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The Cliff-Top Monastery by A.B. Jackson

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If you want a 20-line respite from the fascinating train wreck of American politics (on which my eyes are riveted, like everyone else’s), I recommend A.B. Jackson’s “The Cliff-Top Monastery” in the May issue of Poetry Magazine. A whole short story unfolds in five stanzas. At first, the characters seem to be on a cruise in the modern Aegean, jumping off a yacht, perhaps, to “doggy-swim ashore / and surf the scree slopes in buoyant uproar.” But it would have been wise to notice the epigraph: “The Voyage of Saint Brendan.” These men must be medieval Irish monks on a northern sea. The story quickly turns holy–and then spooky.

As far as I can tell, Jackson’s sources are chapters XII and XV of the Voyage of St. Brendan (written down ca. 900), which relate the saint’s discovery of the Island of St. Ailbe and his return there after numerous adventures. (The raven, however, is spliced in from other Brendan legends.) The original text is fairly didactic, encompassing sermons or lectures by the abbot of the Cliff-Top Monastery. Jackson has extracted the spooky (pagan?) core of the story and made the island a place to flee in haste.

(See also the scholar and his dog; Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf. )

Habermas on the French election

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Here are Jürgen Habermas’ recent remarks on “the future of Europe” at an event with President-elect Emmanuel Macron and German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel. They spoke in March, before the election, but Habermas credits Macron with courage in “a challenging situation.”

Habermas calls for broad public deliberation about the basic values of the European Union, in contrast to a technical negotiation among elites.

European unification has remained an elite project to the present day because the political elites did not dare to involve the general public in an informed debate about alternative future scenarios. National populations will be able to recognize and decide what is in their own respective interest in the long run only when discussion of the momentous alternatives is no longer confined to academic journals – e.g. the alternatives of dismantling the euro or of returning to a currency system with restricted margins of fluctuation, or of opting for closer cooperation after all.

This has been a consistent theme for Habermas for more than seven decades as a public intellectual. In the 1950s, he argued against counting on the German Constitutional Court to define and protect the Federal Republic that had been designed by the Western allies. Instead, the German people must hold a democratic conversation that led to democratic institutions. Likewise, when East Germany fell, Habermas argued that its political institutions were worthless, but that the peoples of East and West should come together to design a new constitution for a unified Germany. (Instead, the GDR was simply absorbed into the post-War Federal Republic.)

Habermas names a list of crises that he thinks are forcing a broader and deeper conversation: Syria, terrorism, and (in a word) Trump.

Nationalist, racist, anti-Islamic, and anti-Semitic tendencies that have acquired political weight with the program and style of the new US administration are combining with authoritarian developments in Russia, Turkey, Egypt, and other countries to pose an unexpected challenge for the political and cultural self-understanding of the West. Suddenly Europe finds itself thrown back upon its own resources in the role of a defensive custodian of liberal principles (providing support to a majority of the American electorate that has been pushed to the margins).

Habermas has always been friendly to the American people and culture, which is a noteworthy stance for the head of the Frankfurt School. He seems to have been a fan of Barack Obama. I appreciate his support for the liberal part of our electorate.

Finally, Habermas calls for an expansion of democratic public spheres beyond the nation-state, in response to the globalization of public problems.

The institutionalization of closer cooperation is what first makes it possible to exert democratic influence on the spontaneous proliferation of global networks in all directions, because politics is the only medium through which we can take deliberate measures to shape the foundations of our social life. Contrary to what the Brexit slogan suggests, we will not regain control over these foundations by retreating into national fortresses. On the contrary, politics must keep pace with the globalization that it set in motion. In view of the systemic constraints of unregulated markets and the increasing functional interdependence of a more and more integrated world society, but also in view of the spectacular options we have created – for example, of a still unmastered digital communication or of new procedures for optimizing the human organism – we must expand the spaces for possible democratic will-formation, for political action, and for legal regulation beyond national borders.

See also: Ostrom, Habermas, and Gandhi are all we need; Matthew G. Specter, Habermas: An Intellectual Biography and Habermas and critical theory (a primer)

when social advantage persists for millennia

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Consider:

  • In Florence, many of the wealthiest taxpaying families in 1421 are still the wealthiest families today. The very top earner in 2011 is descended from a guild member who was in the 97th percentile in 1421. In between came Medici rule, Napoleon, the Hapsburg Empire, the resorgimento, industrialization, democracy, socialism, fascism, and two world wars. Still, the names honored on the endowed chapels of the early renaissance are the names of the families who pay the most income tax in Florence today.
  • In England between 1170 and 2011, relative social status has been more consistently inherited than height has been. The same surnames that are listed as major landowners in the 1086 Domesday Book are still upper-class today. This despite the impact of the English Civil War, the Industrial Revolution, Labour governments, emigration, immigration, and the EU.
  • In Sweden, they stopped creating nobles in the 17th century. Then came the industrial revolution, emigration, democracy, and socialism, yet families whose names indicate noble heritage are still richer than other Swedes.
  • In France, the aristocrats of the Roman era were pagan, Latin-speaking owners of villas and slaves. By the early medieval era, the country’s leaders were Christian bishops who saw themselves as Franks. Yet the Frankish bishops were the lineal descendants of the Romano-Gallic villa owners. The Fall of the Roman Empire, barbarian invasions, and Christianity did little to shake their relative advantage.
  • In China, 13 surnames are over-represented among the highest scorers on the Confucian state exams in 221 BCE. The same surnames predominate among “the high officials in the Nationalist government from 1912 to the triumph of the communists in 1949; professors at the ten most prestigious universities in the country in 2012; chairs of the boards of companies listed in 2006 as having assets of $1.5 million and above; and members of the (still communist) central government administration in 2010.” Between 1912 and today, Mao is thought to have executed 800,000 landlords; and at least 10 million Chinese were killed or driven into exile on the grounds of being bourgeois. Yet now descendants of the old Chinese bourgeoisie sit on the boards of multi-billion-dollar Chinese companies.

A society can be more or less equal. For instance, the practical significance of being in the top or bottom ten percent is much less in Sweden than it is in the US, because virtually all Swedes have safe neighborhoods, income security, healthcare, and education.

A society can be more or less prosperous. Everyone is better off today than they were in the early France of King Clovis. Growth can lift all boats.

And a society can be more or less economically mobile. None of these examples reflect zero mobility. More typical is a correlation of about 0.9 for generation after generation, which leads to a fair amount of change over, say, 2,200 years in China.

But the important point to remember about mobility is that for anyone who moves up, someone else must move down (in relative terms). Unlike prosperity, mobility is zero-sum. And the people who are at the top really, really don’t want their children to move down. They typically have so much financial, cultural, and social capital that even the greatest cataclysms and the most radically egalitarian reforms in human history have left a lot of them sitting on top again, once things settle down.

I’m for mobility. To abandon that ideal is to accept a kind of caste system. But it’s important not to depend on mobility alone, given the remarkable stability of social advantage in all these countries. If your agenda is mobility, you must face the reality that you’re asking the same number of families to accept downward movement as will benefit from upward movement.

Equality and prosperity look relatively promising, by comparison. Christopher Winship argues that “the best way to approach serving the interests of the least well off [may be] to avoid policies that decisively pit the interests of the less advantaged families against those of the more advantaged families.” He cites evidence that Scandinavian countries have achieved the highest levels of shared prosperity and economic equality in the world today not by directly pursuing equality of opportunity (which would mean lowering the odds that the children of the rich will be rich) but by negotiating policies that are attractive to business as well as labor. These compromises have created durable and accountable states that have been able to deliver high-quality services for all. Such states also provide conditions for somewhat more inter-generational mobility than we see in the USA, just because the bottom of the income distribution faces less profound obstacles.

Source: Christopher Winship, “From Principles to Practice and the Problem of Unintended Consequences,” in Meira Levinson and Jacob Fay, eds., Dilemmas of Educational Ethics: Cases and Commentaries (Cambridge: Harvard Education Press, 2016), pp. 177-8. See also to what extent can colleges promote upward mobility?; and why some forms of advantage are more stubborn than others.

the remarkable budget deal

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Many have been rightly alarmed by the Trump Administration’s commitments to terminate programs related to scholarship and science, aspects of k-16 education, environmental and climate research, and national and community service. The critical response from citizens has been appropriate and welcome. But it’s also valuable to recognize the limits on any administration’s ability to change federal priorities, the degree to which valuable programs enjoy bipartisan support in Congress, and the extraordinarily inept record of the Trump team so far.

All of those factors are evident in the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2017. The bill is 1,665 pages long, and it is written as a set of dollar figures plus instructions (“riders”). Because these aren’t presented as changes compared to last year, it is hard to see what Congress has done. But as far as I can tell, most of the changes have been in the direction of more funding for education, culture, science, and even climate science.

The National Institutes of Health, National Endowment for the Humanities, and National Endowment for the Arts all see increases (source). NEH’s research funding is modestly cut, while support for the State Humanities Councils goes up. (My friend Elizabeth Lynn has explained how the State Councils are responsible for the NEH’s political fortunes since the 1970s.) The Corporation for Public Broadcasting is fully funded (source).

EPA faces a one percent overall cut. The Department of Energy’s research budget and the National Science Foundation see increases. Climate research within DoE is boosted. “The Bureau of Land Management, National Park Service and Fish and Wildlife Service all would see more money under the bill, which included few policy riders for the agencies” (source). NOAA receives an increase, and the Climate Program Office within NOAA is held flat. The National Environmental Information Office and Regional Climate Centers have flat budgets.

Education as a whole is cut by 0.1%. Within Education, Title I funding rises; support for education research is trimmed.

The bill “restores year-round Pell Grant funding, a longtime priority sought by student aid groups since its elimination as a cost-saving measure in 2011. The deal also … provides modest increases to college readiness programs TRIO and GEAR UP, which were reduced significantly in the proposed White House 2018 budget plan” (source).

Normally, the president proposes and Congress disposes. In this case, the president has alienated enough potential allies, failed to fill enough key positions, and played his hand so badly that after he proposed, Congress just developed an entirely different budget on a fairly bipartisan basis. To be sure, next year could be worse; and some of the people responsible for implementing these programs will do their best to sabotage them. Still, the new budget deal ought to be an antidote to defeatism.

(See also “mixed feelings on the DeVos nomination battle,” in which I argued that the new Education Secretary will have very limited impact on policy.)

Mozart illustrates the importance of “bids” in romantic relationships

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The psychologist John Gottman discovered a fundamental condition of successful romantic relationships (which is consistent with my experience of 21 happy years of marriage). Partners frequently make “bids” for positive attention. Emily Esfahani Smith illustrates with an example: “the husband is a bird enthusiast and notices a goldfinch fly across the yard. He might say to his wife, ‘Look at that beautiful bird outside!’ He’s not just commenting on the bird here: he’s requesting a response from his wife—a sign of interest or support—hoping they’ll connect, however momentarily, over the bird.” Couples who stay together respond positively to each others’ bids an average of 86% of the time. Couples who end up divorcing respond only 33% of the time.

The opening scene of the Marriage of Figaro is set in the room that Figaro and Susanna expect to occupy after their wedding the next day. They are alone together. Figaro is busy measuring the space for the bed that they will share. He sings a foursquare, masculine theme that has been identified as a march. Simultaneously but separately, Susanna is admiring herself in a new hat and telling herself how happy it makes her. Singing in her own ornamented and undulating gavotte, she asks Figaro to pay attention for a moment: “look a little, my dear Figaro.” He keeps on counting, and she keeps on asking: their two themes now playing in counterpoint. She gets more insistent as her light gavotte turns forceful: “look a little / will you look already at my hat!” At that point, Figaro notices her bid. He switches to her melody and meter to reply, “Yes, my heart, it is very pretty. It really seems  to have been made for me. Ah, next morning at our wedding …” Susanna answers in counterpoint, “How sweet is my tender groom,” as Figaro keeps singing about the “beautiful little hat.” Their melodic lines join as they sing the same lyrics about their wedding.

If you interpret the duet as a competition or struggle of wills, then Susanna wins. Daniel Heartz (1987) writes:

Susanna makes Figaro sing her tune to her rhythm, while complimenting her on her hat. With this little drama in music, which almost needs no text, Mozart has succeeded in foreshadowing the entire opera in the first number. By the end of Act 4 Figaro will have been taught a lesson by Susanna, and learnt to sing her tune for good, we hope, with regard to matters of trust and mutual respect between them. The conflict of march and gavotte, of military masculinity with the feminine grace of one of the most gallant court dances, will [recur in later scenes as well].”

But I’d prefer to see the scene as win/win. Each partner makes a bid and each replies. As soon as the duet concludes, Susanna asks in recitative, “What are you so busy measuring, little Figaro?” Statistics predict that these two will have a happy marriage.

source: Heartz, Daniel (1987). “Constructing Le nozze di Figaro.” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 112.1, 77-98. For a more detailed analysis of the duettino, see Stephen Rumph, Mozart and Enlightenment Semiotics, University of California Press 2011. And see why romantic relationships do not function like markets.