Amor Mundi 5/25/14

05-26-2014

Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.

The Fourth Revolution

The first chapter of The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State by John Mickletwait and Adrian Wooldridge has been reprinted in various forms, most recently in the Wall Street Journal. It begins with fear and awe-of China. The first chapter, parts of which have been reprinted in various forms most recently in the Wall Street Journal, introduces the reader to CELAP, the China Executive Leadership Academy Pudong. "Today, Chinese students and officials hurtle around the world, studying successful models from Chile to Sweden. Some 1,300 years ago, CELAP's staff remind you, imperial China sought out the brightest young people to become civil servants. For centuries, these mandarins ran the world's most advanced government-until the Europeans and then the Americans forged ahead. Better government has long been one of the West's great advantages. Now the Chinese want that title back. Western policy makers should look at this effort the same way that Western businessmen looked at Chinese factories in the 1990s: with a mixture of awe and fear. Just as China deliberately set out to remaster the art of capitalism, it is now trying to remaster the art of government. The only difference is a chilling one: Many Chinese think there is far less to be gained from studying Western government than they did from studying Western capitalism. They visit Silicon Valley and Wall Street, not Washington, D.C." Beginning with the uncontroversial premise that government is broken, The Fourth Revolution argues that two responses are necessary. The first response is technical: "Government can be made slimmer and better." The second response is "ideological: it requires people to ask just what they want government to do." What is needed is a revolution, the surprising and unpredictable emergence of a new common sense that can inspire sacrifice and dedication in the name of a collective vision. Mickletwait and Wooldridge are to be commended for moving beyond the typical jeremiads that all that we need to fix government are technical solutions. The last third of their book is an attempt to articulate a vision of a common idea that can inspire and animate a revolutionary re-imagination of the state. That their proposed idea, which they call "freedom," is actually quite old is an argument against neither the idea nor its messengers. That said, their view of freedom is disappointingly tame and apolitical. Read more in the Weekend Read by Roger Berkowitz on the Arendt Center blog.

A Little More Than An Apple A Day

What happens when a rock star Democratic mayor, a popular no-nonsense Republican Governor, and a billionaire philanthropist decide to make an all-out and high-profile effort to reform the failing schools in a poor post-industrial city? Dale Russakoff, in a long fascinating essay, describes the axis of local and financial interests that drove­-and blocked-school reform in Newark, New Jersey. Despite a $100,000,000 commitment from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the results of the program have been mixed. "Almost four years later, Newark has fifty new principals, four new public high schools, a new teachers' contract that ties pay to performance, and an agreement by most charter schools to serve their share of the neediest students. But residents only recently learned that the overhaul would require thousands of students to move to other schools, and a thousand teachers and more than eight hundred support staff to be laid off within three years. In mid-April, seventy-seven members of the clergy signed a letter to Christie requesting a moratorium on the plan, citing 'venomous' public anger and 'the moral imperative' that people have power over their own destiny. Booker, now a U.S. senator, said in a recent interview that he understood families' fear and anger: 'My mom-she would've been fit to be tied with some of what happened.' But he characterized the rancor as 'a sort of nadir,' and predicted that in two or three years Newark could be a national model of urban education. 'That's pretty monumental in terms of the accomplishment that will be.'"

A Political Animal

In a review essay summing up a recent biography of John Quincy Adams and both a recent biography and a collection of essays from his wife Louisa Catherine Adams, Susan Dunn points to Adams as perhaps the last member of the political generation of the founders, suggesting that he was both brilliant and behind his times: "Adams's program was a transformational one, but he disdained the transactional skills with which he might have achieved his goals. He rejected party-building, party leadership and followership, and piously stood opposed to using the tool of political patronage. He had neither talent nor patience for the essence of democratic leadership: connecting with, educating, and empowering ordinary citizens who were beginning to play a decisive part in American government. He did not grasp, as the historian Gordon Wood memorably wrote, that the voice of the people would become 'America's nineteenth-century popular substitute for the elitist intellectual leadership of the Revolutionary generation.' On the contrary, like the founders who worshiped 'the public' but feared 'the people,' Adams felt only scorn for the idea of dirtying his hands in the increasingly boisterous, personality-driven, sectional, and partisan politics of the 1820s and 1830s." Proving, however, that no one is just one thing, Adams would later prove to be in the advance guard of another issue; after losing the presidency in 1829, he took up abolition, which he fought as a member of the House of Representatives until his death two decades later.

Sometimes The Simplest Solution

Philip Ball pushes on the idea that the most elegant scientific solution is likely to be the best one, and the following ideal that simplicity is therefore beautiful, and finds it empty: "The idea that simplicity, as distinct from beauty, is a guide to truth - the idea, in other words, that Occam's Razor is a useful tool - seems like something of a shibboleth in itself. As these examples show, it is not reliably correct. Perhaps it is a logical assumption, all else being equal. But it is rare in science that all else is equal. More often, some experiments support one theory and others another, with no yardstick of parsimony to act as referee. We can be sure, however, that simplicity is not the ultimate desideratum of aesthetic merit. Indeed, in music and visual art, there appears to be an optimal level of complexity below which preference declines. A graph of enjoyment versus complexity has the shape of an inverted U: there is a general preference for, say, 'Eleanor Rigby' over both 'Baa Baa Black Sheep' and Pierre Boulez's Structures Ia, just as there is for lush landscapes over monochromes. For most of us, our tastes eschew the extremes."

One Thing After Another

Ben Lerner has an excellent essay in the London Review of Books on volume three of Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle series. One of the most distinctive qualities of the series is the overwhelming amount of detail Knausgaard offers to describe even the most mundane of events, like the exact appearance and characteristics of a bowl of cornflakes. Indeed, Knausgaard has remarked in an interview, "I thought of this project as a kind of experiment in realistic prose. How far is it possible to go into detail before the novel cracks and becomes unreadable?" Lerner observes that it is this immersive and anti-literary formlessness-as well as the risk it carries-that ultimately gives Knausgaard's experiment its peculiar power. "What's unnerving about Knausgaard is that it's hard to decide if he's just a child who stares at everything, who makes no distinctions, or if he indeed qualifies as a Baudelairean man-child, as a genius who can 'bring order into the sum of experience, involuntarily amassed'. Another way to put it: does My Struggle ultimately have an aesthetic form? Or is it just one thing after another? I think it's because My Struggle is both absorbing and can feel undifferentiated that you'll find it being likened at once to crack cocaine and Marcel Proust. It's why we can read it compulsively while being uncertain if it's good."

Reaching Into the Way, Way Back For a Way Forward

Paul Carrese and Michael Doran, weary of having to listen to pundits discuss foreign policy and wary of off-the-shelf foreign policy doctrine, look back to Washington's 1796 Farewell Address as a model for present day American decision making. They note four points - the primacy of natural rights and religious ideals, maintaining military readiness and civilian authority, wariness of faction but adherence to Constitutional rules, and a statesmanship balanced between interest and justice - worthy of continued consideration. They conclude, finally, that the foreign policy put forth by Washington is a foreign policy of an informed citizenry: "the Founders' school of foreign policy encourages us to maintain a flexible but principled disposition. Washington hoped his moderate, balanced principles would 'prevent our nation from running the course which has hitherto marked the destiny of nations.' This presupposed civic vigilance by citizens and leaders alike. The Farewell Address thus calls his 'friends and fellow citizens' to take up the hard work of learning about and debating difficult issues, while avoiding passion and partisan rancor to the highest degree humanly possible. In foreign policy, as in all aspects of political life, neither the experts nor the public have a monopoly on insight. Both are capable of error. A successful, long-term American strategy toward any given problem, or any given era of international realities, will command the respect of a large portion of the public and a significant portion of the experts. Such strategies must be a product of co-creation, and must be rooted in our deepest principles and values."

The Not-So-Clear NSA Line Between Terrorism and Crime

In the Intercept, Ryan Devereaux, Glenn Greenwald, and Laura Poitras write about MYSTIC, a secret NSA program that allows the U.S. Government to record and listen to every single phone call in certain countries. "Rather than simply making 'tentative analytic conclusions derived from metadata,' the memo notes, analysts can follow up on hunches by going back in time and listening to phone calls recorded during the previous month. Such 'retrospective retrieval' means that analysts can figure out what targets were saying even when the calls occurred before the targets were identified. '[W]e buffer certain calls that MAY be of foreign intelligence value for a sufficient period to permit a well-informed decision on whether to retrieve and return specific audio content,' the NSA official reported. The program raises profound questions about the nature and extent of American surveillance abroad. The U.S. intelligence community routinely justifies its massive spying efforts by citing the threats to national security posed by global terrorism and unpredictable rival nations like Russia and Iran. But the NSA documents indicate that SOMALGET has been deployed in the Bahamas to locate 'international narcotics traffickers and special-interest alien smugglers' - traditional law-enforcement concerns, but a far cry from derailing terror plots or intercepting weapons of mass destruction. 'The Bahamas is a stable democracy that shares democratic principles, personal freedoms, and rule of law with the United States,' the State Department concluded in a crime and safety report published last year. 'There is little to no threat facing Americans from domestic (Bahamian) terrorism, war, or civil unrest.' By targeting the Bahamas' entire mobile network, the NSA is intentionally collecting and retaining intelligence on millions of people who have not been accused of any crime or terrorist activity."

From the Hannah Arendt Center Blog

This week on the Blog Wolfgang Heuer writes about Arendt and social science in the "Quote" of the Week. And Roger Berkowitz writes about the Fourth Revolution, a call for a classical liberal revolution in the Weekend Read.