People who have never been to sleepaway camp, don’t get it. They tease me when I speak about memories that are decades old, as if I am recalling a past life that never happened. They find it strange that I view my many years at camp as not merely summer vacations but as forces that helped to make me who I am. These camp memories visit me more deeply when the winter sky sets early, fooling me into believing that 4:30 pm is really past midnight. If I am roaming, I wonder if it is already time to go home. I linger. Yes, my summer camp taught me to roam physically—and in my imagination. It was free and free-range.
I’ll tarry briefly where many good tales begin. In the middle: My teenage years, as a camp clerk and then as babysitter for a camp director and finally, as a counselor. These summer jobs were woefully underpaid. But the fringe benefits were great: Opportunities to break rules that were often not enforced, anyway.
I smoked my first joint, out in the open, sitting with friends on a large rock by the lake, right after a late summer sunset. If caught by a camp director, we would have been fired. I don’t think they wanted to catch us. They were somewhere else, smoking their own joints. Romance, along with pot, seemed to be part of the plan for young employees, particularly in regard to the kitchen boys over whom we swooned. My camp, socialist at its core and run by lefty social workers, did not believe in waiters. To check out a kitchen boy, campers and staff had to go to one of several pantries to pick up or deliver food, plates and utensils. A chore made joyful.
In regard to specific romance, I remember the night I spent with a slightly older male counselor, sleeping with him in his tent—and not doing much more than sleeping. (Maybe it was the pot). Before dawn I shoved him awake and said: “I have to go, I will get into trouble.” He laughed a sleepy laugh, perhaps a stoner laugh and said: “Barbara, this is Wel-Met. Nobody gets in trouble for sleeping with someone.” Read more »
Washington resigning his commission. Even George III thought this act made him one of the greatest of all men.
The Founding Fathers aren’t much in fashion among liberals these days. A good friend of mine has been trying to get a novel about Thomas Jefferson published for three years. He has approached more publishers than he can care to name, publishers of all sizes, reputations and political persuasions. He tells me that while most mainstream, as well as niche publishers, have turned his manuscript down, a small number of right-wing houses that typically publish conservative polemic are deeply interested.
My friend’s problems with publishing Jefferson mirror the liberals’ problem with the Founding Fathers in general. At best they are dismissed as outdated dead white men, and at worst as evil slaveholders. But as an immigrant who came to this country inspired by the vision these men laid down, I don’t feel that way. Neither does my 4-year-old who proudly dressed up as George Washington, of her own accord, for Halloween last year. She stood proudly in her little tricorne hat and blue colonial coat, her face full of determination, as if she too was leading an army (she was particularly inspired by the stories I told her of Valley Forge and Washington’s crossing of the Delaware). Both she and I believe that while these men’s flaws were pronounced, and vastly so in some cases, the good they did far outlives the bad, and they were great men whose ideals should keep guiding us. More importantly, I believe that a liberal resurrection of the Founding Fathers is in order today if we want to fight the kind of faux patriotism foisted on us by the Party of Trump (“POT”. We can no longer call his party the Republican Party — that party of Dwight Eisenhower, of Ronald Reagan, of respect for intelligence, fiscal responsibility, international stewardship and opposition to real and not perceived evil, is gone, kaput, pushing up the daisies, as the memorable sketch would say: it is an ex-party).
First, let’s acknowledge the bad. There’s no denying why some liberals feel hesitant about embracing the Founding Fathers. These men who laid out ideals of equality and justice also owned human beings, a glaring contradiction that’s impossible to ignore. They were patronizing toward women and scoffed at their intellect. They would almost certainly have thought that people who looked like me or my daughter could not be equal citizens of the Republic. Washington and Jefferson, in particular, were deeply enmeshed in this brutal institution – Jefferson far more so than Washington, who freed his slaves in his will – and it’s fair to question how they could write about liberty while denying it to others. As early as 1775, Samuel Johnson was asking, “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”; the hypocrisy was obvious on both sides of the Atlantic. For those of us who call themselves liberals and believe in human rights, this hypocrisy is hard to reconcile.
But we must remember the times in which they lived if we want to free ourselves of the disease of presentism. As wealthy Virginia planters, it would be virtually impossible to imagine Washington or Jefferson not owning slaves. Their acceptance of slavery was, however evil and anachronistic it seems to us, common among people of their era. However, their ideas about free speech, religious tolerance, separation of powers, and individual rights were not. In other words, as Gibbon said about Belisarius, “His imperfections flowed from the contagion of the times; his virtues were his own.” In addition, it is important to not bin “The Founders” in one homogenous, catch-all bin. Washington freed his slaves and was a relatively beneficent and enlightened master for his times, loathe to participating in the wrenching practice of separating families, for instance; Adams and twenty-two of the signers of the Declaration of Independence did not own any at all; Franklin later became an abolitionist; Jefferson was probably the biggest culprit – not so much because he owned many slaves but because the gap between his soaring rhetoric and the reality at Monticello, not to mention his relationship with Sally Hemings, is glaring. To recognize these differences between the Founding Fathers is to not excuse their practices; it is to recognize the possibility of human improvement and the fact that in every age there is a spectrum of men and morality.
Photo from the publication “Curtis Cuffie.” Scot Portnoy, Robert Snowden, Ciarán Finlayson (eds.); Katy Able, Carol Thompson, Curtis Cuffie, Michael Galinsky, Margaret Morton, and Tom Warren (photos), 2023.
I recognized the corner immediately: it was right next to Cooper Union, on Lafayette Street in downtown Manhattan. There used to be a large parking lot on the other side of the street, where passers-by occasionally happened upon a colorful bricolage cobbled together from stuffed animals and clothes, discarded household items, deformed umbrellas, and battered car parts. These strange and playful conglomerations looked as though the bric-a-brac and refuse had been plucked together by some invisible furious force to house a spirit or daemon. They were, of course, carefully composed works by the late African-American artist Curtis Cuffie, one of the many ephemeral assemblages he created in the streets of downtown New York in the 1980s and 1990s.
Photo from the publication “Curtis Cuffie.” Scot Portnoy, Robert Snowden, Ciarán Finlayson (eds.); Katy Able, Carol Thompson, Curtis Cuffie, Michael Galinsky, Margaret Morton, and Tom Warren (photos), 2023.
Cuffie installed his improvised ensembles of found objects on fences, window grilles, sidewalks, and traffic signs in Cooper Square, the Bowery, and elsewhere; they were always temporary, and only a few of his works have survived. Cuffie periodically lived on the streets around Cooper Square and his homelessness must have made his emotional tie to the treasures he found and wheeled around in shopping carts all the more urgent. Most of the works he created from this repertoire of materials were abstract, shrines that seemed to grow out of the flotsam and jetsam of a city in constant transformation; seen from a passing car, they flashed in the sideview mirror like otherworldly apparitions. But there were also figurative sculptures: ragged garments strung on wire and string and adorned with hats or wigs became animated spirits on a secret mission. Today, the few remaining works by Cuffie that were not taken down and destroyed by the police or street cleaners are shown and sold in the pristine white spaces of uptown Manhattan galleries, stripped of their context and also, perhaps, a good deal of their meaning. Read more »
In daily life we get along okay without what we call thinking. Indeed, most of the time we do our daily round without anything coming to our conscious mind – muscle memory and routines get us through the morning rituals of washing and making coffee. And when we do need to bring something to mind, to think about it, it’s often not felt to cause a lot of friction: where did I put my glasses? When does the train leave? and so on.
So, we get on well in the world of medium sized dry goods, where things can be dropped on your foot and the train leaves at 7.00 AM. Common sense carries us a long way here. For common sense is what we know already, what we can assume and the things we know how to do because we know what they are.
There are limits, though. We begin to run into difficulties when we apply the categories of the understanding – the normal way we think of things – into areas which look as if they are same kind of thing, but are not. I’m thinking of anything to do with long term change, of the way in which structures underlie what we see, of the complex interactions of the economy and politics. The kind of thinking that we might call common sense is the ‘spontaneous ideology of everyday life’, and it has problems with the larger and longer-range things that both run through our lives and have a history that we should try to grasp.
If we fail to make that effort, we typically find ourselves falling back on the notion that these are just things that we can assume to be the case. This can lead to quite problematic positions. So, a friend of mine – intelligent, well educated – announced to me, apropos of Trump et al ‘half of America is just sick’. Perhaps on reflection he’d think that a bit inadequate, but it does represent the baffled contempt many have for the people who support a party and a politician who they see, rightly, as a threat to whatever democracy remains in the USA. Read more »
Let this text be a string of anecdotes this columnist has been exposed to, mostly through her work in research and academia. Said work was spread in space and time. The anecdotes, however, come from the western world and its sphere of influence.
*
The first-year student is asking me what to do about the courses by those lecturers who don’t know how to answer her questions.
Five minutes later she’s asking the same thing again.
In the meantime she explained that she’s aware many students lack the background necessary for higher education and of the reasons why. And that yes, she knows she can find lectures from elsewhere online.
*
The senior lecturer is showing me photos of past exam answer sheets. It is clear that some science students don’t know lower high school math.
All of them passed the exams thanks to their marks for the other half of the questions, graded by his co-teaching colleague.
*
Minor detail in Guardian article a few months ago. A seasoned professor says that the quality of studies is going down and for the first time ever she had to fail more than 10% of students.
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The friend who quit academia is listening to me being concerned about grade inflation. She comforts me by adding that at one university, on her first day at work, she was made to sign an agreement that she wouldn’t ever fail more than 15% of students. Read more »
When eating an elephant take one bite at a time. ––Creighton Abrams
In the game of chess, some of the greats will concede their most valuable pieces for a superior position on the board. In a 1994 game against the grandmaster Vladimir Kramnik, Gary Kasparov sacrificed his queen early in the game with a move that made no sense to a middling chess player like me. But a few moves later Kasparov won control of the center board and marched his pieces into an unstoppable array. Despite some desperate work to evade Kasparov’s scheme, Kramnik’s king was isolated and then trapped into checkmate by a rook and a knight.
I like to think that President Biden played a bit of Kasparovian chess in delaying his withdrawal from the November election until after the Republican convention in Milwaukee. I don’t know if there’s any truth to my fantasy, but in many ways the timing was perfect. The entire Trump campaign was centered around defeating an aging president who was showing alarming signs of mental decline. Despite some real accomplishments like the passage of the infrastructure bill and multiple wins for conservation of the natural world, Biden appeared to be headed for defeat. The attempted assassination of Donald Trump galvanized an already cultish following and the Democratic Party was in the doldrums—vanquished and confused.
Oh what a difference a week makes!
At this writing, no one yet knows who the Democratic nominee will be now that Biden has withdrawn from the race, and frankly a lot of us aren’t that choosy as long as he or she has a pulse and beats Donald Trump in November. It appears that Kamala Harris will be chosen and money—the singular expression of enthusiasm in American politics—is rushing in like a storm. Harris raised more than $80 million in just 24 hours. Read more »
“It is not often that you see life and fiction take each other by the hand and dance.” ―Lawrence Thornton, Imagining Argentina
Argentine President Javier Milei
Watching the recent elections in Argentina makes an arm-chair economist like me face-palm myself. The country that was once one the richest in the world, the country that has an embarrassingly large assortment of riches—wheat, oil, soybeans, cattle, olives, grapes, minerals and the like–can’t get out of its own way when it comes to retaking its place as a wealthy nation.
In November, Argentina elected Javier Milei, the self-described anarcho-capitalist, as its new president. Milei has a little of everything—a dash of Brazil’s ex-president Bolsonaro, a dash of Trump, and a dash of Elon Musk. He’s like one of those fruitcakes passed around at Christmas with all the colorful little radioactive bits that you can’t quite identify.
Milei was a blasphemous candidate, calling Pope Francis—himself an Argentine– an hijo de puta (son of a bitch), calling the president of Brazil (Argentina’s second biggest trading partner) a corrupt communist and even taking a shot at Micky Mouse, comparing him “…to every Argentine politician because he is a disgusting rodent whom everybody loves.” He’s also a climate-change denier who believes the sale of human organs should be legal and even dithers on the sale of children, saying that it’s essentially context-dependent. Read more »
Hans Bethe receiving the Enrico Fermi Award – the country’s highest award in the field of nuclear science – from President John F. Kennedy in 1961. His daughter, Monica, is standing at the back. To his right is Glenn Seaborg, Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission.
John von Neumann emigrated from Hungary in 1933 and settled in Princeton, NJ. During World War 2, he contributed a key idea to the design of the plutonium bomb at Los Alamos. After the war he became a highly sought-after government consultant and did important work kickstarting the United States’s ICBM program. He was known for his raucous parties and love of children’s toys.
Enrico Fermi emigrated from Italy in 1938 and settled first in New York and then in Chicago, IL. At Chicago he built the world’s first nuclear reactor. He then worked at Los Alamos where there was an entire division devoted to him. After the war Fermi worked on the hydrogen bomb and trained talented students at the University of Chicago, many of whom went on to become scientific leaders. After coming to America, in order to improve his understanding of colloquial American English, he read Li’l Abner comics.
Hans Bethe emigrated from Germany in 1935 and settled in Ithaca, NY, becoming a professor at Cornell University. He worked out the series of nuclear reactions that power the sun, work for which he received the Nobel Prize in 1967. During the war Bethe was the head of the theoretical physics division of the Manhattan Project. He spent the rest of his long life working extensively on arms control, advising presidents to make the best use of the nuclear genie he and his colleagues had unleashed, and advocating peaceful uses of nuclear energy. He was known for his hearty appetite and passion for stamp collecting.
Victor Weisskopf, born in Austria, emigrated from Germany in 1937 and settled in Rochester, NY. After working on the Manhattan Project, he became a professor at MIT and the first director-general of CERN, the European particle physics laboratory that discovered many new fundamental particles including the Higgs boson. He was also active in arms control. A gentle humanist, he would entertain colleagues through his rendition of Beethoven sonatas on the piano.
Von Neumann, Fermi, Bethe and Weisskopf were all American patriots. Read more »
After we get back to our country, black clouds will rise and there will be plenty of rain. Corn will grow in abundance and everything [will] look happy. –Barboncito, Navajo Leader, 1868
Barboncito, Navajo Leader, circa 1868
My idea of a fun evening is listening to the oral arguments of a contentious dispute that has reached the Supreme Court. As much as I disagree with some of the justices, I must admit that almost all of them are wickedly sharp at analyzing the issues—the facts and the law—of every case that comes before them. I don’t always get how they arrive at their final votes on cases that seem cut and dried before their probing inquiry. But most of them can flay a poorly presented argument with all the efficiency of a seasoned hunter field-dressing a kill.
So it was with the recent hearing on Arizona v. The Navajo Nation, heard before the court this year on March 20. At stake, in this case, is what responsibility the US government does or doesn’t have in formally assessing the Navajo Nation’s need for water and then developing a plan to meet those needs. The brief on behalf of the Navajo people, Diné as they prefer to be called, puts the case in stark and unmistakable terms: “This case is about this promise of water to this tribe under these treaties, signed after these particular negotiations reflecting this tribe’s understanding. A promise is a promise.”
The promise referred to in the brief refers to a promise made about 150 years ago when the Diné signed a treaty in 1868 with the US Government to establish the Navajo Reservation as a “permanent home” where it sits today. The treaty is only seven pages long and it promises the Diné a permanent home in exchange for giving up their nomadic life, staying within the reservation boundaries, and allowing whites to build railways and forts throughout the reservation as they see fit. A lot of things were left out—like water rights. Read more »
“It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.” —James Baldwin
The election a couple of weeks ago came as a relief to many of us. It was not a feeling of happily getting back on track again but rather a sense of relief that we hadn’t entirely lost our democracy to shrill lunatics intent on building a bargain-bin version of American fascism. The Republican Party today is unrecognizable even to rock-ribbed Republicans. When someone from the Cheney family threatens to leave the party for its cowardice and extremism, you know you’re dealing with a party that has completely lost its way.
A Republican used to be someone like Dwight Eisenhower, a moderate who worked well with the opposing party, even meeting weekly with their leadership in the Senate and House. Eisenhower expanded social security benefits and, against the more right-wing elements of his party, appointed Earl Warren to be the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Warren, you’ll remember, wrote the majority opinion of Brown v Board of Education, Miranda v Arizona, and Loving v Virginia. If Dwight Eisenhower were alive today, he would be branded a RINO and a communist by his own party. I suspect he would become registered as unaffiliated. Read more »
In a democracy, political decisions are typically made by way of elections. In winner-take-all systems, elections produce winners and losers. It seems natural, then, that in the United States our talk about democracy tends to focus on the competitive aspects of politics. For example, processes for filling political offices are called “contests” and “races”; candidates for such offices are called “contenders” and “hopefuls”; and electoral wins are called “victories,” while losses are called “defeats.” When a candidate loses especially decisively, we reach for stronger language; we sometimes say the candidate was “trounced” or side was “clobbered.” Our popular political vocabulary closely resembles the way we talk about sports. So, in addition to wins, losses, and races, there are cases of running up the score, playing out of bounds, and even spiking the political football.
Seizing on this, candidates and commentators tend to proceed as if political wins are deeply like sports victories. Winners present themselves not only as having prevailed against the other candidates, but also as having defeated everything the opposing side stands for. The team that wins the World Series is thereby the champion, and there’s nothing for the other teams to do other than begin training for next season; similarly, winning candidates tend to proceed as if those they prevailed against are relegated to a similar status: they must reconcile themselves to their losses, step aside, and look towards the next election.
Of course, part of the reason why the sporting vernacular is so prominent in our politics is that it indeed captures fundamental features of how democracy in the United States works. As we noted at the beginning, our winner-take-all elections really do produce winners and losers. So, that similarity is not an illusion. However, the similarity with sports goes only so far, and it is shallower along other lines than its prominence may suggest. Read more »
I’m running for an elected position: school board trustee. It’s a relatively minor position and non-partisan, so there’s no budget or staff. There’s also no speeches or debates, just lawn signs and fliers. Campaigning is like an expensive two-month long job interview that requires a daily walking and stairs regimen that goes on for hours. Recently, some well-meaning friends who are trying to help me win (by heeding the noise of the loudest voices) cautioned me to limit any writing or posting about Covid. It turns people off and will cost me votes. I agreed, but then had second thoughts the following day, and tweeted this:
I’ve been cautioned not to tweet so much about covid because it could cost me votes. But we’re sleepwalking through a crisis that could be averted if we can just open our eyes to it. Hospitalizations and deaths are way higher now than this time in the previous two years.
Protecting kids by possibly saying that one thing that finally lights a fire under chairs to #BringBackMasks is far more important to me than winning a popular vote. Look at young people dropping dead from strokes! The pandemic didn’t end. We’re not easing out of it. We’re in the thick of it. But it appears that some people in power want you at work and going to restaurants and bars and travelling more than they care to prevent children getting sick and hospitals overflowing.
There are variants that bypass vaccines. A well-fitting N95 can stop all variants. And CR boxes filter all variants. If we#BringBackMasks then more of us stand a fighting chance at avoiding getting this repeatedly, accumulating risk factors for brain damage or strokes. Masks don’t stop us from living; Covid does.
I closed my laptop to avoid reading the expected onslaught from haters, but, once I mustered the courage to look, found incredible support instead. Hundreds of new people followed me, and my email was suddenly full of donations and requests for signs. That one tweet appeared to do more than weeks of walking door to door.Read more »
Werner Heisenberg was on a boat with Niels Bohr and a few friends, shortly after he discovered his famous uncertainty principle in 1927. A bedrock of quantum theory, the principle states that one cannot determine both the velocity and the position of particles like electrons with arbitrary accuracy. Heisenberg’s discovery foretold of an intrinsic opposition between these quantities; better knowledge of one necessarily meant worse knowledge of the other. Talk turned to physics, and after Bohr had described Heisenberg’s seminal insight, one of his friends quipped, “But Niels, this is not really new, you said exactly the same thing ten years ago.”
In fact, Bohr had already convinced Heisenberg that his uncertainty principle was a special case of a more general idea that Bohr had been expounding for some time – a thread of Ariadne that would guide travelers lost through the quantum world; a principle of great and general import named the principle of complementarity.
Complementarity arose naturally for Bohr after the strange discoveries of subatomic particles revealed a world that was fundamentally probabilistic. The positions of subatomic particles could not be assigned with definite certainty but only with statistical odds. This was a complete break with Newtonian classical physics where particles had a definite trajectory, a place in the world order that could be predicted with complete certainty if one had the right measurements and mathematics at hand. In 1925, working at Bohr’s theoretical physics institute in Copenhagen, Heisenberg was Bohr’s most important protégé had invented quantum theory when he was only twenty-four. Two years later came uncertainty; Heisenberg grasped that foundational truth about the physical world when Bohr was away on a skiing trip in Norway and Heisenberg was taking a walk at night in the park behind the institute. Read more »
Among the books of the nineteenth century that have something important to say to us now Hegel’sElements of the Philosophy of Right(1820) deserves a prominent place. It’s not the obvious contender for a popular read in the 21st century. He doesn’t make it easy for himself, if getting readers was the aim as his‘grotesque and rocky melody’ (Marx) takes some getting used to, and one has to work a bit to to grasp his arguments. So its not a surprise that is more written about than actually read. This is a pity, as it is right up there with Plato’s Republic andHobbes’ Leviathan as one of the great works of ethical and political philosophy, with arguably even more direct and relevant things to tell us about our society than those other two classics.It’s a text that has been seriously misunderstood and misrepresented – most notoriously by those who represent him as having announced ‘the end of history’.It is true that something, for Hegel, is coming to an end in our time, but it isn’t exactly history.Hegel gives us an acute and pressingly relevant diagnosis of both the promise of modernity, and the contradictions that threaten it. Citizens in the age of Trump, Johnson, Xi Jinping and Biden would do well to attend to what he has to say in these pages.
It is a troubling text for liberals, not because it is anti liberal in the sense of being opposed to the values liberals hold dear (dignity of the individual, freedom of conscience, rights and so on) but rather because its author regards the insights of liberals as dangerously limited. Liberalism, with its focus on the freedom of the individual, sees the function of the state as guarantor of the freedom of the individual, in the context of a civil society and free market. But for Hegel, genuine freedom means more than this. Read more »
Where I live in Colorado there are unstable elements of the landscape that sometimes fail. In severe cases, millions of tons of rock, silt, sand, and mud can shift, leading to massive landslides. The signs aren’t always evident because the breakdown in the structural geology often happens quietly underground. The invisible changes can take hundreds or thousands of years, but when a landslide takes place, it is fast and violent. And the new landscape that comes after is unrecognizable.
Democracies, like landscapes, take time to erode and the erosion isn’t always obvious to those living within its structure. Seemingly small things like villainizing the press, vicious attacks on political candidates, gerrymandering districts, voter suppression, and allowing vast amounts of money to enter the campaign process are all erosive forces that, taken individually, don’t seem like much. But taken together, over time, they break down democracies and invite darker forms of government.
When you start to speak about democracy in this country, it can get wispy and abstract in a hurry. Most of us were taught about democracy as school children in breathless, fabled terms. It’s hard to get past the myths of our founders and our founding to consider both how young and how clunky our democracy really is. For perspective, the oldest tree in the country is a bristlecone pine named Methuselah that sits in eastern California and had its beginning as a seed over 4,000 years before the convention in Philadelphia that hot summer of 1787. We think of our democracy as about 230 years old from the time when the Constitution was signed and George Washington first took office. But it’s only been 156 years since African Americans were freed and only about 100 years since women were guaranteed the right to vote by the Nineteenth Amendment. So our true democracy, at least on paper, is really only about 100 years old, closer to the lifespan of a cottonwood tree. And yet just 100 years into it, since the day when everyone was theoretically given the right to vote, things in the United States are wobbling and teetering. Read more »
Where all are guilty, no one is; confessions of collective guilt are the best possible safeguard against the discovery of culprits, and the very magnitude of the crime the best excuse for doing nothing. – Hannah Arendt.
The quotation from Arendt is often thought to apply to the aftermath of the events of 1939-45, of the Nazi atrocities, especially, of course, the Holocaust. In fact, although it is fair to say it was considerations of that sort that prompted her into thinking about guilt and responsibility, she was very aware of the problematic nature of claims of collective guilt in the post war era. The question is about culpability: the way we ought to think about guilt. She rejected the idea that there is a kind of collective guilt, say of a whole nation (in 1945 the German people, and presumably their helpers in the occupied countries, of whom there were too many). We can widen the question to include Allied war crimes, which generally went unpunished. And of course, pressingly, we turn our gaze to our world and its burden of historical and ongoing crime and oppression.
Arendt rejected collective guilt in part because it tends to blur the difference between the specific actions for which actors need to be held to account, and the vague sense that guilt is shared. Guilt here is being seen in two senses: in the legal sense(X is guilty of a crime) and the feeling of guilt (X feels guilty). Arendt wants to separate them, partly to keep the sense that some are the actors who need to be held to account for actions but also for another important reason, which links to her more general concerns about the difference between politics and morality.
We need to distinguish between two concepts that are often associated: guilt and responsibility. The two concepts do go together, of course. We hold a person guilty of a crime if we regard them as responsible for committing it: that is why we don’t treat the mentally unfit in the same way we do people who know what they are doing is wrong. This applies to the minor and trivial as well as the unspeakably terrible. So Bob steals a bike and he is guilty of it, because he did it, knowingly. And Adolf Eichmann is guilty because he knowingly took part in the Holocaust – he is responsible for what he did. If I did neither of these things, then I am not responsible in this sense and not guilty. But can I be responsible for things I did not do? Read more »
How should people on the ‘progressive’ side of politics view patriotism? That question continues to vex those who would connect with what they suppose are the feelings of the bulk of the population. The answer will vary a good deal according to which country we are considering – the French left, for instance, has a very different relationship to la patrie to that of the US or the UK. In the case of the former, the side cast as traitors has historically been seen as the right. In the USA, at least in the second half of the 20th century it has been very different: those who protested against the Vietnam war were cast as the anti patriots. And today, we still hear that the left ‘hates our country’. The accusation is a damaging one, and has been wielded with glee by conservatives whenever they have the chance. So there is a tricky task for the left, it seems: to be seen as with and not against the mass of people in their identification with the nation and its history, without abandoning an internationalist perspective that rises above the narrow nationalism of the conservative.
I want to suggest here that we need to see that there is a problem with both the approach that seeks to inhabit the abstraction of simplistic universalism and the one that would rush into the warm embrace of parochial particularism (‘my country, right or wrong’ at its extreme). Instead, we need to see that the universal is something emergent, in and through the particular struggles and questions with which we are confronted. It is a concrete universal. Read more »
According to Donald Trump, in a statement made to MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” April 11, 2011, about the fake “birther controversy” of President Barack Obama—the opening salvo in Trump’s campaign of political disinformation—Obama’s “grandmother in Kenya said, ‘Oh, no, he was born in Kenya and I was there and I witnessed the birth.’ She’s on tape,” Trump went on. “I think that tape’s going to be produced fairly soon. Somebody is coming out with a book in two weeks, it will be very interesting.”
And, according to Vox News, President Trump, two weeks after losing the 2020 November 3rd election, tweeted, “I won the election!” He had warned many times prior to the vote that the only way he would lose the election would be if it was rigged, and the only way he would win was if the election was fair, a remarkably trenchant conjuration of the Three Witches’ spell on Macbeth, “Fair is foul, and foul is fair.”
And, according to Chanel Dion of One America News and Trump legal team lawyer, Sydney Powell, software engineers in Michigan and Georgia (and in parts of 26 other states) contracted with Dominion Voting Systems, which has financial ties to Nancy Pelosi, Dianne Feinstein, George Soros, the Clinton Foundation, and the seven-years-dead Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, to make ballot-counting machines switch votes from Republican to Democrat presidential candidates or to leave out a prescribed number of votes for President Trump in Joe Biden’s favor. Read more »
In the presidential election of 2016, around 45% of adult eligible to vote in the USA did not vote. It isn’t disputed that voter suppression, disproportionately affecting people of colour, was one of the causes. Another seems to be a cynicism, or apathy about the process itself. And there may be other reasons. But however you look at it, a situation in which nearly half of the eligible population doesn’t vote in an election for the highest office in the land ought to be causing a good deal of alarm, and not just for those political actors who reckon to be most damaged by this blank statistic. But then, ‘democracy’ has always been rather more of an unfulfilled promise than an accomplished fact, even in the Land of the Free (as well as in the land that boasts the ‘Mother of Parliaments’, where I live).
Slow Progress
In the years following the independence of the 13 colonies from Britain, voting rights for women and native Americans were only extended very gradually (1920 and 1924 respectively). For African Americans the picture is complicated by the different laws in the states, even after the Emancipation Proclamation. Many non white Americans weren’t actually able to exercise their right to vote in the segregated south well into the middle of the 20th century. Even today, extensive gerrymandering and selective use of felony disbarments as well as ID voting conditions continue to be used to exclude black citizens from expressing their democratic choice at the ballot box. And there remains the misuse of the election ballot and its ‘hanging chads’, as well as the power of the Electoral College to modify inconvenient electoral outcomes. Failing that, there is the similarity between the two main parties to act as a block on radical change. Much of this is well known.
What is less often remarked is that even at independence poor whites couldn’t vote either (Washington was elected on a franchise that only extended to 6% of the population). The franchise was extended to poorer white men during the 19th century (different states had different laws and President Jackson, that killer of native Americans, was pivotal in extending democracy to white men). But from the start it was a designed as a limited democracy, and in many ways it has stayed limited. The idea that the USA was actually founded on the principle of full democratic participation is quite mistaken. It was founded on the notion of limited and constrained democracy. Only pressure from below has partially changed things. Read more »
Johnny von Neumann enjoying some of the lighter aspects of technology. The cap lights up when its wearer blows into the tube.
“All experience shows that even smaller technological changes than those now in the cards profoundly transform political and social relationships. Experience also shows that these transformations are not a priori predictable and that most contemporary “first guesses” concerning them are wrong.” – John von Neumann
Is the coronavirus crisis political or technological? All present analysis would seem to say that this pandemic was a result of gross political incompetence, lack of preparedness and impulsive responses by world leaders and government. But this view would be narrow because it would privilege the proximate cause over the ultimate one. The true, deep cause underlying the pandemic is technological. The coronavirus arose as a result of a hyperconnected world that made human reaction times much slower than global communication and the transport of physical goods and people across international borders. For all our skill in creating these technologies, we did not equip ourselves to manage the network effects and sudden failures in social, economic and political systems created by them. An even older technology, the transfer of genetic information between disparate species, was what enabled the whole crisis in the first place.
This privileging of political forces over technological ones is typical of the mistakes that we often make in seeking the root cause of problems. Political causes, greatly amplified by the twenty-four hour news cycle and social media, are illusory and may even be important in the short-term, but there is little doubt that the slow but sure grind of technological change that penetrates deeper and deeper into social and individual choices will be responsible for most of the important transformations we face during our lifetimes and beyond. On scales of a hundred to five hundred years, there is little doubt that science and technology rather than any political or social event cause the biggest changes in the fortunes of nations and individuals: as Richard Feynman once put it, a hundred years from now, the American Civil War would pale into provincial insignificance compared to that other development from the 1860s – the crafting of the basic equations of electromagnetism by James Clerk Maxwell. The former led to a new social contract for the United States; the latter underpins all of modern civilization – including politics, war and peace.
The question, therefore, is not whether we can survive this or that political party or president. The question is, can we survive technology? Read more »
In daily life we get along okay without what we call thinking. Indeed, most of the time we do our daily round without anything coming to our conscious mind – muscle memory and routines get us through the morning rituals of washing and making coffee. And when we do need to bring something to mind, to think about it, it’s often not felt to cause a lot of friction: where did I put my glasses? When does the train leave? and so on.
In the game of chess, some of the greats will concede their most valuable pieces for a superior position on the board. In a 1994 game against the grandmaster Vladimir Kramnik, Gary Kasparov sacrificed his queen early in the game with a move that made no sense to a middling chess player like me. But a few moves later Kasparov won control of the center board and marched his pieces into an unstoppable array. Despite some desperate work to evade Kasparov’s scheme, Kramnik’s king was isolated and then trapped into checkmate by a rook and a knight.
A Republican used to be someone like Dwight Eisenhower, a moderate who worked well with the opposing party, even meeting weekly with their leadership in the Senate and House. Eisenhower expanded social security benefits and, against the more right-wing elements of his party, appointed Earl Warren to be the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Warren, you’ll remember, wrote the majority opinion of Brown v Board of Education, Miranda v Arizona, and Loving v Virginia. If Dwight Eisenhower were alive today, he would be branded a RINO and a communist by his own party. I suspect he would become registered as unaffiliated. 
trustee. It’s a relatively minor position and non-partisan, so there’s no budget or staff. There’s also no speeches or debates, just lawn signs and fliers. Campaigning is like an expensive two-month long job interview that requires a daily walking and stairs regimen that goes on for hours. Recently, some well-meaning friends who are trying to help me win (by heeding the noise of the loudest voices) cautioned me to limit any writing or posting about Covid. It turns people off and will cost me votes. I agreed, but then had second thoughts the following day, and tweeted this:
Where I live in Colorado there are unstable elements of the landscape that sometimes fail. In severe cases, millions of tons of rock, silt, sand, and mud can shift, leading to massive landslides. The signs aren’t always evident because the breakdown in the structural geology often happens quietly underground. The invisible changes can take hundreds or thousands of years, but when a landslide takes place, it is fast and violent. And the new landscape that comes after is unrecognizable.
How should people on the ‘progressive’ side of politics view patriotism? That question continues to vex those who would connect with what they suppose are the feelings of the bulk of the population. The answer will vary a good deal according to which country we are considering – the French left, for instance, has a very different relationship to la patrie to that of the US or the UK. In the case of the former, the side cast as traitors has historically been seen as the right. In the USA, at least in the second half of the 20th century it has been very different: those who protested against the Vietnam war were cast as the anti patriots. And today, we still hear that the left ‘hates our country’. The accusation is a damaging one, and has been wielded with glee by conservatives whenever they have the chance. So there is a tricky task for the left, it seems: to be seen as with and not against the mass of people in their identification with the nation and its history, without abandoning an internationalist perspective that rises above the narrow nationalism of the conservative.
According to Donald Trump, in 
In the presidential election of 2016, around 45% of adult eligible to vote in the USA did not vote. It isn’t disputed that voter suppression, disproportionately affecting people of colour, was one of the causes. Another seems to be a cynicism, or apathy about the process itself. And there may be other reasons. But however you look at it, a situation in which nearly half of the eligible population doesn’t vote in an election for the highest office in the land ought to be causing a good deal of alarm, and not just for those political actors who reckon to be most damaged by this blank statistic. But then, ‘democracy’ has always been rather more of an unfulfilled promise than an accomplished fact, even in the Land of the Free (as well as in the land that boasts the ‘Mother of Parliaments’, where I live).