As if to put beyond any doubt the validity of the analogy between President Obama and Jimmy Carter, inflation, which was at almost historic lows for the past quarter century, is now beginning to resurge to an unsettling degree. One inflationary trend, however, for which the current administration cannot be blamed is that of highter education, which has been shooting upward for almost precisely that same quarter century in which the general inflation remained so low. Of all the causes, however, to which people point for this rise in the cost of college education, none is so important, and so much overlooked, as the cost of administration.
When I went to college, cost was hardly a concern. Attending the large southern state university ten miles from my home, I was able to procure a very strong education for the cost of $500 per semester (I lived at home); for the final two years, I absorbed most of that cost through scholarships received because of my academic work. Hence, a solid education almost exactly twenty-five years ago cost my family $2000. Nowadays such money would hardly come close to paying for a semester at our most modest regional universities.
Many reasons contribute to this inflation. The fact that universities now, like never before, compete with one another for students and therefore simply require lavishly appointed dormitories, cafeterias, and wellness centers (the very name a perfect example of linguistic inflation, when one considers that these used to be called "gyms"); the fact that we have ever-more-lavish sports facilties, together with the people to staff them; the fact that we now require campus psychiatrists, medical staff, security, and a daily menu of institutionally-sponsored entertainments--all of this necessarily drives up the cost of living in the campus township that students will inhabit for four, five, or six years of their lives.
But another very important inflationary pressure (as the economists call it) is the rise in bureaucratic administration. At the school with which I am affiliated, we have a campus student population of, say, 2,000--more or less the same population that the school has had for several decades. Not very long ago, a man who had begun his career at this school in the late 1960s told me (with little exaggeration) that when he arrived on campus, the administration consisted of the college president, his secretary, five deans and several filing cabinets. At present, while the number of students has increased only slightly, the administration consists of a president, a handful of vice presidents, essentially twice the number of deans, a variety of associate deans (most of them created in order to satisfy the aspirations of unremarkably talented folk distinguished only by their unquestioning devotion to the senior administration), a veritable army of chairmen (called "chairpersons" as if to demonstrate an apparently iron law that language inflates to match bureaucracy), and logistical divisions supporting all these folk. The fact that the student population has remained fairly constant throughout these rapid changes leads one to suspect that the reason for all these new positions is not to serve the students.
The cyncial might say that the purpose of so many administrators is to serve not the students but the administrators themselves, since they are all handsomely paid for the mysterious and often vaguely-defined services they provide. This situation, deplorable though it is, does have the merit of raising a puzzle, which may at least help clarify thinking when applied to institutions around the country more significant than my own. The riddle is this: if administration is so grossly inefficient and sucks up so much money for so little return, how does it survive? It would seem, particularly in a day when universities are increasingly run like businesses, that such a system would prove unworkable, since businesses with bloated administration invariably implode sooner or later.
The answer I think lies in the fact that while universities pretend to be businesses, they really are not. They are often attracted to business models because university administrations, like all administrations, seek power, and the business model is essentially autocratic. While in the golden age of American education universities were largely run by faculty, administrations now favor a more hierarchical model of government--with its lack of transparency, its limited circle of those truly making decisions, and its emphasis on rank and chain of command. Ordinarily, in government for instance, hierarchical institutions do not compete as well as democratic institutions because over the long run free contributions by large groups of individuals tend to make smarter decisions than small groups closed off from free and open discussion. Businesses, however, overcome this inherent limitation because those at the top are constantly subjected to enormous pressure to succeed. The CEOs and their staffs are immediately responsible to shareholders, who like to see healthy quarterly earnings reports. If they don't, the CEOs lose their jobs.
But the modern university is not in this way analogous to a business. The CEOs of the universities have adopted from business a more autocratic model of governance, but they have not at the same time assumed the same responsibility to succeed. They are, to be sure, responsible to boards of trustees, but they are also cushioned from the effects of corrupt or otherwise bad decisions because, being funded by the state (if public) or by the endowment (if private) or both, they are rarely in a situation in which one bad deicion, or even series of decisions, will bleed the institution completely dry. No matter how bad things get (within reason), they are always assured of a stream of revenue--not of their creating--which will always shelter them to some degree from the pressures of reality that ensure that businesses make more efficient decisions.
The problem, then, seems to be this: the contemporary university has adopted the worst of two different systems. It takes the money that allows an open, democratic institution to function despite the inefficiencies inherent in such an open process of government and combines it with the more closed management system of the world of business. And it is precisely this closed system of governance that is inappropriate to a setting like the university. Best for all is an open system of governance, and its inherently higher cost is provided for by the guaranteed moneys that flow into the university no matter what decisions (within reason) are made there. Worst of all is the closed system of governance, but it is kept honest in business because it must constantly make sound decisions in order to assure its own survival. Unfortunately, in the current system of higher education in this country, more and more universities are adopting a closed system of governance, while maintaining the supply of money that assures the governors will be able to maintain their positions for considerable periods, despite results. And when that happens, the governors will be ever more tempted to make decisions in their own best interest, not in the best interest of the institution.
And so the public as a whole pays the price, in higher taxes and higher tuition, of subsidizing institutions which, so long as they accept public money, ought to be transparent and open. That they are not means that everyone, whether student or tax-payer, pays a real price for the opaque and closed system that is the contemporary university.
Saturday, April 16, 2011
Tuesday, March 8, 2011
Culture and Politics
In an essay reprinted in a wonderful collection, published in the Coleccion Austral and entitled Mi Religion y Otros Ensayos Breves, Miguel de Unamuno, the remarkable Spanish philospher of the turn of the twentieth century, offers a thought-provoking meditation on the relative value of politics and culture entitled, appropriately enough, "Politica y cultura." The essay argues that the region of Catalonia in the Spain of Unamuno's day was doomed to remain backward, undeveloped, and left behind by the march of progress because the inhabitants of the region devoted all their passion to politics and the fight for power and left little for culture, broadly defined. Indeed, he goes so far as to say that when a society is overly proccupied with politics, its culture stagnates, much to the detriment of its inhabitants.
To be sure he is right: in the end, culture--if we can define it as being, roughly, the expression of a society's relationship to the spiritual and eternal--is far more important than politics, which at best is but one aspect of culture. Nevertheless, much though TMH reveres Unamuno, we must take issue with him here, since we think that he overstates the case. Yes, politics is usually ephemeral, and, yes, it ought to be rooted more firmly, more thoughtfully, in culture. To be sure, a cultured discussion of politics is going to be one more amenable to compromise and to the promotion of civility, if not unity, which often is very desirable. And yet, when one is faced, as one frequently is in politics, with forces that, consciously or not, might destroy the order one is defending, then one may need to leave the museum, take up the mace, and fight in defense of that political system that provides the freedom that makes culture possible.
For it is a fact that throughout history, the highest and most noteworthy cultures, those have spoken with the most reverberate voices, are those which possessed political freedom, however imperfect those freedoms may appear today. The legacy of Athenian culture, for example, far suprasses that of the authoritarian city-state of Sparta; the culture of Republican Rome is far more valuable to subsequent history than the culture of the Empire after it was firmly entrenched. (That the Golden Age Latin writers wrote under the very early Empire is beside the point: Vergil, Horace, and Livy were all educated as free men, and if they wrote under Augustus, they may well have believed that Augustus was not an absolute ruler and that the Empire of their day shared power with the ancient Republican institution of the Senate. So argued Theodore Mommsen, perhaps the greatest modern historian of Rome.) To move to much more recent times, it is the modernism of Western Europe in the twentieth century that proved so vital: though many still read Joyce, who now reads any Soviet authors? Who, for anything other than historical reasons, watches the operas of Madame Mao?
But to ensure the freedom that sparks such creativity, man must always be willing to enter the political trenches. If the twentieth century has shown us anything, it is that freedom is not guranteed--it can be preserved only with care and with vigorous defense against those who think that liberty is a zero-sum game in the sense that they believe that they must take your freedom or mine in order to enjoy their own. If Alain Finkielkraut is correct that "Barbarism," to use Clive James' translation, "is not the prehistory of humanity but the faithful shadow that accompanies its every step," then one must always work vigorously--and in a democracy, that means politically--to ensure that society will successfully overcome the temptation to barbarism. Unfortunately, that means that sometimes we must dirty our hands and not just with the dust of fine old books.
And this is not to say anything that the Renaissance didn't know. In some ways, as Anthony Grafton and others have argued, the Holy Grail of the feverish cultural accomplishments of the Renaissance was the search for the perfect polity. The great scholars of the Renaissance studied Cicero and Demosthenes, Livy and Thucydides, in large part to learn from them about what made the best regime in which a man could realize his full spiritual potential, could be most free. This is the spirit of the deeply cultured Edmund Burke, the great English Parliamentarian of the late eighteenth century, who thought that important as culture was, the political life was necessary as well in order to ensure the peace and stability necessary for culture to flourish. And it is certainly the perspective of, say, the Federalist Papers, which everywhere look with a cultured eye to Roman history for lessons that shaped their view of how best to build our new Republican government. In the nation that they so carefully constructed culture has indeed flourished, but it has done so because, not in spite of, the Founders' strenuous efforts in peace and war.
Unamuno was no stranger to the great combative virtues of a passionate devotion to the truth and a clear assertion of what he thought was right. And while he is correct that man's spirit is more important than his wealth or status, wealth and status are doubtless the least worthy of political goals. The greatest goal of politics is to provide a polity that will ensure the greatest freedom for all--a freedom which will produce a truly great culture.
To be sure he is right: in the end, culture--if we can define it as being, roughly, the expression of a society's relationship to the spiritual and eternal--is far more important than politics, which at best is but one aspect of culture. Nevertheless, much though TMH reveres Unamuno, we must take issue with him here, since we think that he overstates the case. Yes, politics is usually ephemeral, and, yes, it ought to be rooted more firmly, more thoughtfully, in culture. To be sure, a cultured discussion of politics is going to be one more amenable to compromise and to the promotion of civility, if not unity, which often is very desirable. And yet, when one is faced, as one frequently is in politics, with forces that, consciously or not, might destroy the order one is defending, then one may need to leave the museum, take up the mace, and fight in defense of that political system that provides the freedom that makes culture possible.
For it is a fact that throughout history, the highest and most noteworthy cultures, those have spoken with the most reverberate voices, are those which possessed political freedom, however imperfect those freedoms may appear today. The legacy of Athenian culture, for example, far suprasses that of the authoritarian city-state of Sparta; the culture of Republican Rome is far more valuable to subsequent history than the culture of the Empire after it was firmly entrenched. (That the Golden Age Latin writers wrote under the very early Empire is beside the point: Vergil, Horace, and Livy were all educated as free men, and if they wrote under Augustus, they may well have believed that Augustus was not an absolute ruler and that the Empire of their day shared power with the ancient Republican institution of the Senate. So argued Theodore Mommsen, perhaps the greatest modern historian of Rome.) To move to much more recent times, it is the modernism of Western Europe in the twentieth century that proved so vital: though many still read Joyce, who now reads any Soviet authors? Who, for anything other than historical reasons, watches the operas of Madame Mao?
But to ensure the freedom that sparks such creativity, man must always be willing to enter the political trenches. If the twentieth century has shown us anything, it is that freedom is not guranteed--it can be preserved only with care and with vigorous defense against those who think that liberty is a zero-sum game in the sense that they believe that they must take your freedom or mine in order to enjoy their own. If Alain Finkielkraut is correct that "Barbarism," to use Clive James' translation, "is not the prehistory of humanity but the faithful shadow that accompanies its every step," then one must always work vigorously--and in a democracy, that means politically--to ensure that society will successfully overcome the temptation to barbarism. Unfortunately, that means that sometimes we must dirty our hands and not just with the dust of fine old books.
And this is not to say anything that the Renaissance didn't know. In some ways, as Anthony Grafton and others have argued, the Holy Grail of the feverish cultural accomplishments of the Renaissance was the search for the perfect polity. The great scholars of the Renaissance studied Cicero and Demosthenes, Livy and Thucydides, in large part to learn from them about what made the best regime in which a man could realize his full spiritual potential, could be most free. This is the spirit of the deeply cultured Edmund Burke, the great English Parliamentarian of the late eighteenth century, who thought that important as culture was, the political life was necessary as well in order to ensure the peace and stability necessary for culture to flourish. And it is certainly the perspective of, say, the Federalist Papers, which everywhere look with a cultured eye to Roman history for lessons that shaped their view of how best to build our new Republican government. In the nation that they so carefully constructed culture has indeed flourished, but it has done so because, not in spite of, the Founders' strenuous efforts in peace and war.
Unamuno was no stranger to the great combative virtues of a passionate devotion to the truth and a clear assertion of what he thought was right. And while he is correct that man's spirit is more important than his wealth or status, wealth and status are doubtless the least worthy of political goals. The greatest goal of politics is to provide a polity that will ensure the greatest freedom for all--a freedom which will produce a truly great culture.
Don't Even Think about It!
We all know that conspiracies, while an ever-increasing staple on screen and page, don't really exist in the real world of politics. Whenever anyone, whether a John Bircher or Michael Moore, shows us evidence of a conspiracy, all we need do is wait, and the theory will eventually collapse under the accumulating weight of counter evidence. (This seems not to be happening with those who believe that "9-11 was an inside job." But these political Quixotes have from the beginning swallowed such a palpable falsehood that they are already committed to living outside the world of facts, and therefore no amount of evidence to the contrary will sway their faith.)
Indeed, major political conspiracies in an open society are by definition almost impossible, since virtually anything threatens their establishment and maintenance. Anyone with knowledge of one, for instance, can make his fortune simply by giving an interview to the New York Times, so the centrifugal pressures will always overcome the centripetal and tear such a plot apart. For this reason, anyone who believes in conspiracies is perhaps moving around the bend, and it is therefore best not to hang around conspiracists if one wishes to be taken seriously as an analyst of a very complex world in which free agents are constantly making free decisions day by day, hour by hour.
And yet. No, I don't seriously mean to imply that there is a conspiracy afoot in the current Administration when it comes to North Africa, but I do mean to say that the attitude of the President is so difficult to understand that one is tempted not to untie the complex knot with careful reasoning but simply to cut through it with that sharp if old, rusted, overworked, and disreputable sword named "Conspiracy."
One notes, for instance, that virtually the minute trouble began in Egypt, the Administration was applying great moral susaion to aid the uprising and remove Mubarak; a year and a half before, however, when the trouble occurred in Iran, the President remained stubbornly, unconscionably silent. As he did for the first couple of weeks during the uprising in Libya, though he later claimed he did so in consideration for the safety of Americans trapped in that country. But this excuse was nothing more than a justification, since he was far more eager when it came to Egypt, though many more Americans reside there than in Libya. Is the President, then, in favor of popular uprisings and against dictatorships? No: else he would have voiced as much support for the Iranians and Libyans as for the Egyptians. Is he for dictators and opposed to human rights? No, for then he would have supported Mubarak in Egypt.
And here one can see why a conspiracy theorist might say: the President seems to be on the side of anyone opposed to the United States. Both Gadaffi and the regime in Iran are anti-American, and the President has been very reluctant to support those who would imperil those regimes. Mubarak, for all his imperfections, was much more favorably disposed to America than his counterparts in either Libya or Iran, and yet the President was eager for him to be gone, even though many analysts predicted that Egypt would as a result become anti-American. One could put this a number of ways. To wit--another common denominator in these three situations is these countries' relationships with Israel: for whatever reason, the President has been far more eager to replace Mubarak, who kept the peace with Israel for many years, than to put pressure on Gaddafi or the mullahs in Iran, all of whom vigorously oppose the existence of Israel. One could put it still another way: the Venezuelan lunatic Hugo Chavez, who is doing his best to destroy one of the most vibrant and beautiful countries in the Western hemisphere, was, like President Obama, enthusiastic in his support of the rebellion in Egypt but is much more favorably disposed to Gaddafi and to the Iranian regime.
Let me make clear that TMH regards conspiracy theories as the crack cocaine of political discourse, since they appear so attractive, are quickly addictive, destroy one's capacity for reason, and in the end, always succumb, with pain, to the messy circumambient reality of things. However, in the case of the current troubles one can sympathize with those who believe such fairy tales. As with the crack addict, I don't want to be one, but I can certainly understand how folks get hooked, and I can also sympathize with their plight. The current Administration, in other words, is by its amateurish and terribly counterproductive policies, inviting people to draw unthinkable conclusions. Thank goodness we have the Administration's words to the contrary, because their deeds certainly are confusing.
Indeed, major political conspiracies in an open society are by definition almost impossible, since virtually anything threatens their establishment and maintenance. Anyone with knowledge of one, for instance, can make his fortune simply by giving an interview to the New York Times, so the centrifugal pressures will always overcome the centripetal and tear such a plot apart. For this reason, anyone who believes in conspiracies is perhaps moving around the bend, and it is therefore best not to hang around conspiracists if one wishes to be taken seriously as an analyst of a very complex world in which free agents are constantly making free decisions day by day, hour by hour.
And yet. No, I don't seriously mean to imply that there is a conspiracy afoot in the current Administration when it comes to North Africa, but I do mean to say that the attitude of the President is so difficult to understand that one is tempted not to untie the complex knot with careful reasoning but simply to cut through it with that sharp if old, rusted, overworked, and disreputable sword named "Conspiracy."
One notes, for instance, that virtually the minute trouble began in Egypt, the Administration was applying great moral susaion to aid the uprising and remove Mubarak; a year and a half before, however, when the trouble occurred in Iran, the President remained stubbornly, unconscionably silent. As he did for the first couple of weeks during the uprising in Libya, though he later claimed he did so in consideration for the safety of Americans trapped in that country. But this excuse was nothing more than a justification, since he was far more eager when it came to Egypt, though many more Americans reside there than in Libya. Is the President, then, in favor of popular uprisings and against dictatorships? No: else he would have voiced as much support for the Iranians and Libyans as for the Egyptians. Is he for dictators and opposed to human rights? No, for then he would have supported Mubarak in Egypt.
And here one can see why a conspiracy theorist might say: the President seems to be on the side of anyone opposed to the United States. Both Gadaffi and the regime in Iran are anti-American, and the President has been very reluctant to support those who would imperil those regimes. Mubarak, for all his imperfections, was much more favorably disposed to America than his counterparts in either Libya or Iran, and yet the President was eager for him to be gone, even though many analysts predicted that Egypt would as a result become anti-American. One could put this a number of ways. To wit--another common denominator in these three situations is these countries' relationships with Israel: for whatever reason, the President has been far more eager to replace Mubarak, who kept the peace with Israel for many years, than to put pressure on Gaddafi or the mullahs in Iran, all of whom vigorously oppose the existence of Israel. One could put it still another way: the Venezuelan lunatic Hugo Chavez, who is doing his best to destroy one of the most vibrant and beautiful countries in the Western hemisphere, was, like President Obama, enthusiastic in his support of the rebellion in Egypt but is much more favorably disposed to Gaddafi and to the Iranian regime.
Let me make clear that TMH regards conspiracy theories as the crack cocaine of political discourse, since they appear so attractive, are quickly addictive, destroy one's capacity for reason, and in the end, always succumb, with pain, to the messy circumambient reality of things. However, in the case of the current troubles one can sympathize with those who believe such fairy tales. As with the crack addict, I don't want to be one, but I can certainly understand how folks get hooked, and I can also sympathize with their plight. The current Administration, in other words, is by its amateurish and terribly counterproductive policies, inviting people to draw unthinkable conclusions. Thank goodness we have the Administration's words to the contrary, because their deeds certainly are confusing.
Sunday, February 20, 2011
Notate Bene
Just a brief observation that while almost two weeks ago in respect of the uprisings in the Middle East TMH adduced Jeane Kirkpatrick's distinction between totalitarian and authoritarian regimes, we note that just a couple of minutes ago on the panel segment of today's edition of Fox News Sunday, Juan Williams did the same. The essay in which Kirkpatrick makes that distinction is a touchstone--it is essential reading, not only for understanding foreign affairs but also for gaining insight into the different ways managers even in our own society behave. In short, it is an essay that offers a great deal of practical wisdom beyond the confines of its own explicit concerns.
And speaking of Juan Williams, let no more of my very conservative friends dismiss him as merely a left-wing schill. Although he is indeed very liberal, his assertion this morning that Wisconsin's Gov. Brown is making a very reasonable move vis-a-vis the unions in his state is a startling assertion for one of his political principles. If all public argument were conducted by people of his good faith (note: not necessarily of his political positions), then we would all be better off.
And speaking of Juan Williams, let no more of my very conservative friends dismiss him as merely a left-wing schill. Although he is indeed very liberal, his assertion this morning that Wisconsin's Gov. Brown is making a very reasonable move vis-a-vis the unions in his state is a startling assertion for one of his political principles. If all public argument were conducted by people of his good faith (note: not necessarily of his political positions), then we would all be better off.
Friday, February 18, 2011
The Badgers
While the troubles in Wisconsin may not be emblematic of what Glenn Beck says they are--a growing wave of anarchy across the world that threatens peace and stability everywhere--they are indeed emblematic of how much and how quickly things change over time in our society. We are subject to ever-increasing pace in our lives, as the rapid development of political events here and abroad show us now almost every week.
When we at TMH were even younger than we are now, we were consious of the narrative from 1995, when the Federal government was shut down because a conservative Republican House of Representatives and President Clinton could not agree on a budget. The Republicans were the agents of change, since until the year before the Congress had been in its fourth decade of Democrat control, so it was only natural to see those who symbolized change as responsible for what, frankly, some of them explicitly said they were for: shutting down the government.
But time moves on; nothing remains the same, and now the agents of change--at least in Wisconsin--are the liberals. The Democrats left Gov. Scott Walker and the State Legislature in a fiscally untenable situation, since because of their budgets the state is now over $1 billion in debt. Because of this situation, voters in liberal Wisconsin elected conservatives to fix the financial problems, and this the Governor and legislature are trying to do by the only realistic means possible, cutting spending.
Now, however, in order to illustrate their disagreement with the conservative solution, liberals--Democrats all, in this case--have essentially shut down the government. Democratic senators from Wisconsin have all fled the state so that the Senate is left without the quorum necessary to enact the solution that voters elected them to provide. So liberal Democrats are now doing what conservative Republicans did in the 1990s: animated by a philosophical belief they are shutting down the Wisconsin Senate.
If the conventional wisdom in the mainstream media is correct, those who take the initiative in shutting down the government always lose. The media have repeated this narrative again and again to pressure the Republican Congress not to face down President Obama on the matter of a continuing resolution later this spring, but if their logic is correct, then the romantic flight of the Democratic senators from Wisconsin will damage the Democratic, not the Republican, Party in that state. And if Talk Radio is correct (and even liberal Talk Radio agrees), what is happening in Wisconsin is a war by proxy over the future viability of the Democratic Party. If that is so, and if the Democrats are engaged in what the media has been warning for weeks now it would be suicidal for Republicans to do, then the Democrats and their allies in Wisconsin should be very worried indeed.
When we at TMH were even younger than we are now, we were consious of the narrative from 1995, when the Federal government was shut down because a conservative Republican House of Representatives and President Clinton could not agree on a budget. The Republicans were the agents of change, since until the year before the Congress had been in its fourth decade of Democrat control, so it was only natural to see those who symbolized change as responsible for what, frankly, some of them explicitly said they were for: shutting down the government.
But time moves on; nothing remains the same, and now the agents of change--at least in Wisconsin--are the liberals. The Democrats left Gov. Scott Walker and the State Legislature in a fiscally untenable situation, since because of their budgets the state is now over $1 billion in debt. Because of this situation, voters in liberal Wisconsin elected conservatives to fix the financial problems, and this the Governor and legislature are trying to do by the only realistic means possible, cutting spending.
Now, however, in order to illustrate their disagreement with the conservative solution, liberals--Democrats all, in this case--have essentially shut down the government. Democratic senators from Wisconsin have all fled the state so that the Senate is left without the quorum necessary to enact the solution that voters elected them to provide. So liberal Democrats are now doing what conservative Republicans did in the 1990s: animated by a philosophical belief they are shutting down the Wisconsin Senate.
If the conventional wisdom in the mainstream media is correct, those who take the initiative in shutting down the government always lose. The media have repeated this narrative again and again to pressure the Republican Congress not to face down President Obama on the matter of a continuing resolution later this spring, but if their logic is correct, then the romantic flight of the Democratic senators from Wisconsin will damage the Democratic, not the Republican, Party in that state. And if Talk Radio is correct (and even liberal Talk Radio agrees), what is happening in Wisconsin is a war by proxy over the future viability of the Democratic Party. If that is so, and if the Democrats are engaged in what the media has been warning for weeks now it would be suicidal for Republicans to do, then the Democrats and their allies in Wisconsin should be very worried indeed.
Thursday, February 17, 2011
Social Constructs?
Surely we live in an age of meaningless celebration. Not of meaningless celebrities, mind you, since even the most apparently trivial of these--Lady Gaga, for instance, or Lindsay Lohan--offer meaning at least as cautionary tales for personal behavior or as markers of what our society seems to value. No: by meaningless celebration one has in mind Mardi Gras, for example, which will soon be upon us, enacted with fervor on the street of New Orleans. Yet one finds it hard to believe that most of the revellers there really will be engaged in saying farewell to the flesh in preparation for a Lent devoted to intense spiritual exercise, which is the original purpose of the festival. Another example is the celebrations everywhere around us of the life of Ronald Reagan, which began 100 years ago. So many of the people now celbrating his existence--PBS, for instance, on The American Experience--surely don't believe that his life is worth celebrating. Very many of the people now extolling his greatness are the very people who told us when he was alive that he was a doddering old fool who fell asleep in Cabinet meetings and had far too simple a view of economics, Communism, and human nature generally. (To show just how sophisticated is their own understanding of these issues by comparison, they sometimes reply, when asked why he managed so successfully to govern this nation and simutaneously to defeat the Soviet Union, by saying that he was just a very lucky man.)
But it's an empty celebration in another, deeper, sense because while we simultaneously celebrate the life of the man who preeminently in our time believed in human freedom, we are told on every side that there is no such thing. When Clifford Geertz said in the late 1960s that human beings are social constructs, he surprised us all with his bold assertion that human life is not so much a matter of choices made by individuals but that our choices are conditioned and made for us by the larger society. So pervasive has this idea become in our culture that one hardly notices when yet another writer makes the assertion--by now so common as pennies in a parking lot--that gender is also a social construct, an argument made popular, again in the 1960s and 70s by the French theorist Michele Foucault. So it comes as little surprise that in the January 2 edition of the New York Times Book Review no fewer than two important cultural spokesmen (of six polled) make the same point. Pankaj Mishra, for example, asserts that "a writer's individual self-awareness is always historically determined" (10), while Elif Batuman approvingly says that in Marxist criticism "Literature becomes a multifarious dream produced by a historical moment" (11). And, as if uncounsciously to prove their point, these writers, trying so hard to find a unique voice, to express an identity distinct from the others, ends up repeating what--dare we say it?--society has conditioned them to say: that human identity is not a matter of personal choice but of historic inevitability. One is the way one is because one's culture is the way it is.
But it was Reagan's genius--so unsophisticated that he was not bemused by the categories of Continental philosophy--that saw through these assertions to the shimmering truth behind, that human beings are, or, more accurately, can be, free at every moment of their lives. Unlike some who write in the pages of the New York Times Book Review, human beings need not be told what to think and how to act by the society around them: they possess a radical freedom of the will that allows them to chart their own course, no matter how that course runs counter to the culture of the time.
Asserting such freedom may well be painful. It is usually easier to conform to the spirit of the age--to adopt the assumptions made current by the popular media, for instance, or to possess all the material that the current culture deems indispensible for the good life. Nevertheless, though it may prove difficult, one is not required to mimic the behavior one is surrounded with, one need not adopt the assumptions taken as the conventional wisdom. This assertion of human freedom is precisely what the old humanists had in mind when they insisted on a rigorous education to train both mind and spirit. The liberal arts are liberal not because they have been coopted (as they certainly have) in most of our major universities by left-leaning Democrats: originally they were liberal because they were devised for the "liberi," for the free men (as opposed to slaves), who would need the education of the liberal arts in order to be able to make informed, wise decisions about how to act in life. In short, the liberal arts helped people to become free.
And then, as now, they helped people become free and act freely in large part because they helped the individual escape the surroundings of his own culture. Not, to be sure, because one's own culture is uniformly bad but because one's own culture is necessarily limited, while by the study of other cultures, their history, literature, music, art, and languages, one comes to learn about possibilities beyond what one is cheaply fed on a daily basis simply by living in his own society. It is a difficult process gaining another language and struggling through important texts in that other language, but to know what the ancient Chinese said about love in a world in which the present moment is always slipping away, or to know that in a world gone mad, marching in lockstep in a movie by Riefenstahl, Sophie and Hans Scholl gave their lives quietly distributing anti-Nazi pamphlets in Munich, such things tell us that human beings can be other than they are and that the joys of one's contemporary culture are often very shallow indeed.
Paradoxically, what an education in other cultures conveys to the lifelong student is that fundamentally the best of humanity is always the same. The great books, like all great art, tell us that across cultures and across times, human beings are at their core much the same: souls placed in a moment of time, people bathing in Heraclitus' river of endless change, while we long for the permanent, the eternal. That runs counter to the currently received wisdom that human beings are social constructs, for if they are, they will differ radically from one another and they will comprehend only with very great difficulty what another person from another time and place is trying to say. But the fact that we can listen to others from places so far away from times so long ago and can talk to others who will come decades if not centuries after us shows that humans at their core are not merely the products of their time and place but that they have, even if they do not avail themselves of it, an essential, unchanging core.
And these great works to which the liberal arts call our attention point to something still more precise. Essential to that core of identity is human freedom. Whether one is reading Homer's great poems or Vergil's, one finds in them that human beings have the capacity to flee their culture to create others, to stand against what most think of as the inevitability of history and voice objection. To read Don Quixote is to know that the visionary and romantic can exist in a world in which most are devoted to material acquisition; to read Hugo is to know that love can motivate a human being to feats thought impossible by all around him or freely to live by a code of generosity and love in the face of a withering mechanical justice; to read Lady Murasaki is to follow the life of one who, while recognizing the elaborate conventions of his time, shines in part by not being constrained by them. The very project of genuine education--as opposed to indoctrination--is itself an assertion that the human mind is capable of rising above the weak demands of contemporary culture and summoning the freedom to learn that in other times and places those restless beings who have achieved the greatest immortality are precisely those who transcended the limitations of their own time to assert that at his core man is more than a plastic doll molded by the pressures of his time but a being who is, and always longs to be, free.
But it's an empty celebration in another, deeper, sense because while we simultaneously celebrate the life of the man who preeminently in our time believed in human freedom, we are told on every side that there is no such thing. When Clifford Geertz said in the late 1960s that human beings are social constructs, he surprised us all with his bold assertion that human life is not so much a matter of choices made by individuals but that our choices are conditioned and made for us by the larger society. So pervasive has this idea become in our culture that one hardly notices when yet another writer makes the assertion--by now so common as pennies in a parking lot--that gender is also a social construct, an argument made popular, again in the 1960s and 70s by the French theorist Michele Foucault. So it comes as little surprise that in the January 2 edition of the New York Times Book Review no fewer than two important cultural spokesmen (of six polled) make the same point. Pankaj Mishra, for example, asserts that "a writer's individual self-awareness is always historically determined" (10), while Elif Batuman approvingly says that in Marxist criticism "Literature becomes a multifarious dream produced by a historical moment" (11). And, as if uncounsciously to prove their point, these writers, trying so hard to find a unique voice, to express an identity distinct from the others, ends up repeating what--dare we say it?--society has conditioned them to say: that human identity is not a matter of personal choice but of historic inevitability. One is the way one is because one's culture is the way it is.
But it was Reagan's genius--so unsophisticated that he was not bemused by the categories of Continental philosophy--that saw through these assertions to the shimmering truth behind, that human beings are, or, more accurately, can be, free at every moment of their lives. Unlike some who write in the pages of the New York Times Book Review, human beings need not be told what to think and how to act by the society around them: they possess a radical freedom of the will that allows them to chart their own course, no matter how that course runs counter to the culture of the time.
Asserting such freedom may well be painful. It is usually easier to conform to the spirit of the age--to adopt the assumptions made current by the popular media, for instance, or to possess all the material that the current culture deems indispensible for the good life. Nevertheless, though it may prove difficult, one is not required to mimic the behavior one is surrounded with, one need not adopt the assumptions taken as the conventional wisdom. This assertion of human freedom is precisely what the old humanists had in mind when they insisted on a rigorous education to train both mind and spirit. The liberal arts are liberal not because they have been coopted (as they certainly have) in most of our major universities by left-leaning Democrats: originally they were liberal because they were devised for the "liberi," for the free men (as opposed to slaves), who would need the education of the liberal arts in order to be able to make informed, wise decisions about how to act in life. In short, the liberal arts helped people to become free.
And then, as now, they helped people become free and act freely in large part because they helped the individual escape the surroundings of his own culture. Not, to be sure, because one's own culture is uniformly bad but because one's own culture is necessarily limited, while by the study of other cultures, their history, literature, music, art, and languages, one comes to learn about possibilities beyond what one is cheaply fed on a daily basis simply by living in his own society. It is a difficult process gaining another language and struggling through important texts in that other language, but to know what the ancient Chinese said about love in a world in which the present moment is always slipping away, or to know that in a world gone mad, marching in lockstep in a movie by Riefenstahl, Sophie and Hans Scholl gave their lives quietly distributing anti-Nazi pamphlets in Munich, such things tell us that human beings can be other than they are and that the joys of one's contemporary culture are often very shallow indeed.
Paradoxically, what an education in other cultures conveys to the lifelong student is that fundamentally the best of humanity is always the same. The great books, like all great art, tell us that across cultures and across times, human beings are at their core much the same: souls placed in a moment of time, people bathing in Heraclitus' river of endless change, while we long for the permanent, the eternal. That runs counter to the currently received wisdom that human beings are social constructs, for if they are, they will differ radically from one another and they will comprehend only with very great difficulty what another person from another time and place is trying to say. But the fact that we can listen to others from places so far away from times so long ago and can talk to others who will come decades if not centuries after us shows that humans at their core are not merely the products of their time and place but that they have, even if they do not avail themselves of it, an essential, unchanging core.
And these great works to which the liberal arts call our attention point to something still more precise. Essential to that core of identity is human freedom. Whether one is reading Homer's great poems or Vergil's, one finds in them that human beings have the capacity to flee their culture to create others, to stand against what most think of as the inevitability of history and voice objection. To read Don Quixote is to know that the visionary and romantic can exist in a world in which most are devoted to material acquisition; to read Hugo is to know that love can motivate a human being to feats thought impossible by all around him or freely to live by a code of generosity and love in the face of a withering mechanical justice; to read Lady Murasaki is to follow the life of one who, while recognizing the elaborate conventions of his time, shines in part by not being constrained by them. The very project of genuine education--as opposed to indoctrination--is itself an assertion that the human mind is capable of rising above the weak demands of contemporary culture and summoning the freedom to learn that in other times and places those restless beings who have achieved the greatest immortality are precisely those who transcended the limitations of their own time to assert that at his core man is more than a plastic doll molded by the pressures of his time but a being who is, and always longs to be, free.
Sunday, January 30, 2011
Sowing the Wind in Egypt
The general consensus this morning among the conservative commentators on Fox News Sunday ran counter to what we said here yesterday as soon as we learned that the Obama Administration is pushing for Mubarak to leave power in Egypt. Events today have shown those commentators to be far too optimistic and too kind to the Administration. Hillary Clinton made it clear this morning that the Administration not only wanted Mubarak out of power but that it had wanted him gone for some time; that statement, coupled with Vice President Biden's confident support for Mubarak just the other day, leads one to believe that the Administration has not until the past twenty-four hours coalesced around a response--which is worrisome in itself--and that its response is precisely the wrong one.
The Administration should be working to keep Mubarak in power and then, when things stabalize, press him to enact reforms slowly and surely. The current policy of encouraging him to leave will contribute to too rapid a change in Egypt without winning us any friends, since the demagogues that will surely attempt to fill the vaccum will try to gain power by attacking the United States anyway. It is axiomatic, from Syria to Iraq to Cuba to Venezuela: if one wants public prominence quickly, if one is in power and wishes to stay there, blame the United States for all problems and whip up sentiment against her. For this reason, TMH says again that the worst thing that can happen in Egypt at the moment is for Mubarak to leave power.
Now there is talk of the Muslim Brotherhood--whom we were told by the pundits this morning on Fox News Sunday were probably not going to be able to come to power--forming a transitional government now that (as everyone thinks) Mubarak is on his way out. Mubarak is no democrat, but he holds power for the old-fashioned motive of person gain; when the Muslim Brotherhood comes to power, it will hold power for rigidly ideological reasons. It will be on a mission from God, and for that reason, it will command the support of all the most strident elements in Egypt and beyond.
Much as I respect the commentators who spoke this morning, I fear that they are very wrong. I fear that the Administration's response is made fully in the knowledge that Egypt is not likely to bloom into a democracy (if so, why not celebrate President Bush's achievement in Iraq?) but may become another strict Muslim regime. Perhaps the Administration wishes to appease the forces arrayed against the liberal Western democracies, much as Jimmy Carter tried to appease the Soviets by never really doing much in response to their expansionism in the late 1970s.
Not only did such a foreign policy weaken the United States and her allies, it also led to the terrible suffering of many in nations whose fall to communism went unopposed (if not roundly encouraged: see Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe). If the Muslim Brotherhood should come to power in Egypt in part because President Obama has been too eager once again to bow to the radical mullahs east of Suez, we will have helped to condemn millions more to the type of life that Ayaan Hirsi Ali writes so tellingly about in her two memoirs.
Another example from the late 1970s that we would do well to heed is that of Jeane Kirkpatrick. It was she who wrote in her landmark essay "Dictatorships and Double Standards" that traditional totalitarian regimes rarely if ever reform themselves, while authoritarian regimes sometimes do. Hence Castro's Cuba is still a totalitarian hellhole, while Gen. Pinochet allowed during the 1980s the reforms that allowed Chile to become the most viable democracy and economy in Latin America (so free, in fact, that the Chilean courts have now announced that they will hold an inquiry into the death of the Communist Chilean President Salvador Allende, whom Pinochet overthrew in 1973).
If Kirkpatrick was right, it should give us pause: it should make us wonder whether it wouldn't in the long run be much easier for us--and much better for the people of Egypt--if we had an ally of the old, traditionally corrupt variety to work with in Cairo than a new ideologically rigid government. We might well be able to work with Mubarak, particularly if we have this week's unrest to point to as a powerful argument for reform. What leverage the Great Satan will have with the true believers who will condemn us as infidels and friends of the Zionists is anybody's guess.
The Administration should be working to keep Mubarak in power and then, when things stabalize, press him to enact reforms slowly and surely. The current policy of encouraging him to leave will contribute to too rapid a change in Egypt without winning us any friends, since the demagogues that will surely attempt to fill the vaccum will try to gain power by attacking the United States anyway. It is axiomatic, from Syria to Iraq to Cuba to Venezuela: if one wants public prominence quickly, if one is in power and wishes to stay there, blame the United States for all problems and whip up sentiment against her. For this reason, TMH says again that the worst thing that can happen in Egypt at the moment is for Mubarak to leave power.
Now there is talk of the Muslim Brotherhood--whom we were told by the pundits this morning on Fox News Sunday were probably not going to be able to come to power--forming a transitional government now that (as everyone thinks) Mubarak is on his way out. Mubarak is no democrat, but he holds power for the old-fashioned motive of person gain; when the Muslim Brotherhood comes to power, it will hold power for rigidly ideological reasons. It will be on a mission from God, and for that reason, it will command the support of all the most strident elements in Egypt and beyond.
Much as I respect the commentators who spoke this morning, I fear that they are very wrong. I fear that the Administration's response is made fully in the knowledge that Egypt is not likely to bloom into a democracy (if so, why not celebrate President Bush's achievement in Iraq?) but may become another strict Muslim regime. Perhaps the Administration wishes to appease the forces arrayed against the liberal Western democracies, much as Jimmy Carter tried to appease the Soviets by never really doing much in response to their expansionism in the late 1970s.
Not only did such a foreign policy weaken the United States and her allies, it also led to the terrible suffering of many in nations whose fall to communism went unopposed (if not roundly encouraged: see Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe). If the Muslim Brotherhood should come to power in Egypt in part because President Obama has been too eager once again to bow to the radical mullahs east of Suez, we will have helped to condemn millions more to the type of life that Ayaan Hirsi Ali writes so tellingly about in her two memoirs.
Another example from the late 1970s that we would do well to heed is that of Jeane Kirkpatrick. It was she who wrote in her landmark essay "Dictatorships and Double Standards" that traditional totalitarian regimes rarely if ever reform themselves, while authoritarian regimes sometimes do. Hence Castro's Cuba is still a totalitarian hellhole, while Gen. Pinochet allowed during the 1980s the reforms that allowed Chile to become the most viable democracy and economy in Latin America (so free, in fact, that the Chilean courts have now announced that they will hold an inquiry into the death of the Communist Chilean President Salvador Allende, whom Pinochet overthrew in 1973).
If Kirkpatrick was right, it should give us pause: it should make us wonder whether it wouldn't in the long run be much easier for us--and much better for the people of Egypt--if we had an ally of the old, traditionally corrupt variety to work with in Cairo than a new ideologically rigid government. We might well be able to work with Mubarak, particularly if we have this week's unrest to point to as a powerful argument for reform. What leverage the Great Satan will have with the true believers who will condemn us as infidels and friends of the Zionists is anybody's guess.
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