Monthly Archives: May 2017

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.

two cheers for the West

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The defeat of Marianne Le Pen is a victory for the European Union; and the EU is one of the structures built in the wake of World War II either directly or indirectly by the Western Allies in that war. In that sense, the EU is part of a project called “the West” that also includes at least the Marshall Plan and NATO–and arguably institutions that span the globe, like the IMF and the UN. These institutions are now beset by critics from Putin and Orban to Trump.

One reason to call these institutions “Western” is that Washington, New York, and Brussels lie to the west of, say, Moscow and Beijing. But at least some people believe that these institutions reflect a perspective, value-system, or set of ideals that can be usefully named “the West.” When I took a “Western civilization” course in the 1980s, it was colloquially called “Plato to NATO.”

One of the deepest ideological fault-lines of our time is how to assess this thing called “the West.” Imperialistic? Reactionary? Liberatory? Ethnocentric? Universalist? Inclusive? Greedy? Humane? A threat to US (or French) sovereignty, or an imposition of US (or French) power on others?

This debate seems intractable because institutions like the EU and NATO (not to mention the UN) have been involved in so many episodes and policies and have had so many effects on nations around the world. And if the West means a perspective or value-system, it is fatally vague. Anything we could define as “the West” in that sense encompasses too much diversity and overlaps too much with other cultural traditions to be meaningful.* For instance, Plato actually has almost nothing in common with NATO, but was an explicit influence on the Islamic Republic of Iran.

On the other hand, most large, co-constructed projects offer resources and inspirations for the present. Even if the first thing that comes to mind when you think of the EU or NATO is the exploitation of the Global South, these institutions also reflect other traditions. They were built on FDR’s Four Freedoms, the UN Declaration, and the promise of economic and social integration to prevent war. A set of states whose domestic arrangements range from democratic socialism to untrammeled capitalism have cooperated to advance international law, human rights, democratic institutions, and robust and interconnected cultures. I don’t deny that these states have done other things as well, but their achievements have been remarkable. Just compare continental Europe in 1945 and 2017.

I’m not sure we have conveyed the grandeur of this achievement–or its vulnerability. The EU is not just an economic zone with high GDP and a lot of bureaucrats in Brussels. It is part of a project that reflects high ideals for humanity. Stopping Le Pen has saved the EU to fight another day, but it doesn’t automatically convey the institution’s ideals. To make the European project inspiring again will require not only beating off its explicit enemies but also reforming “Western” institutions so that they again advance their best values.

*See my posts on the West and the rest; avoiding the labels of East and West; when East and West were one; and on modernity and the distinction between East and West.

White racial resentment and the 2016 election

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Yesterday, I got to hear Michael Tesler present about his forthcoming book with John Sides and Lynn Vavreck: Identity Crisis: The 2016 Presidential Campaign and the Battle for the Meaning of America. I don’t want to give away the content based on yesterday’s presentation; the book is due early next year. But promotional materials already say: “Identity Crisis reveals how Trump’s victory was foreshadowed by changes in the Democratic and Republican coalitions that were driven by people’s racial and ethnic identities. The campaign then reinforced and exacerbated those cleavages as it focused on issues related to race, immigration, and religion.”

The 2016 election can’t have a single cause, but this book adds weight to the thesis that White racial identity played a major role–more so in 2016 than at any point since 1968. Tesler made me think of an argument by Manuel Pastor, who has noted that White identity peaked in California when Whites saw their majority control nearing its end. In 1994, Californians passed Prop. 187 to block undocumented people from getting state services and to establish a “citizenship screening system.” Governor Pete Wilson made support for Prop. 187 his hallmark issue and used it to win reelection. Incumbent Democratic Senator Diane Feinstein tried to position herself as a critic of immigration as well.

California is no utopia today, but defensive White identity seems to have passed its peak there. I suspect that facing the prospect of losing majority status triggered a sense of threat. Once Whites actually became a minority in California, the sky didn’t fall, and the sense of threat passed. Whites retain their social and economic advantages despite representing just 48% of the votes cast in the 2016 election. I would contrast Texas, where a White-majority coalition still dominates the electorate but the demographic trends are against them. In 2016, 57% of Texas voters were still White (and they preferred Trump by 43 points), but they must know their electoral control won’t last.

It would be valuable to look in more detail at major cities where Whites lost majority control after 1970. Often, White racial identity peaked around the point when the first Black mayor was elected, which marked a threat to White control. The next mayor was sometimes propelled by White backlash, but then a racially diverse coalition came to dominate, and most Whites adjusted to it.

Earlier this year, Pastor told the New York Times, “The United States just went through its Prop. 187 moment.” That period in California was ugly and lasted a while. Pastor asked, “Why go through all of our pain? That was no fun, and it dashed a lot of people’s lives. We underinvested in education. We over-imprisoned, so we got a lot of people locked out of the labor market. We broke apart a lot of families because of anti-immigrant sentiments. We did a lot of stupid things to ourselves.” The good news is that if the country follows California’s trajectory, we will ultimately reach a better place, but we need to get there much faster and with less damage.