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Javier E

To understand today's global data economy, look to the Middle Ages - The Washington Post - 1 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...-data-economy-look-middle-ages

data corporate accountability god medieval Bentham culture

shared by Javier E on 26 Sep 19 - No Cached
  • With Facebook’s announcement Friday that it has suspended more developer apps for misusing users’ data than previously identified, the company revealed how little we know about the life of our data, even when we already know it’s been breached.
  • The global data economy mines human information to predict and influence behavior in ways most of us are incapable of comprehending.
  • to better understand what this means for the future of privacy, we need to look back to a much older idea, one from the Middle Ages.
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  • Christians in the early European Middle Ages, between roughly the 5th and 11th centuries, believed that God knew all human secrets, yet God’s secrets remained fundamentally unknowable to human beings. This widespread and deep-seated belief in an omniscient and mysterious being shaped institutional structures and social behavior in profound ways, as human efforts at concealment were considered futile
  • Today, a new form of mysterious omniscience is having a similarly widespread and unpredictable effect on human social behavior. We know that data about us is being compiled at breathtaking speeds, but most of us have little way of knowing what information is being collected, how it is being used and, crucially, how the various algorithms, clouds, networks and devices even work
  • The belief in an omniscient God structured almost every part of medieval life, especially around the rapidly developing legal systems of the time. Law codes named God as a constant witness in legal disputes in which human witnesses were considered deficient and God’s judgment functioned as a compelling legal tool.
  • By the 18th century, new secular forms of institutional power and surveillance emerged. Jeremy Bentham, for example, theorized the panopticon, a prison structure designed to harness a prisoner’s belief that he was always being watched to shape his behavior in favor of docility. What makes the architecture of the panopticon work is the mysterious omniscience of the prison guards, who can see from their tower into every cell without ever being seen themselves.
  • Today’s global data economy is the new form of mysterious omniscience. And as the reach of these technologies expands, their mystery will be one of the greatest barriers to its regulation.
  • Indeed, as scholar Shoshana Zuboff has written, firms actively confuse the public about the data they process so that their capabilities “remain inscrutable to all but an exclusive data priesthood.”
  • tion of fear and a belief in the benevolence of the divine
  • Where people in the early Middle Ages assigned benevolence to and held tremendous fear in their omniscient God, we have been facing — indeed embracing with remarkably little fear — this mysteriously omniscient technology reasoned to be benevolent because it makes life more convenient.
  • The way medieval law used God’s omniscience in cases of unreliable testimony foreshadows a future — in some ways, one already here — in which the information collected into that mysteriously omniscient entity (including data recorded by devices and retained by corporations) can be harvested and harnessed as evidence in courts of law, particularly where no other human witnesses are available to testify
  • In these cases, corporations have so far resisted sharing the data with the state, with the exception of counterterrorism efforts. But it also contributes to the corporate entity’s growing omniscience and mysteriousness
  • the move from the panopticon to this future iteration of mysterious omniscience could potentially entail a more insidious form of discipline stripped of the fear of punishment and, with its godlike status, of the possibility of democratic regulation.
Javier E

A Holy Week Amid a National Tribulation - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...tional-tribulation-11586474599

response pandemic psychology strategies role model stories

shared by Javier E on 12 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • “You did not come back from hell with empty hands,” said André Malraux to Whittaker Chambers after reading the galleys of “Witness.” None of us want to come back from this time without having gained some insight, some wisdom that we can use to gain greater purchase on reality.
  • A good resource in looking for societal wisdom is Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist, professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business and author, among other books, of “The Righteous Mind.”
  • “This is a time for us to reflect,” he said by phone, “and choose a better story. Right now stories are being rewritten all around us, nationally, individually, and we all get a chance to do some of the rewriting.”
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  • “The key concept everyone has to understand is hardship generally makes people stronger. Fear, challenge, threat—unless they are extreme—tend to produce growth, not damage.”
  • this could be a turning point for some of the young who have been “overprotected.” They are enduring “a giant shock and setbacks.” “This will make them experience, and deal. Many people will grow a lot from it.”
  • In a national emergency it becomes easier to fulfill the key human desire to be part of something—“to be part of Team Humanity, to be useful. That’s why it’s such a pleasure at 7 p.m. I hear the noise, we cheer, yell and bang pots” to honor New York’s health-care workers. “It’s a small thing, but it’s a chance to be part of something larger and know it.”
  • “Every society tells stories, and those stories involve good and evil, and these stories call us together.” They are stories about “moral leadership,” and they make clear that “we each of us get to provide it.”
  • He thinks this might be “the thing”: “It’s the end of a cycle, not the end of the world.” He hopes that in a shift “from I to we,” Americans may more deeply cultivate the virtues we need as a democracy, “which include the virtues of the Christian and Jewish traditions—humility, mercy. We are so quick to judge. We need to be easier on each other, turn down the judgment 80% or 90%.”
  • We are also as a society reminding ourselves of what we hold high—the selflessness of doctors and nurses, for instance
  • “If you want to come out of this crisis,” Mr. Haidt says, “discuss these things.”
  • “The key insight we’re getting is that video communication is surprisingly satisfying,” Mr. Haidt says. Social media connections in which you’re looking for “likes”? “That’s just managing your brand. But talking to someone face to face, if only on a screen, is really good. It isn’t a beer or a campfire, but when we’re starving, it’s good!”
  • “People are doing so much locally and at the state level, there could be a hope for a kind of civic renewal.”
  • he would always say at the end of his talks that if present trends continue we’re in trouble, “but present trends never continue. Something will happen to force this off the trajectory.”
  • By talking about these stories we teach the young what is admirable—this is who you want to be.
  • “The virus may do this. We have all been humbled by it, as a nation of institutions and of individuals, from the beginning.”
  • A friend this week quoted from Edward Achorn’s “Every Drop of Blood,” a study of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address. Mr. Achorn writes that Lincoln had come to think “it was time for Americans to stop thinking about self-righteousness. The only way forward was to recognize that all had been wrong and to treat each other with mercy.”
  • This tells us what bravery looks like, but also what a vocation is, and how a vocation is a spiritual event.
  • He is struck by “all the possibilities of heroism.”
  • What should we learn from this?
Javier E

Opinion | Politician Cyrus Habib Leaves Office to Join the Jesuits - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...cyrus-habib-jesuit.html

politician role model

shared by Javier E on 12 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • Try the parable of the blind man who gave up political glory for Jesus Christ.He quickly climbed the rungs of power, became the lieutenant governor of the state of Washington at 35 and had reason to believe that he’d be governor someday, maybe even before he turned 40.
  • At the age of 8, he lost his sight: A rare cancer forced the removal of both of his retinas. He spent the next decades proving to the world — and to himself — that he could nonetheless accomplish just about anything that he set his mind to.
  • He attended Columbia University. He won a Rhodes scholarship. He graduated from Yale Law. “From Braille to Yale” was how he often described his journey. It made for a great political speech.
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  • “I was in talks with a top literary agent in New York about a book deal, and it was all predicated on my biography, my identity,” he told me recently. He could feel himself being sucked into “a celebrity culture” in American politics that had nothing to do with public service. He could feel himself being swallowed by pride.
  • “How many ways,” he said “can you be called a rising star?”
  • He decided not to find out. Last month Habib, now 38, announced that instead of being on the ballot in November for a second term as lieutenant governor, he would soon leave office to become a Roman Catholic priest.
  • He is entering the Jesuit religious order, whose intensive, extensive ordination process typically takes about 10 years and involves vows of poverty and obedience as well as chastity.
  • But the more frequently that was mentioned, the more awkwardly it sat with him. His friend Lee Goldberg, who went to Columbia with him, told me that Habib watched other politicians race to the television cameras and meticulously plot their careers and was increasingly turned off.
  • Habib worried that if he moved into the governor’s office, he might be too intoxicated by power to let it go. Stepping down now, he told me, is like “giving your car keys to someone before you start drinking.”
  • “We’re not completely in control,” he told me during a series of long telephone conversations over the past two weeks. “Look at what we’re going through now. Something that you can’t even see with the naked eye is ravaging us.”
  • If anything, that bolsters his resolve to take a sledgehammer to the old fortifications of his ego. “That can-do, can-overcome mentality is fantastic and can get you far,” he said. “But if hardened into an ideology of its own, it can crowd God out, because it makes you into a kind of god and says: ‘I’m not a contingent creature. I’m completely independent.’”
  • Habib devoured popular fiction, serious literature and history, reading in Braille or listening to recordings. “Books allowed me to see — through the eyes of the author, the eyes of the narrator,” he said.
  • he and his admirers assumed there’d be even higher offices down the road.
  • And he committed to this course just as political gossips speculated about a heady promotion for him. He was a lock for re-election, as is the state’s governor, Jay Inslee. But in one scenario, a Joe Biden presidency could lead to a high-level administration position for Inslee, who would then have to step down. His lieutenant governor would immediately take his place.
  • Habib said that federal lawmakers increasingly seemed to be interested in posturing, not problem-solving, which involves compromise. “You have to face the political reality you’re in and not just present a competing utopia,” he said.
  • Although he hadn’t been particularly religious as a child or in college, he was subsequently drawn to Catholic teaching and faith, and one of his spiritual advisers in the church recommended that he read “The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything” by the Rev. James Martin, a nationally renowned Jesuit priest and best-selling author. Habib did — and it pointed him toward what he thought might be a more satisfying, impactful way of helping people in need.
  • What about the surrender of his autonomy to the order’s directives? Wouldn’t his world become smaller?
  • “I don’t see it as a shrinking of my world,” he said. “I see it as a shrinking of my self. When the focus is not as much on my brand, my messaging, my re-election, my fund-raising process, my legislative agenda, you create more space for God to operate on you.”
Javier E

Britain Just Got Pulled Back From the Edge - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...609520

UK pandemic response

shared by Javier E on 07 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • Starmer’s elevation is of deep importance on a number of levels. First, after years of appalling ineptitude and moral vacuity under Corbyn’s catastrophic leadership, Britain’s opposition will be led by a credible alternative prime minister whose competence, professionalism, and patriotism are unquestioned. The government can now be held to account.
  • Starmer, appearing on the BBC’s flagship political program, The Andrew Marr Show, broke with the Corbynite position, offering “constructive engagement” with the government. “We’ve all got a duty here to save lives and protect our country,” he said. A boring statement, but almost revolutionary after the Corbyn years.
  • The Queen is the only public figure able to personally link the current fight against the pandemic to the Second World War, the prior struggle that still defines the country, at least in its own perception. The message was well pitched, nodding to the young and old, frontline and staying-at-home. It cast her as a spiritual leader, more than merely figurative.
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  • The National Health Service appears to be rising to the task, the military has been deployed, the BBC has found its voice after years of unease, and the political institutions—torn apart by the financial crash, Brexit, and Corbynism—have refound something of a common set of rules and purpose.
  • The establishment is back. And British politics has some measure of its old self back. Both will be needed again soon, for once this immediate medical crisis is over, an economic one will emerge. Real change may soon follow.
Javier E

The Black Death led to the demise of feudalism. Could this pandemic have a similar effe... - 0 views

www.salon.com/...pandemic-have-a-similar-effect

pandemic black plague history lessons culture

shared by Javier E on 27 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • The plague, in combination with a host of other related and overlapping crises, delivered a death blow to Medieval Europe, ushering in a new age — the Renaissance and the rise of so-called agrarian capitalism — and ultimately setting the stage for the Industrial Revolution and the modern world.
  • the calamitous 14th century is not as far removed from our own experience as we would like to think.
  • Since the Second World War, we have experienced an unprecedented period of economic growth, and so it was for Medieval Europe on the eve of the Black Death
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  • First and foremost, the climate was changing. Sound familiar? Medieval Europe benefitted from several centuries of warmer weather, which boosted crop yields, but by the 14th century, the world was entering the so-called Little Ice Age
  • As the population grew, increasingly marginal land was turned over to agriculture, with diminishing returns, resulting in lower yields per capita and pushing the population dangerously close to subsistence levels. This left little slack in the economy to absorb a significant shock, and the 14th century would soon bring one shock after another.
  • From AD 1000, Europe's population doubled or even tripled, and the economy became increasingly commercialized, underwritten by an increasingly sophisticated financial system, as new cities and towns emerged, universities were founded across the continent, and the magnificent Gothic cathedrals surpassed the Great Pyramid at Giza as the tallest man-made structures in the world.
  • At the same time, Europe entered a prolonged period of heightened geopolitical conflict, during which a dizzying array of kingdoms, principalities, sultanates and city-states waged innumerable wars, both large and small.
  • beginning in 1311, Europe began to experience a series of crop failures across the continent in what became known as the Great Famine. Reaching a peak in northern Europe in 1315-1317, the Great Famine may have killed 5 to 10% of Europe's population
  • Cooler and wetter weather depressed agricultural yields, at a time when there was already very little slack in the food supply. This contributed to a broader economic slowdown, as yields declined and prices rose, but it also brought Europe to the edge of famine.
  • These conflicts inhibited trade between northern and southern Europe and between western Europe and the eastern Mediterranean, further slowing the European economy and incurring a massive fiscal burden that would soon ruin the European financial system and provoke uprisings in both France and England
  • Northern Italy was the heart of the financial system at this time, and a small number of very large Italian banks, often referred to as "super-companies," were lending huge sums of money across Europe
  • All available money was loaned out or tied up in investments, leaving the banks severely under-capitalized and vulnerable to insolvency in the event of a sudden large withdraw or a major default on their loans.
  • war broke out between England and France in 1294, prompting King Edward I to withdraw huge sums of money from the Riccardi of Lucca, approximately equivalent to several billion dollars today. The Riccardi simply did not have the money, and Edward seized whatever assets he could. Then, over the following decades, three more super banks, the Frescobaldi, the Bardi and the Peruzzi, all of Florence, were each ruined by successive English kings who refused to pay their debts.
  • Meanwhile, the Catholic Church, the cultural and epistemological bedrock of Medieval Europe, was facing the most significant legitimacy crisis in centuries
  • It was in the midst of this spiritual, economic and geopolitical crisis that the Black Death arrived, sweeping through Europe in 1347-1353 and upending the balance of power, almost overnight
  • We might compare this crisis of faith with the current legitimacy crisis of science in the United States. Like the scientific method, the Church was a shared way of knowing — a pathway to common understanding, which was essential to the social order of Medieval Europe.
  • he King's men attempted to arrest the elderly Pope, inadvertently killing him. Shortly thereafter, in 1305, a Frenchman, Clement V, was chosen to be the next pope, and the papacy was relocated to Avignon, France. This understandably cast a long shadow over the Holy See, and the Avignon Popes were widely disliked and distrusted. The crisis only deepened in 1378 when a second pope was elected in Rome and a third pope was briefly elected in 1409 before all three were deposed in 1417.
  • This, combined with the soaring fiscal burden of near-constant war, set off a series of uprisings, most notably the French Jacquerie of 1358 and the English Peasants' Revolt of 1381. The aristocracy responded with force wherever they could, but they could not turn back the clock.
  • Both of these developments substantially benefitted commoners, at the expense of the elite, particularly in England.
  • The archetypal serf was not paid for their work in the lord's fields — that was their obligation to the lord in exchange for the use of the lord's land. The modern equivalent would be if your landlord was also your boss, and in order to live in your apartment, you had to sign away your freedom and that of your children, in perpetuity.
  • Not only that, the medieval lord was also the primary unit of legal, civic and military power, often serving as the first stop for legal matters and the first defense against brigands and rival kingdoms.
  • With perhaps half the population gone, there were simply not enough peasants to work the land, and the average income of the English lord declined significantly. In response, the lord's wheat fields were increasingly turned over to livestock, or rented out to tenant farmers, who would pay the lord a fixed rent, keeping the agricultural produce for themselves.
  • The ambitious commoner could now acquire sizable tracts of land, and with the agricultural product of that land entirely at their disposal, commoners were incentivized to maximize the productivity of their land and sell the surplus at market for a profit. This transition is often referred to as the birth of Agrarian Capitalism.
  • In the wake of the Black Death, plague doctors were among the first to believe they had surpassed the knowledge of the Greek and Roman world; ironically, they were wrong, but the lower mortality of later outbreaks led many doctors to proclaim they had cured the disease, which instilled a new faith in scientific progress
  • Sumptuary laws, which restricted what commoners could wear and eat, also became common during the 14th and 15th Centuries. However, these laws do not appear to have been effective, and tensions continued to mount between the aristocracy and the wider populace, who were increasingly impatient for change.
  • Urban laborers and craftsmen also benefitted from rising wages. The average lifespan increased, and standards of living improved across the board. The shortage of skilled tradesmen even created new opportunities for urban women
  • starting in the 14th century, infantry units comprised of commoners, like the Swiss pikemen and English longbowmen, began to win a series of decisive victories against mounted knights, revolutionizing military tactics and hastening the obsolescence of the feudal aristocracy.
  • a new intellectual spirit was taking root across western Europe. Influential thinkers like John Wycliffe and Marsilius of Padua began to question the worldly authority of both the Church and the state, arguing that power rested ultimately with the populace rather than the ruler, and the unworthy ruler could lose their right to govern
  • the economic effects of the plague were nothing short of earthshattering. By killing perhaps 50% of the labor force, the Black Death drastically altered the supply of labor, land and coin. Wages skyrocketed, as labor was in short supply, and rents declined, as the plummeting population density created a surplus of land
  • seven-hundred years later, what, if anything, can we learn from this — what can the crises and consequences of the 14th century tell us about our own pandemic and the impending aftermath?
  • There will be no labor shortage in the wake of the coronavirus; quite the opposite, there will likely be a labor surplus, due to the ensuing economic contraction. As for rents, the housing market is essentially frozen as people shelter in place, and housing prices are likely to decline in a recession, but the real cost of housing relative to income is unlikely to see the kind of seismic shift experienced after the Black Death.
  • most presciently for our own time, Europe was headed for a climate catastrophe, and regardless of the Black Death, the continent would have almost certainly faced a series of demographic shocks, like the Great Plague, until considerable changes were made to the existing socio-economic system.
  • The lesson we should take from this today is not the differences between the coronavirus and the Black Death, but rather the broader similarities between the 14th century and the 21st century
  • war between China and the US still looms ever larger, socio-economic inequality is reaching record levels, trust in institutions and our established epistemology is waning, and as we enter the worst depression since the 1930s, climate change once again threatens to throw us back into the Middle Ages
  • if we continue business as usual, what happens next is likely to be much worse. The calamitous 21st century is just getting started, and a more apt parallel for the Black Death is probably yet to come
anonymous

Donald Trump warns 'dictators' as Japan visit launches Asia tour | US news | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...-arrives-in-japan-on-asia-tour

politics US Crisis trump policy japan asia northkorea

shared by anonymous on 05 Nov 17 - No Cached
  • Donald Trump has begun a tour of Asia with a warning that “no dictator” should underestimate America, in a thinly veiled reference to the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un.
  • North Korea marked Trump’s arrival in Japan by warning the “spiritually unstable” president not to make “reckless remarks” about the regime in Pyongyang.
  • In what many believe is a low-risk start to a 12-day visit that will include stops in South Korea, China, Vietnam and the Philippines, Trump praised US servicemen and women and their counterparts from Japan, a “treasured partner and crucial ally”.
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  • North Korea has launched two ballistic missiles over northern Japan in recent months, and has threatened to conduct a hydrogen bomb test in the Pacific Ocean to demonstrate it has developed the means to threaten the US mainland with nuclear weapons.Trump said the US-Japan alliance had been the cornerstone of regional security for the past six decades, adding: “We dominate the sky, we dominate the sea, we dominate the land and space.”
  • Trump’s bellicose rhetoric targeting Kim Jong-un has unsettled Moon, a liberal who this week said no military action should be taken on the Korean peninsula without his consent.Trump defended his provocative remarks about the North Korean nuclear crisis en route to Japan from Hawaii earlier Sunday.
  • Jonathan Pollack, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, said the trip comes “at a very inopportune time for the president. He is under growing domestic vulnerabilities that we all know about, hour to hour,” he said.
Javier E

The Dying Art of Disagreement - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...dying-art-of-disagreement.html

disagreement liberal arts conversation civics journalism identity

shared by Javier E on 24 Sep 17 - No Cached
  • Disagreement is dear to me, too, because it is the most vital ingredient of any decent society.
  • To say the words, “I agree” — whether it’s agreeing to join an organization, or submit to a political authority, or subscribe to a religious faith — may be the basis of every community.
  • But to say, I disagree; I refuse; you’re wrong; etiam si omnes — ego non — these are the words that define our individuality, give us our freedom, enjoin our tolerance, enlarge our perspectives, seize our attention, energize our progress, make our democracies real, and give hope and courage to oppressed people everywhere
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  • Extensive survey data show that Republicans are much more right-leaning than they were twenty years ago, Democrats much more left-leaning, and both sides much more likely to see the other as a mortal threat to the nation’s welfare.
  • The polarization is personal: Fully 50 percent of Republicans would not want their child to marry a Democrat, and nearly a third of Democrats return the sentiment. Interparty marriage has taken the place of interracial marriage as a family taboo.
  • Finally the polarization is electronic and digital, as Americans increasingly inhabit the filter bubbles of news and social media that correspond to their ideological affinities. We no longer just have our own opinions. We also have our separate “facts,” often the result of what different media outlets consider newsworthy
  • the more we do it, the worse we’re at it. Our disagreements may frequently hoarsen our voices, but they rarely sharpen our thinking, much less change our minds.
  • “The Closing of the American Mind.” Advertisement Continue reading the main story
  • Most importantly, they are never based on a misunderstanding. On the contrary, the disagreements arise from perfect comprehension; from having chewed over the ideas of your intellectual opponent so thoroughly that you can properly spit them out.
  • What was it that one learned through a great books curriculum?
  • As I think about it, I’m not sure we were taught anything at all. What we did was read books that raised serious questions about the human condition, and which invited us to attempt to ask serious questions of our own. Education, in this sense, wasn’t a “teaching” with any fixed lesson. It was an exercise in interrogation.
  • To listen and understand; to question and disagree; to treat no proposition as sacred and no objection as impious; to be willing to entertain unpopular ideas and cultivate the habits of an open mind — this is what I was encouraged to do by my teachers at the University of Chicago.
  • It’s what used to be called a liberal education.
  • The University of Chicago showed us something else: that every great idea is really just a spectacular disagreement with some other great idea.
  • These quarrels are never personal. Nor are they particularly political, at least in the ordinary sense of politics. Sometimes they take place over the distance of decades, even centuries.
  • I got the gist — and the gist was that I’d better enroll in the University of Chicago and read the great books. That is what I did.
  • In other words, to disagree well you must first understand well. You have to read deeply, listen carefully, watch closely. You need to grant your adversary moral respect; give him the intellectual benefit of doubt; have sympathy for his motives and participate empathically with his line of reasoning. And you need to allow for the possibility that you might yet be persuaded of what he has to say.
  • Since the 1960s it had been the vogue in American universities to treat the so-called “Dead White European Males” of the Western canon as agents of social and political oppression. Allan Bloom insisted that, to the contrary, they were the best possible instruments of spiritual liberation.
  • He also insisted that to sustain liberal democracy you needed liberally educated people.
  • According to a new survey from the Brookings Institution, a plurality of college students today — fully 44 percent — do not believe the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects so-called “hate speech,” when of course it absolutely does.
  • What’s clear is that the mis-education begins early. I was raised on the old-fashioned view that sticks and stones could break my bones but words would never hurt me. But today there’s a belief that since words can cause stress, and stress can have physiological effects, stressful words are tantamount to a form of violence. This is the age of protected feelings purchased at the cost of permanent infantilization.
  • Then we get to college, where the dominant mode of politics is identity politics, and in which the primary test of an argument isn’t the quality of the thinking but the cultural, racial, or sexual standing of the person making it.
  • In recent years, identity politics have become the moated castles from which we safeguard our feelings from hurt and our opinions from challenge. It is our “safe space.” But it is a safe space of a uniquely pernicious kind — a safe space from thought, rather than a safe space for thought, to borrow a line I recently heard from Salman Rushdie.
  • Another consequence of identity politics is that it has made the distance between making an argument and causing offense terrifyingly short. Any argument that can be cast as insensitive or offensive to a given group of people isn’t treated as being merely wrong. Instead it is seen as immoral, and therefore unworthy of discussion or rebuttal.
  • The result is that the disagreements we need to have — and to have vigorously — are banished from the public square before they’re settled.
  • One final point about identity politics: It’s a game at which two can play.
  • One of the more dismaying features of last year’s election was the extent to which “white working class” became a catchall identity for people whose travails we were supposed to pity but whose habits or beliefs we were not supposed to criticize. The result was to give the Trump base a moral pass it did little to earn.
  • So here’s where we stand: Intelligent disagreement is the lifeblood of any thriving society. Yet we in the United States are raising a younger generation who have never been taught either the how or the why of disagreement, and who seem to think that free speech is a one-way right: Namely, their right to disinvite, shout down or abuse anyone they dislike, lest they run the risk of listening to that person — or even allowing someone else to listen. The results are evident in the parlous state of our universities, and the frayed edges of our democracies.
  • Yes, we disagree constantly. But what makes our disagreements so toxic is that we refuse to make eye contact with our opponents, or try to see things as they might, or find some middle ground.
  • Instead, we fight each other from the safe distance of our separate islands of ideology and identity and listen intently to echoes of ourselves
  • The crucial prerequisite of intelligent disagreement — namely: shut up; listen up; pause and reconsider; and only then speak — is absent.
  • Perhaps the reason for this is that we have few obvious models for disagreeing well, and those we do have — such as the Intelligence Squared debates in New York and London or Fareed Zakaria’s show on CNN — cater to a sliver of elite tastes, like classical music.
  • Fox News and other partisan networks have demonstrated that the quickest route to huge profitability is to serve up a steady diet of high-carb, low-protein populist pap. Reasoned disagreement of the kind that could serve democracy well fails the market test
  • I do think there’s such a thing as private ownership in the public interest, and of fiduciary duties not only to shareholders but also to citizens
  • Journalism is not just any other business, like trucking or food services. Nations can have lousy food and exemplary government, as Great Britain demonstrated for most of the last century. They can also have great food and lousy government, as France has always demonstrated.
  • But no country can have good government, or a healthy public square, without high-quality journalism — journalism that can distinguish a fact from a belief and again from an opinion; that understands that the purpose of opinion isn’t to depart from facts but to use them as a bridge to a larger idea called “truth”; and that appreciates that truth is a large enough destination that, like Manhattan, it can be reached by many bridges of radically different designs.
  • In other words, journalism that is grounded in facts while abounding in disagreements.
  • that requires proprietors and publishers who understand that their role ought not to be to push a party line, or be a slave to Google hits and Facebook ads, or provide a titillating kind of news entertainment, or help out a president or prime minister who they favor or who’s in trouble.
  • Their role is to clarify the terms of debate by championing aggressive and objective news reporting, and improve the quality of debate with commentary that opens minds and challenges assumptions rather than merely confirming them.
  • This is journalism in defense of liberalism
Javier E

The Vanishing American Adult: Ben Sasse on Virtue in Politics - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...528015

virtue politics self-control culture meaning morality education

shared by Javier E on 29 May 17 - No Cached
  • a serious new book, The Vanishing American Adult. It advances a thesis that’s at once out of place at this political moment and almost too on-the-nose for the Trump years: He believes Americans have lost their sense of personal integrity and discipline
  • people must recover their sense of virtue. The republic depends on it.
  • At this point, the idea of a shared culture is almost unimaginable: America has been carved up into mutually exclusive spheres bounded by religion, race, income, and city-limit signs
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • He’s trying to articulate a language of shared culture and values in a country that has been rocked by technological, cultural, and demographic change. It may be an imperfect attempt. But at least Sasse has identified the right project.
  • The Vanishing American Adult is written as a reflection on the purpose and nature of education, which, Sasses argues, should extend beyond schooling and classrooms.
  • Instead of relying on “institutionalized school-centric childhood[s],” Sasse says, families should develop practices that will prepare their kids to become “fully formed, vivacious, appealing, resilient, self-reliant, problem-solving souls who see themselves … called to love and serve their neighbors.”
  • In a chapter called “Embrace Work Pain,” Sasse encourages families to set their alarms early, maintain a rigorous chore system, and send their kids out to do hard labor; in his case, it was detasseling corn
  • Sasse holds up multi-generational relationships, world travel, and voracious reading as ways of building greater empathy and self-knowledge.
  • A large portion of the book is dedicated to forms of stoicism, discipline, and self-denial: “There is almost nothing more important we can do for our young than convince them that production is more satisfying than consumption,” he writes. “Anyone who swims so completely in a sea of material surplus as to be unaware of the virtues of the simple life is flirting with great moral risk.
  • Citizens who take little interest in books threaten the idea of democracy, which “assume[s] the ability to read—and a desire to read.
  • Americans have long held the “ideal that work is a necessary component of becoming a fully formed adult, that a life well-lived entails a forward-leaning embrace of responsibility.” The country’s great challenge is “to create lifelong learners and lifelong producers,” he writes.
  • he believes culture—and the acculturation of the young—is more important than policy.
  • Americans “are a drifting and aimless people—awash in material goods and yet spiritually aching for meaning.
  • His proposals are about recovering this sense of meaning and establishing a shared language for talking about it, thickening the civic culture that serves as the foundation of political deliberat
  • This is an increasingly radical idea. America has largely responded to the challenges of diversity and pluralism by pushing moral language out of public life.
  • Platforms like Twitter, beloved by Sasse and Trump alike, thrive on outrage, reduction, and snark.
  • n. Like Rousseau, Sasse sees healthy society as a function of virtuous individuals. The senator is making “a plea for self-discipline and self-control” as “the one and only dignified alternative to discipline and control” by the government.
knudsenlu

Misunderstanding the Victims of the Sinai Massacre - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...546752

sufi misunderstanding massacre Islam

shared by knudsenlu on 26 Nov 17 - No Cached
  • What are Sufis? This was a question many were asking after at least 305 Egyptians were massacred on Friday in the Sinai. They were killed in an assault by Islamist militants (likely from the local Islamic State affiliate, although the group has not yet made a claim of responsibility) on Al Rawdah mosque, which is commonly described as a “Sufi mosque.” The implication is that its congregants observed a more “mystical” version of Islam, one that, for example, venerates saints. While such a description is not necessarily inaccurate—it is common to refer to mosques by their apparent ideological or spiritual orientation—like most things related to Islam, it’s a bit more complicated. Many Sufis do not self-define as Sufis, since for them, this is just how Muslims practice—and have always practiced—Islam.
  • For most of Islamic history, Sufism wasn’t considered as something apart. That it is today has much to do with the rise of Islamism, which is generally perceived as anti-Sufi.
  • To describe Sufis as “tolerant” and “pluralistic” may also be true, but doing so presupposes that non-Sufi Muslims aren’t tolerant or pluralistic. On the other hand, describing Sufis as heterodox, permissive, or otherwise less interested in ritual or Islamic law is misleading.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • The idea that Sufis are inherently non-violent or pacifist is similarly ahistorical. Some of the most famous Islamic rebellions were led by Sufis like Sudan’s Mohamed Ahmed, who declared himself Mahdi, or “the redeemer,” and Abdelkader in Algeria.
  • These are far from mere semantic discussions. They inevitably shape the subtext of so many conversations around Islam and politics. Western governments are susceptible to exoticizing Sufis and elevating them as the better, peaceful Muslims. But to see one group of Muslims as better means seeing other Muslims as problems to be solved. Westerners, most of whom have heard of Rumi’s poetry, but have little idea who the Mahdi is, will, naturally, prefer this idea of pacifist, apparently apolitical Muslims, only to find out that most Muslims are just, well, Muslims.
  • In this respect, the mosque that Islamist militants so brutally attacked in Egypt was something more than a Sufi mosque; it was, simply, a mosque.
Javier E

Angela Merkel's Failure May Be Just What Europe Needs - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...merkel-germany-liberalism.html

merkel europe failure immigration Crisis politics germany

shared by Javier E on 22 Nov 17 - No Cached
  • , my sense of the state of Western elites after Trump and Brexit is similar to the analysis offered recently by Michael Brendan Dougherty in National Review. Dougherty has been circulating in high-level confabs since Trump’s election and reports a persistent mood of entitlement and ’90s nostalgia — a refusal to take responsibility for foreign policy failures, to admit that post-national utopianism was oversold, to reckon with the social decay and spiritual crisis shadowing the cosmopolitan dream.
  • there is something mildly encouraging in the willingness of Merkel’s competitors in the political center, not just on the extreme right, to act as though they’ve learned lessons from her high-minded blunder, and to campaign and negotiate as if the public’s opinions about migration policy should actually prevail. Better that kind of crisis-generating move by far, in fact, than a grand coalition of parties united only in their anti-populism
  • What will save the liberal order, if it is to be saved, will be the successful integration of concerns that its leaders have dismissed or ignored back into normal political debate, an end to what Josh Barro of Business Insider has called “no-choice politics,” in which genuine ideological pluralism is something to be smothered with a pillow.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • In Angela Merkel’s Europe right now, that should mean making peace with Brexit, ceasing to pursue ever further political centralization by undemocratic means, breaking up the ’60s-era intellectual cartels that control the commanding heights of culture, creating space for religious resistance to the lure of nihilism and suicide — and accepting that the days of immigration open doors are over, and the careful management of migrant flows is a central challenge for statesmen going forward.
Javier E

White Christianity is in big trouble. And it's its own biggest threat. - The Washington... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...and-its-its-own-biggest-threat

christianity white fear love conservatism gop Crisis politics culture

shared by Javier E on 20 Dec 17 - No Cached
  • perhaps most importantly, white Christians seem unwilling to be guided by the plain truth of our shared faith. Instead of forming judgments about how to live our lives based on how our religious convictions interact with real-life circumstances, we pass off irascible reactions as theological principles.
  • The tyranny of fear in white Christian life is especially visible among white evangelicals, who stand out in their opposition to pluralism in America.
  • We claim to read the Bible and hear Jesus’ teachings, but we think poor people deserve what they (don’t) get, and the inmates of our prisons deserve, if anything, worse than the horrors they already receive. For believers in a religion whose Scriptures teach compassion, we’re a breathtakingly cruel bunch.
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  • Indeed it’s hard to know who we do feel pity toward, except ourselves — for we believe that we are the real victims in today’s world. Those among us who are evangelical Christians are especially paranoid: While Americans overall are twice as likely to say there is more discrimination against Muslims than against Christians, the numbers are almost reversed for white evangelical Protestants.
  • when it comes to keeping us away from the core truths of our faith, I suspect this one error is key: Christians today seem governed by fear.
  • Theologians as well as psychologists will tell you that there is a spiritual peril in acting out of fear and a sense of danger. Fear drives us into patterns of “reasoning” that are far from reasonable, but more akin to reactionary patterns of cause-and-effect
  • And fear moves us away from the core of Christianity — love. “There is no fear in love; but perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love,” says the first epistle of John.
  • White evangelical Christians like guns, for example, and do not especially like immigrants. Compared to other demographics, we’re excited about the death penalty, indifferent to those who are impoverished or infirm, and blind to racial and gender inequalities.
  • Christians’ defensiveness is increasing: in 2012, 54 percent of white evangelicals supported giving preference to “traditional Judeo-Christian values”; that number rose to 76 percent in 2015. What’s true of white evangelicals is a leading indicator for white Christians as a whole. The fear of the future makes us, in Jesus’ words, strain at gnats while we swallow camels (Mt 23:24).
  • This is disastrous because, from the perspective of hope, in many ways our age represents an unprecedented opportunity for Christians. The collapse of Christendom over the past few centuries has created a potentially more egalitarian, authentic and pluralistic religious world. Serious relationships with members of other religious traditions, as well as atheists, teaches believers more about their faith than we would ever have otherwise known.
  • Luther’s dream of a “Priesthood of all believers” is potentially closer than ever.
  • Ironically, it may well be that it is Christians’ fears about losing control of the culture that have accelerated the rise of secularism itself
  • Consider the rise of the “Nones” in American public life — those adults, especially younger adults, who when asked about their religious affiliation, say “none.” For decades that number was very low, but then it began to increase rapidly in the 1980s. Why was that? It seems to be caused by the tight alliance of Christianity, especially conservative white Christianity, with conservative politics over the past several decades — an association itself driven by prophesies of a rising tide of godlessness in America after the 1960s.
  • Pope John Paul II, who most American Christians (even Protestants like me) would allow was a pretty good Christian, said in his first homily as pope, “Do not be afraid!” This remains useful theological advice. If we are Christians, we must believe that we are safer in God’s hands than in our own. We should take no care for the morrow, but preach compassion and mercy to all, without distinction. If we do that, they’ll know we are Christians by our love — rather than our fear.
krystalxu

Romanticism in France (article) | France | Khan Academy - 0 views

www.khanacademy.org/...romanticism-in-france

history culture Romanticism France

shared by krystalxu on 23 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • Artists explored diverse subjects and worked in varied styles so there is no single form of French Romanticism.
  • intimacy, spirituality, color, yearning for the infinite, expressed by all the means the arts possess
  • If David’s work reveals the Romantic impulse in French art early on, French Romanticism was more thoroughly developed later in the work of painters and sculptors such as Theodore Gericault, Eugène Delacroix and François Rude.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • “the Koran of the so-called Romantic artists.”
  • The first marker of a French Romantic painting may be the facture, meaning the way the paint is handled or laid on to the canvas.
  • The theme of man and nature found its way into Romantic art across Europe.
  • Raft of the Medusa (1819
  • Some artists, including Gericault and Delacroix, depicted nature directly in their images of animals.  
  • Lion and Serpent (1835.)
  • Another interest of Romantic artists and writers in many parts of Europe was the concept that people, like animals, were not solely rational beings but were governed by instinct and emotion.
  • Whatever he thought of being called a Romantic artist, Delacroix brought his intense fervor to political subjects as well.
  • That intensity of emotion, so characteristic of French Romantic art, would be echoed if not amplified by the sculptor François Rude’s Departure of the Volunteers of 1792 (La Marseillaise) (1833-6).
  • French Romanticism remains difficult to define because it is so diverse. Baudelaire’s comments from the Salon of 1846 may still apply:
cartergramiak

Opinion | Israelis and Americans Both Are Asking, Whose Country Is This Anyway? - The N... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...us-israel-elections.html

politics trump GOP Culture US history

shared by cartergramiak on 07 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • As Israel struggles to put together a ruling coalition, I was struck by a television report there that a senior ultra-Orthodox rabbi and spiritual leader of the United Torah Judaism party said he’d prefer a government propped up by Israel’s Islamist Raam party than one with leftist Jewish parties, because Israeli Arab lawmakers were less likely to turn everyone secular.
  • This, understandably, added Seidman, is prompting a lot of Israelis and Americans to ask: “What is the unifying basis of our shared association going forward? What worthy journey are ‘we the people’ truly on together?”
  • Indeed, Netanyahu and Donald Trump were each so polarizing that they both stimulated breakaway factions within their own parties: “Anyone but Bibi” and “Never Trump.” But because their enemies hate each other as much as they hate Bibi and Trump, their ability to create broad-based alternatives has been limited.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Already today, noted Ben-David, half of Israel’s adult population is so poor that they do not pay any income tax at all. In 2017, just 20 percent of the adult population supplied 92 percent of all income tax revenue, he said.
Javier E

'The Capitol riot was our Chernobyl': James Comey on Trump, the 'pee tape' and Clinton'... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...e-pee-tape-and-clintons-emails

us violence racism metaphor

shared by Javier E on 19 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Comey offers an arresting metaphor: the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the former Soviet Union. The US has always had a “radioactive stew” of violence, he suggests, but in recent decades it has been largely kept inside a containment building (the law) and tamed by control rods (cultural expectations, such as use of the N-word becoming taboo).
  • “What Donald Trump has done for the last five years is attack the building from the outside to weaken its foundation,” says Comey. “He’s withdrawn the control rods, and that’s a recipe for a nuclear disaster, a radioactive release. That’s what you saw on Capitol Hill, our own Chernobyl, when the ugly radioactive violence and racism of America explodes in public view.”
  • “The Republican party needs to be burned down or changed,” Comey says. “Something is shifting and I’m hoping it’s the fault breaking apart, a break between the Trumpists and those people who want to try and build a responsible conservative party, because everybody should know that we need one. Who would want to be part of an organisation that at its core is built on lies and racism and know-nothingism? It’s just not a healthy political organisation.”
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • “At the end of the day, I still come down in the place that the best interests of the country would not be served by giving him that Donald Trump daily drama in our nation’s capital for three years as part of the United States versus Trump. That would give him the oxygen and the attention that he so craves and make it so much harder for a new president to heal the country both spiritually and physically, and to get some people out of the fog of lies that they’re trapped in.
  • “I just think, on balance, the country is better served by impeaching him, convicting him in the Senate and letting local prosecutors in New York pursue him for the fraudster he was before he took office. That mixture accommodates the important public interest of the rule of law being asserted, but doesn’t do it in a way that makes it impossible for a new president to move the country on.”
  • US democracy had a near-death experience, but survived. “I’m deeply optimistic,” Comey says. “America is a wonderful, complicated, screwed-up country, but it’s always getting better. It usually gets worse before it gets better, but the better succeeds, so we make progress. I am optimistic this will be the inflection point that we so desperately needed. I wish it weren’t so, but this, I think, is going to awaken Americans to the things that matter.”
anniina03

What the Far Right Gets Wrong About the Crusades | Time - 0 views

time.com/...far-right-history-crusades

history culture

shared by anniina03 on 18 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • During the 2016 presidential election campaign, the men – convinced that they had a duty to prevent the American government from ‘selling this country out’ – had stockpiled weapons and attempted to manufacture or buy explosives. And they had picked their target: an apartment complex in Garden City housing Somalian Muslim refugees.
  • The group’s ethos was anti-government, nationalist, and anti-Islamic. In a four-page manifesto scrawled in black, blue and green ink on a spiral-bound notepad they claimed they were ready to rescue the Constitution and prevent the government from ‘illegally bringing in Muslims by the thousands.’
  • they called themselves ‘The Crusaders’.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • The crusades – the long series of wars fought between 1096 and 1492 under the direction of medieval popes against a wide range of enemies of many different faiths, including Sunni and Shia Muslims – have long been fascinating to the extreme right wing, both in the United States and elsewhere.
  • The square-limbed crusader cross
  • is a symbol often spotted on white supremacist marches.
  • Crusader iconography and the language of crusading is usually rolled together with other right-wing tropes and generic threats of violence against non-whites and women.
  • Sometimes, the crusading rhetoric of online cranks and neo-Nazis is translated into deadly action. Nowhere has this been more chillingly demonstrated recently than in New Zealand, where on March 15th this year a lone gunman murdered more than forty people worshiping at mosques in Christchurch. The assault rifles and automatic shotguns used to carry out his crimes were daubed with the references to crusader battles dating back to the twelfth century AD and the names of crusader warriors including the medieval lord Bohemond of Taranto, prince of Antioch.
  • The crusades have immense propaganda value to anyone who wishes to suggest that the Islamic world and the Christian West are engaged in a permanent civilizational war dating back a thousand years or more, from which there is no escape and in which there can only be one victor. Superficially, at least, it is possible to read the history of the medieval crusades in such a way.
  • In other words, the medieval crusades did indeed contain a clear spine of conflict between Christian and Islamic powers. It is also true that at certain times, these wars were essentially spiritual: that is to say, making war on unbelievers, either through the crusade or its Islamic equivalent, the jihad, was an end in itself. Yet we do not have to look very far at all to realize that the story is rather more complex than it appears.
  • for all that modern zealots like to paint the crusades as a period of mutual hostility between Christians and Muslims, the truth is that the story was more often one of co-operation, trade and co-existence between people of different faiths and backgrounds.
  • None of this nuanced history tends to appear in the manifestos of terrorists, or would-be car-bombers. They are content, alas, to perpetuate an idea of the crusades that is binary and zero-sum: an us-or-them narrative designed to justify hatred, racist vitriol, violence and even murder. The medieval crusades were a largely dreadful misdirection of religious enthusiasm towards painful and bloody ends. They were neither a glorious clash of civilizations, nor a model for the world as it is today.
brookegoodman

Byzantine Empire - Definition, Timeline & Location - HISTORY - 0 views

www.history.com/...byzantine-empire

history

shared by brookegoodman on 25 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • The Byzantine Empire was a vast and powerful civilization with origins that can be traced to 330 A.D., when the Roman emperor Constantine I dedicated a “New Rome” on the site of the ancient Greek colony of Byzantium.
  • The Byzantine Empire finally fell in 1453, after an Ottoman army stormed Constantinople during the reign of Constantine XI.
  • The citizens of Constantinople and the rest of the Eastern Roman Empire identified strongly as Romans and Christians, though many of them spoke Greek and not Latin.
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • Located on the European side of the Bosporus (the strait linking the Black Sea to the Mediterranean), the site of Byzantium was ideally located to serve as a transit and trade point between Europe and Asia.
  • Justinian also reformed and codified Roman law, establishing a Byzantine legal code that would endure for centuries and help shape the modern concept of the state.
  • The eastern half of the Roman Empire proved less vulnerable to external attack, thanks in part to its geographic location.
  • As a result of these advantages, the Eastern Roman Empire, variously known as the Byzantine Empire or Byzantium, was able to survive for centuries after the fall of Rome.
  • Even after the Islamic empire absorbed Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem in the seventh century, the Byzantine emperor would remain the spiritual leader of most eastern Christians.
  • Justinian I, who took power in 527 and would rule until his death in 565, was the first great ruler of the Byzantine Empire
  • In the west, constant attacks from German invaders such as the Visigoths broke the struggling empire down piece by piece until Italy was the only territory left under Roman control. In 476, the barbarian Odoacer overthrew the last Roman emperor, Romulus Augustus, and Rome had fallen.
  • By the end of the century, Byzantium would lose Syria, the Holy Land, Egypt and North Africa (among other territories) to Islamic forces.
  • Known as Iconoclasm—literally “the smashing of images”—the movement waxed and waned under various rulers, but did not end definitively until 843, when a Church council under Emperor Michael III ruled in favor of the display of religious images.
  • Though it stretched over less territory, Byzantium had more control over trade, more wealth and more international prestige than under Justinian.
  • Monks administered many institutions (orphanages, schools, hospitals) in everyday life, and Byzantine missionaries won many converts to Christianity
  • The end of the 11th century saw the beginning of the Crusades, the series of holy wars waged by European Christians against Muslims in the Near East from 1095 to 1291.
  • During the rule of the Palaiologan emperors, beginning with Michael VIII in 1261, the economy of the once-mighty Byzantine state was crippled, and never regained its former stature.
  • The fall of Constantinople marked the end of a glorious era for the Byzantine Empire.
  • In the centuries leading up to the final Ottoman conquest in 1453, the culture of the Byzantine Empire–including literature, art, architecture, law and theology–flourished even as the empire itself faltered.
  • Long after its end, Byzantine culture and civilization continued to exercise an influence on countries that practiced its Eastern Orthodox religion, including Russia, Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia and Greece, among others.
Javier E

Opinion | The Revolt Against Populism - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...populism-protests.html

populism global elite middle-class growth corruption legitimacy working class

shared by Javier E on 22 Nov 19 - No Cached
  • We all know now what many of us didn’t appreciate then: Globalized democratic capitalism was going to spark a backlash. It led to growing economic and cultural clashes between the educated urbanites, who thrived, and the rural masses, who were left behind. It was too spiritually thin, too cosmopolitan and deracinated. People felt that their national cultures were being ripped away from them.
  • All across the world, members of the new middle classes feel trapped and abandoned. As Fareed Zakaria noted recently, the I.M.F. sees a world economy that is in a “synchronized slowdown” and growing at “its slowest pace since the global financial crisis.”
  • The second thing the populists have brought is corruption. Trump’s quid pro quo attempt with Ukraine is of a piece with the corrupt practices ushered in by populists all around the world. They vowed to smash the rules, but it turns out it was mostly for self-enrichment and self-protection.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • The populist/authoritarian regimes are losing legitimacy. The members of the urban middle class in places like Hong Kong and Indonesia are rising up to protect the political and social freedoms.
  • The overall message is that the flaws of liberal globalization are real, but the populist alternative is not working.
  • the big question is, what’s next? What comes after the failure of populism?
  • The big job ahead for leaders in almost all these nations is this: Write a new social contract that gives both the educated urban elites and the heartland working classes a piece of what they want most
  • The working classes who have been supporting populists need a way to thrive in the modern economy and a sense they are respected contributors to their national project. The educated elites want their democratic freedoms protected and to live in ethnically diverse pluralistic societies.
Javier E

Andrew Sullivan on the War Within Conservatism and Why It Matters to All of Us - The Ne... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...mund-fawcett-conservatism.html

conservatism history culture Politics

shared by Javier E on 03 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • From its very origins in resistance to revolutionary movements in the late 18th century, conservatism has had two broad contrasting moods. The first is an attachment to the world as it is, and a resistance to too drastic a change in anything
  • The second is an attachment to what once was — and a radical desire to overturn the present in order to restore the past.
  • they are both part of conservatism in its different moods.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The first mood defends liberal democracy as a precious inheritance that requires tending; the second excoriates it for its spiritual shallowness, cultural degeneracy and tendency toward an individualist myopia or socialist utopia
  • Fawcett, the author of “Liberalism: The Life of an Idea,” calls the second not the “far right” but the “hard right,” keeping it central to the conservative tradition as a whole, rather than a departure from it
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