Amor Mundi 3/31/13
Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi:Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.
Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.
John Jeremiah Sullivan has an essay in the new Lapham's Quarterly on animals. Sullivan begins his essay "One of Us" with this description of studies that upend our view of humankind's unique place in the universe. Against the view that humans are special, that we think differently than animals, and that only humans have consciousness, Sullivan writes, "If we put aside the self-awareness standard-and really, how arbitrary and arrogant is that, to take the attribute of consciousness we happen to possess over all creatures and set it atop the hierarchy, proclaiming it the very definition of consciousness (Georg Christoph Lichtenberg wrote something wise in his notebooks, to the effect of: only a man can draw a self-portrait, but only a man wants to)-it becomes possible to say at least the following: the overwhelming tendency of all this scientific work, of its results, has been toward more consciousness. More species having it, and species having more of it than assumed." For Sullivan, we can no longer rely on an easy distinction between human and animal; on the Arendt Center blog Roger Berkowitz responds.
Last year Stephen Morison Jr. went to Egypt to seek out the country's post-Mubarak literary culture. What he found were people alternately disillusioned and still hopeful, including the short story writer Muhamed "Nebo" Abdelnaby, who told him that, as the possibility of censorship has replaced the reality of corruption, the Western expectations for Egyptian writers has changed little: "They don't want us to be experimental; they don't want us to be a little bit crazy; this is for their writers."
Prison Compound at Angola. Photo by Alan Lomax, 1934.
John F. Cline recently began a trip that will retrace many of the routes African Americans took from the South into the North in the early parts of the 20th century. One of his first stops was Louisiana's infamous Angola prison, which he was allowed to tour. Among other things, he describes Angola's hospice program, at which inmates care for dying members of the prison population. Cline notes that those who pass are buried with dignity and respect: "when the hospice patients die, they are no longer buried in a corner of the facility in Styrofoam containers: wooden coffins are built in the prison's carpentry shop, covered with hand-quilted palls, and the dead are taken to their graves in a horse-drawn hearse trailed by an inmate procession."
The Trial of General Rios Montt
Flickr via Ian Bunn
Aryeh Neier points to the beginnings of Guatemala's proceedings against its former dictator General Efrain Rios Montt as a "repudiation" of America's Latin America policies in the 1980s. This is the first time "a former head of state is being tried for genocide in the courts of his own country." The charges against Rios Montt include the deaths of more than 1,700 Ixils, one of the country's indigenous populations, and his trial includes testimony from Ixil survivors, something that Neier thinks is, of itself, "a remarkable development."
Charles Krafft and the Conundrum of Nazi Art
Rachel Arons considers the recent outing of fine artist Charles Krafft as a neo nazi and Holocaust denier. Krafft's work has often included Nazi imagery, which was previously widely believed to have been used ironically. As Arons points out, however, interpreting Krafft, and other artists who appropriate Nazi iconography, has always been complicated. "There isn't," she writes, "a clear line between 'irony' and 'homage' in Krafft's work, and it's a mistake to assume, as many members of the art world apparently have, that an ironic artistic appropriation of Nazi symbols safely amounts to an anti-Nazi critique."
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Blogging and the New Public Intellectual
An Ongoing Series of discussions moderated by Roger Berkowitz and Walter Russell Mead.
April 9, 2013 at Bard Graduate Center
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"David Frum is back. And he's jockeying to be the front and center of the post-Romney American conservative movement". - Eddy Moretti
From the Hannah Arendt Center Blog
This week on the blog, Nikita Nelin rites about his experience as a teacher of literature working with students focused on employment and Jeff Jurgens wonders whether Americans will ever understand what the invasion of Iraq meant for Iraqis.
Amor Mundi 2/24/13
Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.
Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.
Clocking in as the longest article ever in Time (h/t Dylan Byers), Steven Brill’s cover story is the single-best account of the insanity and corruption of our current medical system. Why do we accept the skyrocketing costs of medical care? “Those who work in the health care industry and those who argue over health care policy seem inured to the shock.” Brill shows us why the bills are really way too high. Hint: it is not because the care is so good. There are so many excess costs in the system, that reforming it should be easy, if it weren’t so corrupt.
David Goldhill wants to give all working Americans $1,800,000, the amount he calculates a 23 year-old beginning work today at $35,000/year will pay, directly or indirectly, in health care insurance benefits. Goldhill argues that our health care system wastes most of that money because people have no incentive to attend to costs. He suggests a dual system. Give every American health insurance for truly rare and unpredictable illnesses. But for regular costs and smaller emergencies, he would refund workers the money they are losing and let them pay for healthcare themselves.
Oliver Sacks walks through his past and, with the help of his brother, discovers that a memory he had believed his own had actually been that of another. Starting from there, he gives a short account of the weakness of individual remembering, which allows us to take in something we've heard or seen and make it our own. He concludes, finally, that "memory is dialogic and arises not only from direct experience but from the intercourse of many minds."
The Subtlety of the Dole for the Rich
Michael Lewis writes of the rise of an unapologetic business class in the 1990s and early 2000’s, that they enjoyed the “upside to big risk-taking, the costs of which would be socialized, if they ever went wrong. For a long time they looked simply like fair compensation for being clever and working hard. But that’s not what they really were; and the net effect was… to get rid of the dole for the poor and replace it with a far more generous, and far more subtle, dole for the rich.”
Five women. “Two are wives and daughters in ordinary families unable to comprehend why such misfortune has overtaken them. A third is a young bride living in the household of a high party official. The last two are wives of the Master’s executioners. These stories are based on their memoirs—some written by themselves, others by close friends or by their children. These five women put a human face on the terror of Stalin’s purges and the Gulag in the Soviet Union of the 1930s.”
“Debt doesn’t look like much. It has no shape or smell. But, over time, it leaves a mark. In Spain, it manifested itself, first, as empty buildings, stillborn projects, and idled machines.” So writes Nick Paumgarten. To see how debt looks and smells, look at Simon Norfolk's surreal photographs of Residencial Francisco Hernando, an unfinished development near Seseña, Spain. Working his way through a half-finished city with few people in it, Norfolk's photography suggests that even beginning construction was an act of hubris; "everyone," he says, "wanted to get rich doing nothing."
The Arendt Center’s 2012 conference “Does the President Matter?” asked whether political leadership is still possible today. Guatam Mukunda believes that we can measure the value of a particular leader based on their behavior at the margins—what did that person accomplish over and above what another would have been able to do? In the accompanying video, Mukunda argues that leaders can only be great or terrible when the people selected for such roles are relatively unknown to those making the selection. In an age of information, the chances are slim.
This week on the blog
This week on the blog, we argued that American reformers should shift their efforts at reforming education towards high school and pointed towards Richard Kahlenberg's recent piece in The Chronicle of Higher Education, adding that "poverty, more than race or gender, is increasingly the true mark of disadvantage in 21st century America." We also continued the inquiry into the growing threat that entitlements pose to the next generation, highlighting Geoffrey Canada and Peter Druckenmiller's argument that entitlements are a generational theft that must be arrested. Elsewhere, Na'ama Rokem quotes from Arendt's only Yiddish-language article to explore the philosopher's language politics and her Jewish identity. Jeff Champlin looked at some similarities between Habermas and Arendt in their understandings of power. In the Weekend Read, Roger Berkowitz argues that we need to free federalism from its present partisanship and recall the important connection between federalism and freedom. Finally, if you didn't get around to our remembrance of Ronald Dworkin, you should take some time and give it a read.
Until next week,
The Hannah Arendt Center
Geography is not Destiny
How are we to explain the formation and collapse of the world’s great empires in the sweep of human history? And what might the fates of past civilizations suggest about the global political scene in the present and future? Such questions are the focus of Robert D. Kaplan’s recent book, The Revenge of Geography (2012), which Malise Ruthven treats in extensive detail in the February 21st issue of The New York Review of Books. Kaplan has worked for decades as a journalist, author, consultant, and lecturer, and one of his earlier books, Balkan Ghosts (1993), apparently dissuaded President Clinton from earlier intervention in the former Yugoslavia. Kaplan served as a member of the Defense Policy Board under Secretary of Defense Robert Gates from 2009 to 2011, and since then he has been chief geopolitical analyst for Stratfor, a private global intelligence firm based in Austin, Texas.
As the title of his book suggests, Kaplan regards geography, the physical features of the earth’s landmasses and waters, as the most basic and abiding determinant of human history. He takes issue with accounts that position culture and ideology as the motor forces of social and political affairs, and he questions the notion that globalization, with its boundary-traversing flows of people, goods, ideas, ideas, and images, is fundamentally recasting the contemporary world. Yet he would be among the first to admit that his analytical optic is not new, for he draws much inspiration from the work of the medieval Arab chronicler and social theorist Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406) as well as the British geographer Sir Halford Mackinder (1861-1947).
Ibn Khaldun argued that the earliest societies were formed by nomadic peoples in the rugged steppes, deserts, and mountains who constructed relations of authority through ties of kinship and “group feeling” (‘asabiya). Groups with pronounced ‘asabiya were the most capable of forming expansive dynasties and empires, and stable empires in turn offered the most promising conditions for productive agriculture, prosperous cities, and refined urban life. But every empire bore the seeds of its own demise, since the luxuries of rule were all too likely to result in corrupt and tyrannical rulers. New groups from the severe margins would eventually displace the old dynasts, according to Ibn Khaldun, and the cycle of imperial ascent and decline would begin once more.
Ibn Khaldun’s claims have been most thoroughly elaborated in the work of historian Marshall Hodgson, who is best known for his three-volume work Venture of Islam. But they also resonate with the vision of Halford Mackinder, who proposed the existence of a Central Asian “heartland” within a larger “World Island” of Eurasia and Africa. For Mackinder, this heartland of flatlands and steppes has consistently served as “the pivot on which the fate of great world empires rests.” In Mackinder’s analysis, the geography of Central Asia, with its arid expanses and harsh climates, bred tough nomadic peoples (think of the Huns and Mongols) who not only formed their own empires, but also prompted Russians and Europeans to establish powerful states in order to fend off their advances. In Mackinder’s estimation, controlling this heartland, and that portion of Eastern Europe that lay on its doorstep, provided the key to world domination.
Robert Kaplan draws heavily on Khaldun and Mackinder’s ideas to explicate the geopolitical challenges faced by a number of contemporary states. For example, he applies Ibn Khaldun’s scenario of settled states and nomadic invaders to present-day China, which is defined in his characterization by a dominant Han population in the country’s arable cradle and a host of restive Tibetans, Uighur Turks, and Inner Mongolians on its periphery. “The ultimate fate of the Chinese state,” he contends, will depend on whether the Han can keep these groups under control, “especially as China undergoes economic and social disruptions.” In similar fashion, Kaplan turns to Mackinder’s heartland thesis to make sense of Russia’s recent geopolitical aspirations, which in his view have turned on Putin and Medvedev’s efforts to create a land-based Central Asian empire with vast oil and natural gas reserves.
There are certainly some instances when Kaplan’s insistence on the salience of geography is well-taken. But there are far too many moments when his account is overly narrow if not myopic. China’s “economic and social disruptions”—the embrace of neoliberal restructuring, the rapid but uneven economic expansion, the simmering discontents of both avowed dissidents and ordinary citizens—are hardly secondary to the state’s fraught relations with its sizable ethnic minorities, which cannot in any case be entirely reduced to the realities of the physical environment. In addition, Kaplan is much too quick to impute sweeping cultural effects to geographic factors. For example, he proposes that Mongol incursions from the steppes helped to deny Russia the full impact of the Renaissance.
He also suggests that the country’s current lack of natural boundaries (aside from the Arctic and Pacific oceans) has promoted its thorough militarization and obsessive focus on security. In short, Kaplan paints a canvas of the world’s past and present in bold but overly broad strokes, strokes that in the end obscure a good deal more than they reveal.
Indeed, the thrust of Kaplan’s argument reminds me of nothing so much as the work of Samuel Huntington, another commentator who has sought to provide a skeleton key to the world’s current conflicts. To be sure, The Clash of Civilizations posits cultural divides, not geographical configurations, as the main force driving contemporary geopolitical tensions. But Huntington and Kaplan share the same penchant for more or less monocausal explanations, the same readiness to cast reified peoples, cultures, and states as the central protagonists of their geopolitical dramas. Moreover, both writers imply that the Cold War was a brief interlude that departed only momentarily from the more consistent and defining dynamics of world history. To an important extent, both writers suggest that our global present is not merely shaped by the past, but fundamentally in its thrall.
Thus, The Revenge of Geography and other works of its ilk are troubling not merely because they carry considerable weight in key sectors of U.S. policymaking circles and the broader reading public. More broadly, they leave us ill prepared to confront the specificity and singularity of the current global conjuncture. Much as Hannah Arendt insisted on the newness of totalitarianism even as she placed it within the long arc of anti-Semitism, imperialism, and modern oppression, we too should scrutinize the present with an eye for its irreducible distinctiveness. Little is to be gained, and much potentially lost, from the impulse to read the current moment as the product of general determining forces. Whether such forces go by the name of “geography” or “culture,” they encourage an interpretation of history by commonplaces, including the commonplace that history is ultimately—and merely—a narrative of rise and fall.
-Jeffrey Jurgens
Corruption Takes Root
What is the essence of corruption? This is a question raised by the recent Supreme Court jurisprudence around Citizens United v. FEC. For Justice Kennedy and the Court has concluded, as a matter of law, that only quid pro quo corruption is corruption. An out and out bribe is corrupting, but throwing a congressman a $100,000 party or treating them to fancy meals and trendy restaurants, that is just exercising the right to freely speak with one's elected representatives. That such lavish expenditures come with expectations is, the Court insists, improvable and simply part and parcel of our democratic system.
In Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress—and a Plan to Stop It, Lawrence Lessig explores fully the impact of such "soft" corruption. He writes that the enemy we face today is not a Hitler or even the good Germans who would enable a Hitler. "Our enemy," Lessig writes, "is the good Germans (us) who would enable a harm infinitely less profound, yet economically and politically catastrophic nonetheless. A harm caused by a kind of corruption. But not the corruption engineered by evil souls. Indeed, strange as this might sound, a corruption crafted by good souls. By decent men. And women." Such a crime, he insists, is banal, but "not the banal in the now-overused sense of Hannah Arendt's The Banality of Evil—of ordinary people enabling unmatched evil (Hitler's Germany). Our banality is one step more, well, banal."
Lessig is right to worry that Arendt's phrase is overused, but what is more banal in the banality he so penetratingly describes in his book? In any case, his book better describes the kind of endemic corruption that infects our political system than any other. It should be read.
It is also important to remember that real corruption still exists in our world. It may be more a rarity at a time when one can accomplish so much corruption through legal means, but examples of bold and brazen corruption remain.
Lance Armstrong's web of corruption that silenced and intimidated dozens of his colleagues for over a decade is one example of how corruption can succeed, against all odds, but only for a time. Rumors of Armstrong's drug use floated around for a decade, and yet he still denies it. It took years for the web of deceit to break. As the NY Daily News wrote in an excellent review of the scandal:
The Armstrong myth was so lucrative that suppressing the truth came to require an endless behind-the-scenes campaign to bully and intimidate people into silence. Some of it bordered on gangsterism. Some of it was dressed up in the respectable wardrobe of elite law firms. But mostly it was just hot air - a fact that by 2010 had become clear enough to Floyd Landis that he stepped up and burst the bubble, blowing the whistle on the whole big fraud.
We tend to ignore corruption because it seems so inconceivable in our age of transparency. Corruption requires that the truth be kept hidden. This is extremely difficult and possible only through force and violence and even terror. But eventually, the truth comes out. As Hannah Arendt wrote in another context, "holes of oblivion do not exist." Eventually, the truth will emerge, no matter how many interests and how much money and violence is spent in the futile effort to prevent that from happening.
What brings to mind these brief reflections on the continued efficacy of corruption as well as its eventual failure is an article recently published in The Nation on the Hershey Trust. The author of the story is Ric Fouad, who is also a member of the Arendt Center's Board of Advisors. He is a graduate of the Milton Hershey School and together with a handful of other activists has been fighting a lonely battle against what he sees as the corruption of the Hershey Trust's Board, a fight that for him is inspired by Hannah Arendt's insistence on both truth, courage, and public action.
A little background. Milton Hershey was not just a brilliant chocolatier who had a radical vision of making chocolate—previously marketed only to the wealthy—available to the masses. He was also profoundly philanthropic. Unable to have children, Hershey left his entire personal fortune to the Hershey Trust, whose mission was to administer The Milton Hershey School, a school that Hershey founded to help and educate orphaned boys—the school is now coed and serves children with living parents. That fortune is now worth nearly $8 billion.
By his own account, Milton Hershey's life work would be to help orphaned children, whose plight touched him deeply. Hershey wanted his school to bring orphans into a revolutionary new kind of school, free from industrial buildings common to orphanages. The children were to live in beautiful homes in a bucolic paradise on 12,000 acres of land. They were to work on farms to learn character and attend a school that includes a vocational curriculum as well and have great teachers. It had all the potential to be an extraordinary facility set in truly magnificent settings.
So what is not to like? Well, for one thing, the Hershey Trust has been under investigation for six years, with no resolution and amidst plenty of accusations and charges about misspent funds and broken trust. The bucolic community-wide children's home was telescoped into a crowded centralized campus; the farms were all closed; the vocational program barely survives; and the poorest children, wards of the court, and foster care children came to be rejected in favor of what the administrators deemed a "better" class of child. Local developers made tens of millions in the process.
Tasked with administering the Milton Hershey School, the Trust's incredible resources enabled it to do much else besides. This could be an amazing opportunity to do good. It could also and become a magnet for powerful and connected people who finagled their ways onto the Hershey Trust board in order to access and control the vast wealth the Hershey Trust possessed. And that is what the article in The Nation, as well as numerous investigative articles here, here, and here, in The Philadelphia Inquirer, have alleged. You can also watch Ric Fouad's Harvard Law School lecture "Hershey's Broken Trust" here.
In Republic, Lost, Lessig writes:
The great threat to our republic today comes not from the hidden bribery of the Gilded Age, when cash was secreted among members of Congress to buy privilege and secure wealth. The great threat today is in plain sight. It is the economy of influence transparent to all, which has normalized a process that draws our democracy away from the will of the people. A process that distorts our democracy from ends sought by both the Left and the Right: For the single most salient feature of the government that we have evolved is that it discriminates against all sides to favor itself.
As true as that is about government, it is also true for cycling legends and political clubs. When corruption of all kinds pervades institutions throughout our society, it is only natural that cynicism abounds and we lose faith in the process of government as well as in the integrity of business. It is time to take corruption seriously in this country, and not explain it away as something that happens elsewhere in less civilized and less democratic countries.
You can read an excerpt of Lessig's Republic, Lost... here, at Amazon.com, where you can also buy his book.
-RB
Campaign Finance Laws and the First Amendment
The Arendt Center recently hosted Professor Zephyr Teachout to speak about Citizens United v. FEC and campaign finance reform. The talk was in honor of Constitution Day, which Professor Teachout joyfully informed us may very well be unconstitutional. We carried on.
Teachout began her talk by announcing that the "First Amendment is a terrible thing." Less provocatively, she argues that the First Amendment plays a "dangerous role" in our constitutional culture. Above all, she presented her argument that the Supreme Court's increasing reliance on the First Amendment to invalidate campaign finance laws is, ironically, used to shut down meaningful public debate around the proper role of lobbying in our politics.
She began by telling a story of the Supreme Court case Trist v. Child from 1874. The case involves Mr. Trist who had a claim against the U.S. Government for about $15,000 (about $100,000 in current dollars). Trist hired Child, a lawyer, to represent him and convince Congress to honor its debt. Among other things, Child encouraged Trist to have his friends write to Congressman threatening not to vote for them if they didn't honor this debt to Trist. Child also personally lobbied Congressman. He eventually succeeded in getting Congress to appropriate Trist's money.
Trist, however, refused to pay Child the fee agreed to in their contract. Child sued Trist to get his agreed upon money.
In the Supreme Court decision refusing to enforce the contract, the Court holds that Trist need not pay Child; a number of reasons are given, a few very technical. But the majority of the opinion by Justice Swayne rejects the legality of lobbying with a broad brush. Trist need not honor his contract with Child, Swayne writes, because there was no valid contract. In short, the original contract hiring Child as a lobbyist was immoral and illegal, and thus unenforceable. Justice Swayne argues that the very immorality of the practice of lobbying nullifies the contract between Trist and Child.
Teachout helpfully describes the issue this way. Child says something like: Our contract was just like a contract for me to sell you a car and now you don't want to pay me for the car now that you have it. Trist responds that, in Teachout's colorful analogy,
No, this is like we made a contract for prostitution, and you can't go to the cops after we made a contract for prostitution and get them to enforce that contract. Because lobbying is like prostitution. It is so corrupt that there is no way courts are going to enforce it.
Writing for the Supreme Court, Justice Swayne puts it this way:
The agreement in the present case was for the sale of the influence and exertions of the lobby agent to bring about the passage of a law for the payment of a private claim, without reference to its merits, by means which, if not corrupt, were illegitimate, and considered in connection with the pecuniary interest of the agent at stake, contrary to the plainest principles of public policy. No one has a right in such circumstances to put himself in a position of temptation to do what is regarded as so pernicious in its character. The law forbids the inchoate step, and puts the seal of its reprobation upon the undertaking.
If any of the great corporations of the country were to hire adventurers who make market of themselves in this way, to procure the passage of a general law with a view to the promotion of their private interests, the moral sense of every right-minded man would instinctively denounce the employer and employed as steeped in corruption and the employment as infamous.
There are two remarkable things about Justice Swayne's argument. First, as Teachout notes in her talk, there was nothing remarkable about it in 1874. Many states and governments throughout the U.S. made lobbying illegal. It was seen as an act of corruption. And few if any courts in the U.S. would find this unusual, at least before the turn of the 20th century.
The second remarkable thing to note is how utterly remarkable Justice Swayne's argument is today. To speak of the millions of lobbyists in the US as "adventurers who make market of themselves" as offending the "moral sense of every right-minded man" is a painful reminder of how far our political system has fallen. Not only is the moral prohibition against lobbying something of the past, but also the idea that the Supreme Court would invalidate contracts based on lobbying is nearly unimaginable.
The reason for this change in the legal and even moral status of lobbying is, Teachout argues, the rise of free-speech jurisprudence in the 20th century. Specifically, the Court's acceptance of the basic claim freedom of speech is the fundamental foundation of our democratic system has made lobbying not only legal, but morally defensible. If democracy depends on a marketplace of ideas, then having corporations and individuals hire lawyers and public relations firms to buy and sell influence in politics is at the very foundation of democratic governance. What Teachout forces us to consider is that our elevation of the First Amendment to foundational status in our constitutional firmament is predicated on a political theory that founds democracy on the unfettered marketplace of ideas. If we are to take back our government from corporate adventurers and their lobbyists, we will need to rethink our commitment to free speech, at least as the Court currently understands it.
Teachout's provocative talk attacks less freedom of speech itself than the Court's elevation of free speech to the first amongst all constitutional provisions—the foundational right in our constitutional and democratic system. She traces the rise of free speech jurisprudence to the point where, today, free speech is the paradigmatic right in our democracy. Free speech has become equated with democracy, so that "free speech is democracy."
It is important to see that Teachout is really pointing out a shift between two alternate political theories. First, she argues that for the founders and for the United States up until the mid-20th century, the foundational value that legitimates our democracy is the confidence that our political system is free from corruption. Laws that restrict lobbying or penalize bribery are uncontroversial and constitutional, because they recognize core—if not the core—constitutional values.
Second, Teachout sees that increasingly free speech has replaced anti-corruption as the foundational constitutional value in the United States. Beginning in the 20th century and culminating in the Court's decision in Citizens United, the Court gradually accepted the argument that the only way to guarantee a legitimate democracy is to give unlimited protection to the marketplace of idea. Put simply, truth is nothing else but the product of free debate and any limits on debate, especially political debate, will delegitimize our politics.
This view that free speech is the fundamental bastion of democracy is the basis of Justice Kennedy's decision in Citizens United. In Kennedy's opinion, laws regulating campaign finance regulate speech, and not just force, it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in political speech." If we believe that fair elections require a free airing of all opinions, than restrictions on campaign finance are the most dangerous forms of censorship. Which is why Kennedy can worry that "The censorship we now confront is vast in its reach."
What he means is that all those corporations regulated by the campaign finance reform law invalidated by Citizens United—including large multinationals and also small mom and pop stores and even unions and non-profit corporations—are prohibited from expressing their views about political candidates during an election. In Kennedy's telling, corporations are part of the country and, what is more, an important part of the country. The Government has “muffle[d] the voices that best represent the most significant segments of the economy."
It is helpful to recall Justice Felix Frankfurter's concurring opinion in U.S. v. Congress of Industrial Organizations. The Smith Act had forbidden unions to use funds to pay for politicking, very much like the limitations on corporate funding in the 2002 Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act. In U.S. v. CIO, the Court refused to rule on the Constitutional question of whether the Congress can forbid unions from political speech. Frankfurter, however, does consider it. He argues that we must take seriously the evil of corporate and union speech in politics. The corruption of elections and federal officials by the expenditure of large masses of aggregated wealth But that evil, he counters, "is not one unmixed with good." For Frankfurter,
To say that labor unions as such have nothing of value to contribute to that process and no vital or legitimate interest in it is to ignore the obvious facts of political and economic life and of their increasing interrelationship in modern society.
Replace "Labor unions" with "corporations." That is what Justice Kennedy did in Citizens United. What he said is that corporations have a voice in our political landscape, just as do unions and non-profits. When such corporate entities engage in speech, there is a danger of corruption. But we cannot deny their speech is politically important. Instead of then balancing those interests in a practical way, Justice Kennedy simply said that the First Amendment insists that political speech never be abridged. Our Constitutional system, he argued, demands that the marketplace of ideas be allowed to work unimpeded.
The overriding desire to protect political speech proceeds under the assumption, with Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., that "the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.” What Zephyr Teachout helps to make clear is that this elevation of free-speech to the first amongst constitutional provisions is fundamentally at odds with the desire to regulate political speech to keep politics free from corruption. If we want to get serious about fighting corruption in politics, we need to take seriously the need to question the now unquestionable faith that democracy is founded upon freedom of speech.
To fight against Citizens United and uphold the legal rejection of campaign finance limitations requires that we break the bi-partisan stranglehold that an extreme view of the First Amendment currently has on our constitutional jurisprudence. Only once we do so can we return to a meaningful public debate about when lobbying is and when it is not corrupting. And only once we free campaign finance laws from the First Amendment can we, as we must, have a serious discussion about how much money distorts and corrupts our political process.
These are difficult issues, and weakening the scope and impact of the First Amendment is risky. As Teachout argues, it is a risk we must take to save our democratic system.
To see why, I encourage you to watch Zephyr Teachout's talk here. You can also read the essay on which the talk is based here. Together, they are your weekend reads.
—RB
Recalling the Egyptian Revolution
In the aftermath of the recent presidential elections and the sentencing of Hosni Mubarak, the attention of many observers within and outside Egypt has turned to the complexities of the country’s immediate future. This focus is entirely understandable given Egypt’s prominent place in the wider Arab world and the intractable challenges it now confronts. But it has also entailed a certain emotional and intellectual distance from the transformative events that transfixed the world in January and February 2011. The uprising that took most visible form in the Tahrir Square protests is already retreating into the twilit realm of history and memory.
This process is inevitable, and there is little point in attempting to arrest it. But we would still do well to recall the urgency and enormity of Egypt’s transformation before it recedes even further into the maelstrom of our twenty-four-hour news cycles and day-to-day cares. One occasion for such reflection is the “Egypt Forum” that recently appeared in American Ethnologist, one of the world’s most prominent journals in my field, cultural anthropology. Composed of nine short essays from some of the discipline’s foremost scholars, the Forum illustrates anthropology’s capacity to bring vivid lived experience into conversation with larger processes and forces. Taken together, the assembled contributions remind us that the 2011 uprising was not an inevitable triumph of popular sovereignty, but a tense and even disorienting moment of uncertainty, one in which the very nature of politics was up for grabs.
The “Egypt Forum” makes three notable contributions to our understanding of Mubarak’s ouster from power. First, it underscores how many Egyptian citizens drew on local moral categories, not just the liberal language of rights and democracy, to interpret the uprising. Farha Ghannam examines how residents of one Cairo neighborhood relied on notions of “thuggery” (baltagiyya) to condemn violent attacks against protesters and more general corruption among state officials. Sherine Hamdy describes how her Egyptian acquaintances imagined themselves as resilient in the face of obstacles, but also physically and spiritually enfeebled by years of state-sponsored injustice and brutality. And as Lila Abu-Lughod details, the protests prompted young men and women in one Upper Egyptian village to establish a popular committee to solve problems of resource distribution, build homes for indigent neighbors, and collect funds for displaced families. Rather than couching their efforts in overtly “political” language, however, they dubbed their committee the “Youth of Good Works” (shabab al-khayr).
Second, the Forum highlights the extent to which the protests against Mubarak’s regime defied the commonplace distinction between “religious” and “secular.” Indeed, as Hussein Ali Agrama contends, the protests constituted a moment of “asecular” power not merely because they drew a variety of liberal, left-leaning, and devout participants, but because the protesters were not particularly concerned with characterizing their efforts in “secular” or “religious” terms—or with drawing boundaries between the two realms. Charles Hirschkind is also struck by the accommodating spirit of the uprising, and he traces its guiding sensibility to the careers of three public intellectuals who have reflected in innovative ways on the place of Islam in Egyptian life. For all of these commentators, the Islamic tradition is not an impediment to national independence and democracy, but rather a resource and frame of reference for “an open, nondogmatic style of political engagement.”
Third, the Forum draws attention to the forms of marginalization that the revolution and its aftermath have not entirely overcome. Although women were conspicuous among the protesters who gathered in Tahrir Square, Sherine Hafez notes that they have been largely excluded from Egyptian politics after the overthrow of Mubarak’s regime. Perhaps most notably, they played no role in the “Council of Wise Men” (note the name) that initially negotiated with the Supreme Military Council, and they were entirely absent from the committee charged with reforming the constitution. (Hafez also observes, with biting irony, that it did not take long for Tahrir Square to regain its reputation as a zone of routine sexual harassment.) For her part, Jessica Winegar highlights the ongoing domestic duties that prevented many women from participating in the protests, and she emphasizes the economic realities that made work more pressing than revolution for many of Cairo’s poorer residents. Indeed, many of the young women Winegar knew were only too happy to see the end of the protests, since it meant that they could once more move about the city and return to their jobs.
All in all, these essays are worth reading because they illuminate facets of the Egyptian uprising that have eluded many pundits and other “expert commentators.” They thereby demonstrate the value of intimate and sustained social inquiry, even—and perhaps especially—when the revolution is televised.
-Jeff Jurgens
Occupy Wukan: Or What the Chinese Can Teach OWS About Democracy and Revolution
The most exciting aspect of Occupy Wall Street was seeing Americans—young and old, white and black, Jew and Muslim—coming together in public spaces to talk about matters of public importance. The most disheartening failure of Occupy Wall Street was how quickly those conversations turned to navel gazing. Instead of aiming to lead, to take on responsibility, and to honestly and courageously work to impact the public world around them, the protesters (and that is what they are, at least to date, rather than revolutionaries) satisfied themselves with talking to like-minded people about their dreams and hopes. Occupy Wall Street fizzled because the passions and happiness at making a difference gave way to the solipsistic self-pleasuring of those speaking to themselves, and those like them.
Consider, as an alternative, the villagers of Wukan, China. In September of 2011, the village government sold town land to real-estate developers. Such deals are reportedly common in China, since China repealed local agricultural taxes in 2006. To raise money to run local governments, Chinese local officials are increasingly selling farmland to developers. According to Michael Young, "the local government compensates the farmers with a minimum amount of money and then is paid 50 times more by the developer." According to Young, "60 to 70 percent of local government income comes from selling land to developers." The land sales "enrich officials" and also contribute to economic growth of China.
The land sales have generated huge resentment throughout China, and for a while Wukan was no different. In 2009 villages petitioned and protested the sale of 67 acres of land to a Hong Kong developer. In September of 2011, another protest erupted, but this time serious clashes only intensified the protests. Eventually new villagers were elected to the village government. One of these, Xue Jinbo, was then arrested and died in custody, amidst rumors of torture and mistreatment. The resulting uproar led to something unheard of in China: A free and democratic village election with secret ballots.
On February 11, 2012, over 6,000 of the Wukan's 8,000 residents filled out "pink ballots in rows of plywood booths that ensured their choices would remain secret, then dropped them in big steel boxes sealed with tamper-proof stickers.
Officials tallied the votes in the schoolyard as residents looked on." According to The New York Times report,
It was the first truly democratic vote here in decades, if not ever, and something of a landmark of transparency in China's opaque politics. By the time it ended, the very men who had led Wukan's struggle against an entrenched village autocracy had been chosen as its new leaders.
Even as the Times article reports on the amazing victory in Wukan and the optimism it has spawned, the narrative of the article questions whether anything will change. The corruption underlying the land sales is deep and "reaches into layers of higher governments." The new leaders of Wukan have received threats. Other similar attempts at protests in China have lately been suppressed: "this month in Zhejiang province, north of Guangdong, officials suppressed a Wukan-style land protest in Panhe by systematically rounding up protest leaders and sealing their village off from journalists." The Times quotes Russell Leigh Moses, a Beijing scholar, who argues: "Reform in China doesn't start in places like Wukan. It starts at the top and soaks downward."
I am not an expert in Chinese politics. But dismissals of the Wukan revolution—and that is what happened in Wukan—do seem to ignore the incredible and seemingly impossible victories of the people there.
So what, we must ask, has changed in China? How does the people's occupation and revolution in Wukan compare to the Occupy Wall Street movement here?
Whether or not the people of Wukan get their land back, they have tasted what Hannah Arendt calls public freedom. Like OWS, the people of Wukan experienced the joy of collective action in public. In both cases, they did not simply protest. They also created councils and general assemblies and thus built organizations in which people could act together in public. But there is where the similarities end.
In Wukan, the people did not only occupy parks. They came together and created a new power in society and used that power to take over their government.
Leaders emerged, who channeled the spirit of protest into demands not only for redress of their land claims but for an openness and participation in government. What Wukan shows, in other words, is a new model for revolutionary politics in China—a path towards the creation of local power centers built upon the consensus of individual villagers.
I have no doubt that China can, if it wants, violently suppress these concretions of people power. As Syria is showing now, unrelenting violence can overcome power. And yet, to employ such violence risks destroying the power of the state itself, which is always based upon the consensus of the people. More likely, the revolution in Wukan is an example of the way that people in China are, in steps big and small, demanding the control of their political fate.
What distinguished the United States at the time of its revolution was what Hannah Arendt called the experience of "Public Happiness." From town hall meetings in New England to citizen militias and civic organizations, Americans had the daily experience of self-government. In Arendt's words,
They knew that public freedom consisted in having a share in public business, and that the activities connected with this business by no means constituted a burden but gave those who discharged them in public a feeling of happiness they could acquire nowhere else.
Arendt was always alive to this sense of "public happiness" which she distinguished from the economic and social needs that comprised being well fed and comfortable. Public happiness was found neither in fighting for one's particular interests, nor in doing one's duty by voting or going to town-hall meetings. Rather, the seat of American democracy was the fact that Americans "enjoyed the discussions, the deliberations, and the making of decisions." It was this passion to be involved, to be seen and heard in matters of public importance, and to distinguish oneself before one's peers that Arendt points to as central to the experience of freedom in America.
The promise of Occupy Wall Street was not simply that it would bring about economic equality or other specific results. It was that it returned citizens to the public square to engage again in the public life of the nation. Its failure, at least to date, is that its activists refused to take seriously the responsibility and need to speak and act not only in public, but also for the public.
By avoiding taking stands, by eschewing leadership, by insisting on appealing to everybody, by seeking to offend no one, and by holding themselves above and outside of politics, the movement became consumed by itself, inward looking, and, ultimately, apolitical. The joy of OWS did not translate, as did the joy of the collective action in Wukan, into political power. If we are to rejuvenate our political culture, it is better to look to the revolutionaries in Wukan than the protesters in Zuccotti Park. Or rather, maybe the OWS movement needs to pay attention to Wukan, and think about how to transform its power, joy, and public engagement into political channels.
See the NY Times Slideshow of the Voting in Wukan, here.
-RB
Respecting the Revolutionaries in Homs
Michael Ignatieff, former leader of the Liberal Party of Canada, and author of Human Rights as Politics and Idolotry, has an essay out calling for intervention in Syria. We should all, he writes, feel shame for abandoning the opposition.
The fighters in Homs are holding out now because utter desperation puts them beyond fear. Watching them fight on, we have reason to be ashamed if we think the only thing we can do is send them bandages. More
Ignatieff's is the attitude of the savior from afar. Yes, we should be ashamed, but for very different reasons.
Instead of shame at our abandoning of the Syrians, we should feel gratitude to them for showing us what it means to fight and stand up for and suffer for what they believe in. We should be ashamed less for abandoning the Syrians in Homs than for not heeding their example, for feeling defeated by a corrupt political system, for apathy in the face of a bankrupt political culture, and for not taking responsibility and acting to change our world.
Hannah Arendt was always careful to insist that life is not the most important human right. The core right of humanity is to speak and act in public, which Arendt also called The Right to Have Rights. The Right to Have Rights includes the right to resist and even to die for one's beliefs. To do so is human, and is not senseless, especially when one is then remembered for bravery and heroism. Indeed, human life can often have more meaning in martyrdom then in a comfortable life. Whatever else one can say about Syria, it is the case that people fighting and struggling there are being seen and heard both in Syria and around the world. For that, we should be grateful, awed, and respectful.
That respect may lead some to aid them in words, money, or action. I agree and am not opposed to some of the prescriptions Ignatieff suggests. But let's begin with respect for their incredible courage and willingness to act. We might be able to help the Syrians, but we may have more to learn from them.
Click here to read more about Arendt and Human Rights.
-RB
A Brief History of Campaign Finance
The NY Times penned one of those editorials Wednesday that makes one wonder who is home. The Times takes President Obama to task for forming a Super PAC--or for having someone form a Super PAC for him, because we know there is no coordination between the Super PAC and the Super PAC's beneficiary. As cynical as the current Super PAC frenzy is, and as disheartening as the crush of money being spent by the Republican Super PACs and hoarded by Karl Rove's Super PAC is, what would be served by President Obama refusing to feed at the trough? Recall, he is the first Presidential candidate since 1974 to opt out of the public matching funds system. The idea that he might run as an anti-big-money candidate is hard to imagine, so how could he meaningfully run a campaign claiming on principle to be opposed to the influence of big money, as the Times editorial suggests.
I am in Berlin where on Monday I gave a Keynote Talk to open the State of the World Week in Berlin, sponsored by the European College of Liberal Arts of Bard. My talk was on the Citizen United court case, the case that opened the door to Super PACs. I'll be blogging more about Campaign Finance Reform as the election progresses. But for now, here is a short excerpt of one part of my talk that offered a condensed history of Campaign Finance and Campaign Finance Reform in the United States.
We can divide the history of Campaign finance in the U.S. into 7 stages.
1. The first stage is the pre-History involving the 1787 Constitutional Convention. As Zephyr Teachout has shown, "Corruption was discussed more often in the Constitutional Convention than factions, violence, or instability. It was a topic of concern on almost a quarter of the days that the members convened." Teachout and Lawrence Lessig have argued that there was a strong sense among the founding fathers that the great threat to new Constitution was corruption. And they have pointed to a number of practical responses to that threat in the Constitution itself. These include Article I, Section 6, Clause 2, which prevents members of Congress from holding civil office while serving as a legislator, or from being appointed to offices that had been created—or in which the compensation was increased—during their tenure. The point was to prevent members of Congress from using their posts to enrich themselves and their friends.
Another innovation aimed to prevent corruption was the decision to have those in the House of Representatives serve only for two years. According to Teachout and Lessig, this was designed to counter the formation of bonds between legislators and the President. By turning over the members of the House on a regular basis, it would be less likely that the Representatives would form strong alliances with members of the Executive branch, thus helping to maintain their independence. The founding fathers would surely be astounded by the incumbent advantages apparent today.
2. The Second stage of American campaign finance history runs from the passage of the Constitution until the election of Andrew Jackson in 1828. In early U.S. elections, most campaign expenses were paid directly by the candidates using their own money. Such expenses were relatively minimal, going toward an occasional campaign pamphlet and, sometimes, for food and drink at rallies. As Bradley Smith writes, "Though free from the "corrupting" effects of money, elections in this early period were generally contested by candidates representing aristocratic factions standing for election before a relatively small, homogeneous electorate of propertied white men."
3. The financing of American political campaigns begins to become interesting in 1828, with the election of Andrew Jackson. Jackson's presidency is rightly seen as the true beginning of modern American democracy. And Jackson's campaign for President was the first presidential campaign that appealed directly to the voters and not simply to party elites. Jackson's campaign was organized by Martin van Buren (who later served as his Vice President and thereafter as President). Van Buren was one of the original machine politicians from New York who created the machine concept Boss William Tweed would perfect later in the century at Tammany Hall. What Van Buren did for Jackson was to organize a campaign aimed at the people. This cost money. And what he and Jackson did was to raise money from those who were seeking jobs in the government. This was the beginning of the spoils system, whereby political campaigns were funded by current and prospective government employees; these employees in turn expected to be rewarded with jobs once their candidate won the election.
4. The spoils system lasted until the passage of the Pendleton Act, in 1883, which inaugurates the fourth stage of the development of campaign finance. The Pendleton Act professionalized the Federal Civil Service, instituting an exam for entry into the service and outlawing the Spoils system. The result was that campaign funds from federal officeholders dried up, and politicians needed new sources of funds. The obvious sources were wealthy individuals and corporations. And oh boy did corporations jump into the breach. By the late 19th century, the government was giving grants of land and cash to corporations, and in return the corporations were generously funding political campaigns. In 1888 40%, of Republican national campaign funds came from Pennsylvania manufacturing and business interests. By 1904, 73% of Teddy Roosevelt's presidential campaign funds were raised from corporate contributions. (I take these numbers from Bradley Smith). The age of corporate funded campaigns was here, and it has never left.
5. Once he was elected, Teddy Roosevelt made it a priority to reform the broken campaign financing system that he had exploited so well. With his support, Congress passed the Tillman Act in 1907, which made illegal all campaign contributions from corporations. The Tillman Act opens the Fifth stage of the development of Campaign Finance Reform in the United States.
While the Tillman Act carried penalties for its violation, it instituted no enforcement mechanism. The result is that not much changed. To take only one legendary example, in 1968 and 1972 Clement Stone contributed up to $10 million to President Richard Nixon's Presidential campaigns. Stone's contributions caused a scandal that, together with the outrage over Watergate, led Congress to finally institute a serious attempt at campaign finance reform.
6. The key moment of modern campaign finance reform is the passage of the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA) in 1974, and the Supreme Court's partial upholding and partial overturning of that law in Buckley v. Valeo in 1976. In the wake of Watergate and the loss of trust in government, the Congress passed FECA which: limited individual contributions to individual candidates to $1,000; limited the amount candidates could spend on a campaign; established a system of public financing of campaigns that required a voluntary limit on campaign expenditures; required that candidates, parties, PACs and groups engaging in express advocacy disclose their fund-raising and spending; and created the Federal Elections Commission, to regulate and enforce the new rules.
In a landmark decision that still controls all legal approaches to the regulation of campaign financing, the Supreme Court in Buckley v. Valeo upheld the disclosure requirement and the limits on individual contributions. It also upheld the limits on campaign spending when those limits were voluntary and in conjunction with the decision to accept public financing. But the Court struck down compulsory limits on spending both by individual candidates and by PACs and other groups. While the Court recognized that limits on campaign spending were a kind of censorship that limited the rights of people and corporations to speak about the most central political issues of the day, it also acknowledged "large contributions threaten the integrity of our system of representative democracy." Because large contributions, especially to individual candidates, at the very least appear to suggest a kind of quid pro quo corruption, the Court accepted that Congress has the right to censor such expressions of support. More general expenditures not given to or coordinated with a specific candidate were, the Court argued, not examples of the kind of corruption that would allow Congress to override the fundamental free speech interests of individuals and corporations who would want to influence the political debate. Thus, post-Buckley, the rule was: The Constitution limits censorship of political activity, political speech and political spending on campaigns. Any limit is censorship that violates the First Amendment. And yet the Court carved out One Narrow Exception: speech or activity that either is or gives the appearance of quid pro quo corruption could be regulated and banned.
In the aftermath of Buckley v. Valeo, money continued to pour into politics. Candidates and their supporters made use of "soft money," money given to political parties and other groups and thus not subject to the limits imposed on individual contributions to individual candidates. PACS began to bundle large sums of money that, while not individual contributions to candidates, nevertheless carried the tint of influence peddling. In the year 1993-94, the Democratic Party received $45 Million dollars in "soft money" and the Republic Party received $59 Million. By 1999-2000, the numbers were $92 Million and $244 Million respectively. In 2001-2002, the Democratic Party took in $200 Million and the Republicans $421 Million.
7. The failure of FECA to stem the tsunami of money in elections led Congress to try again, and in 2002 it passed the Bi-Partisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA), also known as the McCain-Feingold Act—the seventh and until now final stage of the effort to regulate campaign finance in the United States. The main innovation of BRCA was to prohibit unlimited soft money contributions by corporations and unions. And it was this provision that was held to be unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in the now infamous case of Citizens United v. FEC.
The core of the Citizens United ruling was Justice Anthony Kennedy's argument that "If the First Amendment has any force, it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in political speech." For Kennedy, "The censorship we now confront is vast in its reach." What he means is that the law bans all those corporations—including large multinationals and also small mom and pop stores and even non-profit corporations—from expressing their views about political candidates for either 30 or 60 days leading up to an election.
In Kennedy's telling, corporations are part of the country and, what is more, an important part of the country. The Government has “muffle[d] the voices that best represent the most significant segments of the economy." Here Kennedy channels Felix Frankfurter, who in the 1941 case of U.S. v.s. Congress of Industrial Organizations, wrote:
To say that labor unions as such have nothing of value to contribute to that process and no vital or legitimate interest in it is to ignore the obvious facts of political and economic life and of their increasing interrelationship in modern society.
U.S. v. C.I.O. dealt with the anti-Union Smith Act, which forbade unions and corporations from using treasury funds to pay for politicking. In this regard, the Smith Act was very much like 2002 Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act. While the majority of the Court refused to consider the Constitutional Question and decided the case on narrow grounds, Frankfurter did. In his telling, the Court must take seriously the evil that Congress sought to address: namely, the corruption of elections and federal officials by the expenditure of large masses of aggregated wealth. And yet, Frankfurter saw that "the claimed evil is not one unmixed with good." The expression of corporate or union speech in elections is, he writes, a good thing! "The expression of bloc sentiment has always been an integral part of our democratic and legislative processes." Replace "Labor unions" with "corporations." That is what Kennedy did.
-RB
The Sport of Politics
This weekend's suggested read is an interview with Lawrence Lessig, author of Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress—and a Plan to Stop It. For years Lessig has advocated for the freedom of information and helped to found and establish the Creative Commons. Recently, Lessig has set his sites on freeing politics from corruption, and his book has been claimed as one of the intellectual foundations of the Occupy Wall Street movement. In this vibrant conversation, Lessig discusses finance reform, the Occupy Wall Street rallies, and how to rehabilitate the public sphere.
Lessig’s recent work addresses how the corruption pervasive in modern institutions is corrosive to public confidence and hence the arena of politics. What he terms “invidious, systemic wrongs” has led to a total loss of authentic civic trust: “the financial collapse is the most astonishing of these examples, “ he states, “not so much because of what happened before 2008, but because of what happened after.” As bad as the crash was, the bailout of bankers was an unparalleled giveaway, a transfer of money from taxpayers to the wealthiest denizens of the financial world.
Lessig encourages the current Occupy Wall Street movement to tap into this exasperation, focusing not on wealth, but fraudulence: “if [OWS] can say, whether or not you believe in capitalism, nobody believes in crony capitalism, and crony capitalism is what we’ve got, it would stand a greater chance of success.” Lessig’s emphasis on corruption is a reminder that it is the perversion of the facts and the rewarding of failure at the highest levels that that is responsible for the weakened state of our political world.
A provocative thinker, Lessig proposes several solutions to restore the political space he sees as dangerously thinned in the era of C-SPAN. These include the establishment of constitutional conventions—‘citizen juries’ where people could come together to debate the issues of the hour. “It would demonstrate something that I think people forget,” Lessig remarks to David Johnson of the Boston Review, “which is that politics is the rare sport where the amateur is better than the professional.”
Click here to read the interview.
Thinking Challenge Excerpt-Katya Lebedev
Truth is necessarily related to responsibility, that is to say that, when one proclaims a fact to be true, one takes a certain amount of responsibility for the statement. Particularly if the proclamation was made in a dispute and the only resolution in sight depends on the outcome of a game of tug-of-war between the “greater” and the “lesser” truths. In the case of the Conservatory, there can be no truth (at least factual truths) since the fog of falsehood has settled on most layers of bureaucratic life in Russia. However, this doesn't impede those whose lives are affected by the falsehoods to retaliate. Students protested, pictures were published and, while the story remained unclear, the outrage spread across all spheres of communication, from blogs to magazines and from youtube videos to newspapers. In some ways, it feels as though the proliferation of untruths have allowed more people to participate in the discussion of truth, as the burden of absolute responsibility has been lifted. Perhaps this is a negative reaction but, so long as the criticism and versions of truths spread, the conversations and debates can continue. The instant one truth has been installed or accepted, it risks being forgotten or worse, taken as an established fact. If a truth is to be eternal, it cannot be immutable, it must adapt to the changing ages, the changing attitudes and the changing people.
This is why, the case of the Conservatory is particular: it is a remnant of the past, and thus the culture of the present. Furthermore, it is a centre for education grounded in the concept of discipline, which on its own is a demonstration of respect for the traditions and the ways of the past. If one were to hazard a guess as to why the Conservatory has become so neglected and dilapidated, it should address the question of discipline. If politics had not strayed from a path of tradition and established methods, there might remain at least a glimmer of respect for the past, while continuing to evolve and adapt to the present. Instead, the breakneck speed of modern politics have left truth and tradition crumpled in the corner, as pitiful as the drenched pile of sheets of music, written by a composer who was once respected and remembered.
Click here to read the full submission.
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