Weekly Digest – December 20, 2020

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Top of My Reading List

This list covers two weeks so is longer than most.

Biden needs to help the United States take a deep breath, without presidential appointees sniping at each other and jostling for position. He’s gathering a Cabinet that mirrors his own strengths — sane men and women, each one likable and competent. Like Biden, they can play the old tunes so well that maybe Americans will begin to forget what they’re so angry about.  But the virtues of calm and collegiality can be overstated. A team of elbows-in former colleagues and aides may end up looking more like a Senate staff than a dynamic Cabinet… Biden’s challenge is that after cooling the national fever, literally and figuratively, he needs to shake things up.

Biden is a decent man.  Attempting to restore an Obama- or Clinton-esque government will fail.  The salad days of corporate centrism are long gone and will not return.  Biden needs to lead with an acknowledgment of what hasn’t worked – which he was intimately involved with – as well as a vision for where we want to be as a country in a generation.  Haaland for Interior Secretary is an excellent nomination.

Our desire for simplicity is understandable. We like our stories to have plots, for life’s messiness to form a neat arc. In reality, we don’t get to start at the beginning. We’re thrown into the middle of things, into the chaos of history…

Yet we all have to face the question of how best to act within the world’s complexity, and the way “normies” cope isn’t ultimately so different from the conspiracists’ reductionism. We tend to steer away from complex explanations, to make things easier for ourselves.

What is simplicity? It’s a quality we feel we can intuitively identify. Simplicity is minimal and elegant. A simple object has no ornament. Everything that is not essential has been refined away. Simplicity is, in most of the ways we commonly talk about it, an aesthetic criterion, something to do with Platonic forms or a white canvas. But it turns up at the foundations of scientific thinking too…

The German theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder has interviewed colleagues about how beauty influences the way they judge their theories, and how it shapes the avenues they choose to pursue. Her book Lost in Math (published in German under the more informative title The Ugly Universe) makes the startling claim that not only do aesthetic notions of beauty have no necessary basis in physical fact, but they might be responsible for the failure of fundamental physics to progress substantially since the Seventies.

Sabine Hossenfelder is always thoughtful and thought-provoking.  As well as the book Kunzru cites, she has a blog and a YouTube channel.

If Trump was the end of the “party of ideas,” the rise of Reagan was its start. But what were those “ideas” in the first place, and were they really as new as people said?

The Clint Eastwood Western The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976), a genre-defining fantasy of anti-government violence, finds redemption for the failed ideas of the white South in the bloody plains of the American West. Eastwood’s character, and the entire idea of the American West in the film, are the product of two of the biggest blows against white supremacy in U.S. history: the Civil War and the civil rights movements. The book on which it was based, The Rebel Outlaw: Josey Wales (1972), was written by a former Klansman named Asa Earl Carter who went by the pen name Forrest Carter (a nod to Confederate hero and Grand Wizard of the postbellum Ku Klux Klan, Nathan Bedford Forrest).

In the uneasy months following 9/11, the Bush Administration provoked a minor controversy when it announced the name of a new office dedicated to protecting the United States from terrorism and other threats. “Homeland security” had unsavory associations: the Nazis often spoke of Heimat, which was also used in the 1920s and 1930s by an Austrian right-wing paramilitary group, the Heimwehr or Heimatschutz. Even Donald Rumsfeld, Bush’s secretary of defense, who had been in discussions about the term months before its introduction, had been discomfited. “The word ‘homeland’ is a strange word,” he wrote in a memo on February 27, 2001. “ ‘Homeland’ Defense sounds more German than American.” Barbara J. Fields, a historian at Columbia University, predicted in 2002 that the term would “remain a resident alien rather than a naturalized citizen in American usage.”

Seventeen years and a television series later, “homeland” no longer unsettles. The Department of Homeland Security has a $40 billion budget, 240,000 employees, and a Cabinet seat. Last summer, as journalists, academics, and intellectuals debated whether a fascist had invaded the White House, a bill reauthorizing DHS sailed through the House of Representatives by a bipartisan vote of 386 to 41. The phrase has found a home in the United States. It is a naturalized citizen.

One of the benefits of turning fifty, which I did in November, is that your memories become useful in unexpected ways. Throughout most of the Bush years, I was in my thirties — old enough to remember a time when there wasn’t a Department of Homeland Security, young enough to feel the novelties of the era. Middle age provides you a different perch. You get to watch, in real time, the shock of the new get absorbed by the soft cushions of the American tradition.

When Bush left office in 2009, he was widely loathed, with an approval rating of 33 percent. Today, 61 percent of the population approves of him, with much of that increase coming from Democrats and independents. A majority of voters under thirty-five view him favorably, which they didn’t while he was president. So jarring is the switch that Will Ferrell was inspired to reprise his impersonation of Bush on Saturday Night Live. “I just wanted to address my fellow Americans tonight,” he said, “and remind you guys that I was really bad. Like, historically not good.”

W paved the way for Trump.   It would be difficult to overstate my disgust that 3 in 5 people view him favorably.

Also Worth Reading

As Tablet’s Park MacDougald summarizes, this new Right sees US economic decline and cultural malaise as largely the result of “a short-sighted American elite [that] has allowed the country’s manufacturing core — the key to both widespread domestic prosperity and national security in the face of a mercantilist China — to be hollowed out.” In response, they promote a modest economic protectionism in the hopes of restoring American manufacturing to its former glory…

These corporatists still pay homage to market efficiency but cast themselves as realists in the face of the threatening rise of China and the hollowing of the American core…

At first blush, their statist program sounds more sensible and attractive than most of what was politically thinkable — from either side of the aisle — before 2016. A radical reorganization of the American industrial structure is needed in order to deliver any real and enduring economic gains for working people. And it is undoubtedly true that too much of US policy is dictated by a professional class free from democratic accountability or the everyday experiences of working people.

But the new Right is not a promising new expression of working-class mobilization — it’s an intellectual symptom of mass political demobilization…  In places where the populist, corporatist, or nationalist Right have made inroads, they have done so as a result of decades of declining turnout. This is the case with the National Front in France, the Five Star Movement and Lega in Italy, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil. Right-wing populism is only politically viable amid the general demobilization of working-class voters.

The Republican Party has morphed into a malignant and profoundly dangerous threat to the country and the long-term prospects for our democratic stability.  I followed up with Murphy to ask what prompted this speech.  “I have a very clear sense of the danger this all poses to the republic,” Murphy told me. “If this becomes at all normalized more broadly than it already is, they will steal an election two years from now or four years from now.”…

If large swaths of the Republican Party are morphing into a much more cancerous anti-democratic force, one that in some basic sense just isn’t functioning as an actor in a democracy, how should Democrats adapt, and communicate to the public about this? How can they compete in the information wars, given the massive media machine the GOP has at its disposal?

The world’s wealthy will need to reduce their carbon footprints by a factor of 30 to help put the planet on a path to curb the ever-worsening impacts of climate change, according to new findings published Wednesday by the United Nations Environment Program.

Currently, the emissions attributable to the richest 1 percent of the global population account for more than double those of the poorest 50 percent. Shifting that balance, researchers found, will require swift and substantial lifestyle changes, including decreases in air travel, a rapid embrace of renewable energy and electric vehicles, and better public planning to encourage walking, bicycle riding and public transit.

I’m NOT predicting that we will anytime soon run out of indium or gallium or niobium, tantalum, germanium, scandium and the many other key metals that are now on the critical list drawn up by the Europeans. But as longtime readers know, we don’t have to run out of something in order for it to become scarce and prohibitively expensive. We only need to see a situation where supply plateaus or even starts to decline for prices to shoot up far beyond what manufacturers can afford and still make a profit…

As a result of the misinformed thinking of many economists who know nothing about the geological realities of planet Earth and the difficulties of shifting complex supply chains, we’ve been led to believe that we will always find substitutes precisely when we need them in quantities we require at prices we can afford. This dangerous assumption has been built into practically every supply chain for the critical materials our complex society relies on.

The decision to end this program revealed the lack of responsible analysis in political and academic discourse regarding U.S.-China relations. It reflected a typical American misperception: the conflation of the CCP with the Chinese people. Sociocultural anthropology tells us that in times of societal strife, the realities of everyday people will reveal far more about their ruling parties than any textbook or op-ed…

More than ever the U.S. needs a program that promotes immersive experiences in China. In order to begin to understand Premier Xi Jinping and the CCP, we must seek to understand the inner workings of Chinese society and its people. When misinformation is the new normal and cross-cultural exchange and scholarship become impossible, this leaves the U.S. in a dangerous and vulnerable position.

In what follows I will be discussing “the work ethic.” Most of my references are to the American-style work ethic, because America has internalised the Protestant work ethic more fully than practically any other society. There are other forms of work ethic, for example the kind you find in Japan, but in fact they’re ideologically quite different. The American-style work ethic means that what you do for a living is central to your personal identity, a strong belief that disciplined work builds character. American workers are often on call at all hours and take that for granted. This feeds into what I’ll call “performative workaholism” – that is, showing up at work and demonstrating you’re working harder than anybody else in the office. Additionally, there is a very strong stigma on unemployment and getting “free stuff” from the government.

One of the most prominent recent critics of the work ethic is the anthropologist David Graeber. In his 2018 book Bullshit Jobs: A Theory we find a definition of “bullshit jobs” as “a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case.” It is important to contrast bullshit jobs with what Graeber simply calls “shit jobs” – namely those jobs like cleaning bedpans or collecting the rubbish. These jobs have to be done, and they are very important to the functioning of society. This kind of work can be a form of drudgery, it is not highly esteemed, it is generally poorly paid, and workers in these jobs are often in a precarious state. In contrast, bullshit jobs tend to be middle-class jobs, managerial white-collar work, often with higher prestige and with a decent income and decent job security – but they are utterly pointless or even pernicious. On the basis of surveys in the US, the UK and the Netherlands, Graeber suggests that around 40% of workers think that they are engaged in bullshit jobs.

In the summer of 1944, a camera was smuggled out of Auschwitz. Inside it was a roll of film with four images from the gas chambers at Birkenau, taken by members of the Jewish Sonderkommando. These photos were distributed worldwide by the Polish resistance. Two of them appear to have been taken in quick succession, discreetly, from within a shadowed doorframe. The other pair, one of which is blurred, appear to have been shot at the hip from a distance. The photos show Jewish women stripping before the gas chamber, and dead bodies waiting to be incinerated. White smoke billows as other bodies burn.

In 2014, the German painter Gerhard Richter sought to make a statement on the Holocaust. He copied these stark black-and-white images onto four monumental canvases, first in pencil, then in oil. And then he began to cover them. Over several weeks, he applied layer after layer of paint, first in muted silvers and greys, then reds and greens and purples and blacks, often pushing it across the surface with a squeegee to create ripples and chasms of paint. Two of the paintings are mostly gray, white, and red; the others have large areas of pulsating green. He called the group his Birkenau paintings.

  • Danielle Allen, Allen for MA.  She’s a potential candidate for MA Governor in 2022.

Ending on a Positive Note

A few years ago, I walked through Tokyo’s neon-lit streets for the first time, wide-eyed and jet-lagged. It only took three days to learn some of the city’s secrets. If you can’t find the perfect noodle shop for lunch, for example, look up and you will see another dozen options, filling the upper floors of what you thought were office buildings. Or that famous places — like Shibuya Crossing, the intersection you’ve seen in 100 timelapses — are famous for a reason, but there’s so much more to learn by picking a metro stop at random and going for a long walk.

Tokyo is a wonderful city.  (I presume that hasn’t changed in decades since I visited!)  Picking a metro stop and going for a long walk is how I got to know it.