See/hear, esp., for those studying the Russian language.

wsj.com

Will Ukraine become part of the West, like Poland? Or will it be drawn back into Moscow’s shadow, like a larger version of Belarus?

Dylan Matthews, vox.com

The Dag Hammarskjöld Library at the United Nations — named after the secretary general who died in 1961 — doesn't make the news very often. Meant to be used by the professional Secretariat staff of the UN and by national delegations, it stores documents and publications from the UN and related organizations, as well as a raft of other books and materials on international relations, law, economics, and other UN-relevant topics. So, you know, a library.

But even the UN's library has a social media presence now, and recently it tweeted the publication that got checked out the most frequently in 2015:

View image on Twitter

To be clear: The UN is full of delegates representing awful dictatorships, and the book that got checked out the most from the UN library was about … how to be immune from war crimes prosecution. That does not seem like a good thing!

The book in question isn't a UN document — it's a doctoral thesis from the University of Lucerne by Ramona Pedretti, pursuing the question of when heads of state and other government officials can be charged in foreign courts. Generally, she explains, there are two forms of immunity in international law from which heads of state can benefit.

"Immunity ratione personae prevents incumbent Heads of State from being subjected to foreign criminal jurisdiction," Pedretti writes. "In contrast, immunity ratione materiae protects official acts, i.e. acts performed in an official capacity on behalf of the State, from scrutiny by foreign courts."

She concludes that immunity ratione personae is absolute, and thus that domestic courts in one country can't indict the sitting leader of another nation, whereas ratione materiae can be invalidated for defendants who've left office — as happened with the arrests of the Nazi fugitive Adolf Eichmann by Israel and Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet by Spain. Basically, Pedretti is arguing that incumbent heads of state can't be charged and prosecuted by a foreign court, whereas past heads of state can.

Matters are slightly different for the International Criminal Court, a treaty-based permanent court that has indicted incumbents — notably current Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir in 2009. As Pedretti explains, those cases can still raise ratione personae issues, and the African Union invoked that principle in condemning Bashir's indictment. The Pre-Trial Chamber of the ICC disagreed, arguing that international courts are generally exempt from ratione personae restrictions, which are only meant to apply to domestic courts in foreign countries (e.g., it means the United States can't indict, say, Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe in American court).

Pedretti ultimately argues that leaders of countries that ratified the ICC's underlying treaty, and ones whose cases were referred by the UN Security Council (like Bashir's), are vulnerable to seeing their ratione personae immunity taken away, but that it goes too far to say that all heads of statement lack immunity before the court.

It's all very nuanced and interesting stuff, especially if you have reason to think you've committed crimes that could land you in the Hague!

1. Social condition that affects a society because of the elevated number of individuals striving to be wealthy. People within the society feel that the only measure of success is determined by how much money and prestige a person has.


Read more: http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/affluenza.html#ixzz3wZjwjLTm

A Facebook comment (thus far -- 4:45 pm, 1/7/2016) to an online discussion to Professor Robert Reich:

By HOLLAND COTTER and ROBERTA SMITHDEC. 9, 2015

The co-chief art critics for The New York Times on the most notable themes of the year.

via MvH on Facebook

David Milne, thenation.com


In his new biography, Niall Ferguson is blind to his subject’s recklessness and treachery.

Dwight Eisenhower’s televised farewell address to the nation in January 1961 is best remembered for its powerful warning to “guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-­industrial complex.” But the departing president remained farsighted on other issues, too. Although his tenure as president of Columbia University from 1948 to 1953 was not a particularly gratifying experience for either party, Eisenhower nevertheless became rightfully concerned that academics at the nation’s universities were losing sight of their core research function—free inquiry—in an unseemly dash to serve government ends, secure funding, and enjoy proximity to power. “The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever-present,” he cautioned, “and is gravely to be regarded.” On both issues, as events would demonstrate, Eisenhower’s warnings were as prescient as they were ineffectual.

Diagnosing and criticizing the weaknesses and attendant dangers of narrowly conceived, policy-oriented scholarship is the strongest feature of Perry Anderson’s American Foreign Policy and Its Thinkers. The book comprises two essays, “Imperium” and “Consilium,” first published in the New Left Review in 2013; an essay first published in The Nation in 2006; and a postscript that dwells on the year 2014. Anderson sets the stage at the beginning of “Imperium.” Since the middle of the 20th century, he explains, the combination of a stultifying bipartisan American consensus on the rudiments of Cold War foreign policy, “the provincialism of an electorate with minimal knowledge of the outside world,” and a political system that gives “virtually untrammeled power to the executive in the conduct of foreign affairs” has created “around the Presidency a narrow foreign policy elite, and a distinctive ideological vocabulary with no counterpart in internal politics: conceptions of the ‘grand strategy’ to be pursued by the American state in its dealings with the world.”

“Imperium” is a concise and bracing history of US foreign policy from the nation’s founding to the present. One of Anderson’s key points is that economic self-interest should be regarded as the principal factor shaping the nation’s diplomacy, as William Appleman Williams argued in The Tragedy of American Diplomacy in 1959. There is much to glean from Anderson’s analysis, although the relentless focus on the dark imperialist intentions of all who have shaped that strategy sometimes rings false. On Woodrow Wilson, for example, Anderson writes that he “gave voice to every chord of presumption in the imperial repertoire,” and that in 1917 Wilson “plunged the country into the First World War.” There is something to the first charge, perhaps, but in the second “plunged” fails to capture Wilson’s deep ambivalence about America’s first major military intervention in the Old World. Anderson’s critique is learned and sharp, but too many individuals and events are reduced to caricature, beholden to powerful economic and expansionist forces outside their ken.

“Consilium” is more important and deserves to be widely read. Anderson discusses the work of many of today’s best-known “grand strategists,” including Walter Russell Mead, Michael Mandelbaum, G. John Ikenberry, Charles Kupchan, Robert Kagan, and Zbigniew Brzezinski, and offers some cutting appraisals. After noting that Joseph Nye Jr., recently added by Foreign Policy magazine to its list of leading global thinkers, did not “warrant consideration” because he “is insufficiently original, with little more than the banalities of soft power to his name,” Anderson distills the essence of a series of books and then skewers their authors’ pretensions. Wilsonianism’s “perfect embodiment is to be found in Ikenberry, the ‘poet laureate of liberal internationalism,’ from whom the dead centre of the establishment can draw on a more even unction.” Concerning Kupchan’s very different book No One’s World (2012)—which urges the United States to accept the reality of relative decline and prepare for an interdependent world “without a center of gravity or global guardian”—Anderson snipes that “empires, like individuals, have their moments of false modesty. The kind of retrenchment envisaged by Kupchan belongs to them.” But the essay is not all pithy evisceration: Anderson praises some of his grand strategists, observing of Robert Art’s work that “analytic precision, closely reasoned argument and lucid moderation of judgment are its hallmarks, producing realism at a higher resolution.”

Anderson encourages one to see that America’s elite universities and most influential think tanks have produced and sustained too many policy-making aspirants who claim to have identified immutable patterns in international affairs, and who believe axiomatically, as Anderson writes, that the “hegemony of the United States continues to serve both the particular interests of the nation and the universal interests of humanity.” Anderson suggests that liberal interventionists, neoconservatives, and most realists share this core assumption. Another crucial failing common to the literature is that it pays little heed to the economic context, namely “the underlying causes of the long slowdown in the growth of output, median income and productivity, and concomitant rise of public, corporate and household debt, not only in the US but across the advanced capitalist world.” Because of such ignorance, “the roots of the decline so many deplore and seek to remedy remain invisible.”

And then there is the problem of simplification, slogan-making, and cooptation. In their academic publications and media advocacy, and upon assuming a policy-­making role, grand strategists have often led with theories—sometimes attaining brand status—on America’s role in managing world-historical forces. In books like Walt Rostow’s The Stages of Economic Growth (1960), Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man (1992), Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996), Zbigniew Brzezinski’s The Grand Chessboard (1997), and Robert Kagan’s The World America Made (2012), policy-oriented scholarship is too often stripped of complexity. Ideas are simplified—and their originality and importance amplified—for the easy digestion of presidential and policy-making aspirants. At the receiving end, policy-makers cherry-pick the sections that suit their purposes and ignore those that don’t. It can make for an almighty mess. Anderson identifies a problematic common theme in his grand strategic canon: “a strain of unconscious desperation, as if the only way to restore American leadership to the plenitude of its merits and powers in this world, for however finite a span of time, is to imagine another one altogether.” He has written a fascinating intellectual history of a cloistered world in which genuine insight is obscured by substantial blind spots and then sometimes weaponized.

* * *

Like many of the thinkers pilloried by Anderson, Henry Kissinger wanted nothing less during the 1950s and ’60s than to take his rightful position in the White House—whether occupied by a Democrat or a Republican—as Aristotle to Alexander of Macedon. Yet as the first volume of Niall Ferguson’s biography makes clear, Kissinger’s career in academia and in government prior to 1968 was littered with disappointments. After failing to secure a tenured position at Harvard, Kis­singer considered leaving Cambridge in 1956 after receiving what he described as “a very advantageous offer” from the University of Chicago. It was scarcely the most traumatic of hypothetical vertical moves, yet Kissinger wrote to McGeorge Bundy, then dean at Harvard College, that he was unlikely to accept the offer because the “incommensurability” between what academic life “could be and what it is” was “particularly poignant” at Chicago. What Kissinger meant by this, Ferguson explains, is that “professors there played a far smaller role in American public life—and particularly in government—than their counterparts at Harvard.” Kissinger’s focus on securing policy work in Washington, DC, was unerring.

Ferguson is himself an aspiring grand strategist with a penchant for slogans: “Empire in Denial” to describe the United States; “Chimerica” for the interconnected economies of China and America; “Killer Apps” for what separates the West from the rest. He advised John McCain’s presidential campaign in 2008 and has been strongly critical of the Obama administration. Early in the book, Ferguson insists on his impartiality: “I can predict with certainty that hostile reviewers will allege that I have in some way been influenced or induced to paint a falsely flattering picture. This is not the case.” Two pages later, Ferguson describes Kissinger as “one of the most important theorists about foreign policy ever to be produced by the United States of America. Had Kissinger never entered government service, this volume would still have been worth writing, just as Robert Skidelsky would still have had good reason to write his superb life of John Maynard Keynes even if Keynes had never left the courtyards of Cambridge for the corridors of power in His Majesty’s Treasury.” Ferguson is no admirer of Keynes—one wonders about the sincerity of the comparison—but the bar he sets by invoking him is way beyond Kissinger’s reach. Keynes’s The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936) is an epoch-making book in a way that Kissinger’s A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace, 1812–22 and Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy (1957) are not.

Ferguson’s goal is to demonstrate that Kissinger was an “idealist,” in the first part of his career at least. (The subtitle of the second volume will reveal what Kissinger became when he joined the Nixon administration.) Few Kissinger scholars have “done more than skim his published work,” Ferguson chides; his own immersive reading reveals that “Kissinger’s intellectual capital had a dual foundation: the study of history and the philosophy of idealism.” On the former, Ferguson offers some insightful points regarding his subject’s hostility toward economic determinism, as reflected in Kissinger’s 1959 observation that the “danger we face is that we will assume…our own materialism motivates the Soviet revolutionaries, and that because we like plenty of iceboxes this is the predominant aim of people who, after all, managed to survive under Stalin.” Kissinger deplored the scientism to which Kennedy’s “best and brightest” were susceptible—“Europeans, living on a continent covered with ruins testifying to the fallibility of human foresight, feel in their bones that history is more complicated than systems analysis”—and Ferguson makes the point decisively.

But on the bigger matter of Kissinger being an idealist, the written evidence that Ferguson provides is both vast in quantity and slight in explanatory utility. He spends a lot of time discussing Kissinger’s Harvard undergraduate thesis, “The Meaning of History.” While it may be plausible to argue that Kissinger’s reading of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason “made him skeptical of the various materialistic theories of capitalist superiority that U.S. social scientists devised as antidotes to Marxism-Leninism,” to hang the central thesis of a nearly 1,000-page book on the subtheme of an undergraduate dissertation demands credulity from the reader. Ferguson clarifies that Kissinger’s idealism was not the same as Woodrow Wilson’s: “I am using the term ‘idealism’ in its philosophical sense, meaning that strand of Western philosophy, extending back to Anaxagoras and Plato, that holds that (in Kant’s formulation) ‘we can never be certain whether all of our putative outer experience is not mere imagining’ because ‘the reality of external objects does not admit to strict proof.’” Yet despite Ferguson’s best efforts, the connections he makes between this formulation and Kissinger’s policy recommendations are faint to illusory.

Kissinger’s response to the Berlin crisis of 1961 to ’62 is one such example. Serving at the time as an occasional National Security Council consultant to the Kennedy administration, Kissinger was appalled by the building of the Berlin Wall and instead favored a confrontation with Khrushchev. JFK accepted the wall as a necessary evil—“A wall is a hell of a lot better than a war”—that inadvertently mocked the supposed superiority of the communist economic system. Explaining Kissinger’s bellicosity, Ferguson says that “Kissinger was the idealist, Kennedy the realist. What Kissinger wanted was an American assertion that the universal principle of national ‘self-determination’—as enunciated by none other than Woodrow Wilson four decades earlier—should apply to Germany, and, indeed, to all of Berlin.” But Kissinger’s urging of a firm response was not primarily about idealism; it was about optics, meaning the importance of the United States making a strong statement to the rest of the world. As Kissinger wrote to Maxwell Taylor, another Kennedy foreign-policy adviser, “The Soviets have made us look like monkeys, weak monkeys and we can’t wait to demonstrate our masochism by crawling back and begging them please to negotiate, so that we can give up something else to them.” Discerning a humiliation for the United States instead of an impossible situation that Kennedy handled adroitly, Kissinger urged a reckless response for the sake of “credibility,” the diplomatic commodity he valued above all.

Kissinger was consistently reckless, and Ferguson is blind to the pattern. Throughout his career, Kissinger was quick to detect potential humiliations for America—in withdrawing from Vietnam too quickly; in the coming to power of Salvador Allende in Chile; in allowing a dependable friend, Yahya Khan’s Pakistan, to lose a fight with India, led by the unreliable Indira Gandhi—and quick to recommend the deployment of US military resources (whether ground troops, bombing campaigns, covert destabilization programs, or military aid), all in the interests of US “credibility.” The responses he counseled as Nixon’s national-security adviser helped to create catastrophes in each of the regions they affected: the destabilization of Cambodia and the rise of Pol Pot; the ousting of the democratically elected Allende government and the rise of the murderous Augusto Pinochet; a brutal war on the subcontinent during which Pakistan slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Bengalis in what historian Gary Bass has described, in The Blood Telegram, as “a forgotten genocide.” Kissinger’s brutal policy advice did not stem from realism in any meaningful way, and it certainly wasn’t inspired by the idealism of Immanuel Kant. It was about demonstrating American power to the world, absent a moral core and a sense of proportion.

Ferguson had privileged access to Kissinger’s private papers and thus brings some compelling new material to light. But his insistence that “idealism” was the compass of Kissinger’s life and career up to 1968 is forced and unpersuasive, and Ferguson is too prone to defer to the views of his subject. The 15-year-old Heinz Kis­singer and his family fled near-certain death in Nazi Germany in 1938, eventually settling in New York City. Following Kissinger’s lead, Ferguson contends that too much has been made of this childhood trauma. He criticizes Jeremi Suri’s Henry Kissinger and the American Century for attributing Kissinger’s skepticism about the effectiveness of democracies in the face of authoritarian challenges to the failings of the Weimar Republic. The “defect of this argument,” writes Ferguson, “is that Henry Kissinger was not yet ten years old when the Weimar Republic died, an age at which even quite precocious children are unlikely to have formed strong political opinions. His earliest political memories were of the regime that came next. Did growing up under Hitler somehow prejudice Kissinger against democracy?” In the sense that the Nazi Party rose to power through a series of electoral successes, why not? The Austrian-Jewish writer Stefan Zweig blamed mass democracy for facili­tating the rise of Hitler and preferred the more restricted suffrage of the Habsburg Empire. It seems dubious to discount the possibility that the terrible wrenches of Kis­singer’s adolescence had little bearing on his subsequent views and career.

These interpretive choices notwithstanding, the first 200 pages form the richest part of the book and detail a remarkable ascent. Kissinger served with great distinction during World War II, and was awarded a Bronze Star for breaking up a Gestapo sleeper cell in April 1945. Just a few days before, he and other members of the 84th Infantry Division happened upon a concentration camp in Ahlem, Germany, where the prisoners who were still alive often resembled the dead. Ferguson reproduces a powerful two-page article that Kissinger drafted—titled “The Eternal Jew,” an ironic reference to a Nazi propaganda film—which has the following searing lines: “That is humanity in the 20th century. People reach such a stupor of suffering that life and death, animation or immobility can’t be differentiated any more.”

Kissinger returned home to study government at Harvard University as one of the many beneficiaries of the GI Bill, which offered a free college education to returning veterans. It was at Harvard that his policy ambitions truly emerged. Kissinger was a highly motivated and entrepreneurial doctoral student, establishing a quarterly journal, Confluence, and, with his supervisor and mentor William Yandell Elliott, an “International Seminar” that brought “young leaders” from across the world to Cambridge for the summer—­which vastly expanded Kissinger’s international contacts, and was partly funded by the CIA. Ferguson’s account of Kissinger’s 1954 PhD dissertation—published three years later as A World Restored—differs from that of most scholars in that he does not view it as a paean to balance-of-power diplomacy and the virtues of Metternich; rather, the “true hero of A World Restored is not Metternich but Castlereagh.” Kissinger’s thesis, we are told, sets out “simultaneously an idealist methodology, a conservative ideology, a philosophy of history, and a tragic sensibility.” Jamming in “idealist methodology” makes for a curious and unnecessarily convoluted interpretation, however. Though Kissinger was attentive to Metternich’s flaws—“He excelled at manipulation, not construction”—the thesis first and foremost pays homage to his brand of realism. It is an impressive book in many respects, though—the finest Kissinger has written.

Kissinger’s second book, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, grew from a Council on Foreign Relations study group on nuclear weapons that he directed. The book, which argued that “limited” nuclear wars were fightable, containable, and winnable, was an unlikely commercial success, selling 70,000 copies in hardback, but it also aroused strong criticism. Writing in The Reporter, Paul Nitze, an influential and hawkish member of the foreign-policy establishment, criticized Kissinger for misunderstanding weapon types, miscalculating blast effects, and underestimating how difficult it would be to impose “limits” on a nuclear exchange. It was a strongly critical review, but Nitze was surprised when Kissinger and the Council on Foreign Relations threatened The Reporter with a libel suit—an episode that Ferguson does not mention, but that surely reveals Kissinger’s vanity and sensitivity to criticism. The book transformed Kissinger into something of an academic celebrity, but as Ferguson correctly points out, “the core of Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy…fails to convince.” As Kissinger devoted more of his time and energy to turning heads in government, his mentor Fritz Kraemer warned him that he was “beginning to behave in a way that is no longer human [menschlich]…. You see too many ‘important’ and not enough ‘real’ people.” Ferguson admonishes Kraemer for his statement, but the description chimes with most of the scholarship on Kissinger in this period.

The Kissinger who emerges during the 1950s and ’60s is not an entirely impressive character, despite Ferguson’s efforts to establish his status as a foreign-policy intellectual with few peers. Beyond A World Restored, Kissinger’s published work up to 1968 has not aged well. It is similarly difficult to discern a pattern of acuity in his policy advice throughout the period. During the Kennedy years, he counseled reckless escalation on Berlin, which could have led to a very dark place. He was a public supporter of the Americanization of the Vietnam War. As a negotiator under Lyndon Johnson during the failed Paris peace talks, conducted via third-party intermediaries in 1967, Kissinger consistently exaggerated North Vietnam’s eagerness to talk and his ability to fashion a breakthrough. An unimpressed Ferguson writes that “Kissinger’s conduct as a negotiator in 1967 was Stockholm syndrome avant la lettre.” But by way of establishing some extenuating circumstances, Ferguson notes that “Kissinger’s prime motive for being in Paris in 1967 was the fact that [his future wife, Nancy Maginnes] was studying at the Sorbonne that year.” This revelation humanizes Kissinger, I suppose, but it scarcely places him in a positive light. In dismissing those scholars who characterize Kissinger as ruthlessly ambitious, Ferguson cites his close advisory relationship to Nelson Rockefeller, whose centrism meant he always stood little chance of securing the GOP nomination. Ferguson doesn’t bother to consider whether the Rockefeller alliance was merely one more instance of Kissinger displaying poor judgment.

Unintentionally, then, Ferguson’s “idealist” more closely resembles an opportunist—often desperate, sometimes hapless, and occasionally highly effective, as he was in 1968 when angling for a foreign-policy job in the next administration. After Rockefeller lost the GOP nomination to Richard Nixon, Kissinger wrote to W. Averell Harriman, who was then leading the peace negotiations with the North Vietnamese in Paris: “I am through with Republican politics. The party is hopeless and unfit to govern.” The two met in Paris in September, but unbeknownst to Harriman, Kissinger was feeding information on the negotiations to the Nixon campaign. Richard Holbrooke, a member of Harriman’s team, was appalled by his duplicity: “We trusted him. It is not stretching the truth to say that the Nixon campaign had a secret source within the U.S. negotiating team.” Kissinger also offered the Hubert Humphrey campaign a large, incriminating file on Nixon that he had compiled while advising Rockefeller. This multipronged charm offensive had one goal in mind—to secure Kissinger a high-level job—and it worked. As Humphrey remarked later, “If I had been elected, I would have had Kis- singer be my assistant.” That is an interesting counterfactual for Ferguson—a fan of such thought experiments—to contemplate.

But Nixon won the election, and he appointed Kissinger as his national-security adviser with the intention of marginalizing the State Department and concentrating decision-making in the White House. This partnership reaped significant achievements that ran contrary to Nixon’s anticommunist reputation, such as détente with the Soviet Union and the opening to China. But it also promoted policies that were callous and cynical, not to mention tactically deficient—born of delusion, arrogance, and contempt for non-Western peoples. Ferguson appears to partly understand this. But rather than explain his subject’s actions, he suggests instead that Kissinger was unexceptional because his predecessors were just as culpable: “You will search the libraries in vain for The Trial of John Foster Dulles,” and “no great polemicist has troubled to indict Dean Rusk as a war criminal.” Ferguson’s complaint is not entirely groundless—Perry Anderson would likely agree—but there is also a measure of false equivalence.

The second volume of the biography could be tricky for Ferguson, not least because his own moral judgments are set at a high pitch. He describes Johnson’s policy advisers as “unscrupulous pragmatists,” contrasts them unfavorably with Kis­singer the unsullied “idealist,” and describes the US role in deposing South Vietnam’s president, Ngo Dinh Diem, in November 1963 as a “genuinely criminal act.” Ferguson quotes Kissinger’s response to Diem’s ouster in the form of a draft statement for Nelson Rockefeller:

The government of an allied country—which had been established originally with strong U.S. support—has been overthrown by a military coup encouraged by our government [and a] thinly disguised military dictatorship has been established…. I do not like our country to be thought of in terms of the cynical use of power. Our strength is principle not manipulativeness. Our historical role has been to identify ourselves with the ideals and deepest hopes of mankind. If we lost [sic] this asset, temporary successes will be meaningless.

In an unlikely turn of events, Henry Kissinger may well be hoisted by his official biographer’s petard. Or perhaps his opportunism will continue to shine through?

Cass R. Sunstein, Parking the Big Money, New York Review of Books:

The fractions of wealth held abroad are highly variable. In Europe, it is about 10 percent. In African and Latin countries, it is much higher—between 20 percent and 30 percent. In Russia, it is a whopping 52 percent. ...

According to Zucman [The Hidden Wealth of Nations: The Scourge of Tax Havens by Gabriel Zucman], the United States is losing $35 billion in annual taxes, and some estimates say that the real loss is as high as $100 billion. If so, and if those who successfully evade taxes are mostly the wealthiest people, there is a serious problem. By way of comparison, the entire annual budget of the Department of State is in the vicinity of $50 billion. ...

Paul Krugman, New York Review of Books

DECEMBER 17, 2015 ISSUE

Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few

by Robert B. Reich

Knopf, 279 pp., $26.95

Back in 1991, in what now seems like a far more innocent time, Robert Reich published an influential book titled The Work of Nations, which among other things helped land him a cabinet post in the Clinton administration. It was a good book for its time—but time has moved on. And the gap between that relatively sunny take and Reich’s latest, Saving Capitalism, is itself an indicator of the unpleasant ways America has changed.

The Work of Nations was in some ways a groundbreaking work, because it focused squarely on the issue of rising inequality—an issue some economists, myself included, were already taking seriously, but that was not yet central to political discourse. Reich’s book saw inequality largely as a technical problem, with a technocratic, win-win solution. That was then. These days, Reich offers a much darker vision, and what is in effect a call for class war—or if you like, for an uprising of workers against the quiet class war that America’s oligarchy has been waging for decades.

1.

To understand the difference between The Work of Nations and Saving Capitalism, you need to know about two things. One, which is familiar to most of us, is the increasingly ugly turn taken by American politics, which I’ll be discussing later. The other is more of an insider debate, but one with huge implications for policy and politics alike: the rise and fall of the theory of skill-biased technological change, which was once so widely accepted among economists that it was frequently referred to simply as SBTC.

The starting point for SBTC was the observation that, around 1980, wages of college graduates began rising much more rapidly than wages of Americans with only a high school degree or less. Why?

One possibility was the growth of international trade, with rising imports of labor-intensive manufactured goods from low-wage countries. Such imports could, in principle, cause not just rising inequality but an actual decline in the wages of less-educated workers; the standard theory of international trade that supports such a principle is actually a lot less benign in its implications than many noneconomists imagine. But the numbers didn’t seem to work. Around 1990, trade with developing countries was still too small to explain the big movements in relative wages of college and high school graduates that had already happened. Furthermore, trade should have produced a shift in employment toward more skill-intensive industries; it couldn’t explain what we actually saw, which was a rise in the level of skills within industries, extending across pretty much the entire economy. 

Many economists therefore turned to a different explanation: it was all about technology, and in particular the information technology revolution. Modern technology, or so it was claimed, reduced the need for routine manual labor while increasing the demand for conceptual work. And while the average education level was rising, it wasn’t rising fast enough to keep up with this technological shift. Hence the rise of the earnings of the college-educated and the relative, and perhaps absolute, decline in earnings for those without the right skills.

This view was never grounded in direct evidence that technology was the driving force behind wage changes; the technology factor was only inferred from its assumed effects. But it was expressed in a number of technical papers brandishing equations and data, and was codified in particular in a widely cited 1992 paper by Lawrence F. Katz of Harvard and Kevin M. Murphy of the University of Chicago.1 Reich’s The Work of Nations was, in part, a popularization of SBTC, using vivid language to connect abstract economic formalism to commonplace observation. In Reich’s vision, technology was eliminating routine work, and even replacing some jobs that historically required face-to-face interaction. But it was opening new opportunities for “symbolic analysts”—people with the talent and, crucially, the training to work with ideas. Reich’s solution to growing inequality was to equip more people with that necessary training, both through an expansion of conventional education and through retraining later in life.

It was an attractive, optimistic vision; you can see why it received such a favorable reception. But while one still encounters people invoking skill-biased technological change as an explanation of rising inequality and lagging wages—it’s especially popular among moderate Republicans in denial about what’s happened to their party and among “third way” types lamenting the rise of Democratic populism—the truth is that SBTC has fared very badly over the past quarter-century, to the point where it no longer deserves to be taken seriously as an account of what ails us.

The story fell apart in stages.2 First, over the course of the 1990s the skill gap stopped growing at the bottom of the scale: real wages of workers near the middle stopped outpacing those near the bottom, and even began to fall a bit behind. Some economists responded by revising the theory, claiming that technology was hollowing out the middle rather than displacing the bottom. But this had the feel of an epicycle added to a troubled theory—and after about 2000 the real wages of college graduates stopped rising as well. Meanwhile, incomes at the very top—the one percent, and even more so a very tiny group within the one percent—continued to soar. And this divergence evidently had little to do with education, since hedge fund managers and high school teachers have similar levels of formal training.

Something else began happening after 2000: labor in general began losing ground relative to capital. After decades of stability, the share of national income going to employee compensation began dropping fairly fast. One could try to explain this, too, with technology—maybe robots were displacing all workers, not just the less educated. But this story ran into multiple problems. For one thing, if we were experiencing a robot-driven technological revolution, why did productivity growth seem to be slowing, not accelerating? For another, if it was getting easier to replace workers with machines, we should have seen a rise in business investment as corporations raced to take advantage of the new opportunities; we didn’t, and in fact corporations have increasingly been parking their profits in banks or using them to buy back stocks.

In short, a technological account of rising inequality is looking ever less plausible, and the notion that increasing workers’ skills can reverse the trend is looking less plausible still. But in that case, what is going on?

2.

Economists struggling to make sense of economic polarization are, increasingly, talking not about technology but about power. This may sound like straying off the reservation—aren’t economists supposed to focus only on the invisible hand of the market?—but there is actually a long tradition of economic concern about “market power,” aka the effect of monopoly. True, such concerns were deemphasized for several generations, but they’re making a comeback—and one way to read Robert Reich’s new book is in part as a popularization of the new view, just as The Work of Nations was in part a popularization of SBTC. There’s more to Reich’s thesis, as I’ll explain shortly. But let’s start with the material that economists will find easiest to agree with.

Market power has a precise definition: it’s what happens whenever individual economic actors are able to affect the prices they receive or pay, as opposed to facing prices determined anonymously by the invisible hand. Monopolists get to set the price of their product; monopsonists—sole purchasers in a market—get to set the price of things they buy. Oligopoly, where there are a few sellers, is more complicated than monopoly, but also involves substantial market power. And here’s the thing: it’s obvious to the naked eye that our economy consists much more of monopolies and oligopolists than it does of the atomistic, price-taking competitors economists often envision.

But how much does that matter? Milton Friedman, in a deeply influential 1953 essay, argued that monopoly mattered only to the extent that actual market behavior differed from the predictions of simple supply-and-demand analysis—and that in fact there was little evidence that monopoly had important effects.3Friedman’s view largely prevailed within the economics profession, and de facto in the wider political discussion. While monopoly never vanished from the textbooks, and antitrust laws remained part of the policy arsenal, both have faded in influence since the 1950s.

It’s increasingly clear, however, that this was both an intellectual and a policy error. There’s growing evidence that market power does indeed have large implications for economic behavior—and that the failure to pursue antitrust regulation vigorously has been a major reason for the disturbing trends in the economy.

Reich illustrates the role of monopoly with well-chosen examples, starting with the case of broadband. As he notes, most Americans seeking Internet access are more or less at the mercy of their local cable company; the result is that broadband is both slower and far more expensive in the US than in other countries. Another striking example involves agriculture, usually considered the very model of a perfectly competitive sector. As he notes, a single company, Monsanto, now dominates much of the sector as the sole supplier of genetically modified soybeans and corn. A recent article in The American Prospect points out that other examples of such dominance are easy to find, ranging from sunglasses to syringes to cat food.4

There’s also statistical evidence for a rising role of monopoly power. Recent work by Jason Furman, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, and Peter Orszag, former head of the Office of Management and Budget, shows a rising number of firms earning “super-normal” returns—that is, they have persistently high profit rates that don’t seem to be diminished by competition.5

Other evidence points indirectly to a strong role of market power. At this point, for example, there is an extensive empirical literature on the effects of changes in the minimum wage. Conventional supply-and-demand analysis says that raising the minimum wage should reduce employment, but as Reich notes, we now have a number of what amount to controlled experiments, in which employment in counties whose states have hiked the minimum wage can be compared with employment in neighboring counties across the state line. And there is no hint in the data of the supposed negative employment effect.

Why not? One leading hypothesis is that firms employing low-wage workers—such as fast-food chains—have significant monopsony power in the labor market; that is, they are the principal purchasers of low-wage labor in a particular job market. And a monopsonist facing a price floor doesn’t necessarily buy less, just as a monopolist facing a price ceiling doesn’t necessarily sell less and may sell more.

Suppose that we hypothesize that rising market power, rather than the ineluctable logic of modern technology, is driving the rise in inequality. How does this help make sense of what we see?

Part of the answer is that it resolves some of the puzzles posed by other accounts. Notably, it explains why high profits aren’t spurring high investment. Consider those monopolies controlling local Internet service: their high profits don’t act as an incentive to invest in faster connections—on the contrary, they have less incentive to improve service than they would if they faced more competition and earned lower profits. Extend this logic to the economy as a whole, and the combination of a rising profit share and weak investment starts to make sense.

Furthermore, focusing on market power helps explain why the big turn toward income inequality seems to coincide with political shifts, in particular the sharp right turn in American politics. For the extent to which corporations are able to exercise market power is, in large part, determined by political decisions. And this ties the issue of market power to that of political power.

3.

Robert Reich has never shied away from big ambitions. The title of The Work of Nations deliberately alluded to Adam Smith; Reich clearly hoped that readers would see his work not simply as a useful guide but as a foundational text. Saving Capitalism is, if anything, even more ambitious despite its compact length. Reich attempts to cast his new discussion of inequality as a fundamental rethinking of market economics. He is not, he insists, calling for policies that will limit and soften the functioning of markets; rather, he says that the very definition of free markets is a political decision, and that we could run things very differently. “Government doesn’t ‘intrude’ on the ‘free market.’ It creates the market.”

To be honest, I have mixed feelings about this sales pitch. In some ways it seems to concede too much, accepting the orthodoxy that free markets are good even while calling for major changes in policy. And I also worry that the attempt to squeeze everything into a grand intellectual scheme may distract from the prosaic but important policy actions that Reich (and I) support.

Whatever one thinks of the packaging, however, Reich makes a very good case that widening inequality largely reflects political decisions that could have gone in very different directions. The rise in market power reflects a turn away from antitrust laws that looks less and less justified by outcomes, and in some cases the rise in market power is the result of the raw exercise of political clout to prevent policies that would limit monopolies—for example, the sustained and successful campaign to prevent public provision of Internet access.

Similarly, when we look at the extraordinary incomes accruing to a few people in the financial sector, we need to realize that there are real questions about whether those incomes are “earned.” As Reich argues, there’s good reason to believe that high profits at some financial firms largely reflect insider trading that we’ve made a political decision not to regulate effectively. And we also need to realize that the growth of finance reflected political decisions that deregulated banking and failed to regulate newer financial activities.

Meanwhile, forms of market power that benefit large numbers of workers as opposed to small numbers of plutocrats have declined, again thanks in large part to political decisions. We tend to think of the drastic decline in unions as an inevitable consequence of technological change and globalization, but one need look no further than Canada to see that this isn’t true. Once upon a time, around a third of workers in both the US and Canada were union members; today, US unionization is down to 11 percent, while it’s still 27 percent north of the border. The difference was politics: US policy turned hostile toward unions in the 1980s, while Canadian policy didn’t follow suit. And the decline in unions seems to have major impacts beyond the direct effect on members’ wages: researchers at the International Monetary Fund have found a close association between falling unionization and a rising share of income going to the top one percent, suggesting that a strong union movement helps limit the forces causing high concentration of income at the top.6

Following his schema, Reich argues that unions aren’t so much a source of market power as an example of “countervailing power” (a term he borrows from John Kenneth Galbraith) that limits the depredations of monopolists and others. If unions are not subject to restrictions, they may do so by collective bargaining not only for wages but for working conditions. In any case, the causes and consequences of union decline, like the causes and consequences of rising monopoly power, are a very good illustration of the role of politics in increasing inequality.

But why has politics gone in this direction? Like a number of other commentators, Reich argues that there’s a feedback loop between political and market power. Rising wealth at the top buys growing political influence, via campaign contributions, lobbying, and the rewards of the revolving door. Political influence in turn is used to rewrite the rules of the game—antitrust laws, deregulation, changes in contract law, union-busting—in a way that reinforces income concentration. The result is a sort of spiral, a vicious circle of oligarchy. That, Reich suggests, is the story of America over the past generation. And I’m afraid that he’s right. So what can turn it around?

4.

Anyone hoping for a reversal of the spiral of inequality has to answer two questions. First, what policies do you think would do the trick? Second, how would you get the political power to make those policies happen? I don’t think it’s unfair to Robert Reich to say that Saving Capitalism offers only a sketch of an answer to either question.

In his proposals for new policies, Reich calls for a sort of broad portfolio, or maybe a market basket, of changes aimed mainly at “predistribution”—changing the allocation of market income—rather than redistribution. (In Reich’s view, this is seen as altering the predistribution that takes place under current rules.) These changes would include fairly standard liberal ideas like raising the minimum wage, reversing the anti-union bias of labor law and its enforcement, and changing contract law to empower workers to take action against employers and debtors to assert their interests against creditors. Reich would also, in a less orthodox move, seek legislative and other changes that might move corporations back toward what they were a half-century ago: organizations that saw themselves as answering not just to stockholders but to a broader set of “stakeholders,” including workers and customers.

Would such measures be enough? Individually, none of them sounds up to the task. But the experience of the New Deal, which was remarkably successful at creating a middle-class nation—and for that matter the success of the de facto anti–New Deal that has prevailed since the 1970s at creating an oligarchy—suggest that there might be synergistic effects from a program containing all these elements. It’s certainly worth trying.

But how is this supposed to happen politically? Reich professes optimism, citing the growing tendency of politicians in both parties to adopt populist rhetoric. For example, Ted Cruz has criticized the “rich and powerful, those who walk the corridors of power.” But Reich concedes that “the sincerity behind these statements might be questioned.” Indeed. Cruz has proposed large tax cuts that would force large cuts in social spending—and those tax cuts would deliver around 60 percent of their gains to the top one percent of the income distribution. He is definitely not putting his money—or, rather, your money—where his mouth is.

Still, Reich argues that the insincerity doesn’t matter, because the very fact that people like Cruz feel the need to say such things indicates a sea change in public opinion. And this change in public opinion, he suggests, will eventually lead to the kind of political change that he, justifiably, seeks. We can only hope he’s right. In the meantime, Saving Capitalism is a very good guide to the state we’re in.

1. 1
   “Changes in Relative Wages, 1963–1987: Supply and Demand Factors,”The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 107, No. 1 (February 1992). ↩
2. 2
   A good overview of the decline of SBTC is Lawrence Mishel, Heidi Shierholz, and John Schmitt, “Don’t Blame the Robots: Assessing the Job Polarization Explanation of Growing Wage Inequality,” EPI–CEPRworking paper, November 2013. ↩
3. 3
   “The Methodology of Positive Economics,” in Essays in Positive Economics (University of Chicago Press, 1953).  ↩
4. 4
   David Dayen, “Bring Back Antitrust,” Fall 2015.  ↩
5. 5
   Jason Furman and Peter Orszag, “A Firm-Level Perspective on the Role of Rents in the Rise of Inequality,” October 2015, available atwww.whitehouse.gov. ↩
6. 6
   Florence Jaumotte and Carolina Osorio Buitron, “Union Power and Inequality,” www.voxeu.org, October 22, 2015. ↩

Drew Gilpin Faust, New York Review of Books

DECEMBER 17, 2015 ISSUE

The historian John Hope Franklin, who died in 2009, would have turned one hundred this year. I have thought of him often in recent months as we have seen a conservative Republican governor call for the removal of the Confederate flag from the South Carolina State House grounds, as the Democratic Party has renamed the Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner in order to distance itself from two slave-owning forebears, as Yale University debates removing the name Calhoun from one of its undergraduate colleges.

Many Americans in 2015 seem to be undertaking an unprecedentedly clear-eyed look at the nation’s past, at the legacy of slavery and race that has made us anything but a colorblind society. There could be no more fitting tribute to Franklin’s one hundredth birthday than this collective stock-taking, for no one has done more to delineate the contours of that shameful legacy and to insist upon its importance to America’s present and future. And in that effort he has also done something more for history itself: insisting not just upon its relevance, but indeed its preeminence as the indispensable instrument of change and even salvation from legacies that left unexamined will destroy us. “Good history,” he remarked in 1989, “is a good foundation for a better present and future.”

Franklin’s childhood in segregated Oklahoma introduced him to racism’s cruelties at an early age. He was just six when he and his mother were ejected from a train for sitting in a white-only car. His father was so embittered by his treatment as a black lawyer that he moved his family to an all-black town after resolving to “resign from the world dominated by white people.” Yet Franklin’s parents insisted that he was the equal of any other human being, and his mother repeatedly urged him to tell anyone who asked him about his aspirations that he planned to be “the first Negro president of the United States.” If you believe in yourself, his mother urged, “you won’t be crying; you’ll be defying.” 

Defying, not crying. That captures John Hope Franklin’s life, and it captures the history he wrote, a history that would, in his words, “attempt to rehabilitate a whole people” and serve them as a weapon of collective defiance. Inspired by a brilliant teacher at Fisk University, Franklin came to see how “historical traditions have controlled…attitudes and conduct,” and how changing history, challenging the truth of the “hallowed past,” was the necessary condition for changing the present and future. In important ways, the study of history was for Franklin not a choice; it was an imperative. “The true scholar,” he wrote in 1963, “must pursue truth in his field; he must, as it were, ply his tr ade…. If one tried to escape,…he would be haunted;…he would be satisfied in no other pursuit.” History, in the many meanings of the term, chose him.

But the “Negro scholar,” Franklin wrote, should not imagine he could disappear into an ivory tower. The choice to “turn his back on the world” was not available. From Jonathan Edwards, to Thomas Jefferson, to Ralph Waldo Emerson, to John Kenneth Galbraith, Franklin observed, the American scholar had been drawn into policy and the practical. The black scholar must fully embrace this tradition of American intellectual life. “I now assert,” Franklin proclaimed,

that the proper choice for the American Negro scholar is to use his history and ingenuity, his resources and talents, to combat the forces that isolate him and his people and, like the true patriot that he is, to contribute to the solution of the problems that all Americans face in common.

Fundamental to the task at hand would be rewriting the history of history, revising the “hallowed” falsehoods, illustrating how the abuse and misuse of history served to legitimate systems of oppression not just in the past but in the present as well. Misrepresentations of the past, Franklin came to recognize, had given “the white South the intellectual justification for its determination not to yield on many important points, especially in its treatment of the Negro.” Post–Civil War southerners had endeavored to “win with the pen what they had failed to win with the sword.”

Franklin detailed the way the antebellum South rewrote the history of the American Revolution to justify its increasing commitment to slavery, how the popular history represented by the 1915 film Birth of a Nation worked to justify the early-twentieth-century revival of the Klan, how in a volume commissioned for a prominent series on southern history, respected historian E. Merton Coulter’s racist assumptions produced a distorted view of Reconstruction that made an implicit argument against the extension of civil rights in the years immediately following World War II.

But Franklin did not simply critique and revise; he did not just overturn existing interpretations by bringing a different lens to bear, or even by just grounding the narrative of the past in what were quite revolutionary assumptions of common human capacity and dignity. Franklin, the scholar, unearthed reams of new facts—facts no one had bothered to look for previously, facts buried in archives, newspapers, government records, facts no historian had searched for until history decided black lives mattered.

Franklin’s approach to the doing of history is perhaps most faithfully and explicitly chronicled in the introduction to his biography of the nineteenth-century African-American historian George Washington Williams. A pioneer in charting the black experience, Williams, who died in 1891, had been all but forgotten until Franklin began “stalking” him. Franklin recounts the story of how over three decades he traveled to countless offices, libraries, and archives on three continents. He pursued clues and leads with imagination and unquenchable curiosity until he was able to piece together a full portrait of the man and his work. Franklin rescued Williams from oblivion to install him in his rightful place as a pathbreaking black intellectual, a precursor to Franklin himself in creating a true history of the nation’s past and the place of African-Americans within it.

The kind of exhaustive research Franklin undertook and described for this biography underpinned all his efforts to expand the scope of American history. He discovered the ironies and contradictions of American unfreedom in the lives of free blacks in antebellum North Carolina; he demonstrated how the pervasive presence of violence shaped and controlled every aspect of white—as well as black—lives in southern slave society; he illustrated the hunger for liberation in the records of runaways determined to free themselves. And in From Slavery to Freedom (1958) he sought to create an overarching American and global narrative to explain it all. The book has sold more than three million copies.

Even Franklin, who had personally felt the brunt of segregation, who had understood the terrors of racial violence and oppression, was sobered by what he found. Writing From Slavery to Freedom, piecing together a comprehensive account of five hundred years of black history, brought tales of horror before his eyes:

I had seen one slave ship after another…pile black human cargo into its bowels…. I had seen them dump my ancestors at New World ports as they would a load of cattle and wait smugly for their pay…. I had seen them beat black men…and rape black women until their ecstasy was spent leaving their brutish savagery exposed. I had heard them shout, “Give us liberty or give us death,” and not mean one word of it…. I had seen them lynch black men and distribute their ears, fingers, and other parts as souvenirs…. I had seen it all, and in the seeing I had become bewildered and yet in the process lost my own innocence.

The past and present of racial oppression in America angered Franklin. His own treatment in graduate school, in the profession, in humiliating incidents that occurred till the very last years of his life provoked him to express his outrage—in autobiographical writings and in what he called “literary efforts” that he refrained from publishing. He was scrupulous and insistent that such emotions and any of what he called “polemics” or “diatribes” should not “pollute” his scholarly work. Yet he acknowledged that “the task of remaining calm and objective is indeed a formidable one.”

Franklin reserved a particularly vehement resentment for any effort to co-opt or distort his own historical work—to undermine its truths in support of a particular agenda. What he came to regard as one of the worst of such incidents occurred in the early 1960s when the US Commission on Civil Rights invited him to write a history of civil rights since the nation’s founding, to be completed in time for the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1963. When Franklin delivered the manuscript, however, it was greeted with disappointment by commission members who had anticipated “a note of greater tolerance and moderation.” Franklin reminded the commission that the history of blacks in the United States was “not a pretty picture,” and continued, “I am afraid that I cannot ‘tidy up’ the history that Americans themselves have made.” Forty years later, Franklin still deplored the commission’s “blatant and crude use of me in its effort to present a false picture of ‘Negro progress.’” Just as bad, it was also a blatant and crude use of history.

The truth that was at once scholarship’s product and purpose must not be undermined. The black scholar, he wrote, “must understand the difference between hard-hitting advocacy on the one hand and the highest standards of scholarship on the other.” This commitment embraced both idealism and instrumentalism. I am struck as I reread John Hope Franklin’s meditations on history by his sense of vocation, by the awe with which he regarded the role of scholar, by the almost sacred language with which he spoke of what I fear is today now more often regarded as just another job or profession. For Franklin, it was a transcendent calling, one that in the logic of his era and origins should have been unattainable for him.

Franklin recognized an irony in this. The black scholar must “pursue truth while, at the same time, making certain that his conclusions are sanctioned by universal standards developed and maintained by those who frequently do not even recognize him.” The revisionist history Franklin sought would, he believed, be unassailable, would overtake past interpretations and exert its force in changing the world because it would, within the clearly articulated standards of the prevailing historical enterprise, be more exhaustively researched, more powerfully argued. It would be a quintessential use of the master’s tools to take down the master’s house. Franklin had a deep and inextinguishable faith in the power of an accurate and just history to change the world. It was, as he put it, “armed with the tools of scholarship” that he did battle against laws, superstitions, prejudices designed to destroy “humane dignity” and even “his capacities for survival.”

Yet the historian did not need to be entirely confined to the realm of pure scholarship. The tools of history could also—though separately—be deployed in policy work where past realities could illuminate pressing contemporary dilemmas. Perhaps the most meaningful of such engagements for Franklin was his work with Thurgood Marshall and the team of lawyers and advisers building the case against school segregation for Brown v. Board of Education. The legislative history of the Fourteenth Amendment would be a crucial element in the case. This was an instance, Franklin proclaimed with some pride, of “historians to the rescue!” In this circumstance, he deemed it appropriate to present his findings “like a lawyer’s brief,” rather than aspiring to the more “objective” and dispassionate stance of the disinterested scholar.

Ultimately, Franklin concluded as he looked back, “I could not have avoided being a social activist even if I had wanted to,” but the tensions between this activism and his scholarly ideals compelled him throughout his long life to self-consciously negotiate the treacherous shoals between advocacy and objectivity. “While I set out to advance my professional career on the basis of the highest standards of scholarship,” he observed in his autobiography, “I also used that scholarship to expose the hypocrisy underlying so much of American social and race relations. It never ceased being a risky feat of tightrope walking.”

In 1980, in an address that marked his departure from the University of Chicago, where he had taught for sixteen years—what proved to be only his first retirement—Franklin announced an explicit shift in perspective in relation to the past. With now unimpeachable credentials as a highly distinguished historian, with a large and influential oeuvre of historical writing, and as the recipient of almost every imaginable honor, he perhaps felt the burden of establishing legitimacy partially lifted. He had earned the right and freedom to speak his mind. Up to this point in his career, he said, he had regarded himself as among “the faithful disciples of Clio, concerned exclusively, or at least primarily, with the past.” He had for four decades, he said, left it to “sociologists, political scientists, and soothsayers” to chart a course for the future. But now, as he was leaving formal teaching responsibilities, “I propose to shift my focus and to dare to think of Clio’s having a vision of the future.”

In actuality, Franklin can hardly be said to have abandoned his accustomed rigorous historical research during the twenty-nine remaining years of his life. Nor had he been entirely silent about the future in his first sixty-five years. His evolution would perhaps better be described as an expansion of focus rather than a shift. But as the twentieth century approached its end, Franklin began to envision the century to come and to anticipate the persistence of race and its legacy into a new time.

In April 1992, while Franklin was in the air en route to the University of Missouri to deliver a series of endowed lectures, a Simi Valley, California, jury announced the acquittal of the Los Angeles police officers who had beaten Rodney King. By the time he reached the St. Louis airport, Los Angeles had erupted in riots that ultimately killed fifty-three people before the California National Guard was summoned to quell the violence. For Franklin, these events seemed a tragic affirmation of the argument at the core of his already-prepared Missouri lectures: racism, “the most tragic and persistent social problem in the nation’s history,” had not been eliminated—even with the notable progress of the civil rights movement. As W.E.B. Du Bois had proclaimed the problem of the twentieth century to be “the problem of the color line—the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea,” so now Franklin cast his eyes forward to declare it the fundamental challenge for the twenty-first. “I venture to state categorically,” he proclaimed, “that the problem of the twenty-first century will be the problem of the color line.”

And again (or still) he worried about willful distortions of history—this time including more recent emerging histories—that threatened to undermine the nation’s capacity to confront and eliminate racial injustice. The myth of a colorblind society, often erected upon a cynical celebration of the achievements of civil rights legislation and the Voting Rights Act, was being developed in the 1980s and 1990s, Franklin believed, to end the struggle for racial equality by proclaiming it already achieved. “A color-blind society does not exist in the United States,” Franklin stated emphatically to his Missouri audience, “and never has existed.” But to advance the myth, Franklin asserted, was not simply a delusion; it was a far more pernicious act of bad faith. “Those who insist we should conduct ourselves as if such a utopian state already existed have no interest in achieving it and, indeed, would be horrified if we even approached it.”

Brown had, in Franklin’s words, been “no magic wand.” “Litigation, legislation, and executive implementation, however effective some of it was, did not wipe away three centuries of slavery, degradation, segregation, and discrimination.” Color remained “a major consideration in virtually everything Americans thought, said, or did.” Rodney King’s beating was clear testimony to the persisting force of race. Today, more than twenty years later, Franklin could deliver the same message. We are neither colorblind nor post-racial. Franklin would have been deeply saddened, but I doubt he would have been surprised, by the events in Ferguson, Staten Island, Charleston, Cleveland, Baltimore. He would have been equally saddened and, one guesses, angered by the recent evisceration of the Voting Rights Act and by the threat to student body diversity in higher education implied by the Supreme Court’s decision to reconsider Fisher v. University of Texas.

In the last months of his life, Franklin was buoyed by the rise of Barack Obama, which he declared “amazing.” “I didn’t think it would happen in my lifetime.” He dared hope that the nation had “turn[ed] a significant corner.” But he knew that erasing the color line required far more than electing a black president. Until we had a new history, we could not build a different and better future. The fundamental requirement, what we

need to do as a nation and as individual members of society is to confront our past and see it for what it is. It is a past that is filled with some of the ugliest possible examples of racial brutality and degradation in human history. We need to recognize it for what it was and is and not explain it away, excuse it, or justify it. Having done that, we should then make a good-faith effort to turn our history around.

In other words, it is history that has the capacity to save us. “Historians to the rescue!” Dare we think that the recent rejections of Confederate symbols and of the reputations and legacies of slaveowners might be the opening for such a revisionist and clarifying effort? How can we lodge the truth of history in national discourse and public policy?

In an editorial on September 4, 2015, The New York Times underscored how a full understanding of history must be at the heart of any resolution of America’s racial dilemma. In words that come close to echoing Franklin’s, the Times wrote of what it called the “Truth of ‘Black Lives Matter’”—a truth rooted in the legacies of the past. “Demonstrators who chant the phrase,” theTimes noted,

are making the same declaration that voting rights and civil rights activists made a half-century ago. They are not asserting that black lives are more precious than white lives. They are underlining an indisputable fact—that the lives of black citizens in this country historically have not mattered, and have been discounted and devalued. People who are unacquainted with this history are understandably uncomfortable with the language of the movement.

Only if we understand and acknowledge this past can we grapple with the conflicts of the present and the promise of the future.

“To confront our past and see it for what it is.” Franklin’s words. The past “is.” Not the past was. The past lives on. What would it mean to confront it, to see it clearly? Recent history can offer us some examples of nations that have taken on the burden of their history. Germany and its Nazi past. South Africa and apartheid. The principle, and in South Africa an explicit policy and practice, was that of “truth and reconciliation,” a recognition that only a collective investigation and acknowledgment of past wrongs can exorcise them and liberate a nation and a people for a better future. History must move beyond the academy, must become a recognized part of everyday life and understanding for all those who would themselves be free from its weight.

Recently, two powerful new advocates have taken up Franklin’s call for history to come to America’s rescue, echoing many of his observations and insights for a new time and across new and different media. These two twenty-first-century black intellectuals are outside the formal precincts of the academy, yet speak explicitly about why historical scholarship and understanding must play a central part in addressing the tragedies of race in American life. They offer us new, yet in many senses familiar, ways of approaching a moment when it seems possible that both history and policy might change.

Nearly a half-century younger than Franklin, Bryan Stevenson, who grew up in segregated southern Delaware, remembers saving his money for a first youthful book purchase: From Slavery to Freedom. Stevenson’s life and work reflect the historical sensibility that characterized Franklin’s understanding of the American present. In a TED Talk that has been viewed more than two and a half million times, in a best-selling book, and in a life dedicated to the pursuit of equal justice, Stevenson has joined in summoning history to the rescue.

Before the Civil War, we as a nation created a narrative of racial difference to legitimize slavery, he explains, and we convinced ourselves of its truth. As a result, instead of genuinely ending slavery, we helped it evolve into a succession of new forms of unfreedom, culminating in today’s mass incarceration. “Burdened” by a past of racism and cruelty, “we don’t like to talk about our history,” he observes. We have been “unwilling to commit ourselves” to a necessary “process of truth and reconciliation,” so we have not succeeded in transcending our past, in confronting and abandoning its assumptions and inequities. We have been too “celebratory” about the civil rights movement; we “congratulated ourselves too quickly” that the ugliness of racism was eliminated when it continued to infuse our institutions and our attitudes.

Aside from his teaching at NYU, Stevenson’s day job is directing the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) in Montgomery, Alabama—suing to stay executions of innocent prisoners, persuading the Supreme Court that children should not be tried as adults and sentenced to death or life imprisonment. But he has made himself a historian as well. The EJI recently issued a detailed report on the slave trade in nineteenth-century Montgomery—part of a project its website describes as

focused on developing a more informed understanding of America’s racial history and how it relates to contemporary challenges. EJIbelieves that reconciliation with our nation’s difficult past cannot be achieved without truthfully confronting history.

EJI joined with the Alabama Historical Commission to sponsor three historical markers in downtown Montgomery memorializing the domestic slave trade in which the city played such a prominent part. Now Stevenson has embarked on a new project to erect markers at the sites of the thousands of lynchings that terrorized blacks in the post–Civil War South.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, nearly sixteen years younger than Bryan Stevenson, was born six decades after John Hope Franklin. Martin Luther King was seven years dead; much of the hope of the civil rights movement had evaporated; racism, bitterness, and a combination of militancy and despair prevailed. Coates’s father, a former member of the Black Panther Party, was an initially self-taught intellectual who became an archivist of black history and created a press to share the record of those of African descent from ancient Egypt to Marcus Garvey to Attica. Paul Coates grounded his son “in history and struggle,” lessons that would make Franklin’s work seem a bit old-fashioned, conciliatory, perhaps even compromising.

It was Malcolm X who became Ta-Nehisi’s hero. “I loved Malcolm because Malcolm never lied…. He was unconcerned with making the people who believed they were white comfortable in their belief.” Coates resisted white tools or rules. And he would flee the academy—dropping out of Howard without completing a degree. But he too embraced history. “My reclamation,” he wrote, “would be accomplished, like Malcolm’s, through books, through my own study and exploration.” Perhaps, he mused, “I might write something of consequence someday.”

It would seem he has done just that. On the second page of his recent meditation on race, Between the World and Me, Coates proclaims, “The answer is American history.” His own deep immersion in the past—“I have now morphed into a Civil War buff,” he confesses—served as epiphany and impetus: “I could not have understood 20th-century discrimination without understanding its 19th-century manifestations.” Searching for a deeper understanding of the forces underlying the realities of black oppression that he already knew so acutely, Coates turned to scholarship and the traditions of African-American history that John Hope Franklin had done so much to build. Coates has mastered the academic literature and from it he has come to understand that slavery was not “ancillary to American history” but “foundational.” It remains as a “ghost” all over American policy today, as Coates has demonstrated in his call for reparations to counter the enormous inequities of race reinforced by modern federal housing and zoning legislation.

In Coates’s view, whites have been urged away from their real history by myths that have hidden the violence and injustice at its core. America must reject Civil War narratives that have obscured the war’s origins in slavery, that have permitted unexamined celebration of Confederate gallantry, and that have turned the “mass slaughter of the war into a kind of sport in which one could conclude that both sides conducted their affairs with courage, honor and élan.” The “lie of the Civil War,” he explains, “is the lie of innocence.” It is a dream, a myth that has lulled and blinded white America as it denied and evaded so much of its past. White Americans “have forgotten the scale of theft that enriched them in slavery; the terror that allowed them, for a century, to pilfer the vote; the segregationist policy that gave them their suburbs.” It is the denial of this history that sustains an emollient innocence and makes the injustices of the present possible.

As John Hope Franklin learned when he undertook the research that he fashioned into From Slavery to Freedom, an understanding of history destroys innocence. And the brutal and undeniable truths of murders captured and shared on social media challenge our national presumptions of innocence as well. Can this unavoidable confrontation with the realities of our present open us in new ways to the meaning of our troubling past? Can history help relieve us once and for all of the burden of that ignorance and the evil it can produce? Are we as historians committed—and prepared—to seize this responsibility to extend history beyond the academy? Are we as a nation at last ready to welcome the truth that can yield reconciliation?

If so, it is in no small part because of the kind of history John Hope Franklin dared to write and the ideals he represented as he walked the “tightrope” between engagement and objectivity, as he struggled to unite history with policy and meaningful change, as he sought truths to save us all. Black Lives Matter. History Matters. John Hope Franklin showed us how much they matter to each other.

Jessica Chasmar, The Washington Times - Wednesday, January 6, 2016

By Ernesto Londoño January 8, 2016 2:48 pm, New York Times


The American government was thrilled by the landslide victory of the
Venezuelan opposition in last December’s parliamentary election. But Latin
America hands at the State Department couldn’t have been thrilled to learn the
new speaker of Venezuela’s assembly is the veteran opposition leader Henry
Ramos Allup.

About a decade ago, the American embassy in Caracas issued a cable
conveying a scathing assessment of Mr. Ramos and dim hopes for the
country’s then­-beleaguered opposition under his leadership.

His party, Acción Democrática, the cable said, is “going nowhere fast,”
partly because its leader is “unimaginative, overconfident and even repellent.”
For good measure, the cable’s author also called Mr. Ramos “crude, abrasive,
arrogant and thin-­skinned.”

The embassy cable, which was among the government documents made
public by WikiLeaks in 2010, chided Mr. Ramos’s party for spending too much
time seeking money from the international community and not enough time
courting potential voters. “When refused by one Embassy official, they ask
another,” the cable said.

Mr. Ramos was not in a conciliatory mood during this week’s
rambunctious opening session of parliament. Making dismissive hand
gestures, he directed workers to remove posters of the late Venezuelan
President Hugo Chávez and his hand­picked successor, Nicolás Maduro, from
the national assembly hall.

The Venezuelan opposition has been beset by infighting and ideological
differences since Mr. Chávez, a socialist leader, took power in 1999.
Opposition leaders banded together last year in an effort to wrest control of
parliament from Mr. Maduro’s party.

The opposition remains a fractious bunch. Some have argued that the new
leaders in parliament should attempt to find common ground with Mr.
Maduro’s government to address the country’s economic crisis and other
pressing problems. Others, including Mr. Ramos, want to focus on ousting Mr.
Maduro. During the opening session of parliament, Mr.
Ramos announced that the opposition will seek to remove Mr. Maduro from
office within six months.

Danielle Allen is a political theorist at Harvard University and a contributing columnist for The Post.

The landscape of the 2016 election is seismic. Deep beneath the surface of our daily lives, three tectonic plates have collided, and a tsunami now pounds us. The names of those plates are income inequality; “ overcriminalization and excessive punishment in the U.S. Code ,” to quote Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan; and demographic transition.

On the first two, right and left are actually, weirdly enough, experiencing a meeting of the psyches, or something of the sort. But the third issue casts everything in the light of racial questions and makes the strange fact of latent bipartisan agreement almost impossible to see.

Income inequality began its remarkable climb in the early 1980s, and the income share of the top 10 percent now exceeds the level of the 1920s. In the summer of the 1992 party conventions, as I remember it, commentators had noticed that income inequality was rising, but it was too early to tell whether the curve would descend again. The arc of history didn’t turn, and now income inequality is at historic heights. Much of the United States is suffering from wage stagnation, and the money-soaked presidential campaign is largely being funded by a very small number of Americans.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Donald Trump are both tapping into these issues. Both disavow super PACs and promise, with quite different degrees of moral seriousness, to reverse the decline experienced by lower-income segments of the population. Sanders wants to reverse that through redistribution. Trump appears to have placed a gambler’s bet on something of a racial protection racket. He stands ready to make his largely white crowds “great again” by protecting them from a variety of intruders and competitors, generally of different ethnic backgrounds, while he asks for a nice fee in the form of a hefty tax break for the wealthy.

As to overcriminalization, mass incarceration also began its remarkable climb in the early 1980s and has now reached globally historic levels. The Black Lives Matter campaign against police violence has turned our phone cameras on fundamental issues of race, yes, but not only on those issues. It has also focused our eyes on clear examples of an excessive growth of state power, well-exemplified by the war on drugs. Perhaps surprisingly, the effects of the growth of the penal state ramify well beyond city streets, all the way, for instance, to the Gulf of Mexico. 

Kagan criticized overcriminalization and excessive punishment in a Supreme Court decision that reversed the felony conviction of John Yates, a commercial gulf fisherman who was accused of throwing 72 undersize grouper overboard when caught with them by a federal agent. On the basis of Sarbanes-Oxley, a law meant to rein in accounting shenanigans, Yates was charged with “destroying, concealing, and covering up undersized fish to impede a federal investigation.” That is, he was thought to be guilty of “tampering with any physical object that might have evidentiary value in any federal investigation into any offense,” an act that exposes you to a possible 20-year prison sentence. In other words, until the Supreme Court intervened, throwing grouper overboard could be life-altering.

Every Republican candidate has raised the issue of governmental overreach as a major problem to be tackled in this election.

Now if you are following me, you’ll notice that I just did something very strange. I just suggested that the Black Lives Matter campaign and the motley cast of characters seeking the Republican nomination are on the same page on something. I’ve proposed that they share a concern for excessive state power. As if the activists from Ferguson, Mo., might now be thinking, “Where was Ammon Bundy when we needed him?” As if Trump fails to see potential allies in the Black Lives Matter protesters who turn up at his rallies.

Why don’t these voices on right and left sing in harmony? Because of race.

This brings me to the third seismic issue, the remarkable demographic transition underway in this country. It also brings me to rancher Cliven Bundy, Ammon’s father, notorious for saying in 2014 that he wondered whether African Americans weren’t “better off as slaves.”

The United States’ days as a home to a white majority are, for all intents and purposes, done. Children born in 2011 are members of this country’s first majority-minority birth cohort. And children who entered kindergarten in fall 2014 were on track to be the first majority-minority school cohort. We may be no more than a dozen years from the entrance of majority-minority age cohorts into our voting ranks. 

These facts are forcing upon us, at long last, the question of what will become of the remarkably long-lived tradition in many parts of this country of white social and political control. As a Trump supporter was quoted in a recent Post article as saying, “Something has to be done because we’re shrinking, we’re being taken over by people that want to change what America is.” She added, “You can’t say it nicely.”

The deep question here is whether we will pursue the politics and policies of something like apartheid South Africa or complete, at last, the dream too long deferred of a racially egalitarian democracy. The Republicans are, at best, split on this question. The Democrats are certainly for the latter, but they have been able to avoid engaging too deeply on the issue because they consider the voters who agree with them to be firmly in their camp already.

In other words, with regard to income inequality and concerns about excessive growth in state power, right and left are rubbing up against each other in ways that are awkward, embarrassing and uncomfortable for everyone. That’s one thing that this election season is teaching us, and that’s why the potential effects are seismic.

But here’s the other thing it’s teaching us. The question of our racial future divides us utterly, and this third issue makes it impossible for us to see the potential points of solidarity that the political quakes have cast upon our shores.

Riding high on the crests of this tsunami are some fundamental matters that we must certainly face and about which we may, stunningly, but quite possibly, agree. Yet the danger from the quake is none the less for that, and the challenge of figuring out how to master this moment is nothing if not thoroughly daunting.

If only we could do it together, despite our racial history.

via NIM on Facebook

businessviews.com

Распад Российской Федерации не приведет к хаосу. Наоборот, экономический потенциал новых государств обеспечит населению большинства из них достойную жизнь. А нынешняя способность региональных элит контролировать территорию обеспечит порядок.

voxpop_66 (voxpop_66) wrote,
2016-01-03 12:08:00 via VM on Fcebook

Есть слова, которые мы часто употребляем, но при этом совершенно не помним, что когда-то они были еще и чьими-то именами или фамилиями. Вот лишь самые неожиданные из них...


Чарльз Бойкот собственной персоной

1. Хулиган — это фамилия ирландской семьи, отличавшейся очень буйным нравом. Главным был молодой Партик Хулиган, фамилия которого то и дело мелькала в полицейских отчетах и газетных хрониках.

2. Шовинизм происходит от имени наполеоновского солдата Николя Шовена, который особенно рьяно служил Наполеону и Франции и имел привычку выражать свой патриотизм и исключительность своей страны в пафосных простонародных речах. Что примечательно, фамилия происходит от слова «лысый» (сalvinus).

3. Саксофон. Адольф Сакс представил свое изобретение как «мундштучный офиклеид». Этот инструмент назвал саксофоном друг изобретателя композитор Гектор Берлиоз в статье, посвященной изобретению, и слово тут же стало популярным.

4. Сэндвич. Джон Монтегю IV граф Сэндвич занимался подготовкой кругосветной экспедиции Джеймса Кука, и, так как ему некогда было отвлекаться на еду, он придумал простой и удобный сэндвич.

5. Бойкот. Британец Чарльз Бойкот работал управляющим у одного землевладельца в Ирландии. Однажды работники устроили забастовку и стали игнорировать англичанина. А благодаря британской прессе, освещавшей эти события, фамилия Бойкот стала именем нарицательным.

6. Джакузи. Итальянец Кандидо Якуцци (Jacuzzi) изобрел джакузи (джакузи — неправильное «американское» произношение этой итальянской фамилии, которое, однако, прочно укоренилось во многих языках мира).

7. Оливье. Повар Люсьен Оливье известен как создатель рецепта знаменитого салата, оставшегося тайной, которую Оливье так и не разгласил до самой смерти.

8. Бефстроганов. Французский повар графа Александра Григорьевича Строганова изобрел это блюдо. На французский манер оно звучит как bœuf Stroganoff, то есть «говядина по-строгановски».

9. Лодырь. Немецкий врач Христиан Иванович Лодер открыл Заведение искусственных минеральных вод, в котором пациентам советовал быструю ходьбу в течение трех часов. Простой люд, глядя на эту суету, придумал выражение «лодыря гонять».

10. Шарлатан. Слово шарлатан по легенде произошло от имени французского врача Шарля Латена. Он проводил бессмысленные операции, обещая полное выздоровление, и, получив деньги, скрывался. А несчастным пациентам становилось только хуже.

11. Галиматья. Французский лекарь Галли Матье верил в целительную силу смеха. Он лечил пациентов хохотом, для чего смешил их анекдотами и разной галиматьей.

12. Пасквиль. В Риме жил один острый на язык гражданин по фамилии Пасквино. Народ его очень любил. Однажды недалеко от дома Пасквино установили статую, которую в народе назвали в его честь. Римляне по ночам стали обклеивать статую листовками, в которых язвительно высказывались о своих правителях.

13. Блютус (blue tooth — буквально «синий зуб»). Разработчики назвали эту технологию в честь короля викингов Харальда I Синезубого (Harald Blåtand), который объединил Данию и Норвегию.

14. Июль и август. Июль назван в честь Юлия Цезаря. Август — в честь римского императора Октавиана Августа.

15. Меценат. Первого из известных истории меценатов звали Гай Цильний Меценат.

16. Силуэт. Этьен де Силуэт был контролером финансов во Франции, но после неудачной попытки провести реформу был вынужден покинуть свой пост. Тогда он изобрел новый метод развлечения — обводить тень человека на стене. Эта идея так понравилась его гостям, что слава Силуэта разнеслась по всей Европе.

17. Мансарда. Архитектор Франсуа Мансар впервые использовал подкровельное чердачное пространство для жилых и хозяйственных целей. С тех пор чердачный этаж под скатной крутой крышей носит название мансарда.

(с) Закон Времени

via LG on Facebook

Николай Подосокорский,
philologist.livejournal.com

Филологические анекдоты

Mimi Howard on Anti-Education, lareviewofbooks.org

January 9th, 2016

Philip Martin, nwaonline.com

Will Self, theguardian.com [original article includes links]



The web privileges novelty over originality, and the apparent fluidity and diversity of our online existences is deceptive, argues this perceptive loiterer in social media


This is a curious book; a text that in its physical production – its writing, its publication and possibly even its reception – says much more than its actual words disclose. Which is not to say those words are badly written or otherwise lacking. Laurence Scott has set himself the formidable task of registering the impact of the new digital technologies on our cognition, our perception and our emotions; in short, our phenomenology in its broadest sense. Other pundits take on the political, economic and social changes occasioned by the world wide web and the internet – Scott busies himself with the existential ones. The four-dimensional humans of the book’s title are our wired selves, compelled increasingly to inhabit an environment in which the old certainties of space and time are being disrupted by a global network that abolishes distance and privileges instantaneousness.

Besides the title, Scott devises other motifs to exemplify these transformations: the four-dimensional human, ever conscious of the clock ticking in the corner of the screen, looks through “a reverse peephole” into the homes of others. Airbnb encourages us to turn booking a night’s stay into a paradoxical form of intimacy: we may never meet the people who pimp their sheets to us, yet both parties know exactly where to find one another should those sheets be egregiously stained. The frontier era of cyberspace, was, Scott suggests, painfully short-lived: we set off pell-mell into the virtual new-found-land, gleefully abandoning the old strictures of gender, sexual orientation, class, age and ethnicity, only to find them catching up with us – and indeed being still more rigidly imposed by interests for whom it is essential our identities be defined, so they can sell us stuff we don’t need, but which they know we’ve bought in the past.

If the vertiginous seesaw between seeming anonymity and actual surveillance (by both commercial and state apparatuses) typifies online life, then our communications within it have, Scott suggests, an equally Janus-faced character. One of the great strengths of this book is that its author offers himself up as the experimental rat in the virtual maze, analysing his own emotional responses to a life on social media. He writes of how in an era when everyone has the permanent possibility of communicating with just about anyone else, his own interactions with those actually present have become curiously stilted. He distinguishes between telephonic silences, which link us together “like a thick rope”, from Skype ones that, as we avoid our interlocutors’ eyes, only drive us further apart. Nowadays, he writes, the phrase “awkward silence” is utterly tautologous: all silences are awkward.

Scott, who is a self-styled social media “loiterer”, rather than a compulsive tweeter, is particularly good on the ways four-dimensionality seems to queer our flesh-and-blood existence: the friend who continually updates their online profiles can seem oddly insubstantial and anachronistic in person; the fleeting real-life encounter can turn into a persistent virtual presence, hovering around our twittering timelines; while the deaths of casual acquaintances can gain huge salience, even as those of old friends are lost in a spume of pixels. Marshall McLuhan’s much-trumpeted “global village” is, it transpires, not some Laurie Lee hamlet where everyone brings in the hay together, but a world-girdling Hollywood chock full of overdemonstrative divas. And, according to Scott, this is the virtual world at its best, because the confusions of scale and proportion are necessarily uncanny, making us only too aware of the trolls and stalkers who lurk about in the unearthly glow of light-emitting diodes.

But if the capacity of the internet to unite us is deceptive, so are the apparent fluidity and diversity of our online existences. In a section that takes as its starting point Marx’s apercu in The Communist Manifesto about the transformative power of capitalism, “All that is solid melts into air”, Scott argues that far from liberating us into a realm of vaporous reinvention, every web-surfer is “training to be a taxonomist”. The culture and operation of the web thrive on our willingness to point and click and view; Scott cites “cyber-philosopher” Jaron Lanier, who coined the expression “virtual reality”, as the champion of “a sustainable global economy based primarily on exchanges of information” – namely all those clicks and likes and views – but he himself isn’t convinced. Perhaps too much of a cybernaut and an egalitarian to argue straightforwardly that the web banalises culture by bypassing the traditional gatekeepers, Scott instead wittily dissects the phenomenon of “Normcore”, seeing it as emblematic of a medium that relentlessly privileges novelty over originality.

But really, as Lear observed to Cordelia (who clearly didn’t have an Amazon Prime account), nothing comes of nothing, and no “information economy” can ever topple the suzerainty of things. In some quite prosaic ways Scott is an ideal person to tackle this subject: he is in his mid-30s, and so reached adulthood before the inception of wireless broadband, the technological change that freeze-dried cyberspace into full, gelid existence. Moreover, he is both a creative writer and a perceptive literary critic, who leavens his text with some mercurially brilliant turns of phrase and poetic coinages, while at the same time stiffening it up with huge dollops of literary explication and quotation. There’s room in The Four- Dimensional Human for everything from Proust’s madeleine to Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher”, and back again. The former is employed to discuss the web’s time- and memory-distorting capabilities; the latter as prescient of its simultaneous visibility and obscurity.

I enjoyed Scott’s tropes, whether it was nailing the defining quality of Katie Price (AKA Jordan) as “eternal nextness”, or describing the x-ray view of screened luggage as a Warholian “pastel fantasia”. And I appreciated the erudition, which brings the same degree of criticality to bear on The Wings of the Dove as an advert for Dove soap, without thereby implying any necessary equivalence. However, speaking with all the gravitas of my 53 years, and as not so much a digital immigrant but more of an away-dayer who takes short trips into cyberspace, I think Scott may not quite have the long view necessary to fully apprehend this epochal transformation in our terms of existence. In part, his scholarliness is responsible, making of him an oddly fusty zeitgeister, since he explains emergent technologies almost solely by reference to content derived from one – the codex, or physical books – that is increasingly redundant. Yet there is also a failure here to fix the phenomenon of digital media properly in a universal timeline, one that allows for other developments that have had just as radical effects.

I’ve often thought the virulence with which these technologies have battened on to human psyches is due to our already having been softened up. Really, the communications and media technologies that came to fruition in the late-19th and early-20th century already constituted an embryonic “world wide web”; many of the characteristics Scott attributes to his contemporary four-dimensional human were already evident in the city-dwellers of the recent past. High-speed transport links allowing for mechanised distribution systems, the telegraph, the telephone and radio were all in place by the late 1920s, while the roiling, jostling urban millstream was itself a spatial analogue of the cluttered screens that have subsequently come to fill our vision. Scott does understand the past has much to teach us, yet understandably he wants to make it new by privileging the novelty of the virtual; but, really, metropolitan existence, at once utterly anonymous and rigidly codified, while also imposing on us all sorts of spatial jump-cuts and temporal stitching, has been the truly transformative force in human affairs. The new media have – through their ubiquity and prevalence – finished the job by changing the physical city into an electro-physical network.

Towards the end of this book Scott seems to lose his focus; shifting from forensic descriptions of web-heads’ perceptual and cognitive glitches into lengthier philosophising of the Whither goest thou? form. Unlike Bob Dylan’s Mr Jones, Scott sees there is something going on here but he has a fairly good idea of what it is: a sinister lock-step between humanity’s technological “advance” and its compulsive shitting in its own nest. He tries to stave off what he terms “the Demon of Melodramatic Prophesies” which can bedevil writing about the present, yet having already identified as intrinsic to virtual existence a collapsing of the future and the past into a permanently digitised “now”, he can’t avoid the doomsday intersection of human connectivity and environmental degradation.

But this is a cop-out: seemingly even youngish literary types such as Scott cannot help being nostalgic for the quill, parchment and carrier pigeons they never knew; and would prefer extinction to any version of “the singularity” (the absorption of biological into machine intelligence) that may lie ahead of us. Which is a shame, because with his joyful phrase-making and sharp eye for the follies and absurdities of wired life, Scott would be the perfect investigator to report back on what it feels like to be … uploaded.


The Four-Dimensional Human by Laurence Scott, review: 'scattershot'

Nicholas Blincoe. Daily Telegraph [original article includes links]

Laurence Scott, shortlisted for the 2015 Samuel Johnson Prize and winner of the Jerwood Prize, sees the archetypal image for our world in the final frame of The Social Network, with Mark Zuckerberg withdrawn and alone in the world of his invention, Facebook, repeatedly stabbing “refresh” but unsure whether his connections to the outside world are real, ironic, or false. We live in a world where we are always connected and unable ever to be truly lost, Scott argues; where we need emojis to guide us because language is treacherous and we can no longer read expression or intonation.

Scott lectures on Victorian literature and he begins The Four-Dimensional Human by noting how the idea of a “fourth dimension” gained currency at the end of the 19th century as an idea of another world, or as an intermediate state, or perhaps as time itself.

Scott is surely right that the fourth dimension is finally here in the form of cyberspace, yet his book is scattershot. Although there are insights, the overall effect is of a series of random routines. Indeed, the most obtrusive things about the internet – multi-player gaming and ubiquitous pornography – are only tangentially touched upon, as though they are too grubby to deserve serious attention.

Scott also has an off-putting, elaborate style, as though he had developed it from a checklist of formal rules for “literary” writing. However, his book lacks the obsessiveness of real research. Its random quality extends to the endnotes, where he is eager to tell us when he quotes from Lorde’s 2013 album Pure Heroine yet fails to give any references for his frequent citations of Marx.