Music and Silence, Liberal Democracy and Suffering

To be religious is to hear music in the silence. That is, to experience/find the supernatural in the natural. This is also why Max Weber’s phrase for the non-religious, ‘the religiously unmusical’ is so apt.

Grace I also find an interesting notion. My interpretation of grace is being possessed/passionate, being full of meaning, having the Divine ‘lift’ you (in quite a literal sense, like ‘a spring in their step’).

 

More marginalia. I was reading Occidentalism, which is a rather deep well (maybe I just haven’t read enough books about ideas for a while), and was struck by their discussion on the West’s (effectively, to my judgement, liberal democracy) relation to suffering. The particular paragraph:

In the Slavophiles’ worldview, exemplified by Dostoyevsky, we should not be trying to solve problems through the human intellect; we should seek salvation instead. We cannot grasp the tragic sense of life through reason, but only through the wisdom of the heart. As Pascal said, “The heart has its reasons which reason does not know”. The reasons of the heart are informed by one’s own suffering, and by seeing others suffer. Suffering as the great educator is denied by the Western mind, which always pursues happiness. Hedonism and too much reliance on the intellect bar the West from what it needs most, a way to salvation.

First a quick definition of my understanding of the sense of the tragic: that we are mortal and that death is inevitable, also that suffering is an integral part of the human condition. There is much meat on the bones here. There is the interesting idea of salvation, which I take to be learning to live with the sense of the tragic (which by the judgements of many humans across human history can’t simply be done with reason or the intellect). The sense of the tragic jars the Western mind because the Western mind believes by and large everything thing has a use and is necessary in some way, and that human beings live in a world where nearly all things lay open to human being to be used (usefulness, or at least control or at the very least understand). Therefore, it is logical that suffering (which always suggests/signifies death) is an unwelcome stranger.

How does the West react to suffering (especially of others)? Do we always pursue self-interest and happiness in some sense, and does that make us resistant to experiencing/fathoming suffering? By extension, how do we respond to tragedies, the causes of suffering? I do wonder if there is some intrinsic part of the West which makes empathy, hospitality and responsibility difficult for Westerners. Do we then need some big undeniable occurrence of suffering to wake us from our slumber and stir us to action? There is the idea that only with crises do people respond, not when suffering (or real potential for it) becomes apparent. This complacency, this dreariness of the spirit I find a very distressing idea. Like some sort of lazy and crude evolutionary response on display, where only when disaster seems so large do people respond, therefore seemingly with the motivation of saving their own arses and humankind at large. Need we be more mindful of the tragic?

While I fervently reject demands to do away with ‘Western ideas and the Western way of living’ completely I do  ponder over much of it. There is no certainty at all that much of ‘the West’ can’t be tweaked and improved. I very much believe this century will be ‘a century of the middle’ of the political spectrum, where we will learn how large and variable the options of the centre can be (with centre-left and centre-right becoming the new left and right). I think there is much possibility left to make the liberal democracy, which is pretty much apparent in all Western societies, into social democracy, moving things to ‘the centre-left’, and I think in general this is a functional tweaking and bettering. Reform, not revolution, is all thats required.

 

P.S. Some organisations of humanitarianism which inspire belief in me that suffering is not ignored are the ICRC (and the larger federation, the IFRC), Oxfam International, FINCA, CARE, Medecins Sans Frontier and the UN and its numerous departments (ones I’ve particularly noticed are UNICEF, FAO, WFP, UNHCR and the DHA).

Arguable Sacrifices of Liberal Democracy

Here is the list

1- greatness/heroism

2- sense of the tragic

3- hierarchy

4- culture (specifically in depth)

5- heterogeneity (e.g. pop culture displacing a more varied cultural sphere. True for social practices as well)

6- spiritual purity

7- idealism (if all individuals are seeking self-gain etc etc)

8- nature/ the idyllic lifestyle

-9 simplicity

10- rugged/dangerous /// honest/genuine lifestyle (opposed to a lifestyle of ‘comfort”)

11- authenticity

12- freedom

13- community/security

 

Long posts are out for the moment. While I think there are robust defences for most of the above points not being sacrificed, or their sacrifices not being meaningful or a bad thing anyway, I do think they make for interesting arguments.

Africanists

List of top African studies scholars:

– Martin Meredith

– Alex de Waal (largely has the politics of a jerk, a la Ferguson, nonetheless good scholar)

– Ioan Lewis

– Kenneth Menkhaus

– Paul Collier

– Gerard Prunier

– Robert O. Collins

– Toyin Falola

– Richard Pankhurst

– John Iliffe

 

A provisional list. A somewhat funny list, some have great breadth, others have great depth. Differing angles of economics, disasters, genocides and violence with, of course, loads of history. Sure very important names are left out, to my embarrassment. Not a bad starting compass anyhow.

Autobiography

A few interests which have possessed me over recent times: reading/literature, chess, football, the Beatles, wine and cuisine browsing and thinking over tired old debates.

My ideas I hold are centrally tied to liberalism (of both a society and an international order). I believe diversity is constructive and tolerance is needed to make such a system of many parts work (and prosper). Further, I believe in public goods, safety nets, rules and norms as all systems need some basic architecture to make sure everything works as it should.

I’m interested in ideal places and best models. I see the university as an ideal place, as its both thoroughly bound to a place and national whilst being international all over. Further, universities epitomise diversity and tolerance (maybe due to wealth, but I like to believe socialisation and education play a big part), with many different people interacting whilst there are civil clubs based around similarity (what Rorty called private or narcissistic clubs, from memory). Overall there is passion and difference alongside civility and cooperation. I believe exalting ideas plays a role in making this happen, with the consequent role of acknowledging that education is important and the self can be altered or recreated, which further lends credence to the notion that society can be altered or improved, or perhaps even recreated or revolutionised.

Last I want to give a nod to what I think of as middle-ground ideas, ideas which straddle between more macro ideas in the social sciences and more micro ideas. Ideas of complexity, chaos, emergence, self-organisation, network theory and systems theory are all examples to my mind which breakthrough more static and bounded concepualisations of social reality to offer and explain a model where big and small phenomena exist simultaneously and interact with one another in a host of ways and often. This view tends to acknowledge that there are multiple factors behind most phenomena and that most phenomena occur upon a spectrum with extremes and middle-grounds, with the middle-grounds being where the most common/observed phenomena are and they are mixes of the two extremes often (note: Robert Axelrod’s  the evolution of cooperation and the complexity of cooperation noteworthy, two interesting titles to follow up on).

Media and Empathy/Guilt

Reading Nicholas Kristof’s piece on the Horn of Africa famine I came across the part in the article which hits home the reality of the otherwise aloof facts and news. It described the tragedy of one Somali refugee and from the mere reading of the facts one can’t help but be stirred. What the hell, here is the passage (with a twist at the end which transcends the home-hitting part):

Listening to the stories of these Somalis left my heart aching. Consider one man I met who had just trekked across the desert and arrived at Dadaab: Bele Muhammad, a 45-year-old farmer. Two of his children had starved to death in the previous three weeks, he told me. A 14-year-old boy, Abdul Aziz, died first, and then an 8-year-old girl, Fatuma. Mr. Bele’s wife and six remaining children were near death, so he set out on foot with 50 others to walk to Kenya to scout a route.

It was a horrific 10-day journey, partly because eight armed bandits attacked his group shortly after it crossed the Kenyan border. “The robbers asked me for money, and I said I had none,” Mr. Bele recounted.

The bandits separated the men from the women and then, he thinks, raped the women. The bandits tortured the men with fire to find where they had hidden money; Mr. Bele showed me the burns on his face and arms.

Finally, the bandits realized he had nothing and released him. And now, despite the ordeal, Mr. Bele is sending word back to his family that his three strongest children, ages 4 through 12, should set out and try to walk to Dadaab — even if that means they will be attacked by bandits, even tortured or raped along the way.

“If they stay in Somalia, they will die of hunger,” he said bluntly. That’s what the choice comes down to for many Somalis: Do they risk starvation at home or torture and rape while fleeing?

As for his wife, Mulki, and the other three children, Mr. Bele says they are simply too weak to attempt the journey. Mr. Bele was quiet for a moment and then added: “I pray for them. They may die. But there is nothing that we can do.”

As he braced himself to learn of the death of his wife and three weaker children, there was one silver lining. After Mr. Bele arrived barefoot and burned at the camp, another Somali refugee (and CARE employee) named Abdulkadir Abdullahi Muya felt compassion for him.

Mr. Abdulkadir reached into his own pocket and provided Mr. Bele with clothes, shoes and food — and restored his faith in humanity. And mine.

Some people call descriptions like this ‘poverty porn’, ‘disaster porn’, ‘liberal guilt’, ‘middle class guilt’, ‘Western guilt’ and a bunch of other names. All of these phrases are very telling, but I think it is worthwhile to try and describe what is going on in the first place. First there is (to simplify media) the newspaper, which has news articles. Most, or many, of these articles one can read or peruse with an aloofness. While many have heartache not all document in a visceral way such heartache or tragedy. But some do, and to my judgement it is just accurate and good journalism to do so. It is vital when analysing something to understand both its macro level (e.g. tens of thousands have starved to death in the Horn of Africa) and the micro level (the passage above, that many have fled and become refugees and have faced violence, theft and rape as they desperately flee to survive).

So an article (which is usually agreed with otherwise in full, i.e. the facts about the issue at large, in this example of widespread food shortages and tens of thousands dying from starvation) has a passage, like above, which confronts a person. The initial reaction is one of empathy, to simply fathom what is going on one has to relate/understand to the information one must empathise. One can deny thereafter, ‘oh no thats just guilt being imposed on me!’, but the reality is one is empathising, at least initially (as noted the powerful old forces of denial and repression can undermine the initial reaction). Empathy and guilt have a strange relationship. They are often correlate. Sometimes (especially if in relation to the above loaded terms) it is simply political and psychological denial to pretend that feeling the plight of a Somali is just an illegitimate attempt to trap and ensnare one into feeling for or caring about something. Conservatives have really put Nietzshe to treacherous use in my opinion with this. Yet empathy is political, don’t be confused about that point. Although, like with politics, there are legitimate and just forms and there are illegitimate and not just forms. To conclude the empathy guilt relationship I recall a teacher asking why someone who ran over another with a car, with mitigating circumstances and the courts deeming the driver was not responsible, should feel guilty. I believe it is because people have an inherent anti-fatalistic drive where they think (legitimately/arguably or not) ‘if only I hadn’t…’, they imagine the possibilities and cannot readily justify themselves by circumstances. This is a powerful free will vs determinism paradox, yet I believe it gets at why people are haunted by possibilities and by guilt.

I think in this day and age visceral emotions are unwelcome strangers. With such rationalised processes which people go about daily so rationally and functionally, like reading the paper or watching the evening news,  people are startled by these exceptional interruptions in their rational day, when we are confronted with the other and empathise with them. I think these confrontations are a healthy injection of human reality, the brute facts of others which we should not shut off, and our being is reminding us to be open to them.

On illegitimate empathy and guilt. One could be tramatised with too many tragic confrontations of reality of people (children especially, of course). That is by and large needless and not helpful. Furthermore, there is the possibility of overkill, of needless repetition. This, I believe, can be counterproductive in stirring people to support legitimate causes. Lastly there are illegitimate causes which can exploit these confrontations, like replaying 9/11 images a million times to get people to support invading Iraq would be. Or similarly any nation exclusively showing their own people suffering and not the suffering of other peoples would be clearly manipulative and wrong (as noted, the kind of thing which justifies war-making and in general plants seeds for conflict). Choices are always made with showing people stories of human tragedy, and there must be checks that, for instance, what fills up a newspaper is sufficiently reasonable and that it isn’t sensationalist, overkill or dubious (by limiting who people empathise with).

The fact is there are many that we must understand with our hearts and minds, there is much in this world deserving of our attention. A person won’t do much with a mind thats comprehended an issue but a heart thats absent. Likewise a beating heart with a clouded mind will not get much done quickly enough. It can be taxing, it has a ‘cost’ on one to empathise, but in this consumerist age it is a price we have to learn to bear and pay.

The Twentieth Century and the Social Sciences

What do people want to know about the Twentieth century? It was the most barbarous and revolutionary century ever. People want to know what happened, how the century happened the way it did and why it happened the way it did. What how and why overlap, so more detail is necessary.

What knowledge is wanted is the data, then the marco (societal) level of understanding and the micro (personal) level of understanding. Lastly, thanks to time, the question is begged ‘what shall we do in the future’ which beckons knowledge known as policy and knowledge known as politics, ideology and ethics.

First, the knowledge we need to know it data. I think of data as simply being the business of naming, who a person is (their name literally), when a personal was born, where they were on day x at time y and what activity they were doing, and so forth. This business is by and large neutral, is it largely about agreeing on words and finding out (empirical work: observing, studying and so forth) how much reality these words describe. For instance, how many Jews were in Germany in the year 1900, in Berlin in 1900, then in Germany in 1945 and Berlin in 1945. Data should be relatively easy to sort out, yet there are difficult questions which typically involve intentions/thoughts and culture/ethnicity, questions like how many communists were there in Austria pre-WW2, how many collaborationists were there in France during the war, how widespread was Judaism in Germany pre-WW2 and how do we define a German and a Jew (e.g., do people with German ancestry who live outside of Germany count as Germans? Do those with parents born in the country count? Just one parent that a German? Or third generation, with not parents but all grandparents being German? Do these people outside of Germany with German ancestry need to speak German? And so on and so on).

Second, knowledge that is desire is about the societal level. How did fascists overtake Italy and Germany, how did the Bolsheviks overtake Russia? What there force involved, was there popular support or sympathy, did historical matters like being defeated in war or having a disastrous economy count? So, at this level there are often concepts which organise groups of tangible phenomena, hence there is more abstraction. The point of this is usefulness. Without speaking of fascists, Nazis, totalitarianism, evil, propaganda, statist government/centrally planned economy and more how could one begin to discuss and explain the Twentieth century (without talking forever, naming each phenomenon at a very generic level)? This level is evidently the more difficult to arrive at consensus with, as you can readily agree that a person was named so and so and was born on day x more readily than you can agree on if fascism exists,i.e., is there really a uniform phenomenon or are many different things being called one word in a manner which conceals more than it reveals/illuminates, and what precisely are fascism’s attributes. This is tough business because firstly what words/ideas are useful to some people are not useful to others, even if there can be a practical consensus that certain ideas to describe society (e.g. nation-state, capitalist, Soviet, communist, Christian, Catholic, German etc.) are useful there will always be some dissenters and disagreement. This is in part to do intellectual honesty and concerns, mainly, I believe over whether matters have strayed too far from empirical evidence and the more readily performable business of finding out about data, or whether they haven’t been theoretical enough and lack ideas to unify (i.e., effectively, make useful) a field of study (*cough cough* psychology). Politics and social matters also effect study at this level, for instance some sadly will argue that fascism didn’t exist (often nuts who deny the Holocaust and form hateful political organisations) or will argue that ‘Islamofascism’ is an important (hence evident, out there in reality) phenomenon. The fact is we need this knowledge but it will always, sometimes fairly and sometimes unfairly, be contested to some degree.

Third and last there is knowledge about the individual. People want to know way Hitler thought and did what he did, why elites who should of known better aided Hitler and Nazism (Albert Speer, Martin Heidegger, many political elites and so on) and why normal people were complicit or ignorant and how they could exist in a country like Germany where such madness prevailed. It should also be noted, it is pretty self-evident anyways, that the macro and micro levels are interconnected. Studying the personal level involves studying intentions, influences on thoughts and behaviour and trying to fathom the depths of the human mind. You can study when Hitler was born, where he was at the age of 12 and where he was schooled, but ultimately it must be studied what he said and wrote (and furthermore what he thought and intended, which are intertwined with one’s spoken words, written words and behaviours) how what he did informs who he was. Once again usefulness reigns, you could study texts to find out effectively where he was everyday of his life but evidently only a tiny amount of humans who achieve such an intellectual feat. To understand why someone was where they were and what they were up to is all important. The ‘black box’ of the mind must be studied. This is like the macro level, seemingly bound to be disagreed with to some degree. Once again there are fair (or largely fair) honest intellectual disagreements like doubts that we can say from an early age Hitler was anti-semitic (does saying something as a child count? Kids can say anything sometimes. How many anti-semitic comments and actions does it take before we can describe someone as an anti-semite? One comment in childhood? Occasional comments at school [which, of course, in the environment of pre-WW2 Europe could just be conformity not and enduring internal trait]? and so on). Sometimes skepticism can be taken too far, like we can know just about nothing about what a person thinks or intends. Also, once again, political and social matters count, some want to say the fringe politician exclaiming ‘those foreigners’  shouldn’t be allowed in ‘our country’ can’t be called hateful or racist. Some want to say Obama is a socialist (skillfully abusing both marco and micro words/ideas). With people often relying on their everyday experience to form characterisations of people (like many Americans who happen to reside in the southern states ‘knowing’ Obama is a socialist, if one wanted to critique empiricism/experience alone this is a fine kind of example to start with), and many relying on stereotypes or crudely simple characterisations for individuals and groups they no nothing about it is clearly hard to accurately, truly or meaningfully have knowledge of a person.

 

Have a little sympathy for the social scientists. It took a several millennia for people to use language and have knowledge about the sky and the stars and planets above and the natural world down below. Social science in earnest has been going on for a few centuries, and stars, rocks and fish don’t argue back. Social science also has the self-referential issue where fallible human beings are studying human beings, with complicated intentions and collective social organisations to grasp. The Twentieth century gave us data and urgent purpose to understand ourselves, so that we may not be destructive and may create for ourselves, know ourselves and, hopefully, learn to live peacefully with ourselves.

Australiana

The following is a list of people I find interesting and instructive to follow in their affairs. Some of the people I find very interesting, some less so. I decided nonetheless to go for breadth and include a range of persons lest they fall off my radar. Further, they are all rather influential people and even further still they are all rather public individuals. I highly rate the importance of public intellectuals and these particular persons rate highly by my judgement on positively influencing debate and discussions important for Australian society and the world at large.

In no particular order:

– Gareth Evans

– Geoffrey Robertson

– Michael Kirby

– Waleed Aly

– Antony Loewenstein

– David Marr

– Robert Manne

– Hugh White

– Hugh Mackay

– Raimond Gaita

– Tim Flannery

– Patrick McGorry

– Peter Singer

– Clive James

– Petern Craven

– Robert Hughes

– Germaine Greer

– Tim Costello

– Phillip Adams

– Ross Gittins

– Tim Colebatch

 

I’m sure I’ve forgotten some. Hopefully I come across, and more emerge that I would like to add to such a list.

Second are important publications. The Quarterly Essay, The Monthly and D!ssent (I think I like this magazine… haven’t really read) are probably the big three Australian publications I rate. I need their names written copiously so they can surround me and prod me into reading their valuable and instructive writings.

Lastly a shout out to the ABC (with the Drum, Four Corners, Q & A, Foreign Correspondent, its 24 hour news and more), and SBS (esp. Dateline, their lovely World News and numerous high quality documentaries).

Despite the doubts I grew up with looking over it all Australia does have a number of respectable grownups, along with a rich and wide-ranging national conversation which keeps things together.

“Amateurs borrow, professionals steal”

“Amateurs borrow, professionals steal” is a quote attributed to Lennon, who apparently stole it from T. S. Elliot “amateur poets borrow; mature poets steal” (how fitting given the content of the quote, I personally like Lennon’s more general formation better). The quote makes me think about influence. Influence is an incredibly important topic, and not sufficiently discussed in my opinion (at large, dialogue or conversation are the relevant topics).  Talking about borrowing and stealing reminds me of another point, that there is very little that is new under the sun. What is generally considered ‘new’ is nearly always derivative and at best reformulated/reinvented into something significantly different (significantly different, that is ‘new’). Now the difference is amateurs take from other and don’t create, they don’t build on top of their influences. Pros do sufficiently, that is, whilst they may have a range of influences the overall repertoire or corpus is too different to simply/accurately describe as just a hodgepodge of influences.

I was thinking about attribution and whether it is important, and in spite of my original beliefs that it was important for a person to ‘fess up’ about their influences I now don’t think its that important. One can never describe all the sources that inspired them, from living years upon years in a country to the specific weather of one day many things make a person do what they do and even if we tried we couldn’t completely say what drove us to do what we did (Freud). Truth is inscribed in reality anyway, a fine mind can effectively always tell from whence something derives. Take the master thieves Derrida and Zizek, you can largely tell what influenced them, even if they at moments are a little quiet on some points. Importantly they are creative, all honest minds will agree that they give more (or differently) compared with what they took. In life, thats all you can ask for.

At many points there is a tension between one’s ideas and reality. There is a fork in the road, only one path can be travelled. These two mutually exclusive paths are called ‘pride’ and ‘intelligence’, one must be traded off to pursue the other. I have found a strong indicator to illustrate when someone has reached a crossroads and has energetically paced down the path of pride: when they make appeals to the future (especially to the ‘uncertainty’ of the future. Well duh, the future is always uncertain). It is a strange business in IR, when predication is often looked at askance to see people stating the point ‘well… we don’t know how things will turn out!’, with the implication being that the factors which undermine theirs theories might dissipate down the road. Well of course that could happen, or they could be even more contradicted by evidence and events. The ‘need more evidence!’ cry has been on show with the Libyan intervention, with ‘we don’t know how it will turn out’ argument being a common refrain to the spectacular undoing of a 42 (!) year rule by dictator colonel Gaddafi. I have noticed the people dismissing the fall of this incredibly long iron-fisted rule were people who judged that after the intervention took place that a stalemate with a possible fracturing of Libya was what could happen in the future (that is at the end) of the intervention, thus making it a failure.

A second example is the EU. People are speculating that ‘whatever doesn’t kill you will make you stronger’ with regards to the EU’s sovereign debt crisis, maintaining it will integrate into a stronger union as it moves away from this debt crisis. Once again, sure that could happen (I hope it does). Yet the problem is when one’s argument is largely dependent upon these claims. Prediction, overall, is not a bad thing. Yet it should be noted that it is a lousy argument supplement.

Now lets go stealin’ (and rhymin’! why not)!

 

P.S. Another thought on the quote is that amateurs only take a few ideas, ideas that seem nice and useful. Professionals take every idea that seems good to them. On the policy of taking ideas that one finds agreeable my philosophy is steal everything thats not nailed down!

On Tony Judt and The World We Have Found

Reading Tony Judt’s Reappraisals fills me with intense jealousy over the incredibly deep comprehension and the very fine sharp judgement he possessed, which has made me think about what has happened post-89 and what is unique about contemporary times.

Judt perfectly sums up the assumptions we (the West) carried into the post-cold war world: ‘with too much confidence and too little reflection we put the twentieth century behind us and strode boldly into its successor swaddled in self-serving half-truths: the triumph of the West, the end of History (i.e. the vindication of democracy & capitalism together), the unipolar American moment, the ineluctable march of globalization and the free market’. By 2011 all of these half-truths are under heavy fire, the West is stalling (if not falling) vis-a-vis preeminence, whatever model for society we thought was proven to be the best clearly isn’t that good (and may not even be the best, this poorly specified History ending creature), the unipolar moment for American and Western worldwide rule is being questioned and globalization and the free market are falling upon hard times post global financial crisis.

Post-89 politics and the conventional battle over political ideas has waned (because History ended, didn’t it?) and culture came to the fore. We got culture wars and presumably intelligent people like Harvard’s Samuel Huntington waxed lyrical about ‘civilisational’ differences. Abortion, euthanasia, multiculturalism (and what it means to belong to a nation-state) and lastly, as epitomised in 9/11, religion all became the issues. After 9/11 the world’s only superpower waged war on the abstract noun ‘terror’ (who said ideas were dead?) and invaded central Asian wastelands to chase after a few thousand impoverished tribesmen and a handful of rich pseudo-Muslims. As Judt said rightly these were the years the locusts ate, culminating in the huge 2008 failure of both the History ending model of society and the free market & globalisation.

To reiterate, what is unique in the post-cold war era is the centrality of ideas (instead of material well-being) as seen with social issues (like abortion and sexuality), how to be a citizen (or more precisely, how to observe the nation of the nation-state a citizen resides within) and lastly religion and it’s place in the contemporary world. The problem is that elections and politics in general were once the medium through which to decide ideas. Now, post-89, there is a sense that dull elections are all sorted as there are no Big Ideas, no ideals which divide the major parties, so there is apathy for politics and at most these political sideshows on abortion and homosexuality are all thats left in conventional elections. Unto themselves though they are not large enough issues to paint a big picture, envision a world to work towards or a narrative (which doesn’t have to be ‘grand’ or absolutist) through which the world can be understood within. The fact is we are dealing with unresolved issues of the 20th century (how to be a citizen/nationalism, social issues, religion in modernity and the PRECISE model which mixes government and markets) so ignoring the 20th century will come at a cost.

Nationalism is back (how did we get rid of it in the first place?…) in the guise of a discussion about multiculturalism. I haven’t fully fathomed it but it is important and interesting that the central point of discussion is ‘multiculturalism’ and not ‘nationalism’ (which haunts multiculturalism and one side of the discussion may make much of it, but it is not central). I think its because we are discussing ‘the other’ and not the self, and are on the whole discussing ‘society’ and not ‘the individual’. I think these matters focusing on the other and society are inevitably more complex then discussing what the beliefs and behaviours of individuals should be (these old discussions about the individual were centred on the self and others in a like group; easier asking ‘who am I’ and ‘who are we’ then ‘who is the other’ and ‘who are they’), as one can never speak for the other, is significantly divided by difference (though not completely, but gender, race, culture and the rest matter), can never know another mind completely and to fathom a society which is one group made up of a diversity of groups is much tougher than fathoming a single group (Yes! I think thats it, a real main point I just hit on the head). I believe the 21st century will expose how far humankind can extend empathy and trust towards it’s members, and from all I can tell is it’s very uncertain how things will turn out…

Religion, quickly, is also back. Actually, I don’t think it left (we just thought it was leaving). The issue will be whether religion can significantly exist in a free and fair modern society, which like multiculturalism is very uncertain. Maybe we need to get rid of religion completely (I sincerely hope nonetheless that Dawkins is as stupid and mistaken as I believe he is), maybe religions need to change to adapt to modern society or maybe we just had some contingent conflicts which won’t happen again and actually things are ok (optimistic speculation for once from me. why not?). We shall see…

Lastly, the end of History and the vindication of the one true way…. Which way is that? I don’t think we ever worked it out. Politically democracy, economically capitalism. Ok… and? There are manifold positions within democracy and capitalism, we need more specific types of each to be chosen so no more global financial crises happen, so there are plentiful jobs and a respectable distribution of wealth and that democracy can flexibly monitor and control the situation and all feel fairly treated by its arrangements. Democracy is a strange and flexible beast, the important thing is a widespread sense of fairness and the consequent sense of social solidarity.

Lastly, Judt laments the decline of the sharp Left Right divide in politics where people were politically opinionated to one side and in general each position articulated a lot of politics by nature of having a firm position on politics in general. This seems credible to me, it is difficult discussing politics and motivation thought and participation in politics. Two strong motivations for political engagements are the political ideological motivation and the nationalist motivation (ideally people by virtue of being citizens would be strongly motivated to understand and participate in politics, yet what do we see…). Closing the door on the former I fear opens the door for the latter, which isn’t in the contemporary interconnected world’s interest. Maybe the 20th century’s old school Left Right politics had it right… the question is though can you have a meaningful Left Right divide without political excess and extremism? Further, given how discredited the old left (communism) and old right (fascism/extreme nationalism) are can we return to Left Right politics?

The world we have found post-cold war & the 20th century has much in line with the 20th century itself. Climate change is maybe the only game changer, East Asia rising in power is new (yet a challenge to Western power is not) and the rise of Islam is significant and new (yet the issue of religion and modernity is not). The emphasis on ideas about social practices and norms, about what it means to be a citizen or national, the existence of contemporary global terrorism and whether religions or ‘civilisations’ can be reconciled shows that thinking and abstraction will be big this century. Material equality, everyone having their fair share and the nature of distributing goods and services to people seems like it will be, in the main, confined to the 20th century. Also capitalism as a truly global phenomenon and the precise balance of free market and government tutelage needs to be sorted, hence I think we need to discuss material matters yet I don’t know if or how that could happen (further, we would be discussing as I believe centre-left and centre-right politics, a much more nuanced beast then the old Left Right politics and perhaps too detailed a debate and unwieldy for democracy at large [e.g. ‘I think we need more oversight and regulations in this industry, yet this other industry needs deregulation and increased flexibility!’ and so on]). There is old (and possibly revamped) phenomena and new frames of reference (namely, cultural/social over the political, and ideas/abstraction over materialism), plus new challenges (namely climate change). Yet history remains a flowing book, so hopefully we remain mindful of the old as we recognise and confront the new.