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Author Archives: Peter Levine
the power of reputation
Here’s an observation about networks. Some people know a lot of others within a field or community and are very widely liked. It is difficult to criticize anything they do or say, either in their company or behind their backs, because the odds are high that others present will like them and be biased in their favor. On the other hand, some people have made lots of enemies within a network. It is difficult to praise any of their work behind their backs, because other people tend to be biased against them.
Reputation is self-reinforcing–and more so in tightly woven networks. People who are liked and admired generate praise even when they are not present–and even when their actual work doesn’t merit support. People who are widely disliked do not get the credit they deserve; they never fare well in conversations that occur out of their hearing.
There is a huge literature on social networks–even a specialized blog. I’ll bet that literature includes studies of the pattern I mention here. In any event, smart activists understand it instinctively and work every day to bolster their reputations.
top 10 paintings
The Guardian proposes “20 paintings to see in the flesh before you die.” There’s much discussion on the Guardian’s site and on Crooked Timber. I happen to have my own list lying around. I notice that I have picked innovative pictures, because I believe that we derive aesthetic pleasure not only from a work in itself but also from the story of art, which is a sequence of courageous discoveries and experiments. Further, the following are mostly pictures that have something to say about art. They imply theories of painting and representation that we could try to paraphrase in prose. That makes them especially interesting. But they are not mere manifestos or illustrations of ideas; they are also extraordinary images.
Giotto, Scenes of the Passion, Capella Scrovegni (a.k.a Arena Chapel), Padua, 1305 Masaccio, Tribute Money, Brancacci Chapel, Santa Maria della Carmine in Florence, 1426-8 Jan Van Eyck, The Arnolfini Wedding, National Gallery, London, 1434 Piero Della Francesca, The Flagellation, Urbino, 1455 Giorgione and/or Titian, F?te Champ?tre, Louvre, Paris, 1508 Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi), Madonna di Loreto, 1603-05, S. Agostino, Rome Diego Vel?zquez Las Meninas, The Prado, Madrid, 1655 Johannes Vermeer, View of Delft, Mauritshuis, The Hague, ca. 1660-1661 Edouard Manet, The Old Musician, National Gallery, Washington, 1862
Some limitations: These are all paintings (not sculptures, drawings, stained glass, or buildings) that I have personally seen during my late adolescence or adulthood. I can’t recommend such reputed masterpieces as Caravaggio’s Burial of St. Lucy, because I have only seen them in illustrations. This stricture also explains the European bias; I’ve never visited Asia (beyond Turkey), Africa, or South America. Finally, my list doesn’t adequately represent Modernism. I didn’t want to add token works to represent a whole category of art; I wanted individual masterpieces. I had difficulty identifying specific Modernist works that could stand up to particular “Old Masters.” (However, I was tempted to include a Picasso like The Guitar Player, or a Matisse.)
the republic of conscience
At Campus Compact’s 20th anniversary, Mary Robinson gave the keynote address. She is a distinguished lawyer, former President of Ireland, and former UN Commissioner of Human Rights. At one point, in her soft Irish accent, she read Seamus Heaney’s “The Republic of Conscience,” a poem that he has now given to Amnesty International. Read all 39 lines, but this is how it starts:
When I landed in the republic of conscience
it was so noiseless when the engines stopped
I could hear a curlew high above the runway.
At immigration, the clerk was an old man
who produced a wallet from his homespun coat
and showed me a photograph of my grandfather.
The woman in customs asked me to declare
the words of our traditional cures and charms
to heal dumbness and avert the evil eye.
No porters. No interpreter. No taxi.
You carried your own burden and very soon
your symptoms of creeping privilege disappeared.
the origins of government
Would this work as a definition of a government? “An institution designed to outlast individual human beings that operates within a fixed geographical territory; it has permanent fiscal accounts, offices with mutually consistent and complementary roles that are held temporarily by individuals, and real property. It has some authority over all the people and institutions within its territory (where ‘authority’ means the ability to make and enforce rules claimed to be legitimate).”
If this definition works, then Florence had a government in 1300. Dante, for example, held various offices for his city, was paid for his work out of public accounts, made binding decisions while he was a city magistrate, and represented the government abroad. When he was exiled, he left the jurisdiction and employ of Florence; his office and legal power passed to another man.
In Dante’s time, England basically lacked a government. That is not to say that England was disorganized or backward. The English erected great cathedrals, castles, schools, and universities; their leading cities were international entrep?ts; their knights were capable of ransacking France. Nor was England an individualistic and atomized society–on the contrary, people were bound to one another by obligations, often inherited and unshakable.
But there was no English government. A baron was a personal vassal of the king, to whom he owed certain duties and from whom he could expect protection. Each baron had many vassals who owed him duties (as men personally obligated to other men). And each peasant was a vassal of a minor lord, entitled to certain birthrights, such as use of particular fields and woods, but obligated to work the land of his ancestral village and share the crop with his lord. The borders of the realm depended on what fiefs the monarch had inherited; thus the “national” territory might shift with each change of king.
None of the offices of the realm, from monarch to peasant, was governmental in the modern sense. Take Justices of the Peace: they were the closest equivalents of modern police, but they were not paid, trained, or overseen. They were just vassals of the monarch who were morally obligated to preserve the King’s Peace by sword or by persuasion. There was a public treasury, the Exchequer, but it had very minor importance. Even when Queen Elizabeth I ascended the throne in 1558, she was expected to pay for what we would call “government” (e.g., foreign embassies) out of her inherited wealth, rents on the extensive lands that she personally owned, plus some import duties. Her claims to sovereign power were controversial, and in any case, she lacked the personnel, the files, and the budget needed to “govern” in the modern sense.
She did obtain an effective espionage service when Sir Francis Walsingham started paying for secret information out of his own pocket; Elizabeth then authorized him to supplement those payments from her treasury. Even so, the English secret service was really just a group of Sir Francis’ servants and retainers, and he was a personal retainer of the Queen. When Walsingham died, so did the organization.
In men like Walsingham, we see the origins of government. He was a professionally trained expert (a lawyer), not a nobleman with any hereditary powers. He held an appointed office, Mr. Secretary, which he was free to quit. He structured his civil service as a bureaucracy and tried to serve the permanent interests of England as a Protestant state, not merely those of his Queen. However, had Elizabeth married Fran?ois, the Duke of Anjou and Alen?on (as she threatened), then Walsingham would have faced a choice. This Puritan lawyer could have become a personal servant of a Catholic French nobleman, or he could have quit public life.
The medieval case shows that we could have elaborate social structures without governments; that is a relevant conclusion at a time of globalization, when governments are losing authority over fixed territories. It is not clear, however, that we can have elaborate social structures and personal liberties without governments.