to conduct Oxbridge admissions now.

What we urgently need in this country is a campaign for real history in schools, to match Jamie Oliver's campaign for healthy school dinners. Like junk food, junk history is bad for kids. It encourages snacking and the mental equivalent of obesity – a chronic lack of mental shape. So here's what I would propose to vary the historical diet in English education.

Here's the point where Ferguson may generate some controversy, but this should generate some thought. The remainder of his article follows below:

    I also believe there should be a compulsory chronological framework over the entire period from entering secondary school right through to sixth form. All students at GCSE and A-level should cover at least one medieval, one early modern and one modern paper. The crucial thing is to have an over-arching story – a meta-narrative, as academics pretentiously call it. The one I propose for my new-look history course is called "western ascendancy".

Why do I use the word "western"? Aside from cowboy films, is it not completely passé? And why have I used the word "ascendancy", implying as it does some politically incorrect superiority?

The answer is simple. Western predominance was a historical reality after around 1500, and certainly after 1800. In that year, Europe and its New World offshoots accounted for 12 per cent of the world's population and (already) around 27 per cent of its total income. By 1913, however, it was 20 per cent of the world's population and more than half – 51 per cent – of the income. Today the west's share is back down to 12 per cent of the population, but still around 45 per cent of the income. Like it or not, the fact is that after 1500 the world became more Eurocentric. And understanding why that happened is the modern historian's biggest challenge.

It was a surprising turn of events. Had you made a tour of the world in the early 1600s, you would have hesitated before betting a significant sum that western Europe would inherit the earth.

The Oriental challengers for world power were outwardly a great deal more impressive. Ottoman Turkey under Mehmed IV (1648-87) was able to send an army under Grand Vizier Kara Mustafa to besiege – and very nearly conquer – Vienna in 1683. Mughal India in the reign of Shah Jahan 1627-58) was able to conquer the Deccan and to build the Taj Mahal and the Diwan-i-Am in Delhi. Qing China saw its golden age under the Kangxi Emperor (1662-1722). China had already invented the magnetic compass, paper, gunpowder, the spinning wheel, and the clock. The Muslim world had for many centuries led the west in the crucial field of mathematics. Indian astronomers had been far ahead of their medieval European counterparts.

So why did the states of western Europe – Portugal, Spain, France, the Netherlands and Britain – end up trouncing these eastern competitors, not only economically but also militarily and in some respects also culturally, so that by 1900 the world was dominated by western empires?

Anthropologist Jared Diamond's answer is essentially: geography, which determined two very different political orders. In the great plains of eastern Eurasia, monolithic Oriental empires evolved that had the fatal ability to stifle innovation. In mountainous, river-divided western Eurasia, by contrast, multiple monarchies and city-states engaged in competition and communication, and it was these processes that accelerated innovation sufficiently for an industrial revolution to take place.

His argument is almost irresistibly attractive, but for one difficulty. From the vantage point of the 1630s and 1640s, political fragmentation in Europe meant civil war and chaos.

Other hypotheses exist. One is that it was the acquisition of colonial "ghost acres" and the fortunate location of European coal deposits that gave the west the edge over the east. Or it may have been the cultural legacies of the Reformation.

If I were permitted to hazard some hypotheses they would go as follows. There were, in essence, six "killer applications" that allowed the west to establish dominance over the east: market capitalism, scientific method, representative government, modern medicine, the consumer society, and the Protestant work ethic.

The value of this approach to history at secondary level is threefold. First, it provides a narrative for around 500 years of world history. Second, it makes a comparative approach to history unavoidable, for clearly an interpretation of western success requires some complementary explanation of eastern stagnation. And, third, understanding western ascendancy encourages students to re-examine the present and the future, asking: are we approaching the end of western ascendancy? After all, most of these six elements have been more or less successfully replicated in some major non-western societies.

Let me not be misinterpreted. The point of studying western ascendancy is not to slip covert imperialist apologia into the curriculum. On the contrary, the great strength of this framework is that it allows students to study world history without falling into the trap of relativism, i.e. arguing as if the Ashanti Empire were in some way the equal of the British Empire.

Western ascendancy was not all good, any more than it was all bad. It was simply what happened and, of all the things that happened over the past five centuries, it was the thing that changed the world the most. That so few British schoolchildren are even aware of this is deplorable. Knowing the names of Henry VIII's six wives or the date of the Reichstag fire is no substitute for having a real historical education.

We have recently witnessed a successful campaign to improve the quality of lunches served in British schools. It is time for an equivalent campaign against junk history.

My comment: I think that Ferguson makes a strong argument here. He's talking "big history", which gives context to things like the Reichstag fire and other discrete events. To grasp history, the change wrought by time, one must have some sense of time and continuity, of change with some trajectory, even if caused for random, unanticipated events. For reasons I cannot explain, from a very early age I wanted to understand the sequence of events. I wanted to know who came first, Hitler or the Kaiser? (I kid you not about this, I remember puzzling over this at our house on Pioneer Avenue, and we had moved away from there before the beginning of the third grade.)

As to the importance of history, Ferguson makes a quick argument, but John Lukacs provides an event better and deeper appreciation of the importance of history. Put simply, everything is history. People, institutions, nature (think evolution as the keystone to modern biology), thinking itself, is always history (we can only think and imagine based on what we've experienced in the past). The late Neil Postman, NYU professor of "media ecology", argued that almost all subjects should be taught through their history. If you think about it, a lot of social science is history frozen in time to allow for more careful examination, much as a biologist takes a living organism out of history by killing and then dissecting it. Ferguson's argument should receive serious consideration both in the UK and in the US, the subject matter is too important to ignore.

Stiglitz on Skidelsky on Keynes

Stiglitz, winner of the Nobel Prize in economics and a faculty member @ Columbia, writes a review of Skidelsky's Keynes: Return of the Master. I reviewed this book earlier, but for a consideration from a (I must say) better source, read this one. I think that Stiglitz raises many interesting issues here. Our recent financial meltdown remains a source of fascination for me, as I think that a lot of contemporary economics is built upon illusion.

Dan Pink on Motiviation

Listening to Dan Pink's new book, Drive, and found this short piece that will give you an executive summary of his points. I haven't finished the book yet, but I'm enjoying it very much. In less than 10', this News Hour report gives you the gist of his argument.

Lawyer Stuff: Who Is the Greatest Lawyer of the Century?

An interesting discussion of who should receive recognition as the greatest lawyer of the century. Clarance Darrow receives the nod over Thurgood Marshall & Edward Bennett Williams. http://llr.lls.edu/volumes/v33-issue2/uelman.pdf.

Krugman Parodies McConnell

If you don't read Paul Krugman regularly, you should (including his blog). His cred is impressive, including a Nobel Prize in economics. However, he writes in his column for the NYT in a very accessible, and often quite humorous, manner. Here he makes a superb argument by analogy and parody. Oh, that all political discourse could prove so entertaining and enlightening! Instead, we tend to hear a lot of Tea Party rants. Am I wrong, or do some conservatives—certainly not all—go primarily with rants and taunts for political persuasion and "liberals" (hard to define, mind you) go more with humor and parody to make their points? Think The Daily Show and the Colbert Report.

The Classics Edition

Following up on the post from yesterday, the following list of "classics" that I've found most gratifying. Again, I go with authors rather than any one particular work (although the last entry, Max Weber, got on based on a single, relatively short work). Again, I list these in roughly chronological order:

1. The Old Testament (Hebrew Bible). We're talking selections, not the whole thing. Especially Genesis, Exodus, Job, Psalms, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes.
   
2. New Testament. (I read the entire NT straight through as a senior in high school, once I'd returned from the Dark Ages of pretty much not reading books after the 6^th grade.)
   
3. Plato (Apology, Crito, Phaedo, and Republic)
   
4. St. Augustine (Confessions, City of God (portions)).
   
5. Dante (Comedia. Perhaps the greatest single work in Western lit? )
   
6. Machiavelli (The Prince).
   
7. Montaigne (Essays)
   
8. Shakespeare (a long list: the four great tragedies, The Tempest, Henry V, etc.
   
9. Spinoza (Ethics).
   
10. Ralph Waldo Emerson (Essays, etc.).
    
11. Karl Marx (No, I am not a Marxist; however, he gets included because the early Marx was an interesting idealist and the later Marx was such a force that even if one disagrees with him, one must consider him and respond accordingly).
    
12. William James (essays, Talks to Teachers, and especially The Varieties of Religious Experience).
    
13. Max Weber (Politics as a Vocation).
    

A Baker’s Dozen of Influential Thinkers for Me

Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution recently posted a list of his top 10 most influential books, and his site pointed the way to others who compiled such lists. I gave the matter some brief thought, but I found the project too intimidating. Only 10 books? I can't limit myself that that low a number for a year-end list, let alone a lifetime. However, perhaps more to the point, I tend to think in terms of authors and not single works (although there can be one hit wonders). Therefore, I decided upon a baker's dozen of thinkers whom I have found that have most affected my thinking, beliefs, and that have served in some way to inspire me. In a later post, I think I'll do a list of "classics", and then a list of Modern (since 1800) literature. For inclusion on this list, the person must have been alive during my lifetime, essentially, the 2^nd half of the 20^th century. I have read a number of works by each of the authors, so it's not a single work that I can easily point to. For each person, I'm considering a body of work that has had, and in some ways continues to have, an effect on my thinking and outlook. I will just name the list today (and honorable mentions), and I will try to comment on each member in later posts. In addition, I am attempting to compile the list (but not the honorable mentions) in roughly the order that I recall that I "discovered" each of them. Here goes:

1. Hannah Arendt
2. Garry Wills
3. Alan Watts
4. Robert Solomon
5. Ken Wilber
6. Reinhold Neibuhr
7. John Patrick Diggins
8. Northrup Frye
9. Jon Elster
10. Colin Wilson
11. John Lukacs
12. Pierre Hadot
13. Nassim Taleb

Receiving honorable mentions in no particular order at all except in the order that they popped into mind:

1. Jacob Needleman
2. Phillip Bobbitt
3. Niall Fergusson
4. James Hillman
5. Robert Anton Wilson
6. Buddhist writers (have to work on this, as a number could pop into mind)
7. Martha Nussbaum
8. Robert Kaplan
9. Charles Hartshorne
10. William Irwin Thompson
11. Gerry Spence

Enough for now. Food for thought.

Great Thought of the Day from Daniel Patrick Moynihan

"The late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan liked to say that everyone is entitled to his own opinions but not his own facts."

From http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/no_way_to_treat_a_senator_20100413/, discussing how Tom Coburn (yes, that Tom Coburn, the Oklahoma senator) gets nailed for suggesting in public that Nancy Pelosi is a "nice lady" and that people won't be sent to jail by the health care reform bill. Wow.

Mark Johnston’s Saving God: Religion After Idolatry

Saving God: Religion After Idolatry (2009, 198 p.) is an extended essay by Princeton philosopher Mark Johnston. Johnston's book provides a well-written and tightly argued understanding of God in the Western monotheistic tradition. His conclusions are not orthodox, but his insights create a deeply satisfying and challenging work. While a small portion in the latter part of the book involves some rather dense (but not inaccessible) philosophical argument about the existence of God (reaching a panentheist conclusion), the better part of the book addresses the understanding of God in the three great monotheistic religions based on the Bible and their respective traditions. Because this book is so well written, insightful, and persuasive (to my mind), it's difficult to review it. In fact, I read it twice; once through initially, and almost right away again with my pencil handy, marking and annotating, like a 49'er who stops sifting through the dust and finds something that merits a pick-ax and a toothbrush.


The title of this book happened to grab me because of its reference to idolatry. I wondered for some time about this issue of idolatry, worshiping a false god or a false image of God. My own sense was that all religion consists of a form of idolatry, perhaps necessarily, as a part of human fallibility. This seems true despite the stark Biblical injunction against idolatry. Johnston argues that asking favors of God amounts to a form of idolatry. There is, however, in Christianity (and I think in Judaism and Islam, as well) a tradition of the via negativa, a tradition of not attempting to attribute qualities to God, or attempting to define God, because God is sui generis. Think Pseudo-Dionysus, The Cloud of Unknowing, Meister Eckhart, and more recently, Paul Tillich's conception of God as the Ground of Being. Johnston does not explore this tradition. However, I think that this tradition bolsters his argument. (I think a good deal of Johnston's perspective originates in Spinoza, the incredibly insightful 17th-century Dutch philosopher.)


To close, and to give you a better sense of Johnston's perspective and insight, I offer the following extended quote comparing the death and example of Jesus with that of Socrates. This follows in the book shortly after my recent posting of a Johnston quote to celebrate the Easter season. Johnston writes:

    And when all the crowds who had gathered there for this spectacle saw what had taken place, they returned home, beating their breasts. (Luke, 23:48)

    This is the sense in which Christ destroys the Kingdom of self-love and false righteousness. Of course, it is not that the psychological power of self-love and false righteousness is actually diminished by the Passion and Crucifixion. Instead, self-love and false righteousness—that is to say, the central elements of the characteristically human form of life—no longer make up a defensible realm.

    Contrast the death of Socrates. He also asks for it. He is a victim of those who would police the Athenian conception of respectability, an averaged-out conception of pious virtue. But Plato romanticizes the death of Socrates; his death is a fearless and noble suicide. Socrates talks philosophy until the very end; he is full of arguments, for the soul, and even when he is not relying on these (bad) arguments, he remains convinced that release from the body remains a very desirable thing, something that philosophy prepares us for. Socrates accepts the hemlock as a healing balm for the sickness that is life.

    But suppose instead that he had to anticipate being stripped, beaten, and hung from a tree; how would the pose of nobility and fearlessness have held up then? Is there not something decadently twee about the death of Socrates as Plato presents it? And is this not connected with the calming doctrine of the afterlife, and with the corresponding idea of this life as a sickness that death heals?

    Crucially, Plato's Socrates recognizes the legitimacy of the Athenian state; he accepts its claims upon him and does not flee even in the face of an unjust sentence. In this way the death of Socrates secretly valorizes the false righteousness of Athenian respectability, by showing that even someone who really understands virtue will bow to this false righteousness in the end. Human ways of going on are secretly redeemed by Plato's Socrates. The Kingdom of self-love and false righteousness remains legitimated.

    The ordeal of Christ's Passion and Crucifixion is not at all like this. There is nothing noble or "humanly redeeming" about it, beginning as it does with his desperation in the Garden and ending with his despair on the Cross. It is not a cathartic tragedy. It leaves us at a total loss. We can return to human ways of going on only if we forget what happened. If we do not forget, we need to find a way to live that is not some form of self-love and false righteousness. In addition, if we do not forget, we know that we cannot find this in ourselves. Then, and only then, are we prepared to take the two commandments, the salvation from without, seriously.

Wills on Remnick on Obama

New Yorker editor David Remnick's new biography of Obama, The Bridge: The Life & Rise of Barack Obama (2010) (just released) is reviewed in the NYT by Garry Wills. Remnick's Lenin's Tomb is an excellent book on the collapse of the Soviet Union that I enjoyed very much, and the New Yorker probably still has the best writers in its stable as any magazine—print or electronic—in the world, so all of that speaks well for Remnick's credentials. As for Wills, the author of Nixon Agonistes (a great book), Reagan's America, The Kennedy Imprisonment, as well as other biographical pieces, we have a writer who has considered and understood American political leaders in a way that very few can match. This combination makes for a very worthwhile review. Wills, in his typical way, finds the irony in Obama's traits that brought him to the top (such as conciliator) but which may prove his undoing (or at least great limitation) as president. Read it and come to your own conclusion. I see Wills' point, but I remain hopeful that Obama's capacity for change and adjustment may seem him through to further successes. If Obama can take himself beyond what got him there, he has the potential to become a great president.

Mark Johnston for Good Friday

I recently finished Mark Johnston's exceptional book, Saving God: Religion After Idolatry (2009, 198 p.). I could write a great deal about this book, and I hope to do so, but apropos for today, I think it best just to share this quote:

    Why did Christ have to suffer and die at the hands of legitimate religious and political authorities? Why wouldn't the viper [a fatal viper bite in the Garden of Gethsemane] have sufficed? Not, pace Girard, because only then could the suffering and death of Christ be a reductio ad absurdum of scapegoating sacrifice, but because only then could it expose the mechanisms in the heart of false righteousness, this secret love of self-love trying at all costs to put down the anxiety of how to live, even to the point of murder. The Crucifixion discloses how far we are prepared to go in order to defend our idolatrous attachment to one or another adventitious form of righteousness." [Emphasis in original.]

    Johnston, Saving God, p. 171.