Burning Down the House

Posted on March 29, 2011 by Timothy Burke

Why ask for William Cronon’s email? Certainly it’s to intimidate him, and indirectly, his colleagues. I think that’s only the beginning. In the end, it’s a declaration by the organizations filing the requests in Wisconsin, Michigan and wherever else they will ask next that they don’t want any public universities of any kind. This is genuinely a pretty serious abandonment of a consensus position. It used to be that Republicans and Democrats alike agreed that higher education was an important investment in human capital and an important precondition of the flourishing of the American dream. Sure, on the right you might grouse more about the left-wing eggheads, but you still believed in the basic idea of public education. A Republican governor was as proud of having a flagship campus and a public university system as a Democratic governor was. No longer.

You may say, “Aren’t you exaggerating”? Honestly, I don’t think so. When you decide that you don’t want William Cronon around any longer, you’ve decided you don’t want any professors, any intellectuals, any higher education. Cronon is as good a blue chip standard as you are ever going to see for scholarly excellence. There is nothing faddish about his work, but at the same time, his scholarship has been remarkably creative and imaginative from the beginning of his career to the present. His prose is clean, communicative, engaging for a very wide variety of readers. He has a reputation for being a dedicated teacher and for generosity in his institutional service. In environmental history, where many scholars have passionate and highly political visions of the subject, Cronon is famous for his even-handed and exploratory approach to his work. He’s pretty much what a consensus politics would define as an ideal American intellectual: original, ruggedly independent, creating useful and practical knowledge, dedicated to truth.

When the Wisconsin Republican Party misuses a public records law to ask to peer inside the core of his professional life on a fishing expedition, the message is clear: leave. Not just to Cronon, but all of his colleagues. In an America where being the employee of a public university means that your emails and professional records are subject to routine examination by every tinpot bully that wants to rummage around in them, any professor or administrator who could leave for a private institution will eventually leave. That’s how labor markets work. In the long run, that will leave you with faculty with a heroic dedication to public service, faculty who couldn’t escape humiliatingly inferior terms of employment, and rent-a-expert mouthpieces for whichever industry or lobbying firm wants to hire their services. And so ends public higher education in the United States. Welcome to a failed state.

Not that the Wisconsin Republican Party is doing the damage all by itself. The tendency towards rent-an-expert analysis is doing plenty of damage in its own way. The intimidators are trying to burn the house down, but rent-a-experts are termites gnawing away at the foundation. Track the performance of various expert voices addressing the nuclear crisis in Japan and you’ll get a pretty good sense of the magnitude of this problem. For a complex example of the problem’s dimensions: a blog post from an MIT professor that was originally sent to his friends and family to offer an explanation of the reactor’s design and of nuclear power, but that also expressed in no uncertain terms the opinion that there would be and could not be any significant release of radiation from the Fukushima Daiichi power plant. Since that time, the post’s author has offered an intelligent retrospective analysis of his own credibility or lack thereof, and his work has been incorporated into a wider effort to “clean up” the expert assessment in a more useful ongoing resource for public understanding.

I don’t want to single out this author as a conspiracist, and I appreciate his effort to rethink and recontextualize his initial entry into the public debate, something that other highly vocal experts who were quick to debunk fears about the Japanese accident have not done. The problem with expert participation in the online public sphere is not just that our information can iterate wildly across a wide domain almost instantly. It is also that the online public sphere is absolutely loaded with people who really do use their status as experts to serve as mouthpieces for some kind of paymaster outside of their own universities: researchers who shill for Big Pharma, experts who are peddling some rent-a-solution into the NGO pipeline for implementation in development work, and so on. It is not wrong to view a lot of public expertise coming from university faculty with skepticism.

A public intellectual has to engage issues of public concern fearlessly, but they also have to try and live by the code of a ronin, to be a masterless samurai, not out of shame or inability to find a patron but because that’s what inquiry requires. That’s the source of the intellectual’s value, and it is the reason why the public should support research in universities or should demand independent reportage and writing. If industries or civic organizations want research for their own profit or narrow institutional interests, let them hire their own experts and let them be transparently identified as such at every moment.

This also means that to speak as an expert about the things which you know best requires disclosure and caution in equal measure. If you have an interest or a history that matters, say so. And an expert has to be judicious: nothing does more to destroy the value of expert authority for a public than to be overly aggressive, dogmatically certain, itchy trigger-fingered. The more I know as an expert about an issue, the less certain I become about prognosticating about it. As an expert historian, my most confident judgment would be that people who are absolutely certain about what’s going to happen next in a crisis are very likely to be wrong.

Speaking as an intellectual is not always speaking as an expert, and we should want our public university faculty to do both: to be educated, thoughtful and independent participants in the public affairs of their day and to provide authoritative insight into the subjects they know best. That’s not just practically useful, it is one of the aspirations of a better, freer society. Whatever threatens that independence, whether it is political bullies or people who sell expertise cheap to the highest bidder, is underwriting the decline of American life.

Posted in Academia, Politics | 6 Comments

Lose the Future

Posted on March 25, 2011 by Timothy Burke

It sometimes seems like historians should be the first to provide some perspective when something in our lives seems to be going downhill. Like many readers, I felt that sense when reading a recent New York Times article about changes in the experience of psychiatrists and their patients. The professionals interviewed clearly feel regret and loss about changes to the nature of their work, and I suspect their patients might feel the same, if they had any sense at all that things used to be different. But it’s hard to think about how to explain a change that has so many moving parts.

Sometimes people are simply wrong about a change like this, and what they think is worse is unquestionably better. Sometimes when the world around us changes, it’s neither better nor worse, just different. Still, sometimes things really do get worse by any standard. I don’t think there’s anyone over the age of forty who thinks that airplane travel today is generally a more pleasant experience than it was thirty or more years ago. Maybe planes fly a few more places than they once did, or fly more often, maybe the relative cost of a few fares is lower than it once was, but that’s about it. This change, however, is not altogether that hard to understand. The cost of fuel, the consequences of deregulation, and a business model where the pursuit of profit margins has so far done nothing that could erode the inflexible need of a large subset of customers for air travel.

The mysterious cases are the ones that trouble us because they frequently involve no obvious or easily targeted villains, no apparent solutions, and the terrifying sensation of being on a very unfun version of Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, only one with no madcap amusement value at all. The case of changes in clinical psychology described by the Times, however nuanced we might make it by adding in more details or complications, is one of those baffling instances where what we now do is very obviously worse than what we used to do. We could start listing the reasons why it’s happened. The intensification of profit-seeking in medical treatment both by the medical and insurance industry and among individual practicioners, the power of the pharmaceutical industry, the loss of professional autonomy by many psychologists, the complex failures of many past non-pharmaceutical therapies, an increasing number of patients pursuing treatment for mental health issues, and the widening income gap leading to fewer middle-class patients who can afford anything but highly standardized care are explanations that leap to mind. None of them would be easy to reverse through policy or organized social pressure.

The feeling of bafflement in the end comes from something more elemental. Only thirty years ago, psychologists could see and come to know a good deal about their patients from sessions lasting for an hour or more then at prices that many middle-class patients could afford. Are we so much poorer a society now, so that it is obvious that this is absurdly lavish, impractical, or implausible, a snapshot from a vanished golden age? Despite recession and war, that degree of loss and failure doesn’t seem to leap out at us at every moment.

Paul Krugman’s March 6th column on education underlined a similarly disorienting moment. Krugman’s argument is that most college education is rapidly losing value because most of those educations trained a white-collar middle-class to do modestly skilled but repetitive forms of clerical work that can now be done much more cheaply either directly by computers or by using information technology to subcontract such work to similarly trained workers outside the United States. Whatever you think of Krugman’s argument that the decline of the union movement is the key explanation for this transformation, I think the basic observation is fairly accurate. Maybe one thing this shift tells us is that those jobs were always a profound misuse of human capital. On the other hand, I’m as optimistic as anyone that there are new professional niches and functions waiting for the properly educated college graduates of the future but even I don’t really have an idea of how those niches could possibly support a white-collar middle-class the size of what we had thirty years ago. Without some kind of far broader commitment to restock the economic and social middle of the income distribution and to pinch back the tails, there’s nothing that even the best-designed system of higher learning can do to make headway. Again, it just feels like life is worse and it’s not clear why it must be so.

———–

The number and density of feelings of this kind in my life lately has a lot to do with why I found President Obama’s “Win the Future” slogan to be one of the more repellant political visions of the past three decades. I wish it were merely an empty marketing slogan. I wish it were merely a cynical toss-off. I wish it were merely as silly and irrelevant as “Whip Inflation Now”. But it’s not. “Win the Future” is the central credo of the people who are steadily losing us any hope of a future that improves upon the past. It is the slogan of misdirection and humbug, a motto whose best translation is, “Nothing up my sleeves, pay no attention to the man behind the curtain”.

Behind the slogan was the 21st Century version of dark satanic mills: we must be ever more dire and invasive in the way we ratchet competitive pressures into education and work, ever more aggressive in how we extract productivity at every stage of social and economic life. The speed setting on the treadmill must go up each week without fail. The usual range of boogeymen was trotted out: in China they are prepared to eat their own young, so we must as well! In India they chain their elementary-school students to a slave barge fueled by the study of calculus and SQL, and so must we!

“Win the Future” is about re-imagining human life as the worst massively-multiplayer online game ever designed, an endless boss raid without a poopsock in sight, perpetually amassing the gearscore necessary to take on the next boss, the next expansion pack, always having to outdo the other l33t guilds by surrendering ever vestige of a life which might be about something other than the game, and never a moment to rest, never a sense of real progression.

Where’s the vision of an easier, better, more satisfying life? A richer life in both material comfort and leisure time? A more satisfying spiritual life, or a life more fulfilled by intimacy in family, community or love? A life which progresses us towards freedom or discovery or truth? Towards new technologies whose deliverables are something other than, “Work hard to make more technologies after this technology!” A future based on reflection or wisdom or understanding? Anything besides, “Those guys over there are coming to eat your lunch, better get your nose to the grindstone!”

I’m the first to see the folly and sometimes serious danger of past projects to envision and create better futures. But the very worst feeling of all that I have of being delivered into a present which is mysteriously so much worse than the memorable past is the hollow misery that comfortably lounges inside “Win the Future”.

Posted in Politics, Production of History | 8 Comments

Today’s Captain Renault Moment

Posted on February 25, 2011 by Timothy Burke

London School of Economics faculty: Saif al-Islam Gaddafi was such a nice young man, we never knew he would have anything to do with the mass killing of the people of Libya. But we see now that he’s made a tragic choice, and so we’re going to go about making a few changes here once we cash the remaining checks sever ties to Gaddafi-funded projects.

Am I being too self-righteous? This is an underlying issue in most elite educational institutions. We admit talented students from a variety of backgrounds all around the world, including from very wealthy and/or powerful families. I don’t inquire into backgrounds at all if I can avoid it. It once took me four years to figure out that a student of mine was related to one of our biggest donors even though she had the same last name. So maybe I’ve educated a small-potatoes version of Gaddafi, for all I know, someone who is right now serving as the Deputy Underminister in an Interior Ministry and signing off on torture orders. I might be the guy in the news some day saying what a nice young man or woman that person was and I just don’t understand how this happened. You always know that you might be involved in educating a seemingly decent person who uses the credential to gain entry to an important profession, move into a leadership role and become a social malignancy.

Students are the agents of their own education and they’re responsible for how they use that education. You don’t refuse to admit a qualified applicant because of their parents or background. That said, there is also no requirement to be stupid about people in general or one person in particular. One of the basic roles of the London School of Economics and some of its most immediate peer institutions in the contemporary global economy is to grant technocratic credentials to the well-connected children of authoritarian functionaries. At some point, decisions that look one way when you’re inside the intimate dialogue of one teacher to one student look another way at larger scales.

Maybe you need to admit and teach the Saif Gaddafis: pulling on that thread might unravel a tapestry full of unpredictability and beauty. You don’t need to suck up to them, take their money to create Potemkin institutes, or to believe when they write an utterly standard piece of technocratic gospel about best practices and democratization that they believe it for a minute. What LSE faculty should have seen in Gaddafi’s dissertation is another mode of mimicry, a kind of neoliberal pantomime. It should have reminded them of how little in the end any of the white papers and policy summits and good-governance roadshows do to actually change the regimes which are the most odious examples of bad governance, and how easy it is to tailor a certain kind of earnest social science into some new clothes for the emperor.

I grant this: we all will in our lives cash a check that we shouldn’t have cashed, accept an invitation where the menu at dinner turns out to be pure poison. Most of us will know and appreciate a person who will suddenly reveal themselves to be capable of malice, destruction or extraordinary evil and wonder both at why we didn’t know it before and how to reconcile this revelation with what we already know about that person, how to explain to victims and observers that what seems simple to them is in fact complex, human, mysterious.

I can find some sympathy in the case of Saif Gaddafi’s teachers for David Held, but it’s hard to feel the same for Benjamin Barber. Rather than begging for a more reflective, contemplative understanding of the human heart, Barber is doubling down. And the reason, as this discussion at Lawyers, Guns and Money makes clear, is that Saif Gaddafi’s choices have uncloaked some of Barber’s choices, that he’s been acting as an auxiliary member of the regime, a lobbyist, a geopolitical launderer. So he talks of tragedies to come in Libya in order to not have to have an accounting of the mountain of tragedy beneath his own feet.

Barber is hardly the last intellectual to have talked himself into an appreciation for a tyrant’s supposed past accomplishments via a sovereignty fetish: I still run into people in my own field who are trying to sell the line that Robert Mugabe was an upstanding crusader for justice until some mysterious dark side of the Force turned him bad.

Once you sign on to be a court jester, it’s hard to give up playing the fool.

Posted in Academia, Politics | 5 Comments

History Swallowed Whole

Posted on February 22, 2011 by Timothy Burke

Last week was a busy time, so I got behind in my blogging. As is often the case, by the time I can get around to finishing a piece, the point I intended to make has been made. As is also often the case, I’ll go ahead and make it anyway.

Scott Turow, Paul Aiken and James Shapiro last week argued in the New York Times that without copyright, we would have had no Shakespeare. Or at least that’s what the framing of the article was meant to imply. Reading carefully, what they argue instead was that without money, Elizabethean writers would have had no reason to create as much cultural work than they did, that until there was a business model that rewarded performers and writers for their work, the kind of exuberant creativity we seemingly all treasure today would have been impossible. Copyright, as the authors vaguely acknowledge, came later. (You have to know that Shakespeare wrote before 1709 to fully pick up on that acknowledgement.)

This is a pretty classic example of the use of historical analogy as sleight-of-hand, rather than as an investigative tool. Turow, Aiken and Shapiro mean us to understand that copyright was a necessary cause of the possibility of profit that they suggest fueled the work of Shakespeare, and therefore that copyright as we have it today is an equally necessary condition of the continued creation of cultural work. They’re undone by their fatal attraction to the iconic name of Shakespeare, however. If that’s where they want to start the story, the analogy actually undercuts their case.

The dramatic explosion of entrepreneurial cultural creation that they associate with copyright began two hundred years before the first copyright law. Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson, made their living without copyright. What came before copyright was the printing press, a new technology that permitted dissemination of printed texts and images on an unprecedented scale, at unprecedented prices.

Authors made a living in the post-Gutenberg era not by creating works of intense personal originality, but by cheerfully rummaging through the works of classical, Christian or other earlier authors and stealing plots, characters, passages. Nostradamus was a bestseller partially because he grabbed whatever he could find that sounded interesting or impressive from both obscure and well-known texts. Shakespeare was a master at this kind of remixing, but so were many of his peers, well-known or otherwise. Early modern printing and creating was quite lucrative, and not just because of Bibles and plays. Pornography was another big profit stream, advice and almanacs, political pamphlets, a whole range of familiar kinds of works flourished.

So why copyright? What did copyright (in English law) do? It secured profits for publishers by protecting their investment, and allowed them to regularize their payments to authors as a result. This was an important development and it had many long-term consequences, some of them very positive. But it was not responsible for making writing and creating profitable, nor was it responsible for the early modern explosion in printing, publishing or for that matter inventing or scientific study. The Royal Society was not Edison Labs, and much of what we celebrate about science and technological innovation today owes far more to the former than the latter.

If you want to work by analogy, you’ve got to take the whole thing on board. If you do that in the case of the financial incentives for cultural and technological innovation, the conclusion can’t be a resounding defense of the copyright regime as we know it. The only way you can use history to prove that the immediately pre-Internet copyright regime was the best of all possible worlds is by using the 1980s as an analogy, at the highwater mark of global legal enforcement of its powers and the most elaborate policy framework clarifying its reach combined with some balance of profitability between most cultural industries and cultural creators. Go back to the early 20th Century and not only do you find many cultural industries substantially unfettered by copyright, you also often find publishers and owners utterly in control and many artists impoverished and cheated out of even meager earnings.

In the end, that’s what most writers, artists, and publishers over a certain age are really looking to: the last great business model. It’s hard not to sympathize with them, or to ignore the fruits of that model. In publishing, for example, many writers had just managed through lengthy collective struggle to secure many rights that their predecessors had been cheated out of.

Early modern European print culture does indeed suggest that money had a lot to do with stimulating a huge wave of cultural invention. It also suggests, however, that there is more way than one to skin a cat. Authors and publishers would be better served trying to figure out a new business model than to equip their old one with more weapons and power.

It may well be that in a new business model, less money will be made, or that it will be spread among more people. Rather than a few professional photographers making large salaries, thousands of amateur photographers making small ones. Rather than a few novelists making large salaries, more novelists making a bit of money. This is about the shift from tournament economies to something flatter and more distributed.

This last point is especially important considering Turow, Aiken and Shapiro’s apparent appreciation for the way that early modern print culture widened the range and volume of cultural creation. If there’s one thing that new media have demonstrated, it is that the old culture industries dramatically underestimated the creative capacity of the world around them, and relied far too much on closed-shop networks to determine whether a work was worth publishing or producing.

If the culture of the future has more people producing cultural work for smaller personal payments, then that says less about what has to happen to copyright and more about what has to happen to the world of work in general. It’s possible to imagine a world where a good deal of what we read and watch comes from creators whose main jobs involve something else. For that to be a hopeful vision, we have to imagine that all work will be less about a crazed pursuit of even more extractive productivity, that we will leave space for many people to have several working lives in parallel to one another, to personally diversify our revenue streams. Which would also, by the way, be pretty close to the early modern habitus that Turow, Aiken and Shapiro claim to treasure so very much.

It’s also worth considering what kind of cultural work might be impossible to undertake in a 21st Century distributed business model because of its very high overhead. In those cases, maybe the protection of very aggressive copyright might still be an important incentive to take that kind of financial risk. Note, however, that this is a very different and more focused idea. Not, “Protect copyright at all costs, indiscriminately”, but “What kind of work requires expensive up-front investment, has great social importance, and runs strong risks of not making its money back in the marketplace whether or not it’s protected by copyright?” Viagra doesn’t pass that test, and neither does Avatar. Before we refocus copyright regimes to this class of cultural work, we’ll all want to rethink what actually does belong in this category.

Posted in Blogging, Intellectual Property | 4 Comments

Real and Fake Realism

Posted on February 11, 2011 by Timothy Burke

I think “realism” has to be reclaimed from the people who get called realists. Realists in policy circles flatter themselves relentlessly, saying that only they really know the way the world actually is, only they are prepared to accept and accommodate the inevitable disappointments of the world, only they know the contours of our possible futures. These were the people inside of the world of American and European policy formation who professed (often through leaks and indirect remarks) that the neoconservative dogma of Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney and other planners of the Iraq War horrified them, and for that, they were often regarded as a preferable alternative.

But these are the people who sold us aid to Mubarak, support for the Saudi royal family, accomodation with tyrants everywhere. Today’s realists are the lineal descendents of the people who felt there was no choice but to accept the permanence of similar regimes in Eastern Europe and Asia, no alternative but to pay off Mobutu, Marcos, the Shah. And these are the people who quake at “instability” and look for the next authoritarian to back, to manage the possibility of genuine change back into predictable org-chart forms of patronage and clientage.

They triumph on the fields of policy for a day, but against the deeper powers now stirring, stirring since the 18th Century all around the world, that realism is delusion. The political elites who try so hard to turn liberal democracies into dusty-dry technocracies reveal again and again that they have no real faith in the long-term revolutionary force of liberalism. Every declaration of independence, every constitution written, every proclamation of human rights, they have tried to limit or hedge or restrict those commitments before the ink on them is dry. Democracy, but not for you. Rights, but not there. Emancipation, but not so far. Free elections, but not where we need stability. And every hedge and limit condition since the 18th Century been a self-evident kludge, transparently temporary and provisional.

And so again and again, the realists, pundits and technocrats and advisors, find themselves dully amazed to be on the wrong side of history, staring forlornly from a ditch at the side of the road as their ride disappears into the distance. Eventually they pick themselves up, dust themselves off and say, “I knew it all along”. And a few days after that, “We must be realists about what will happen next”, as they restore a managerial composure, make scenarios, wargame out the possibilities, repaint and reframe what was for them a black swan event.

The thing is, it’s not a black swan for those of us who see in the history of liberalism an idea that unfolds from the inside out into a potentially endless series of expansions and expectations. It’s not inevitable that it will succeed perpetually in this unfolding, nor are all the forms and ways in which that idea is and will be expressed, lived and understood the same. But the pseudo-realist sets himself or herself against that unfolding without having the guts to actually oppose it. They pretend to defend, support, embrace the promise of liberalism, but believe that somehow it will fail to be defended, fail to be embraced, that some “they” cannot handle liberalism, that “we” are too weak to defend it, that entropy and decline will swallow it up. So they withhold real support, withdraw real hope, and resign to a perpetual expectation of the Spanish Inquisition.

It doesn’t matter how many times that reality exuberantly demonstrates how miserly and complacent this alleged realism actually is, and how ill it serves the actual self-interest of liberal states. What’s a more stable situation for a country like the United States? A world of liberal democratic allies or a world of heavily subsidized autocracies that are always one day away from a sudden eruption into the unknown future? One country can’t be a unipolar hegemon in that former world, but that country might sleep a lot better at night because of it. The realists tell us this is a vision that belongs alongside sugarplum fairies and unicorns. The people of Egypt beg to differ.

Because the aspiration to rights for all and autonomy in economic, social and cultural life is not the end of history, there are no guarantees: not for Egyptians, nor for Americans. Everything we make and achieve and value can be taken away from us someday. Judging from America’s own discontented winter, we are the most likely agents of our potential deprivation. None of the things that fulfill our humanity come with guarantees: we do not love because we are promised that love can never fail, we do not invent and make and create because we have foreknowledge that what we imagine will always come into being. Nor can we take control of every circumstance to gain that guarantee. That was the hubris of the neoconservatives, and whatever happens to Iraq in the long run, it’s hard not to notice that it took 100,000 dead people to make it happen with none of those dead people agreeing to or expecting that cost in advance, versus some hundreds dead in Egypt, nearly all of them people who took their risks knowingly.

What is real is that in every place where autocratic stability now holds eventually people will demand their freedom, and in all likelihood hold a bitterness in their hearts towards the realists who denied that such a day or moment could ever come, or that the risks of such a moment could never be commensurate with the possibilities. My kind of realism, which I think should suffuse every dimension of the policy of the government which represents me, would side with the reality of that eventual moment and scorn the false stability that an outsourced collection of torturers, secret police and hard men hawk to us from the street corner in front of history’s ash heaps.

Posted in Politics | 2 Comments

Dear JF

Posted on February 8, 2011 by Timothy Burke

Dear J.F.:

I’m really getting frustrated by the constant nit-picking and whining about my undemocratic regime by the United States. Every time I go to an international meeting not only do I have to worry about my security forces staging a coup d’etat while I’m out of the country, I also have to fret about whether the Americans are going to try and block me from attending or whisper nasty things about my wife’s spending habits to the other delegates. Doesn’t seem to make much difference who is in power in the U.S., either. It’s not like it’s a big deal, ok, I mean, they’re not going to really put any pressure on me or anything, but it’s annoying. How can I get them to shut up and stop bugging me?

Yours,
President-for-Life

Dear President-for-Life:

Take heart! If the United States is persistently bugging you about your undemocratic ways, it actually means that you don’t matter at all to the United States. If you had any significance to them at all, they’d be much more reserved about criticizing you in public, and in private, they’d probably give you helpful tips on how run a secret police force and filter the Internet. (Though honestly, I recommend you get some advice from China, they’re really much better at it these days. It’s another of those Sputnik-style races.) So one way to get rid of those pesky complaints is to contact the State Department about being a client regime. But the fact that you’re not already probably means your country is in a useless place, lacks resources, or is otherwise unimportant. Here’s what I’d suggest: you probably already have your trusted advisors giving you a delusional vision of the world that conforms to your egotistical whimsy. Just ask them to not tell you about any remarks made by the Americans, to give you edited versions of the news, remove CNN from your cable channels and replace it with another porn channel, and always have your vice-president or minister of internal affairs meet with the U.S. ambassador.

Dear J.F.:

Why can’t we get the United States to back our democratic uprising against our long-time autocratic ruler? They were really enthusiastic about a similar uprising in a nearby country and passed on whatever resources they could to the protesters.

Yours,
The guy with a slight head wound down by the tank in the upper northwest corner of the crowd.

Dear Head Wound:

Since you appear to be in one of those countries that actually matter to the United States, I’m guessing that you’re not ready for democracy. The people in the country nearby are ready for democracy, probably because their government both matters to but doesn’t listen at all to the United States. Please go home and wait until your government says that you’re properly ready for democracy or until your government stops mattering to the United States.

Dear J.F.:

I was wondering if you have any advice on how to make myself over as a national leader. I’m being pushed for a promotion before I’m really ready, most of my experience to date has been arranging for the torture of people my boss brings to me. I think I’m pretty good at being a faceless bureaucrat and I’ve been working hard at developing my power-behind-the-throne skills. But my boss is pretty desperate, it looks like there’s going to be an unexpected vacancy, and I don’t want to miss my chance.

Yours,
Secret Minister

Dear Secret:

If you haven’t already read it, I recommend a little book by Machiavelli called The Prince. It sounds to me like you’ve got the “feared” part of your job down pretty well, now you need to work on the loved part. A couple of little techniques: 1) Bite the hand that feeds you (though check with your boss before you do). Your staff and subordinates will trust you more if it looks like you’re willing to talk back to the boss on their behalf. In your case you want to be sure that it looks like your boss’s BFF over near your country doesn’t like you. I know you’ve had a good working relationship with the BFF but I’m sure they’ll understand if you pretend otherwise for a while. 2) Get a better wardrobe, look the part. The pinstripes look good on you but they just remind people of the faceless bureaucrat/torturer thing. Go military for now, people love a man in a uniform. 3) Splash some cash around the office, get your boss to give you a slush fund for gifts, make sure to remember the guys down in the mail room and the custodial staff, you can work on breaking up any strikes or labor organizing later on after everybody’s calmed down a bit. 4) Bash the guy you’re replacing some, set up a complaints box, maybe a grievance committee or something that will deliver some recommendations. Got to seem like you’re listening. 5) Make sure your boss is willing to give you a golden parachute agreement in case things don’t work out. If your situation is unsettled enough, the boss may have to make another move later on, and you don’t want to end up the scapegoat.

Posted in Politics | 4 Comments

I Would Have Had My Great Books, Too, If It Weren’t For Those Meddling Hippies

Posted on February 1, 2011 by Timothy Burke

Mark Edmundson complains, again, that the dirty hippies screwed up the world and killed literature in the process.

Rather than a dreary point-by-point response to everything objectionable in the essay, I want to focus on one issue in it that Alan Jacobs and I were discussing earlier on Twitter, because it’s a problem that crops up in similar jeremiads against the culture of the present.

Edmundson complains that literary scholars stopped making judgments about the relative quality of literary and cultural work in the course of the 1960s, thereby instantaneously flushing the entirety of the Western tradition down the toilet in a matter of a decade or so. Why didn’t the public at large just keep at the discernment of quality thing? Because ultimately Edmundson, similar to some conservative or traditionalist humanists, believes in a command model. The public only valued literature because the critics told them to. The public only understood literature because the critics told them what it meant. The public only read literature because the critics lead them through the reading of it. Once the commandment vanished, so did the Western tradition itself, and with extraordinary rapidity.

For one, this doesn’t exactly square with claims about the immortal greatness of Shakespeare, Milton, Melville, etcetera. So self-evidently great, so full of incomparable majesty and worth, so important that they get tossed overboard for “Three’s Company” and some nachos the moment a small group of tweed-festooned men stop continuously churning out oracular instructions about how to read and honor the classics? That’s a picture of literary criticism that makes critics sound more like secret police for an authoritarian regime.

Second, of course, most of the canon as it stood in 1950 or so is still being read and valued by critics and general audiences alike. But I’m tired of trying to make that particular point to the “English departments only teach classes about the laundry lists of left-handed lesbian Iniut factory workers” crowd: you can hear a thunderous squoosh of fingers inserted into earwax every time this fact gets in the way.

Third, and most important, Edmundson and a small number of similarly-minded critics prefer to see criticism in terms of a command model, and their critical colleagues as betrayers, because the alternative is to actually make arguments about quality that are persuasive. If there’s anything that’s been forgotten (by Edmundson, apparently) it is that these are the hardest kinds of interpretation, not the easiest, at least if you want to make them as substantive, well-reasoned intellectual claims built on a systematic infrastructure that other critics could add to or disagree with. Arnold’s aphorism about the best that has been said and known stirs many a critical heart, but don’t forget the hard work that follows if you don’t want statements about quality to simply be a tea-sipping genteel version of The Argument Clinic from Monty Python.

When a critic with this complaint against the present moment actually ventures to anoint a literary work as having quality (or as lacking it), their assertion often comes down to one of three things: 1) of course this is great, because it is one of those works that was called great by those great literary critics we used to have; 2) of course this is great because the wrong kind of lesbo-Marxist-postmodernist critics hate it WARGLEBARGLE LOOK OVER THERE IT’S A UFO; 3) of course this is great because it talks about love and sadness and things that are very profound and makes me feel all philosophical and stuff, like when I was a teenager and did I ever tell you about how I felt in high school?

Go ahead, think about it for a minute. Why is one work of literature great and another not so much? For that matter, why is a work of high culture great compared to a work of popular culture? (Or is it?) The answers to those questions are never obvious. If you think you can tell me in a paragraph why Moby Dick is a greater work of literature than Northanger Abbey, I don’t think you really know what you’re talking about, even though I’d completely agree with the sentiment.

There is a reason that critics did stop making “is this great?” the first and last question of literary analysis (Edmundson is not wrong to say that this problem has been sidelined in cultural criticism, and this does indeed raise problems, as the concept of good and bad work is indispensible). The reason is that it’s a really hard philosophical problem that was made to seem easier through slight-of-hand when the answer was conflated with the preferences and tastes of a fairly narrow social class that held itself aloof from a wider public.

It is not a question that can be successfully answered through collecting data or assembling evidence. The history of critical judgment does not provide one with any confidence of steady improvement over time in the sorting of great from not-great, even before the dirty hippies and postmodernists wrecked the whole thing. Many works that traditionalists now commonly celebrate as self-evidently “great”, literature that makes its way into Great Books programs, was not infrequently once regarded by expert judgment as derivative, weak, pointlessly transgressive, vulgar, or lowbrow popularizing. Tell me that Dickens is great, and I’ll remind you that there were once expert critics who saw him otherwise. It works as well the other direction as well: there’s a long list of works once lauded as self-evidently great which even the most florid defender of the traditional canon would likely concede are now best forgotten.

I’d welcome an investigation of what makes some cultural works great and others ordinary or bad that was consciously intended to provide a critical toolkit to other readers and critics. Note that to be useful as an infrastructure for future criticism, such a work couldn’t answer all questions of greatness in advance. Not a canon, but the foundation for making a canon. To be useful, it would have to be applicable to works that its creator had never read or considered, and to stimulate rather than close down debate about works that its creator knows well.

That’s a mighty work I’m imagining. I wouldn’t blame anyone for refusing to tackle it. I would blame those, however, who regard this kind of critical judgment as easy, blame all the rest of the world for failing to undertake it, and yet can’t seem to be bothered to do it themselves beyond a few one-liner declarations about the greatness of favored works.

Posted in Academia, Books, Cleaning Out the Augean Stables, Popular Culture | 22 Comments

The Real Jean Valjean

Posted on January 31, 2011 by Timothy Burke

Look, it’s not like you can’t find a heaping load of unjust judicial decisions in any decade of American life you care to name, and like as not, it’s an African-American at the receiving end. Still, the conviction and sentencing of Kelley Williams-Bolar for lying so that her two daughters could attend school in the district where their father lives is something of a milestone. (Via 11d)

All professionals may have to face their own little moment of truth where they have to decide whether to follow orders or commit a greater crime against human beings. It doesn’t matter if the law says you have to sentence her. Don’t. Break the law, resign the bench, refuse. There’s no criminal here except the broken system. If you must sentence someone, sentence the legislature in Ohio. Sentence the superintendent in both districts. Sentence the idiot bureaucrats who use attendance or some similar metric to set the funding of schools, giving them an incentive to demand enforcement of these kinds of policies. If they’re not guilty, no one is.

If you must have a policy against such a thing, don’t ever enforce it. Just hope the policy is enough.

The whole story underscores a point I’ve made before. If you don’t understand why there is a level of populist disdain for the actions of government in the United States, this kind of story should help to explain it. It does no good to lay out the catechism of good government (roads built, services offered, libraries funded) against this memorable narrative of singular contempt for the desperate choices of one person. Any more than it would have helped Inspector Javert to lay out the resume of criminals he’d jailed in order to justify hounding a man over a loaf of bread. It may be an exceptional case, but it’s an exception that suggests a rule underneath it, that at present judges and officials and police regard breaking their rules as more important than living up to our obligations. The more of that there is, the more that some kind of rush to the barricades has an appeal.

Posted in Politics | 6 Comments

Wait, Who Has Sinister Connections to Insiders That Influence Their Reporting?

Posted on January 31, 2011 by Timothy Burke

There’s a second story buried inside the story of events in Egypt and Tunisia.

It’s the story of how mainstream American journalists find themselves perpetually staring at a magic mirror, telling themselves that they are the fairest of them all. And then scowling in rage at all the youthful Snow Whites the mirror shows them instead: blogs! online media! and now, worst of all, Al-Jazeera! Al-Jazeera, with its mysterious (sinister!) agenda, its undisclosed connections, its desire to influence events!

As opposed to what? The New York Times, the Washington Post, the major US TV network news operations, with their still-largely cozy relationship to undisclosed inside sources, their unabashed mouthpiecing for American policy elites, their protected stable of hack editorialists and pet experts? Why is anyone still talking about Martin Peretz, for example, let alone as lovingly as Stephen Rodrick does? He isn’t even worth getting angry about: he is, or ought to be, an irrelevance.

But this is what mainstream American journalism has been doing for so long: talking to the same small circle of people as if they were the whole wide world. Now they react in dismay and confusion when the clouds of hot air briefly part and they dimly glimpse long well-lit avenues thronged with experts, commenters, and observers of whom they know nothing. Like Columbus, they try to cop a wise pose and rename these new worlds a slightly unfamiliar shore of the Indies, soon to be an outpost of the Old World, while secretly trembling inside at the enormity of the unknown continents they now gaze upon.

Al-Jazeera of course has its own slant (more than one) on things. This is neither unusual nor particularly bad. Good journalism and strong perspectives have been happy bedfellows everywhere for the last two centuries except among a weird cult of American reporters who think of objectivity primly, as a chastity belt, a sanitary cordon, instead of thinking of their obligation being to truth, the hard facts, calling it like it is. Not the least, “objectivity” is a form of self-congratulation that prevents you from having to audit your own slants and account the many favors for insiders that you’ve paid off. The New York Times was near the head of a very long line of American publications that conspicuously failed to investigate much of anything about the Bush Administration’s security policies, particularly with regard to Iraq, until it became utterly safe and conventional to do so, while cheerfully passing along manipulative leaks from insiders that were intended to pimp the war in the public sphere. Or later, paid fitful attention to investigating the underpinnings of the financial crisis.

What I see when I watch Al-Jazeera, first of all, is interesting video accompanied by clear disclosures about the conditions under which the video has been gathered. The BBC also historically has been fairly good about this kind of privileging of actual video gathered from actual locations, unlike most American television news, which prefers giving us the anchor’s vapid teleprompterings, a few of the aforementioned reliable pundits, and a light smattering of carefully edited images. What I see secondly is a wide range of interesting interview subjects with a wide variety of perspectives and professional experiences being asked some pointed, valid questions. All of them: I have yet to see someone come on Al-Jazeera English who gets asked nothing but the softballs and love notes that are relatively common in American television journalism. I get something I can dissect critically, view skeptically and yet find useful, compelling and interesting to watch.

American journalists tell us that the waning of their profession is a terrible fate that impoverishes us all, that they are the helpless victims of changing times and technology and a fickle mob of digital natives, and that it is our civic duty to watch them, cherish them and find alternative funding sources for them to carry on as they have always carried on. I see the same trends and think, “In many respects you did it to yourselves”. If you’d only reported as you claim to report, if you’d only even now ask tougher questions, investigate past the story you’re spoonfed by the State Department insider you went to college with, freshen up the experts and commenters you rely upon, and take a genuine interest in the new world of information and reportage out there, you wouldn’t be one step in the grave, as unmourned as Scrooge is in his vision of Christmas Future. There is yet time! Buy a goose for Al-Jazeera, hoist a hobbling blogger on your shoulders, and for god’s sake, buy some more light for your offices so you can see better than you presently do.

Posted in Blogging, Information Technology and Information Literacy, Politics | Comments Off on Wait, Who Has Sinister Connections to Insiders That Influence Their Reporting?

Bang for the Buck

Posted on January 30, 2011 by Timothy Burke

One of the most aggravating things about many self-proclaimed Tea Partiers both in and out of political office at the moment is their braying about their budgetary parsimony, their claim of superior attention to keeping the federal budget small and lean. A smart, aggressive budgetary manager doesn’t approach cutting a budget like Friday the 13th’s Jason in a summer-camp cabin. Every thrifty shopper knows you don’t save money by refusing to buy anything. That’s not thrift, that’s poverty. If you’re trying to keep a tight grip on a budget, the real question is, “What’s a bargain? When do I get a lot for very little?” and conversely, “Must I have the most expensive items in my budget? Is there a cheaper alternative, or if it must be expensive, must I do it?”

So the issue with something like the National Endowment for the Humanities is not that it’s an expense the nation can’t afford, because it’s hard to imagine a cheaper date. A dollar or less per citizen of the United States? What’s not to like? It ends up on the wish list of cuts because Tea Party followers don’t like it, not because it’s expensive. Honestly, we should have a few $1/person items in the budget to tickle every ideological and cultural fancy. A buck here for the NEH, a buck there for faith-based initiatives. Unless that list goes on nearly infinitely, it’s never going to matter much in the big picture of the deficit. I’m no great fan of the current set-up in the academic journal-publishing world, but however much I might feel in my most extreme moods that journals could just go away, it’s honestly not worth quibbling about the cheap ones. If you’re worried about budget, just worry about the big tickets.

So let’s think about one big budget item: $1.3 billion in military aid to Egypt. And more aid from other sources. That’s a reasonably big chunk of change for a single country. What does it buy us?

As far as I can tell, it’s a down payment on long-term hatred for the United States. An advance on the anger after some kind of revolution or uprising, paid without fail year after year after year. Is there anyone still stupid enough to think that had we only given more money to the Shah of Iran every year he was in power, somehow that would have compensated his people adequately to tolerate his torture, his secret police, his corruption? Assuming, of course, that you could have made sure that the additional money would have gone to the people, rather than to buy another feather in the Peacock Throne.

Is this on the list of possible cuts drafted by the Republican Study Group? No. What’s on it? Economic assistance to Egypt. I’ll give some of the most intense Tea Party advocates this much: they’re willing to go at the military budget, too. But the criteria always has to be something other than, “Do I like this? Support this?” It really should be, “What gives me a lot for a little? And what costs a lot in relation to the overall budget for almost no gain (or worse, for a loss)?”

Posted in Politics | Comments Off on Bang for the Buck