Monthly Archives: March 2009

snapshots from February and March

Out of the bathroom window in the middle of the night, a scene from an expressionist painting. The moon, too large, glares through black tree limbs. Snow forms a smooth shape, a pearly pool, amid the trunks. Houses stand at crazy angles.

    Two people walk through the cold naked grove;
    The moon goes with them, they gaze at it.
    The moon slips over tall oak trees;
    No cloud obscures the heaven’s light
    Into which the black spikes reach.

    (From Richard Dehmel, Zwei Menschen, 1903)

A woman is running, screaming up Winter Hill in Somerville toward a gas station, where a knot of people stands. One of them is a police officer. Her dog lies on his side as if asleep.

False spring on Brattle Street: grand Victorian houses, an anthology of architectural styles. Joggers, toddlers in strollers, buds on the manicured foliage.

On a beach near Gloucester, the vacation houses have a slum-like look. They are small and boarded-up for winter; the streets are deserted in the cold sea air. There’s a game of horse-shoe on the sand, and dogs run joyfully in the surf.

flypmedia’s “meet the millennials”

I happen to be quoted/filmed in this FLYP cover story, which contains lots of good, basic information about today’s young voters. But I recommend it for a different reason: it’s a great example of multimedia journalism, complete with charts, text, music, and embedded videos. I’m more of a linear, one-paragraph-at-a-time kind of reader, but this format is obviously compelling and I’m not sure I’ve seen anything like it before.

critical thinking about “critical thinking”

Here are three interestingly complementary comments. The first is from the moderate-conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks:

    A few years ago, a faculty committee at Harvard produced a report on the purpose of education. “The aim of a liberal education” the report declared, “is to unsettle presumptions, to defamiliarize the familiar, to reveal what is going on beneath and behind appearances, to disorient young people and to help them to find ways to reorient themselves.”

    The report implied an entire way of living. Individuals should learn to think for themselves. They should be skeptical of pre-existing arrangements. They should break free from the way they were raised, examine life from the outside and discover their own values.

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thinking about scarcity

Environmentalists rightly argue that we should be much more aware of scarcity. Resources run out; there is only so much waste that the earth can absorb; and exploiting habitats causes species to vanish. Environmentalists are not the only ones who recommend paying attention to scarcity. A budget, for example, is a representation of limited resources. Any household, organization, or nation should live within its budget. Raising awareness of scarcity is a project that I can sign up for.

On the other hand, some resources are not finite. We can make as many new cultural products as we want. Works of art, music, or literature from one cultural background need not deprive other traditions of space or resources. Ideas spread without losing their value; often they gain importance because of their diffusion. As Jefferson wrote, “He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.”

The Internet is another great example of a basically infinite resource. (Computers use electricity, but the amount of energy per byte is cut in half every 18 months.) More generally, there is no obvious limit to the growth and diffusion of human opportunity, so long as that growth takes the right forms. We cannot all get richer if that means that we all buy Hummers. But we can all get richer.

When scarcity dominates people’s thinking, they are unlikely to trust others. We may cooperate if we feel that we must, since resources are limited; but we seem to cooperate better when we are optimistic and expect everyone to win. There is “an association between distrust and economic insecurity and a limited-good view of the world” (Orlando Patterson, “Liberty Against the Democratic State,” in Mark E. Warren, Democracy and Trust, p. 155). Harry Boyte once argued on this blog that creative civic populism arises in times of optimism and growth, whereas narrowly technocratic and hierarchical politics is more typical when people are conscious of scarcity. Twentieth-century fascism played off scarcity, while FDR promised an infinite expansion of opportunity.

I would conclude that an awareness of scarcity is not intrinsically virtuous. It all depends on whether the good in question is actually scarce. We should be frugal with limited resources, but generous and extravagant with goods that that can be created infinitely.

the worm turns

Several months before the 2004 election, I wrote a post entitled “what’s wrong with the left, and what we can do about it?” I criticized the belief that Democrats lost elections because Republicans had unfair advantages or played the game better. At that time, many liberals were blaming Fox News and Karl Rove for their problems and were developing a presidential election strategy that revolved around better “messaging.” I suggested (as a thought-experiment) that we imagine what Democrats would say to the American people if they had two hours of uninterrupted time. Then all the machinations of spinmeisters and biased media would be irrelevant. I claimed that Democrats would have nothing inspiring to say about the future of America. I then proposed several directions that could be more engaging: a theme of stewardship; a commitment to bold, persistent experimentation; a good-government reform platform; and an agenda of helping everyone to be creators and contributors to the commonwealth.

When that year’s Democratic Convention was all about John Kerry’s macho biography and the stupidity of George W. Bush, my heart sank (although a speech by the new Senator-Elect from Illinois moved me).

But political history has since moved with remarkable speed. The Obama Campaign was inspirational and forward-looking. Themes of stewardship, experimentation, good government, and creativity/service were prominent. An additional issue is now paramount and creates an urgent need for deeper change: the economic collapse. The recovery effort opens great opportunities for better stewardship, transparency, reform, and public work.

Meanwhile, Republicans are debating whether they should be openly saying that they want Obama to fail. (I remember private conversations about Bush in 2002-4 that had a similar flavor.) When your critical “message” about your opponent is your focus, you are in deep trouble. The lack of intellectual vision on the right now matches or surpasses what we saw on the left just four years ago.