Category Archive
The following is a list of all entries from the random noise category.
Embodiment of beauty
In the foreword to his “Green Hills of Africa,” Hemingway says:
“The writer has attempted to write an absolutely true book to see whether the shape of a country and the pattern of a month’s action can, if truly presented, compete with a work of the imagination.”
As far as I’m concerned, he succeeded spectacularly. Hemingway was an avid hunter and even if you do not share his passion, or indeed even find it acceptable, you cannot but be drawn in and fascinated by his account of a hunting safari in Serengeti.
David Foster Wallace, who used to be a ranked juniors’ player in the US in his adolescence, does something similar in the article “Federer as Religious Experience” published about three years ago in NY Times’ Play Magazine, in which he talks about his experiences of watching Roger Federer play tennis. While there is nothing fictional about the story, it does read like as great a piece of fiction as any. The piece bears several hallmarks of his usual style(1) and the two depictions of particular balls played by Federer, against Agassi and Nadal, respectively, are positively poetic. There is a fair amount of technical discussion and detail in the article (which, again, shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who knows DF Wallace) and it may well be that this is both a bit difficult as well as tedious to a reader who hasn’t played much tennis, but I honestly think that it’s well worth a bit of an effort to try and follow his explanations.
As it happens, I was lucky enough to watch another Federer-Nadal final at Wimbledon a year later, and can thus personally vouch for several things that Wallace says in the article about the top-level live tennis. I remember that feeling of being mesmerized by the combination of the intensity, raw power and ballet-like grace which really doesn’t come across in a remotely comparable way when watched from the TV. I fully agree with DF Wallace that only by being there in person you’re truly able to appreciate what he in the article terms as “kinetic beauty” – a human beings’ reconciliation with the fact of having a body. And by beholding that beauty, you’re rather painfully reminded that you too have a body–of course, a rather simple and blunt instrument even in its theoretical full potential when compared to that of Federer–but are simply wasting away its potential. By watching Federer perform at the border of impossibility, and indeed, pushing that border, a kind of phenomenological point is driven home to a spectator: our bodies are not simply vessels for our minds and identities, they are our ways of being-in-world, our ways of interacting with time and space. And just like in, say, verbal conversation, there are different levels of proficiency and fluidness in all interaction.
Incidentally, a lot what Wallace is saying resonates with Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s 2006 book “In Praise of Athletic Beauty”. Rather than looking at sports as a social practice or a form of amusement, Gumbrecht approaches athletics as an occasion for aesthetic contemplation, seeking and finding beauty, dignity and grace in disciplines such as bare-knuckle boxing or sumo wrestling–which are probably quite far away from most peoples’ idea of aesthetic experience. It’s a very worthwhile book to read no matter on which side of the camp–loving sports or loathing it–you happen to be.
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(1) Of course, there is also plenty of tennis-related stuff in the “Infinite Jest”. Oh, and if you are at all familiar with Wallace’s writing I do not need to remind you not to skip footnotes in his article.
Going rate for democracy
This week’s NATO summit stood up to the challenge (or, depending on your school of though, bowed down to the US pressure) and promised additional 7,000 troops to Afghanistan next year. Together with additional 30,000 US soldiers this will take the foreign contingent in Afghanistan almost to the 100,000 mark in 2010. That’s a lot of soldiers, a veritable flexing of military muscle meant to signal that the US and NATO mean serious business and are not to walk away and leave Karzai’s fledging government to their own devices. At the same time, when grudgingly signing off the troop commitments, all the states involved used the opportunity to do some finger-wagging towards the very same Karzai’s administration and stress that they must mend their ways and root out the corruption that’s plaguing the nascent democracy.
While everybody involved surely has nothing but best intentions in their minds, things are not quite as simple as they may seem. Alex de Waal has published a very interesting article in the Prospect Magazine on how trying to force what we believe is the integral component of good democratic governance on so-called fragile states is in fact likely to cause a lot more harm than good. He explains his views in a more thorough way in this article in International Affairs journal – a very worthwhile reading if you’re at all interested in peacekeeping and state-building in Africa.
In order to understand how the political process works in places such as Afghanistan or Congo, de Waal urges us to give up the notion of politics as a debating chamber of values (as it is in established democracies where different parties managing political conflicts have a substantial common vested interest in the state as going concern). “Fragile states”, says de Waal, “are typically defined by what they are not–they are not Weberian states in which autonomous state institutions administer the rule of law and regulate political conflicts, and not states in which governments deliver services on an efficient and impartial basis”. When we look at fragile or ‘failed states’, as they are also known (such as Afghanistan, Somalia, Sudan or Congo), we should not assume that statehood is not ‘working’ in these places and should be somehow established through free elections and subsequent participatory government, supported by international peacekeepers until the new government gains legitimacy – after which the foreign troops can withdraw. This, says de Waal, is a formula for peacekeeping missions without end. Instead, he says, we should pay attention to how these states actually function – because they in fact do function, albeit differently from what we may be used to.
And the way they do function is, according to de Waal, as patrimonial marketplaces where loyalties are traded with violence as an implicit or explicit tool for bargaining. Any agreements hold only because, and until, the price is right. As such, any intervening international forces will only become a party to the same process, often unwillingly or even unknowingly, affecting the going rate of trade and tilting the balance of negotiating power toward one party (typically the central government). It should be understood, however, that this is not a fundamental change of how the politics is done – it is only a temporary balance that stands to get renegotiated as soon as the external force withdraws, and is therefore sustainable only through continued presence.
What this all means though, if de Waal is right, is that the current heavy-footprint Afghanistan mission has snowflake’s chance in hell to succeed, at least within the 1-2 year attention span of the international community, and the thing that actually could work (i.e. local elite buy-in to the political process) is ruled out as a corruption. It really is a catch-22 for Western leaders – even if they believed that what de Waal is advocating is the right approach, they could not opt for it in reality as this would effectively mean bribing one’s way to democracy – which is somehow a lot less conceivable route than dying and killing other people for it.
As a footnote it occurred to me that this sort of ‘marketplace of loyalties’ approach to politics is in no way limited to Africa or Central Asia alone. I am not familiar enough with European politics in general (although to think of it, the way how Eastern European states were cajoled into the “Coalition of the Willing” really does smack of patrimonial politics) to make this sort of observations on the EU level, but in Estonia this model is very much present – if not on the national then on the municipal level, where local elites auction off their allegiances to the highest bidder and where coalitions are formed that make absolutely no sense whatsoever on the basis of party programs, but make all the sense in the world when looked at from the market point of view. Apparently there is still, after almost 20 years of independence, a phase of primary accumulation going on.
Inconvenient untruth
With Copenhagen summit set for the next week, there could hardly have been a worse moment, at least PR-wise, for breaking out what the international media already refers to as Climategate. It turns out that world’s foremost authority in climate research–Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia–along with their colleagues around the world had been cooking the raw data on climate change in order to make it better conform with their hypothesis of man-made global warming. And not only that – apparently they had also been actively suppressing the dissenting voices to the point of CRU’s leader Phil Jones having promised to keep two articles voicing different opinions out of the UN report “even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is”.
This is important on at least three different levels. First, there’s a general point about how the academy, and academic publishing in particular, works. Although it is probably true – at least I certainly hope so – that the kind of things described in the article above are unfortunate and rare exceptions rather than a norm, it still does point towards a general problem. While the academic peer review process is meant to ensure the impartiality and independence of the assessment it too has its limits. As Paul Feyerabend has wryly observed – Galileo’s grant proposal to use the strange premise that terrestrial optics applied also to the celestial sphere, to assert that the tides were the sloshing of water on a mobile earth, and to suppose that the fuzzy views of Jupiter’s alleged moons would prove, by a wild analogy, that the planets, too, went around the sun as did the moons around Jupiter would not have survived the first round of peer review in a National Science Foundation of 1632. Even though we nowadays have literally tens of thousands of academic journals, covering every subject imaginable, there is still an inevitable orthodoxy coded into the very peer review process itself. Those who are charged with the task of reviewing and assessing whether any particular piece of knowledge is worthy of publication are necessarily practitioners in the field themselves, with all the academic allegiances that this entails along with their own views and interests to keep in mind. So getting the opinion out that’s at odds with going line of thought has always been controversial under this system.
The particular tragic of the current scandal, however, is not so much in exposing the flaws of the academic peer review process (which is hardly much news to anyone who has been involved or interested in academy) rather than seriously discrediting the environmental movement. Because even though it appears that the man-made global warming scare that got Al Gore his Nobel prize turned out being “Inconvenient untruth”, the climate is changing and we’d better try to understand the reasons behind it and possible consequences that follow. And if Climategate leads to taking an eye off that particular ball then I’m afraid that this is ultimately bad news for everybody.
And this leads us to a third point, and namely – what is the broader aim and purpose of climate research? I have long been incredulous to the rhetorics of most of the fundamentalist environmentalism, including the brand that Al Gore has been preaching – which basically sees the nature as something pristine and inherently balanced. And from this it follows that mankind is a force that threatens this delicate natural equilibrium that has supposedly been around for ages and eons and would remain so, lest we destroy it. The problem with this view is twofold: first it is simply wrong on empirical grounds. The world has been through enormous environmental calamities long before we acquired powers to contribute to them, indeed before humankind even was around on this planet. There was a global freezing now known as Ice Age, and a subsequent global warming. There’s now a Sahara desert, covering the landmass of the size of Europe, where once there was a very lush vegetation. Or think of coal, oil and natural gas – they are fossil fuels, remnants of once living organisms, think of the scale of environmental destruction that had to take place for them to fossilize. And as there were no humans around at that time, we’d have to conclude that all those events – like half the globe freezing over or Sahara turning into desert – were natural. Now, if we agree, as we surely must, that the natural world does change and all those changes are not necessarily what we would find beneficial or benign from our human point of view. And this is the core of the second and in fact deeper problem – it may well be that the current climate change is not man-made, or at least not to the extent that it has been believed to be recently, but it may still be a threat to the environment – to our environment, the state of nature that we, as humans, need to thrive at this planet. But properly responding to this problem is impossible if we hold dear to the principle that “nature is not to be messed with”. One of the upshots of Climategate is in fact precisely that fighting against global warming (be it real or imagined, man-made or natural) is an enormous project of global engineering – what we should do is not to protect the nature as something abstract and transcendent, but protect a very specific kind of nature, a specific balance that we can’t take for granted even if we “do nothing to threaten it”. This is what I see the biggest danger of Climategate – if it turns out that climate change is not, after all, a man-made rather than natural phenomena, it doesn’t change the fact that it may still well be the largest and most serious challenge that the mankind is facing.
Choose your own utopia
Slavoj Žižek has published a short essay in LBR a couple of weeks ago commemorating the fall of the Berlin Wall. It contains several familiar riffs for those who have been following his writings recently (like a reference to The Eighteenth Brumaire or his speculation on whether China could be a successful example of a capitalist society that doesn’t need to provide its members democratic freedoms in order to thrive) but the main theme of the article is the fate of anti-communism in the Central and Eastern Europe over the last 20 years. And in this Žižek makes an interesting observation, noting how the problems and challenges of the new era are seen in terms of old struggles – although most of the former Eastern block countries have been democratic for almost two decades now, any failures are seen as remnants of the old system that still haven’t been completely purged.
Žižek asks:
How and why are these ghosts being raised in countries where many young people don’t even remember Communism? Anti-Communists ask a simple question – ‘If capitalism is really so much better than socialism, why are our lives still miserable?’ – and offer an equally straightforward answer: it is because we don’t yet have capitalism, we don’t yet have true democracy. Ex-Communists are still in power, disguised as owners and managers. We need another purge, the revolution must be repeated.
And in this way, Žižek argues, the Central and Eastern Europe has been largely living for a capitalist utopia, believing that soon the true democracy and prosperity will arrive (now embarrassing populist election slogan of Estonia’s rightist Reform Party that set the target for Estonia to become one of the five most prosperous EU nations in 15 years was a perfect example of this kind of utopianism) – quite without realising that this is capitalism that they are living in, about as good as it gets. Electorates have been buying the stories of how the rising tide lifts all the boats and seeing in the practice the social inequality creeping up constantly – only to dismiss it as “a transition problem”, something that will eventually pass once everyone becomes laborious and savvy like those at the top.
On this note there is another interesting, if lengthy, article-cum-book-review from LBR by David Runciman that discusses the relationship between social inequality and quality of life – and makes some very profound points, the main one being that “among rich countries, the more unequal ones do worse according to almost every quality of life indicator you can imagine” and that “per capita GDP turns out to be much less significant for general wellbeing than the size of the gap between the richest and poorest 20 per cent of the population ”. And, as the book under review – The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better - makes clear, in most of the cases this is not because of those at the bottom bringing down the average metrics of quality of life – on many accounts, those at the top in unequal societies fare worse than those at the top in egalitarian ones (although they may be much better off in absolute money terms), and in some accounts they may well actually fare worse than those at the bottom in more egalitarian societies. It is a lengthy and complex argument, as the review makes it apparent, and not everything is as clear-cut and simple as the title of the book makes it look like, but there is a lot that would deserve a very close attention by those who want to argue over the respective merits and shortcomings of capitalism vs. socialism.
From A to B
It is the beginning of the worst season of the year to be in Estonia – which will run from mid-November to about mid-March. The weather is mostly either bad or miserable and the daylight is trickling down to a couple of hours around mid-day, succeeded by grey and pale twilight that succumbs to a complete darkness before most of the people get out of their offices. There will be a few days of nice winter, as there always have been, but overall it has long appeared to me that the price of having to endure all the rest of those 4 months for those brief sunny spots is way too stiff.
Anyhow, I am glad to report that this year I won’t be paying it. On Friday I changed our car back to summer tires and on Saturday morning we packed it to its limit and left Tallinn with Helelyn, Miikael, Chiba and me. Two days of driving has taken us to Brno, CZ and if we put in another 13-hour day of driving we could reach Dubrovnik (which is our final destination) already tomorrow.
However, I have heard nice things about both Bratislava and Zagreb, so it is likely that we will take it easy tomorrow and just try to reach the Croatian coast – which would leave us with another easy day to get to Dubrovnik on Tuesday.
Dead End of History
Arthur: Now stand aside, worthy adversary.
Black Knight: ‘Tis but a scratch.
Arthur: A scratch? Your arm’s off!
Black Knight: No, it isn’t.
Arthur: Well, what’s that, then?
Black Knight: I’ve had worse.
Arthur: You liar!
Black Knight: Come on, you pansy!
–Monty Python and the Holy Grail
Here is an online interview with Francis Fukuyama 20 years after the publishing the book that brought him into the limelight – The End of History. While I have many bad things to say about the original account, I really even don’t need to bother – for two reasons: 1) Fukuyama’s Hegelian view of the ultimate and irreversible victory of the liberal democracy has not only been challenged by a huge number of people, smart and otherwise, all around the world but has proven wrong also empirically, and 2) he seems to have learned next to nothing over the last two decades. So let’s take a look at some of the arguments that Fukuyama brings forth in his interview.
The basic point — that liberal democracy is the final form of government — is still basically right. Obviously there are alternatives out there, like the Islamic Republic of Iran or Chinese authoritarianism. But I don’t think that all that many people are persuaded these are higher forms of civilization than what exists in Europe, the United States, Japan or other developed democracies; societies that provide their citizens with a higher level of prosperity and personal freedom.
Oh really? Not all that many people out there who don’t agree with Western liberal democracy being the “highest form of civilization”, you say? Apparently Fukuyama hasn’t been watching news much. But this is even not really the crux of the point. The real question would be this – as Žižek has asked: what if Chinese authoritarian form of state capitalism ends up providing its citizens with a higher level or prosperity (if not personal freedoms – but the value of those vs. some personal prosperity might vary in different places and at different times)? What then? Does is then become a highest form of civilization? And if not, why should the western liberal democracy be it now?
The real question is whether any other system of governance has emerged in the last 20 years that challenges this. The answer remains no.
China, anyone?
Clearly, that big surge toward democracy went as far as it could. Now there is a backlash against it in some places. But that doesn’t mean the larger trend is not still toward democracy.
However, this also doesn’t mean that the larger trend IS toward democracy. I mean, it’s not that I loathe liberal democracy and think that it is bad for the people and should be just forgotten – quite to the contrary. But to see the events of last 20 years as a temporary setback, or – to quote the Black Knight of Monthy Python – “nothing but a flesh wound”, would be a prime example of wishful thinking.
At the same time, I don’t believe the existence, or even prevalence of cultural attributes, including religion, are so overwhelming anywhere that you will not see a universal convergence toward rule of law and accountability.
What if accountability could be framed not only within the framework of periodic elections but, for instance, precisely in terms of religion? And, one could argue that sharia is the ultimate rule of law – a law that permeates the whole society.
In the end, though, that is not enough. You cannot solve the problem of the “bad emperor” through moral suasion. And China has had some pretty bad emperors over the centuries. Without procedural accountability, you can never establish real accountability.
This didn’t prevent George W. Bush running two consecutive terms as the emperor of not only America but, de facto, of the whole world. Any accountability, should such be forthcoming, is purely post factum – kind of Nürnberg-accountability at best. Of course, it is better than none at all, and the statutory limit of two terms of office means that no matter how bad the president, his damage is temporally limited to eight years. But as George W. Bush demonstrated, one can do a lot in eight years, and unfortunately liberal democracy is no safeguard against disasters such as this. In fact, I’d venture a guess that it will be a lore more difficult to make democratically elected leaders of Israel, for example, accountable for shelling schools and bombing civilian targets than will be to convict Karadzic.
It is certainly possible that Fukuyama is right and I am dead wrong. It is possible that we’re simply living through some dark times right now, that soon China’s success will cave in and that America and EU will claim their rightful places as beacons of civilization once again, beyond any challenge or doubt. This all is possible, although not very likely in my opinion. But this is not the point – it is all right to have different opinions. As Blaise Pascal pointed out long ago – what we should do in a situation where we have different options and opinions under the conditions of uncertainty is to look at their respective outcomes. Not only say that “I believe eventually it will be all right”, but also consider what happens if it won’t, what happens if things go otherwise. What if liberal democracy is not the final form of the government and society, what if it is not the end but instead a dead end of history? The fact that we would like it to be doesn’t make it so. And this is where Fukuyama fails most miserably by my standards.
Scary other people
About a week ago, a friend posted a clip on “muslim demographics” on his Facebook-feed which, quite predictably, really got me going. It is 7 minutes of ominous-looking illustrative computer graphics with even more ominous-sounding voiceover that aims to demonstrate how Europe in particular and the Western world in general is facing a muslim onslaught and is about to be engulfed by the tidal wave of hostile culture within next couple of decades, lest we, the people of the free and enlightened world, start reproducing like rabbits and preaching gospel to infidels.
Not surprisingly, the source of this “call to action” is religious itself. One of the underlying assumptions of the grand and dark picture that emerges from the clip is that – while christians seem to be giving birth to people who are endowed with reason and capacity of free choice, and who can subsequently become not only christians but also citizens of the state they live in, doctors, drivers, writers, athletes, and yes, sometimes even muslims – muslims are begetting only muslims, always and over many generations. So if christianity (or belonging into Western culture) is a, supposedly enlightened, state of mind, being a muslim is akin to dominant gene. Many claims that are being made in the clip do not of course stand any closer scrutiny (here is an excellent recent article from FT that deals with most of this stuff), but that’s the thing – most of the people watching it and then forwarding it to others apparently do not feel that there’s a need for any closer scrutiny to something that is already evidently clear. After all, isn’t that what Spengler and Huntington said? Who cares of details such as muslim birth rates in Europe plummeting way faster than average western ones? Isn’t it a lot easier to talk of “muslim crime” than deal with the cultural and racial discrimination of immigrant population in European countries?
This, however, led me to reflect back upon something that we ended up discussing with students in a seminar a couple of weeks ago – and namely, why is it that we feel threatened by people who are somehow markedly different from us? Of course, we may perceive them as a threat to our way of life, we may feel that if church bells tolling are being taken over by prayer calls from mosques then our worlds will be changed too. But in many cases, this doesn’t go very far to explain our fears. Why, for instance, do many heterosexual people feel threatened by homosexuality? After all, their fertility rates should lead us to believe that the threat of homosexuals taking over the world is non-existant and indeed, that the mere fact of their survival thus far is nothing short of miraculous. Why can’t we, free people, tolerate someone’s choice to wear ḥijāb? Why is the only way to make sense out of such choice that the person so choosing must be deluded in that being her own free will – and should be subsequently forcibly liberated from such tradition?
But maybe it is because the existence and presence of someone markedly different simply undermines the notion of our world being the best or even the only possible one? This is what Judith Butler has argued with gender and sexuality – as long as gender is defined through the discourse of heterosexual practices (such as woman being defined as an object of heterosexual male desire, or marriage being a union between man and a woman), a homosexual person stands as a challenge to the clear and unambiguous notion of gender of everyone so defined. Similarly with muslims – the presence of people in our midst who do not necessarily adhere to our deeply held notions of what it means to be free or what constitutes a life worth living, but appear, against all odds, still be able to lead fulfilling lives, is a threat to our way of life in a way that runs much deeper than we would like to acknowledge.
Why so few?
A couple of days ago I happened to stumble upon a lecture by Nick Bostrom, the director of The Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University and probably the world’s foremost transhumanist. If you don’t know who he is, or haven’t heard of transhumanism before, I suppose it’s an interesting viewing – kind of TED stuff that so many people seem to really like (and sure enough, Bostrom has several lectures available there as well).
In the lecture, Bostrom explains in about 20 minutes his well-known view of existential risk for humanity and outlines a “possibility space” for human species, along with his threefold model of future of human development (extinction/stagnation/posthuman). I have in fact all sorts of different problems with Bostrom’s approach, but now I suddenly realised that they don’t even matter. Bostrom argues that what defines us as human, compared against animals for instance, is our superior mental, cognitive or whatever other capabilities, and argues quite persuasively that there is no reason to believe that the limits we currently face in those terms should be considered as somehow final and unsurpassable. Therefore it follows that if we were to increase those capabilities (for instance, by increasing our brain volume) we would likely become able to think thoughts that are currently impossible, and indeed, unimaginable for us. And I don’t really even disagree with that.
Where I do disagree though (and, as I said earlier, this is quite apart from all kinds of different ethical objections) is that I honestly don’t believe that things such as brain volume or our current cognitive capacities (such as ability to hear only within certain frequency range or see within certain spectral range, and so on) could honestly be considered serious limitations for “most of the people, most of the time”. I would maintain that for vast, vast majority of us those limits are never came nowhere near of. Apart from very select few we all live our lives well below what we would actually be capable of, by virtue of being humans. And this sentiment is, for me, perfectly captured in this small episode in a wonderful movie “Waking Life”:
Montreal
As I mentioned in my previous post, I decided to take a short trip to the disunited state of Canada before heading back to Europe and I must say that Montreal is every bit as great as I heard it would be. After four months of America it is truly relaxing to walk the streets filled with good restaurants and small cafés, hearing french spoken all around you and smelling someone smoking pot every few hundred yards – in the middle of the day and in the middle of the town. And nobody seems to mind the least. There is also some of the most impressive graffiti around that I have seen anywhere.
Cornell blues
And so the six weeks of 2009 School of Criticism and Theory have came to end. It will be strange and certainly sad to leave Ithaca – I’ve really gotten into the groove with seminars, lectures, colloquia, gym, receptions, sitting in library, participating in reading groups, etc. With about 80 SCT people around, you’re always bound to meet somebody where-ever you go, and often those meetings turn into spontaneous evenings spent together with food, some booze, and good discussion. In a strange way people have really grown together and I am sure that many of us will be meeting in the future. I am seriously considering coming back to the US for the next year’s ACLA conference, for the reason of meeting SCT people as much as to hear the actual presentations.
Anyway, tomorrow it will all be over and this means that I will drag my 30 books to a post office and mail them home and then slowly start thinking of moving back towards Europe myself. My initial plan was to fly from Montreal to Paris but meanwhile when I was trying to make up my mind over how and when exactly, the Paris airfare for next week flights went up about 4 times. As I am so close to Canada now – and as I hear that Montreal is a very nice place in August – I will probably just go there anyway and then make my way back to NY and catch my flight from there.
