Barcelona’s Revolutionary Requiem Asserts Enlightenment Values

Posted on by Dick Edelstein

by Dick Edelstein

Photo: David Ruano

Following the opening night performance of Mozart’s Requiem in Barcelona last month, I left the Gran Teatre del Liceu harboring the thought that this revolutionary setting was a slick riposte to the existential challenge of malevolent Trumpian ideology, a notion that could have motivated theatre director Romeo Castellucci’s approach to staging Mozart’s much beloved and final work in his Liceu debut. Castellucci is already well known to Barcelona theatre audiences, and he is planning to return to the Liceu in the near future with his own opera project.

This staged production of the Requiem premiered at the Aix-en-Provence Festival. Although it is a mass for the dead, the Requiem, like much of Mozart’s music, expresses an irrepressible joie de vivre and is more about celebrating the cycle of life than mourning a death. Here we enter into the labyrinth of ambiguities and controversies that surround this work. Mozart’s views on the Church, society, Masonic beliefs, and enlightenment values molded his attitude towards life and death. This tension of ideas is manifest in the interplay between the text, music, and dramatic symbolism in Castellucci’s highly kinetic, fully-staged setting that includes folk dancing, gestural movement, choreography, set decoration, and multimedia support.

The opening scene evokes a tragic mood as an elderly woman sits in a bare bedroom placidly staring at a small mid-century tv set until the scene changes to depict her death and burial. Throughout the work, the chorus performs movements, gestures and folk dances in scenes that represent community activity and folk rituals. Although the Requiem usually takes an hour to perform, the inclusion of five additional short devotional pieces by Mozart has resulted in a 90-minute running time that works well for musical theatre. Castellucci has previously staged innovative performances of devotional music, always managing to surprise his audience, and he seems to prefer these works to Italian melodrama. In this case, the Requiem provides a sound foundation for a theatrical setting, and the narrative that emerges is only partly rooted in 18th century customs and beliefs since it resonates with our own times as well.

The program notes make the extraordinary claim that Mozart’s immensely popular work “is not just the culmination of a late stage of Mozart’s oeuvre, but the pinnacle of musical history…”  That’s a pretty bold claim, but let’s have a look at a snippet of this work that shows some of the qualities of the piece as a whole. Read more »

Friday, March 7, 2025

The Pharisees’ Fence: Misplaced Concreteness And Liminal Unease

Posted on by Jochen Szangolies

by Jochen Szangolies

Image credit: Randy Fath on Unsplash

When asked about the foundational technologies of human civilization, most people will probably point to the wheel, or fire, or maybe the lever. Perhaps the atlatl as arguably humanity’s first machine might make the cut. Few, I think, would point to the humble fence: rather than being a construct, fences often seem to us merely a recognition of divides already present, and thus, hardly a separate technology on their own. The land is divided according to ownership, and the fences erected upon it merely mark this preexisting reality.

In truth, fences, both physical and metaphorical, fulfill an important role in the transition from a natural, unmodified, technology-free world to a reality structured according to human design. Their prevalence in metaphor is evidence of this: you can sit on them, tear them down, they are in our heads, the grass is greener on their far side, good ones allegedly make good neighbors, you can mend them, or swing for them in an attempt to achieve your most far-out performance.

The primary role of the fence is that of demarcation. Put on an originally pristine plain, it divides it into a ‘here’ and a ‘there’. Interpreting each side in terms of possession, it distinguishes between ‘mine’ and ‘theirs’; in terms of identity, it separates ‘us’ from ‘them’. It takes a continuum of possibilities and replaces it with a sharp distinction. As such, it is the original digital technology.

(Parenthetically, fences are also the original capitalist technology: not just in defining the notion of ownership, but through the concept of enclosure, the appropriation of common land that was worked by all, to be rented back to its original cultivators.)

Fences are the ultimate expression of the human tendency to categorize, to parcel off, to structure. They are a quintessentially lobsterian creation: as its hard carapace rigidly shields its vulnerable interior from a dangerous environment, so does the fence protect the shepherd’s flock from the roaming wolf. As the lobster’s analytic claw dissects whatever catches its attention, so do fences slice the land into discrete plots.

There is no question of the usefulness of fences. But the impulse to dissect, to rein in, and to replace vague continua with clear boundaries can all too easily result in a misplaced concreteness where real ambiguity exists, and in hard dichotomies where the reality is one of continuity across perceived differences. Read more »

Welcome To The Family Floyd

Posted on by Eric Schenck

by Eric Schenck

It’s Christmas of 2013. In my family we usually have some kind of white elephant gift exchange, and this year the theme is “Bizarre of the Bazaar.” The weirder the better.

All the presents lay stacked on a table, ready to be unwrapped. We play with dice and booze. Around and around they go, and I end up with a miniature treasure chest. 

I don’t know what’s inside, but it’s my turn to open it up. I unlock the chest, and there, staring back at me, in all his glory…

Is an 18-inch long clown. His face is white, his cheeks and nose cherry red. He wears an eternal smile.

The game proceeds, but I’m drawn to him. I know which present I want. 20 minutes later, after countless laughs and a few stiff drinks, the clown is mine.

We sit around the table and brainstorm names. His happiness seems to hide something. This clown looks jolly, but to us, he knows more than he lets on. There is a certain sense of melancholy. He looks at you, and as you look back, you realize just how much those little eyes have seen.

It takes a while, but we finally settle on what to call him. A name to match the melancholy. Something that says “I’ll laugh at your jokes, but the pointless nature of existence is always in the back of my mind.”

We have a new member of the family…

And his name is Floyd.

*

To call this “weird” doesn’t do it justice. Adding an 18-inch clown to our family tree is strange. So much so, that I dare not share it with anybody outside of my immediate family.

Is it abnormal? Yes. But somehow, it fits. Some families have secrets they can’t possibly share. Some families have dark boxes they’d rather not open.

We have Floyd. Read more »

Thursday, March 6, 2025

This Time It’s Different

Posted on by Barry Goldman

by Barry Goldman

I was 20-something and fresh out of law school in 1980 when Ronald Reagan was elected. Like the rest of my demographic, I was morbidly depressed about it. So it was meaningful for me when I saw the Weavers’ movie Wasn’t That a Time and heard the great Lee Hays say:

We have a thought for the year. We’ve been around long enough to tell you: Be of good cheer. This too will pass. I’ve had kidney stones and I know.

The Weavers had been hauled before the House Un-American Activities Committee and blacklisted by the industry. Hays was an alcoholic, a diabetic double amputee, and he would die within months. Kids like me were all bent out of shape about the Reagan ascendency. But old hands like Hays had seen far worse. He wasn’t going to let a simple-minded B-actor like Reagan freak him out. I aspired to that kind of equanimity.

Around the same time, I sat in on a political science lecture by a professor who had been a foreign service officer. He must have been significantly younger than I am now, but he seemed grizzled to me at the time. He said all revolutionary movements are essentially utopian. The central idea is that there is a madman at the wheel. If we could just knock out the madman and grab the wheel, we could steer to safety. He said, sadly, this is a juvenile fantasy. The bitter truth, he told us, is there is no madman. And there is no wheel.

The world is much more complicated than the slogans of the revolutionaries would have it. There are no simple solutions. There are not even any simple problems.

Worse, the idea that there are simple solutions leads inevitably to fanaticism. The notion that there is a simple truth, we know it, and that guy over there is preventing us from reaching it, leads us to excuse pushing that guy out of the way. Read more »

Wednesday, March 5, 2025

Crises of Democracy

Posted on by Kevin Lively

by Kevin Lively

In the six weeks since taking office, the Trump administration has moved with an alacrity boarding on mania, pursuing the tactical doctrine of Steve Bannon: flooding the zone. In a head spinning few weeks, the effort to reshape the federal government (i.e. make it small enough to drown in a bathtub), spearheaded by Elon Musk have done the following: stop all federal hiring, put all federal diversity equity and inclusion staff on leave, attempted to freeze trillions of dollars in federal funding, offered two million federal workers the option of being paid without working until September – then being fired, installed Elon loyalists inside the highly sensitive treasury payments system (Clinton’s secretary of labor was unamused), moved to cut 90% of USAID’s budget, moved to shut down the consumer financial protection bureau, et cetera, et cetera.

While many of these moves have been challenged by the courts, the sheer scale of this attempt to effectively destroy broad swathes of the federal government is nonetheless shocking. Surely such a broad based attack can’t really be in the interests of Trump’s voters and financial backers? For example, Veterans Affairs doctors are among the 2 million employees who received the offer to quit, and what is really to be gained by cutting funding for HIV medication for South Africa? If the goal was really to save money to address, say, the debt, then you would want to increase IRS resources not fire 6700 members of its staff. This raises the obvious question: “Whose interest is this actually in?”

As I discussed in my previous column, there is a rich history from which the Trump administration came, and the logic of these actions is no exception. In fact proposals to eliminate or reduce many of the functions of government have been widely discussed with varying degrees of enthusiasm among both conservative and liberal policy planners for decades. Albeit none have been able to act with as much zeal as we are now seeing. Most obviously we can look to Reagan as the first real fruition of this spirit. During the 1980 presidential debates he said quite plainly that he wanted to introduce tax cuts in order to reduce government spending. In his eight years, he reduced the top marginal tax rate from 73% to 28%, and cut the highest personal income tax bracket from 70% to 38.5%. This was an insufficiently enthusiastic attack for Pat Robertson. In Robertson’s 1988 presidential bid he promised to cut the budget by $100 billion while eliminating every single Carter holdover from among the 100,000 federal employees who could be terminated at will.

Clinton, although coming from the less enthusiastic side, still passed a substantial welfare cut in 1996 pushed on him by Newt Gingrich. This reform introduced work requirements and devolved the program down to the states as the scandal wracked TANF program. The effects were a rapid drop off in recipients of welfare and medicare: participation dropped by as much as 53% as early as 1998. Needless to say the Bush tax cuts continued the streak, and despite facing the worst financial and deficit crisis in modern memory, Obama made no moves to plug the massive hole in the federal budget from the previous decades of tax cuts on the wealthy. Biden, a hold over from the waning days of the New Deal, appeared to be a last gasp attempt to reverse this trend. Now Trump has shifted into an unrestrained overdrive of the most conservative elements.

If this argument holds, then it appears that there has been some tacit bipartisan consensus which has predominated over the last 40 years or so. Clearly this is a nuanced phenomena with many disagreements. However in broad strokes it seems clear that both parties seemed mostly content to let the government budget and its social programs erode. Read more »

Tuesday, March 4, 2025

R.I.P. AI Safety?

Posted on by Malcolm Murray

by Malcolm Murray

The Paris AI Summit the other week might have been the end of a 10-year run for AI safety as Azeem Azhar, the creator of Exponential View, put it. The concept of AI safety, which can be said to have started in earnest with Nick Bostrom’s 2014 book Superintelligence, had a 10-year run, in which it grew in understanding and acceptance among the public and decisionmakers. Subsequent books, like Max Tegmark’s Life 3.0 and Stuart Russell’s Human Compatible, further established the field. High-level AI safety principles were declared in Asilomar in 2017, at that time by all notable AI scientists and leaders.

Further, this was already of course before AI was even actually any good at anything but very narrow tasks. When AI capabilities actually caught up with the hypothetical concerns, with GPT-3 in 2020 and came into the eye of the public in a broad way with ChatGPT in 2022, it led to AI senate hearings, the UK Bletchley Park summit, the Biden Executive Order, the voluntary commitments on the AI labs, the attempted bill SB-1047 in California and the addition of general-purpose models to the EU AI Act.

That 10-year run now seems to be largely over, or at least severely weakened. We had already seen the Trump administration repealing Biden’s Executive Order on AI, removing the ability for the US government to test AI developers’ models for safety. Then, at the Paris AI Action Summit, it became abundantly clear that the world has turned away from AI safety. The main summit had banners stating “Science, not Science Fiction”, the speech from J.D. Vance was very clear that the focus would be only on AI opportunities, Macron focused on investments – the announcement of a new French data center – not mentioning any downsides (“plug, baby, plug”). The voluntary AI developer commitments – the Frontier Safety Frameworks – that had been a focus of earlier UK and Korea summits were glossed over completely. Perhaps most significantly, the formidable State of the Science report led by Yoshua Bengio, the IPCC-style report which was commissioned at the earlier summits and completed for this one, was not mentioned at all in the main event. This report, which was meant to establish a common basis for discussion, was in fact relegated to a side event the week before, at a university two hours outside of Paris. Read more »

Personal Identity and Willful Ignorance

Posted on by Rachel Robison-Greene

by Rachel Robison-Greene

Ada sits alone at a table contemplating whether she should drink the liquid from the glass in front of her.  She’s been promised that the result of doing so will be an immediate revision to her set of beliefs.  If she drinks from the glass, she will believe only things that are true.  She won’t become omniscient; she won’t know everything.  The liquid will simply replace all false beliefs she has with corresponding true ones.  Ada likes to think that she is intellectually humble.  She likes to believe that she generally acts in accordance with reliable processes for forming beliefs.  Most importantly, Ada believes that she values truth.  Nevertheless, she can’t shake the feeling that drinking from the glass would be a kind of suicide.

In The Sources of Normativity, philosopher Christine Korsgaard argues that reasons for action spring from what she calls our “practical identities.”  These practical identities are ways of conceiving of ourselves that we value and hold dear. For example, I may view myself as a friend, a mother, a lover, etc., and the reasons I have for behaving in various ways are picked out by what those identities permit or forbid.  The identities that provide us with overriding reasons are those we’d rather die than give up.  As Korsgaard says, “The only thing that could be as bad or worse than death is something that for us amounts to death—not being ourselves anymore.”

Harry Frankfurt makes a similar argument in his book, Reasons of Love. He argues that the things we care about are the sources of our reasons and the things that we love create what he calls “volitional necessities”—they generate reasons for action that can’t fail to motivate us, at least to a degree.  The things we love and care about define who we are and what we’re willing to do.

Ada bonds with her sister over their shared love of music.  They enjoy the work of one particular artist above all others.  In particular, they admire this artist’s skill and creativity.  They also share her values.  If Ada were to learn that this artist actually didn’t write her own music, it would not only impact her perception of the artist, it might also impact her relationship with her sister.  If she were to learn that the artist was actually cruel, manipulative, or abusive, she might find her new assessment of the artist’s character at odds with her sister’s assessment. What would happen then? Read more »

Monday, March 3, 2025

Does Wealth Inequality Matter?

Posted on by Martin Butler

by Martin Butler

In the UK and USA the gap between the richest and poorest ten percent continues to grow.  Few would argue that inequality resulting from racism, sexism, disablism or any other sort of prejudice is morally acceptable. Wealth inequality, however, being a matter of degree, is far less straightforward. The familiar nightmare vision of totalitarian ‘communism’ hangs over the idea that everyone should have exactly the same level of wealth.  Most accept that some level of wealth inequality is a positive good, in that it incentivises effort and excellence. But if we agree that wealth inequality pe se is not necessarily wrong, at what point does it become unacceptable? And why would going beyond this point be unacceptable?[1]

Many would argue that equal opportunities are what matter. We can imagine a society with excellent equal opportunities that nevertheless has significant levels of wealth inequality. And we assume here that all wealth is acquired legally though legitimate means. A society with excellent equal opportunities would be one where the basics – education, healthcare, housing, a living wage and so on – were readily available right across the board so that the young of the poorest in society would start life not necessarily on a level playing field, but at least on one that was not hopelessly skewed against them. Of course family influences are crucial but these are always going to vary, so perfect equal opportunities – like perfect anything – is for the birds. Once off the starting blocks, those from the poorest background in such a society would have a similar (or at least not too dissimilar) chance to succeed as those from higher wealth groups. No matter what their background, those who failed to take the opportunities on offer, or chose not to take them, would be likely to fall into the lower wealth brackets. There would still be significant wealth inequality but this would result from individual effort and talent or the lack of it, which would mean high levels of upward and downward social mobility. Implicit in the vision of modern liberal democracies is the ideal of meritocracy, allowing for wealth inequality due to differences in talent and effort but finding inequality based on prejudice and discrimination morally abhorrent.

What’s wrong with this vision? One problem is the fact that in most liberal democracies, though upward mobility is not unusual – despite the fact that in recent years it has declined considerably – downward mobility is far less common. This is in terms of wealth rather than income, and the reason for this is inheritance. Societies, despite the move towards individualism, are in the main composed of families. Every individual has a mother and a father who will usually pass on any accumulated wealth to their offspring. This exposes one of the contradictions in the values of the liberal world view. On the one hand we fully endorse equal opportunities, but on the other we regard it as natural that we have a right to hand on accumulated wealth to our offspring. Inheritance taxes are unpopular because they seem to undermine this right. But a society where inherited wealth plays an increasing role in wealth inequality is a society where opportunities are less equal. Inherited wealth – or simply having well-off parents – increases an individual’s opportunities in all sorts of obvious ways that are unrelated to the merits of the offspring who receive these benefits. Inheritance works directly against meritocracy.[2] Read more »

Poem by Jim Culleny

Posted on by Jim Culleny

Two young men greeted a new crew member on a ship’s quarterdeck 60 years ago and, in a matter of weeks, by simple challenge, introduced this then 18-year-old who’d never really read a book through, to the life that can be found in them. —Thank you Anthony Gaeta and Edmund Budde for your life-altering input.

Narraganset Evening Walk to the Base Library

Bay to my right (my rite of road and sea)
I hold to its shoulder, I sail, I walk the line.
The bay moved as I moved, but in retrograde
as if the way I moved had something to do
with the way the black bay moved, how it tracked,
how it perfectly matched my pace, but
slipping behind, opposed, relative
—Albert would have a formula or two
to spin about this if he were here.
Behind too, over my shoulder, my steel grey ship at pier,
transfigured in cloud of cool white light
spraying from lamps on tall poles ashore,
and aboard, from lamps on mast tops and yards
among needles of antennae gleaming above its
raked stack in electric cloud, enmeshed
in photon aura, its edges feathered into night,
enveloped as it lay upon shimmering skin of bay.
From here, she’s as still as the thought from which she came:
upheld steel on water arrayed in light, heavy as weight, sheer
as a bubble, the line of pier etched clean, keen as a

horizon knife, library ahead, ship at night behind.

The bay to my right, as I said, slid dark
at the confluence of all nights,
the lights of low barracks and tall offices
of the base ahead all aimed west skipped off bay
each of its trillion tribulations jittering at lightspeed
fractured by bay’s breeze-moiled black surface
in splintered sight.
Ahead the books I aimed to read,
books I’d come to love since Tony & Ed,
in the generosity of their own fresh enlightenment
had teamed to bring new tools to this greenhorn’s
stymied brain, springing its self-locked latch,
to let in fresh air crisp as this breeze
blowing across a bay from here to everywhere,
troubling Narragansett from then to
me here now.

Jim Culleny
12/16/19 Rev. 3/2/25

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Sunday, March 2, 2025

Giselle: a non-fiction excerpt from “The Berber Father”, a novel in progress

Posted on by David Winner and Angela Starita

by David Winner

After  Giselle died, I wanted to define the role that she played in my life, an uncommon relationship, a step-grandmother.

Giselle on the left in Poland in the early 1930s

Her existence had been presented to me by my parents as a fait accompli, an addendum to my list of older relatives: Baba and Jeta, my maternal grandparents from Prague who ran a bakery together in Cleveland, my father’s mother Faie, bone thin, friendly but extravagantly self-involved, and her ex-husband, the dour, bald Grandfather Percy who married Giselle in the early 1950s.

Giselle was the only adult that I knew by first name.  Giselle’s last name was Winner like ours, but it would have been ridiculous to call her Mrs. Winner or Grandmother Giselle as no kid had three grandmothers.

Like a breath of perfumed wind, Giselle occasionally blew into Charlottesville where I grew up.  From whence she came and to whence she returned, I don’t think that I thought to ask.

Several decades after her death when I first started visiting Christopher, her son and my uncle, in Rome in what had been Giselle’s apartment, he told me the bare outlines of her story.

There were photographs of an adolescent Giselle in 1930’s Poland, blond, ethereal, standing outside a grand house in the country.  Grace Kelly comes to mind.

When the Germans invaded, Giselle’s family found themselves in their crosshairs.  My mother wondered if they were Jews, but nothing suggested that to be true.

The Germans killed her father, her uncle, her siblings.

But Giselle and her mother escaped.  Her mother went to France, but Giselle took one of the trains that ran between Nazi-friendly territories to Fascist Rome.

In Rome, an illegal alien and perhaps a Jew, Giselle did everything that she could to survive, including, Christopher’s dark speculation, sex work. Read more »

On Accepting Difference

Posted on by Marie Snyder

by Marie Snyder 

I recently watched the lovely film, A Real Pain, about two cousins (played by Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin) who travel to Poland to visit their departed grandmother’s home. In the first 20 minutes of the movie we’re shown two dramatically different personalities, both neurotic in their own way, but one more inward and the other laser focused on other people. It’s in our vernacular to understand the characters as introverted and extraverted, but there is still disagreement over what that means and, more importantly, what to do with that information. 

I think we’ve veered off course since Jung’s Psychological Types, now over a century old, the precursor to the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) and more recently the Five-Factor Model (FFM) or “Big Five.” There are lots of other personality inventories like John Holland’s six Personal-Orientation types, Arthur Brooks’ mad scientists, cheerleaders, poets, and judges, and Martin Seligman’s top five strengths, but MBTI and FFM seem to have sticking power. 

We automatically notice the similarities and differences between ourselves and others, which can become shortcuts to establish a connection and a sense of identity; despite the questionable validity of the inventories over these hundred years, they can provoke acceptance of ourselves and others if used wisely. Read more »

Friday, February 28, 2025

Baker/No-Baker, Thinker/No-Thinker

Posted on by Mark DeLong

by Mark R. DeLong

An English baker in 1944 pours dough from a very large metal bowl. The bowl is about 2 meters in diameter and is tilting on a rack designed to make moving the bowl and pouring its contents easier.
A Modern Bakery – the Work of Wonder Bakery, Wood Green, London, England, UK, 1944.

“Computerized baking has profoundly changed the balletic physical activities of the shop floor,” Richard Sennett wrote about a Boston bakery he had visited and much later revisited. The old days (in the early 1970s) featured “balletic” ethnic Greek bakers who thrusted their hands into dough and water and baked by sight and smell. But in the 1990s, Sennett’s Boston bakers “baked” bread with the click of a mouse.1Richard Sennett reported about visits he made to the bakery about 25 years apart. The first visits took place when he and Jonathan Cobb were working on The Hidden Injuries of Class (Knopf, 1972), though Sennett and Cobb do not specifically recount the visits in their book. The second visits took place when Sennett was working on The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism (W.W. Norton, 1998). “Now the bakers make no physical contact with the materials or the loaves of bread, monitoring the entire process via on-screen icons which depict, for instance, images of bread color derived from data about the temperature and baking time of the ovens; few bakers actually see the loaves of bread they make.” He concludes: “As a result of working in this way, the bakers now no longer actually know how to bake bread.” [My emphasis.]

The stark contrast of Sennett’s visits, which I do not think he anticipated when he first visited in the 1970s, are stunning, and at the center of the changes are automation, changes in ownership of the bakery, and the organization of work that resulted. Technological change and organizational change—interlocked and mutually supportive, if not co-determined—reconfigured the meaning of work and the human skills that “baking” required, making the work itself stupifyingly illegible to the workers even though their tasks were less physically demanding than they had been 25 years before.

Sennett’s account of the work of baking focuses on the “personal consequences” of work in the then-new circumstances of the “new capitalism.” But I find the role of technology in the 1990s, when Microsoft Windows was remaking worklife, a particularly important feature of the story. Along with relentless consolidation of business ownership, computer technologies reset the rules of labor processes and re-centered skills. Of course, the story is not even new; the interplay of technology and work has long pressed human labor into new forms and configurations, allowing certain freedoms and delights along with new oppressions and horrors. One hopes providing more delight than horror.

Artificial intelligence will be no different, except that the panorama of action will shift. The shop floor will certainly see changes, but other changes, less focused on place, will also come about. For the Boston bakers, if they’re still at it, it may mean fewer, if any, clicks on icons, though those who “bake” may still have to empty trash cans of discarded burnt loaves (which Sennett, in the 1990s, considered “apt symbols of what has happened to the art of baking”).

In the past few weeks, researchers at Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University reported results of a study that laid out some markers of how the use of AI influences “critical thinking” or, as I wish the authors had phrased it, how AI influences those whose job requires thinking critically. Other recent studies have received less attention, though they, too, have zeroed in on the relationship of AI use and people’s critical thinking. This study, coming from a leader of AI, drew special attention. Read more »

Footnotes

  • 1
    Richard Sennett reported about visits he made to the bakery about 25 years apart. The first visits took place when he and Jonathan Cobb were working on The Hidden Injuries of Class (Knopf, 1972), though Sennett and Cobb do not specifically recount the visits in their book. The second visits took place when Sennett was working on The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism (W.W. Norton, 1998).

One thought for living in a high-tech world: The groove before the machine

Posted on by Bill Benzon

by William Benzon

That’s a highly condensed form of an idea that began with this thought: You have no business making decisions about the deployment of technology if you can’t keep people on the dance floor for three sets on a weekday night. There are a lot of assumptions packed into that statement. The crucial point, however, is the juxtaposition of keeping people dancing (the groove) with making decisions about technology (the machine).

What did I have in mind? I was specifically thinking about the decisions currently being made about the development and deployment of artificial intelligence and the hype driving those decisions. In particular I was thinking about pouring billions of dollars in developing the infrastructure to support AI. The most prominent example is the Stargate project, introduced by President Trump in the presence of executives Larry Ellison, Masayoshi Son and Sam Altman:

Really? Color me skeptical.

What bothers me is that these decisions are being made by a relatively small group of billionaire technology executives, but the resulting technology commitments will affect us all. What do these people know or care about human happiness? How does that figure into their decisions? Is it really true that more wealth for the technology sector, means more wealth and happiness for all of us?

That’s where keeping people on the dance floor comes in. Speaking as a musician with considerable experience, I know that that is not easy. I also know that, when it works, it’s the best feeling in the world. This, or something like it, is a real question. Read more »

Thursday, February 27, 2025

A Sense Of Balance: Getting To Like Ike

Posted on by Michael Liss

by Michael Liss

Too many people don’t care what happens so long as it doesn’t happen to them. —William Howard Taft, former President and Chief Justice

Some may belittle politics, but we know, who are engaged in it, that it is where people stand tall. —Tony Blair, Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Somewhere between those two statements, made by two exceptionally accomplished and intelligent men, is a truth. Somewhere there is a fulcrum. There has to be.

Portrait of Dwight D. Eisenhower, by James Anthony Wills, 1967. White House Historical Association/White House Collection.

Where? If you think about it, contemporary politics is often just a sorting mechanism. We voters pick a team, we align our views with that team, and we tighten our bond to that team through ideologically similar traditional and social media. In doing so, we become so consumed with pursuing our own interests that we often lose our capacity for empathy. To Taft’s point, we don’t care what happens as long as it doesn’t happen to us. We don’t care who pays for it, so long as we get it.

What about politicians? Do they “stand tall”? Do they stand for everyone? We know they often don’t. To rise in the party, and/or to keep their jobs, the pols needs to hew ever closer to whatever idea (or person) exercises the strongest gravimetric force. The distillation process continues until most individuality disappears, not just in the ambitious (or worried) pol who learns to squawk in lockstep, but also in the vast majority of rank-and-file voters. Both groups look past, or even take up positions that, in calmer times they might have thought disqualifying as a matter of principle—or even manifestly against their own interests.

Nothing said here is particularly new—even more so now, as both major political parties have become less ideologically diverse over the last several decades. There’s an acute imbalance right now because Trump is such an accelerant, but if we ever get past the Trump Era with our traditional basic values intact, we are going to need to find a sense of balance again. To quote Lincoln, we must “disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.”

Just how do we disenthrall ourselves? Read more »

Lessons From Singapore: Stamping Out Corruption

Posted on by Eric Feigenbaum

by Eric Feigenbaum

When I first traveled to Thailand at age 23, friends warned me that should I ever encounter the police – for any reason, whether I was right or wrong – to quickly offer them 100 baht. One friend I made during my backpacking period got in trouble for smoking a joint on the beach – marijuana being VERY illegal in Thailand at that time.

“They arrested me and I knew I had no longer than the time it would take to get to the police station to bribe my way out,” my friend told a group later. “So I asked to go to the ATM and they took me! They told me 10,000 baht [roughly $230 at that time] would be good. So I gave it to them and they let me go with a warning to never make that mistake again.”

While $230 wasn’t a small sum to a 22-year-old backpacker, it was a very small price to avoid potentially a decade in a Thai jail.

During the year I lived in Thailand, I learned it was common for businesses to pay “protection fees” to the local police. When I subsequently worked in Taiwan, I learned the same basic rules applied. In China, a little money ensured government officials stamped contracts and forms. When I lived in Bali, the police sometimes setup “checkpoints” along key roads where drivers slowed, rolled down their windows and handed cash – usually 20,000 rupiah (roughly $2 USD at that time) to an officer – not a word exchanged.

Corruption has a long history across most Asian societies.

When Singapore became an independent republic in 1965, it was no different. Only its largely British educated founders – many of whom studied at Cambridge and the London School of Economics – hated corruption. Besides the inherent iniquity of it, they understood the drag corruption places on economic development. While none are free from corruption, first world countries generally eschew graft and do their best to minimize it.

“It is sad to see how in many countries, national heroes have let their country slide down the drain to filth and squalor, corruption and degradation, where the kickback and the rake-off has become a way of life, and the whole country sinks in debasement and despair,” said Singapore’s founding Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew.

Unfortunately, corruption is costly to extinguish. Read more »

Wednesday, February 26, 2025

And When He Got to Moving

Posted on by Jerry Cayford

by Jerry Cayford

Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

“If I Had My Way” is one of the great protest songs (aka “Samson and Delilah”). The biblical story of Samson expresses the theme that a primitive and chaotic force beneath protest can escape all restraint. Samson is a destroyer: “He lifted up that jawbone and he swung it over his head / And when he got to moving ten thousand was dead.” No specification of who exactly died is necessary, for it doesn’t much matter with Samson.

We might think the story is a warning, but what makes “If I Had My Way” so electrifying is the chorus celebrating Samson’s destructive spirit:

If I had my way
If I had my way in this wicked world
If I had my way I would tear this building down

The listener singing along revels vicariously in a rage so deep it has become nihilism: things are so bad I no longer care and just want to tear it all down. The revolutionary intent is clear in the anecdote about Samson in which he kills a lion with his bare hands: “And the bees made honey in the lion’s head.” The symbolism is obvious: lions always represent rulers; the bees are workers; and honey is the sweet life. Samson is the working class’s spirit of vengeance against a condescending and abusive ruling class. It is a spirit that has started to move again in our own wicked world.

I

Let us start with the song of an angry strongman. In the second section, we’ll consider how the nihilistic spirit of Samson has been awakened by a political betrayal of democratic promises. In the final section, we’ll look at philosophical ideas about what we imagine should keep that spirit from waking. First, though, the song.

Most people know “If I Had My Way” either from Peter, Paul and Mary’s 1962 version (from which I quote) or The Grateful Dead’s 1977 “Samson and Delilah.” But the song is a traditional African-American spiritual dating back at least to the early 20th century (three versions recorded in 1927), and maybe all the way to slavery. (The folk music magazine Sing Out! explores the song’s history in a four-part 2019 article: 1, 2, 3, 4.) Rev. Gary Davis brought it into the folk revival of the civil rights era in 1960, and then Peter, Paul and Mary brought it to mainstream audiences on their first album, which was so popular that royalties from it kept Rev. Davis (given copyright credit) financially secure for life (Sing Out!). I take Peter, Paul and Mary’s as the definitive version, in part because it is substantially rearranged to make the protest elements explicit. Read more »