September 25th, 2016
09-25-2016A Better Way To Hear People
Jo Guldi argues that the Brexit vote and similar anti-elitist political movements need to be understood as more than simply a form of economic populism. While it is true that many Brexit and Trump voters are part of a working class milieu that has been excluded from the benefits of a global cosmopolitan society, these voters are motivated by more than economics. Guldi rightly sees that the rise of the anti-intellectual and anti-elite voting blocs is rooted in an ancient discord between the elites’ claim to justified mastery over the masses.
“Brexit in fact belongs to a centuries-old contest between expert rule and participatory democracy. In order to make sense of the possible directions that overall policies might turn, we need a longer history that puts into perspective the notion of an underclass exacting revenge against an elite. The story of that contest in Britain, stretching back to the eighteenth century, provides a corrective to both the enthusiasts and the cynics. It shows the deeply entrenched impediments to greater local control even within a national tradition at the same time that it furnishes models for new forms of participatory engagement.”Teaching Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Coriolanus this week, I was struck by the powerful sympathy the bard finds in his hero’s extraordinary elitism. He has contempt for the people. He refuses to flatter them, to say they deserve grain won in conquest, to even profess to love and value them. Yes, Coriolanus goes too far, he lacks discipline, and he does not understand that a statesman must moderate his extreme character. But his claim that the best should rule and the best should rule for the good of the commonwealth resonate in the tragedy. Should not those who sacrifice the most for the public good receive the largest shares? Coriolanus is a tragic hero for Shakespeare because that unfiltered claim for nobility is both recognized as a virtue and piteously taken too far. The play is popular today because of the obvious parallels with present politics. Many see the rise of authoritarian figures like Donald Trump in Coriolanus. But actually, Trump is closer to a Sicinus and Brutus, the cynical and power hungry Tribunes of the people. Where the play reflects politics today is in the extremity of the positions taken by both sides, Coriolanus who refuses to respect the people and the people who react with blood in their eyes. What both sides forgot is that the side also is comprised of good people seeking the common good. This is a lesson that Thomas Jefferson knew well, as he wrote to Abigail Adams in 1804:
“Both of our political parties, at least the honest portion of them, agree conscientiously in the same object: the public good; but they differ essentially in what they deem the means of promoting that good. One side believes it best done by one composition of the governing powers, the other by a different one. One fears most the ignorance of the people; the other the selfishness of rulers independent of them. Which is right, time and experience will prove.”What statesmanship and politics require is to understand that the other side - at least the honest portion of them - are also good people who simply disagree about the path to the good of the public. The other side is not simply a “basket of deplorables” or a bunch of effeminate elites. What Shakespeare teaches is that amidst the eternal political divisions of the elites and the masses, there is above a need to discipline our feelings and learn to see our political adversaries as also our political allies in a common struggle. Guldi’s essay is insightful in reminding us that the revolt of the masses is not simply a call for better jobs, although it is surely that in part. It is also a call for respect and participation in the democratic practice of self-government. After fifty years of an extreme rise in elite governance and bureaucratized rule, large majorities of people in Europe and the United States are concluding that the global and cosmopolitan world is not one that values them. To respond that all they want is better jobs is to refuse to listen to what they are saying, all of which is made easier by the charge that they are racist and xenophobic. It is easy to advocate democracy in the abstract. When the people actually seek to claim what they want is when democracy becomes challenging. The hard work is to truly listen to the so-called deplorables, to work with them, to seek to forge a common good that allows all sides to thrive in accord with their visions of the good. This happens best when there are multiple and active institutional means for the people to voice their opinion in public. But with the nationalization of power in the United States and the rise of multi-national governance in Europe, there are increasingly few such means. As the elites govern in bureaucratic castles, the danger is the rise of tribunes of the people who trumpet the most dangerous populist fantasies. Guldi writes that the past offers a helpful path forward:
“A proliferation of new models for democratic participation thus appeared throughout the twentieth century, many linked to the rethinking of expert rule and bureaucracy itself. Patrick Geddes criticized the bureaucrat as well as the university-based book learning that formed a part of the professional economist’s education. Through the 1960s, student and worker movements protested for greater inclusion of their agendas into politics, and British radicals such as Colin Ward theorized what self-government on the local level might look like, drawing inspiration from worker-owned cooperatives and the self-built public housing schemes of Sweden. But only a limited number of these ideas actually received the state support necessary to see them replace an expert-run welfare state with a welfare state run by neighbors. The Mass Observation movement of wartime Britain used mass participation, rather than expert bureaucracy, as a model of anti-spy surveillance. From the 1980s forward, Britons experimented with participatory mapping as a means of performing regional planning where everyone could take part, but their results were mostly limited and trivial. Brexit is a recrudescence of this ongoing struggle between experts and citizens—a showdown between the ideal of state and capitalism forged in the eighteenth century and ideas of participatory democracy articulated in the early nineteenth century, fought for in the twentieth century, and still unrealized at present.”—RBForm more information visit: http://bostonreview.net/world/jo-guldi-brexit
Intolerable
Gordon Hull writes - in a post that the University of North Carolina made him remove from University’s Ethics Center webpage - that the continued violence by police against Black Americans is intolerable.
“I do not have very many solutions, but I think minimally that it’s very important that white people hear this (and there were few other white people in attendance, at least at the session I was in). Consider the following. In the past week, there was the Friday shooting in Tulsa of Terence Crutcher, who appeared to have his hands in the air and whom even the Tulsa police have conceded had no weapon. The candidate for a major political party, who has spent the last several years proclaiming (or questioning, or insinuating with a wink) that the country’s first African-American President wasn’t eligible to be President on account of his supposedly being born in Kenya, suddenly declared not only that he believed Obama was born in the United States, but falsely claimed that his opponent started the smear campaign. Then, in a stunning display of gaslighting, he and his spokespeople denied that he had said otherwise since 2011, even when shown video evidence refuting him. On Monday, that candidate’s campaign released a video showcasing the support of Ted Nugent, who is one of the most racist individuals to have set foot on a stage in a long time. Then on Tuesday evening, the national Fraternal Order of Police endorsed that candidate. This is just in less than a week. In the meantime, the regime of mass incarceration (that the other candidate facilitated a generation ago) continues: although the rate is dropping a bit, Black Americans are incarcerated at six times the rate of White Americans, a situation that legal scholar Michelle Alexander calls the “New Jim Crow,” because being convicted of a crime can permanently disenfranchise someone. Even a study that seemed to find that Black Americans are shot (it did not distinguish fatal and non-fatal shootings) at a frequency similar to white ones, also found they are subjected to routinized non-lethal violence at a much, much higher rate than white Americans. Any society ought to find this state of affairs intolerable.”Form more information visit: http://www.newappsblog.com/2016/09/on-the-police-shooting-in-charlotte-and-being-ordered-to-remove-a-post.html
Weaponized Sensitivity
[caption id="attachment_18389" align="alignleft" width="300"]
By walnut whippet from Hull, UK - Lionel Shriver at Humber Mouth Festival 2006, CC BY 2.0[/caption] Lionel Shriver gave a speech recently at the Brisbane Writers Festival.
“Let’s start with a tempest-in-a-teacup at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. Earlier this year, two students, both members of student government, threw a tequila-themed birthday party for a friend. The hosts provided attendees with miniature sombreros, which—the horror— numerous partygoers wore. When photos of the party circulated on social media, campus-wide outrage ensued. Administrators sent multiple emails to the “culprits” threatening an investigation into an “act of ethnic stereotyping.” Partygoers were placed on “social probation,” while the two hosts were ejected from their dorm and later impeached. Bowdoin’s student newspaper decried the attendees’ lack of “basic empathy.” The student government issued a “statement of solidarity” with “all the students who were injured and affected by the incident,” and demanded that administrators “create a safe space for those students who have been or feel specifically targeted.” The tequila party, the statement specified, was just the sort of occasion that “creates an environment where students of colour, particularly Latino, and especially Mexican, feel unsafe.” In sum, the party-favour hats constituted – wait for it – “cultural appropriation.” Curiously, across my country Mexican restaurants, often owned and run by Mexicans, are festooned with sombreros – if perhaps not for long. At the UK’s University of East Anglia, the student union has banned a Mexican restaurant from giving out sombreros, deemed once more an act of “cultural appropriation” that was also racist. Now, I am a little at a loss to explain what’s so insulting about a sombrero – a practical piece of headgear for a hot climate that keeps out the sun with a wide brim. My parents went to Mexico when I was small, and brought a sombrero back from their travels, the better for my brothers and I to unashamedly appropriate the souvenir to play dress-up. For my part, as a German-American on both sides, I’m more than happy for anyone who doesn’t share my genetic pedigree to don a Tyrolean hat, pull on some leiderhosen, pour themselves a weisbier, and belt out the Hoffbrauhaus Song. But what does this have to do with writing fiction? The moral of the sombrero scandals is clear: you’re not supposed to try on other people’s hats. Yet that’s what we’re paid to do, isn’t it? Step into other people’s shoes, and try on their hats.”Yassmin Abdel-Magied attended the speech and she walked out. She was incensed that Shriver argued that a white man can write about the experience of a Nigerian woman. Abdel-Magied wrote a blog post in The Guardian about how Shriver’s speech defended “cultural appropriation.” “It’s not always OK if a white guy writes the story of a Nigerian woman because the actual Nigerian woman can’t get published or reviewed to begin with.” For Abdel Magied, Shriver’s “attitude drips of racial supremacy, and the implication is clear: “I don’t care what you deem is important or sacred. I want to do with it what I will. Your experience is simply a tool for me to use, because you are less human than me. You are less than human…” The organizers of the Brisbane Writers Festival responded by disavowing Shriver’s speech and organizing a new session for Abdel-Magied and others to respond. This led Shriver to write an essay in The New York Times decrying the rise of “weaponized sensitivity.”
“In an era of weaponized sensitivity, participation in public discourse is growing so perilous, so fraught with the danger of being caught out for using the wrong word or failing to uphold the latest orthodoxy in relation to disability, sexual orientation, economic class, race or ethnicity, that many are apt to bow out.”Worth noting is that Shriver has not bowed out of the public discourse, nor has she in any way been punished for her speech. If the festival created a reply session, Shriver’s talk was still the keynote. And while Shriver’s critics attacked her in the The Guardian and in The New Republic, she responded in The New York Times. The fracas between Shriver and her critics is important, but it is not an instance in which free speech was violated. On the contrary, it is an example of free speech being used to air discordant opinions. What is disturbing about the attacks on Shriver is the way words and feelings are being weaponized. Specifically, Shriver is being called a “racist.” This is an awfully strong word for the opinions she offered. To be labeled a racist can be disqualifying from performance in certain communities. What is more, on colleges and even in national legislatures, bureaucracies are forming that will punish and censure people for words that are felt to be offensive. In Australia, where Shriver spoke, “the Racial Discrimination Act makes it unlawful to do or say anything likely to “offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate.”” In the United States, Title IX of the 1964 Civil Rights Act now requires colleges and universities to ensure that “all students feel safe and have the opportunity to benefit fully from their schools’ education programs and activities.” It is right to limit hate speech, speech that repeatedly and threateningly targets an individual or group in ways that promotes violence or is so harassing as to prevent one from leading one’s life. What we are currently witnessing, however, is a movement to employ both extreme shaming and legal threats to shut down legitimate discussion of important questions about which people legitimately disagree. —RB At our upcoming fall conference, REAL TALK: Difficult Questions About Race, Sex and Religion, we'll be asking questions about these issues. We hope you'll join us on October 20th and 21st, 2016 for some real talk about this question, and others, at the heart of the question of thinking in the 21st century.Form more information visit: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/13/lionel-shrivers-full-speech-i-hope-the-concept-of-cultural-appropriation-is-a-passing-fad