Roots and wings

Ulrich Beck died of heart-attack on January 1. To remind us of some of the important contributions of this very original social thinker, I am reposting this review which first appeared here in 2007.





 
Power in the Global Age: A New Global Political Economy by Ulrich Beck
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In this much-praised essay, Ulrich Beck, German sociologist and professor at Ludwig-Maximilians Universität in Munich, demonstrates why neither nation-states nor international capital alone can save us from the many dangers of the "globalized" globe, and proposes an alliance of these two forces (which can't be ignored) with global "civil society" movements -- not to withdraw from globalization, but to engage it and realize its potential for making a better world for all of us.

Beck argues that: 1. The most urgent problems are now too global to be dealt with effectively by any state (global warming, pollution, exhaustion of carbon fuels, AIDS and other diseases, immigration, terrorism, etc.); 2. Transnational organizations (UN, WTO, NATO, etc.) are clumsy and ineffective, because they are still playing by obsolete "rules" of seeking common ground among states rather than among citizens; 3. Global capital is thus unrestrained by laws except companies' own "extralegal laws" of agreements among themselves, and exercises power over states by nonviolent means of threatening not to invest (in, say, Bolivia, if its laws become too uncomfortable) -- though companies do have to invest somewhere in order to survive, and fierce competition among and within companies makes their leaders' power precarious; 4. Global NGOs can exploit the vunerabilities of global capital (e.g., by organizing consumer boycotts) and pressuring states (e.g., by mobilizing voters and demonstrators), either to solve terrible humanitarian or ecological problems (e.g., Greenpeace, Amnesty International) or exacerbating them (e.g., al-Qaeda -- which is another kind of global nongovernmental organization).

The only hope for humanity is for these three forces (states, which are still necessary instruments of power, enlightened global capital, and global civil society) to combine forces as cosmopolitans, meaning that they feel themselves as belonging simultaneously to the cosmos and to the polis ("glocalization"), not to impose a Western vision of democracy or American culture or any other particular ideology ("universalism" of this sort is imperialism), but recognizing and accepting "the otherness of others" (die Andersheit der Anderen), different strokes for different folks, all recognizing one another's rights to live in a better world.

He says all that in far too many words (my favorite, from p. 286, is Globalisierungsbefürwortungsgegner, rendered by the translator as "opponents of the pro-globalization lobby") and occasionally surrealist metaphors (cosmopolitans should have "both roots and wings" he says over and over), repeats ideas and even phrases, and tells you many things that you already knew (e.g., Pres. Bush's attempt to impose his own sketchily-developed vision of a world order has had and can only have disastrous results, in Iraq and everywhere). Still, the basic ideas (the 4 points numbered above) are probably valid and well worth thinking about and maybe even acting upon -- the utopian (his term) cosmopolitan vision is a lot better than any of the alternatives under discussion.

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Historical fiction: impossible and necessary

Anyone who has seriously attempted it knows the impossibility of representing past events authentically, as they were lived and felt by the people involved. Michael Graves was surely aware of this impossibility when he impersonated a Roman noble of the 1st century A.D. in I, Claudius. John Fowles, in The French Lieutenant's Woman, interrupts his narrative to acknowledge the impossibility of truly understanding the thoughts of his character Smithson, who is, like Fowles, an Englishman and lived only a bit more than a century before Fowles' book. People then just didn't think the way we do. Even in our own families, in overlapping generations, grandchildren and grandparents are often bewildered by one another's reactions and behaviors.

There are authors unaware of this gap, and who present a Cleopatra or a soldier of Napoleon's Grande Armée as though they saw the world just like, say, a contemporary American teenager or a Green Beret. They put contemporary characters into past situations, changing little more than the wardrobe. But when you and I read historical fiction, we demand something more. We want to get into the minds of those very foreign people. People in the past just don't think and act the way we do. It's not just a question of how much they know or what tools or weapons they have available — all that is important — but, more mysteriously, the ways their brains are configured.

The biggest break between one kind of thinking and another comes, historically, with literacy. As Julian Jaynes, Walter Ong, and the pioneering work of Vygotsky and Luria in Uzbekistan and other neuroscientists and diverse scholars have made clear, the neural paths that connect and stimulate different parts of the brain change enormously with literacy. As Jaynes put it, preliteracy we used to hear voices that seemed to come from afar but were really memories stored in one hemisphere of the brain, whereas learning to read connects the two hemispheres so that one half of the brain is aware of what the other half is firing off in electrons.

But the changes don't end there. Even in a society where everyone is literate, new technologies — the telegraph, then the telephone, then TV, and on to Smartphones and Whatsapp — create new neurological connections. Our concepts of time have changed enormously, but also our sense of relationships in an era where one can suddenly acquire a zillion "friends" or even "followers" without leaving home.

In my case, in my novel in progress, I'm trying to understand and to present to readers the thinking of people who acted in — whether for or against or just trying to survive — the Paris Commune of 1871. They spoke a different language from the one I'm using, but more than that, they lived in a culture that was more oral than ours (not everybody knew how to read, and only a minority read anything at all complicated), where inner city mobility was either on foot or by horse-drawn vehicle or on horseback, and where relationships — men and women, or comrades of the same sex, or rivals — obeyed different traditions from ours. 

But we must try to reach them, if we are to understand anything about the Commune and thus to understand how the western revolutionary tradition emerged and how it has changed. We can come closer to understanding if we read carefully what they themselves said about it, and the testimony left by survivors of the bloody massacre of May 1871, together with court transcripts and newspaper reports and other documents, is abundant. We can come closer, but we cannot quite reach them. So my solution, like Fowles' in The French Lieutenant's Woman, is to acknowledge the gap, to let readers know that I am aware that those people are and ever will be different from us.

References:
Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy 
On Lev Vygotsky and Aleksandr Luria:

           Vygotsky, Luria, and the Social Brain Charles Fernyhough Durham ...

Michael Graves, I, Claudius

John Fowles, The French Lieutenant's Woman 

My novel in progress: The Bookbinder 

 

Petition Vietnam Peace Commemoration Committee

In case you haven't seen this, there is a petition going to Lt. Gen. Claude M. "Mick" Kicklighter of the Vietnam 50th Anniversary Commemoration Program, demanding that any commemoration include all of us who protested with all the energy we could summon against that monstrously cruel war.

Petition Vietnam Peace Commemoration Committee

If you too were active, here's your chance to sign and describe some of what you did. Together, we finally made it impossible for them to continue — making it clear first to LBJ, and then to Nixon, that they couldn't keep the peace at home if they continued the war abroad.

Here you can find my statement, along with those of all the other signers, describing a little bit of how we were involved in those actions.

Viet Nam Today: Annotated Signers

Shattering a 'national mythology' Israel News - Haaretz Israeli News source

Shattering a 'national mythology' Israel News - Haaretz Israeli News source

Born Again in a Second Language - NYTimes.com

Born Again in a Second Language - NYTimes.com

Vietnam, the ongoing memory | Harvard Gazette

Lest we forget. This war shaped all our lives, even of those not born till afterward. For thus of who were young adults 40 years ago, the draft, the enormous expense of the destruction (bombs, aircraft, medical attention to the wounded, junkets of congressmen), the deep political divisions (antiwar vs. LBJ and McNamara 'Realpolitik'), the clashes of protesters and police, the career decisions and other moral dilemmas, the grieving for the enormous human losses skewed the lives of all of us — and that was just in the United States. The consequences in Vietnam were enormous, too enormous for most Americans to even think about at any length or depth — because thinking about it, seriously, could bring us to the brink of despair, or of action.

Vietnam, the ongoing memory | Harvard Gazette

The Paris Commune, and them and us

Fighting Over the Paris Commune | The New Yorker 

Raoul Rigault

Right on my subject. All the contradictions that Adam Gopnik mentions are themes of my novel in progress. I'd quibble with some of his characterizations — Raoul Rigault and others were no angels, communeux or communards (they themselves generally used the first term) were far less inclined to annihilate their enemies than were the Versaillais commanders, “well-dressed ladies” really did do some of those horrible things after the massacre (we have ample newspaper accounts, by foreign and presumably objective reporters). And and then there's this remark,

There are many instances in Merriman’s account of people being saved by accident or by the act of a charitable and decent individual. But there is scarcely an incident of a principled humanity, where one side or the other refused to massacre captured civilian prisoners or hostages on the ground that it was the wrong thing to do, rather than impolitic at that moment.

Yes, there were such instances, not only but mostly by "communards" — the most vivid testimony is in Vuillaume's "Red Notebooks"(also the best source on the crazed self-importance of Vuillaume's one-time friend Rigault). But in the last days and hours, the desperation of the Commune's defenders led to uncontrollable, mad rage on the last remaining, eastern streets of Paris. Eugène Varlin, draped in his official Commune sash, tried mightily but failed to save a group of hostages on the rue Haxo (image right).

A bloody mess, and it's true that the "Communards" were hardly united, except in their anticlericalism, and had they "won" or at least held out for a longer time, it's not at all clear that the progressive, democratic and humanitarian leaders among them would have ruled. Well, all this is rich material for my novel "The Bookbinder" (working title), which will be not only about the Paris Commune of 1871 but about us and our world today.

Published for the First Time: a 1959 Essay by Isaac Asimov on Creativity | MIT Technology Review

Published for the First Time: a 1959 Essay by Isaac Asimov on Creativity | MIT Technology Review



Very sensible and somewhat surprising ideas. 

An earthquake of a book about an earthquake event

Ten Days that Shook the World by John Reed
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This vivid first-hand reportage of the first ten days of Bolshevik power, from the seizure of the Winter Palace in Petrograd, 25 October 1917 (by the Julian or Old Style calendar, which corresponds to 7 November 1917 in the Gregorian or New Style calendar) to its consolidation in Moscow and gathering force in the rest of Russia, is strongly partisan, pro-Lenin and the Bolsheviks, but also scrupulously documented and honestly, frankly observed. Reed describes the appearance, voices and quirks of the protagonists, including anonymous soldiers, sailors, Red Guards and workers, making apparent the chaotic, improvised character of most of the events, and the quick-witted decision-making and sometimes pitiless actions, especially those of the austere and uncompromising Lenin and the far more colorful, dramatic, and sarcastic Trotsky that repeatedly saved the Bolshevik insurrection from impending disaster. Reed does not hesitate to describe flaws, doubts and internal disputes, showing how precarious was their adventure and how close to failure. He collected leaflets, newspapers and bulletins from all parties, many of them reproduced in the book, and learned enough Russian not only to translate these but also to conduct interviews of Kerensky, Trotsky, Lenin and many other actors in this drama. Events in Petrograd and, later, Moscow are acutely observed, making this an indispensable account of the violent, chaotic, suspenseful first days of the seizure of power by masses of workers and soldiers with no administrative experience and, for all but the few intellectual leaders of the various parties, scant literacy or general knowledge of culture or history.
Those first ten days did indeed shake the world: they determined Russia's withdrawal from the Great European War, shaking diplomacy and strategy for all the other powers involved (Germany, Austria, England, France, the US especially), and created the beginnings of the hastily assembled Red Army which would eventually to triumph over the many fronts in the civil war in the world's largest nation, which was also one of Europe's least developed. The book itself continues to shake readers loose from more simplistic interpretations of this terribly complex series of events that redrew the lines of world power for the rest of the 20th century.
This 1922 edition is the first to appear with a foreword by Vladimir Lenin, encouraging all to read it. Reed was surprised and delighted to learn that Lenin had actually read it, and apparently was not offended by the very frank reporting that did not glorify the Bolsheviks, even though it supported them. Recognized even by the fiercest opponents of Communism as splendid and indispensable reportage, reader demand has not diminished and the book continues to be reissued by any number of publishers and in virtually all languages. Even if you have no particular interest in the Russian revolution (unlikely, but who knows?), you will find this book a model of vivid, scrupulous journalism — as Reed had already demonstrated in an earlier book, "Insurgent Mexico" but was unable to repeat after "10 Days," because he died in 1920 of typhus, in Russia. He was 33. He is buried alongside other revolutionary heroes just outside Lenin's mausoleum in Red Square.

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Anti-boycott petition

This just come to my in-box from a scholar at Tel Aviv University. I agree (broadly) with the argument that an academic boycott is not the way to encourage dialogue, and dialogue is what we most need in the age of extremisms. Boycotts of many products may be effective, for example, a boycott of the Israeli weapons industry might be a very good thing — and might even make the Israel government respond. But boycotts of academic or any other intellectual interchange — "I refuse even to listen to you" sort of boycotts — will not only be utterly ineffective to change Israeli (or anybody's) policy, but will simply hamper much needed communication. 

They are seeking signature from academics, but I am not affiliated to any academic institution, so rather than sign I'm expressing my support here. Follow the link to read the petition, though I think Professor Dreyfus' presentation of the case is especially clear.

Friends,

May I suggest that you consider signing this petition against academic boycotts, specifically academic boycotts of Israel’s academic institutions, scholars and students. The petition originated in the USA but is intended to be signed by scholars in all
countries. 

Personally, I oppose much of our present government’s policies with respect to Palestinians and a Palestinian state. So do many of my colleagues. However, I oppose an academic boycott in principle (see Zvi Ziegler’s arguments below) and in practice: A boycott is likely to weaken voices against government policy and strengthen the right wing in Israel. 

Best wishes,

Tommy

Tommy Dreyfus

Zvi Ziegler is head of the committee gathering signatures. He writes,

Our approach is that academic boycotts are harmful to the progress of mankind , and that science should be pursued without discriminating against people on account of their race, gender, nationality, politics, etc. This approach is identical to the one expressed by several national academies of science, including the USA one.