Blue Shift

New Template.  Anybody Like?  Anybody hate?  Should I go back or give this one a try for a while?

The Ship of Fools Adds One More Passenger

Found another review of Elizabeth Young-Bruehl’s Why Arendt Matters. This one by someone who seems to like Arendt but not the "Arendt Industry":

Perhaps it was inevitable, then, that the centenary of Arendt’s birth
should have devolved into a recitation of the familiar. Once a week, it
seems, some pundit will trot out her theory of totalitarianism,
dutifully extending it, as her followers did during the Cold War, to
America’s enemies: al-Qaida, Saddam, Iran. Arendt’s academic chorus
continues to swell, sounding the most elusive notes of her least
political texts while ignoring her prescient remarks about Zionism and
imperialism.

Yet, to defend the industry a bit here, when one scans the book reviews of any work on Arendt, the only "recitation of the familiar" appears to be the tired litany of misguided, ever-tired and ever-pointless whisking away to either Arendt’s thoughts on Zionism, her thoughts on Marx, or the fact that she slept with Heidegger when she was in college.  All of which, have NOTHING to do with ANYTHING. 

Mercifully, Young-Bruehl and others have beaten the Heidegger thing senseless enough that we are spared the aimless droning on about it with more and more frequency.  This has left the reader of Arendt critics merely to the mundane semiotics of critics who say she’s a bad Marxist, a bad Jew, a bad historian, a bad woman. 

Arendt is not any one thing, and in fact, a quick read-through of contemporary theories of perception, science, philosophy, etc. reveal that NOTHING is "one thing" because there’s "no such THING as THINGS."  Things, categories, shapes, images, etc. are HEURISTICS, they are devices to allow us to interpret the world.  Arendt, keenly aware of this, writes thematically to challenge and develop our understandings the world.  To say, as Professor Robin does, that,

This last section (of The Origins of Totalitarianism) is the least representative – and, as historians of
Nazism and Stalinism have pointed out, least instructive – part of the
book.

is to commit to the mistake what is "instructive" about The Origins of Totalitarianism is how closely her writing represents a police report.  Getting all of the facts right is not, for what Arendt is doing, the most important of projects, for the next time around, the particulars will not be the same anyway.  In saying this, I am not saying that she has complete license to be fanciful in her account of history, but she can be profoundly wrong about things and still profoundly instructive. 

Furthermore, Robin’s article doesn’t hold itself up to this standard anyway.  One of my Professors, Dr. James Glass, offers a nice rebuke to the account of Jewish resistance that Arendt paints in Eichmann in Jerusalem.   The author of this review pulls out what he sees as some of the good things from Arendt’s writing from other places in her work, and one of them is her discussion of careerism.  He cites Eichmann as a place where Arendt makes a real contribution, but if his historical razor is a valid tool for Arendt’s work, surely, the mistakes she makes in Eichmann must force him to junk the heuristics on careerism just as much as he argues we should junk the totalitarianism heuristics. 

Perhaps we can read this inconsistency as personal preference.  Professor Robin just happens to like Arendt’s thematic writings on some subjects and not others, and the other one’s that he doesn’t like get too much attention in his view.  This reading, while my first reaction, seems like it may be unfair as I reflect upon it.  Professor Robin is trying to warn against wedging our new reality into themes that might not be there in useful ways, something that Arendt criticized US policy makers for in the 1960’s.  I’m not sure that I agree with him, or that he is being entirely fair to Elizabeth Young-Bruehl and Samantha Power, BUT any attempt by anyone to ring the bell and say, "let’s make sure that we are thinking," I think, must be listened to very carefully by anyone who takes Hannah Arendt’s grand project seriously.

I think, (luckily for me as a scholar on the subject), that there is something still missing on the subject of "why Arendt matters", which is another way of asking, "Okay here’s all this seemingly pretty good stuff, what do we DO with it, anyway?"  I would think that part of the answer is that we learn from it, and we talk to each other about what ti means.  To this end, I believe that Robin’s piece is  a thoughtful addition to this year-long consideration of Arendt’s contemporary importance.  I would add that, none of us are really speaking for Arendt, we’re speaking for our own judgments as people who have tried to learn from Arendt.  There’s no reason to go all "originalist" on Arendt’s work in such situations: the goal is to think the problem through.  To the extent that learning from Arendt is helpful, that’s great.  But we do not need to get Power, Robin, and myself in a room and iron out some sort of "Arendt orthodoxy" on Homeland Security policy or the like.  We have learned different things from Arendt, and we take this learning to different places.

Public Interest?

"Don’t believe in what they tell me, there ain’t no cure.  The rich stay healthy, the sick stay poor."  – U2

Russia: Still the Oil Grinch

Energy management issues abound.  The US is getting serious about polar bears.  Nigerian Rebels continue to use oil as a means to play politics.  And, for the second straight year, Russia is leveraging its petroleum power against its neighbors in highly belligerent ways.  Once again, my standard, tired prognostication.  The global energy situation is getting worse.  There will be more and more escalation when it comes to disputes over the various key resources.  This bodes very poorly for how politics will play out in the energy resource rich, and landlocked, Central Asian Republics, who are entangled in relationships with Russia (and former Russian strongmen as leaders in many of them), China, Pakistan, Iran, and Islamic movements of various stripes.  It also bodes poorly for the disputed claims in the South China Sea, African politics, and American societal-infrastructural architecture. 

The Somalia Crisis

First off, I want to express that The Washington Post  has been all over reporting the Ethiopian invasion of Somalia, and giving it the attention that it  so truly deserves.  I saw little to no coverage on the networks tonight, the Harrisburg Patriot News had a couple of paragraph story on page A8, and as of right now, while there has to be 80 links on the front page of The Tennessean, there are NO links to any stories on the subject. 

Anyway, Bashir Goth is already way out in front in terms of backing the Ethiopian invasion.  I’m certainly sympathetic to the problems that the Islamic Courts Movement presents, but already, in just this one post, one can already seeing the color of particularity washed out by analysts who wish to ply their trade as modern day George Kennan’s and sniff out a new domino theory. 

I point this out not to take sides in a political event about whose details I know fairly little.  Ethiopia may be doing the right thing in invading Somalia as Mr. Bashir suggests.  However, I cannot find myself persuaded by the implication that all one needs to know to judge the situation is which side the Islamic fundamentalists are on and thus find myself for the activities of whoever is attacking them.  So here are some questions I feel, as a viewer of this historical event, I would like greater clarification on before feeling as though I have a more adequate perception of what is going on.

1.  Even if Ethiopia may be right to attack the Islamic Courts Movement, what will doing so accomplish?  What are the range of possible outcomes and how likely are each of them? 

2.  What does this do to the whole region, particularly since Africa is a region where everyone’s military seems to always be partially engaged fighting rebels in one neighbor’s country and supporting rebels in another’s?  Has Ethiopia crossed some sort of line that, if not only goes unpunished, but applauded by the West, will embolden other nation-states who are Western friendly from doing this (I’m trying hard not to look at you, Rwanda and Uganda) and feeling like the West will support whatever lame "our enemies sponsor terrorism" story they give them?

3.  It has long seemed to me that the bulk of US foreign policy in Africa is to "pretend that it doesn’t really exist" for as much as it can get away with as possible.  That might lead to bad outcomes (see Rwandan and Darfur genocides), but it also forces us to ask, what does the Africa picture look like with an engaged United States?  Even if it would be helpful, it certainly, by virtue of adding one more country into the mix, complicates all of the other relationships in African politics.  In what ways would we want to understand such complications before getting involved. 

4.  How can we possibly back Ethiopia for fighting Islamists in Somalia who, while its form may be abhorrent, trying to actually create a stable political government and do so little to fight Islamists already in charge who are perpetrating mass murder and mass relocation in Darfur? 

5.  How much of a problem is it going to be to separate the emotional imprint of our foray into Somalia from a clear-headed analysis of the present situation.  I feel that our Iran policy is still clouded by the feelings of embarrassment when the Shah was deposed.  Are we going to have too many people who remember Somalia as our own failed mission, and see this as some artificial redemption?

The sentiment that "We cannot allow another September 11"  is  valuable only insofar as it serves as a reminder that we need to be as vigilant as possible in making keen political judgments when they matter the most.  It is not valuable as a license to allow the pain of our memories of that day to wash out our best rational judgments.

In many international incidents and issues around the world, appeals for one thing or another invariably "run home" to the persuasive easy route that sentimentality provides.   But good judgments about such political issues require more than finding one theme or another from old and trotting it out and emphasizing it to make one’s case.  Instead, good judgment requires that we ascertain what is to come next and why as best as possible, and to figure out the best course of action that manages the reality we are to live in, given what changes we anticipate are coming. 

Armed with such little information about places like Somalia and Ethiopia, and such strongly worded opinions with broad and terrifying themes, as in Mr. Bashir’s PostGlobal post, I it seems unlikely that the American public can demand good judgment on such issues from political leaders, for they have no standard by which to judge.  This informational/performative structural problem in foreing policy, it seems to me, is just as large, if not larger, a threat to advancing American security through foreign policy as Islamic fundamentalists. 

Against The Day Blogging (Pt. 1)

I have put it off long enough.  I have made my Christmas leisure activity the scaling of literary imposing-ness that is Against the Day.  I downed two chapters yesterday: both about a band of aeronauts flying a "blimp-like object" called "The Chums of Chance."  I have no idea where this is going, but to read Pynchon’s prose, so far, has been a delight rather than a chore.  I will report in more detail, hopefully tomorrow. 

Random Thought on Nietszche

I decided to read On The Genealogy of Morals while I gave my students their final exams.  I read the translations by the great Walter Kaufman, and I laughed out loud at some of the selected aphorisms that he picked out to place between "The Genealogy of Morals" and "Ecce Homo."  I find Nietzsche a more and more enjoyable read, and I feel that I appreciate his dynamic quality the more I read everyone else and also the older and more mature I become as a reader. 

I always feel like there is something very genuine that draws the philosopher to write great books, and that the core of this reason does not relay change from book to book, year to year.  Thinkers find new elements to pursue, no threads of discovery, sometimes even, they find ideas that cause them to contradict themselves and even do serious damage to much of their earlier work.  Nevertheless, it seems to me, that the spirit of the writer remains the same, and it is the exploration of this spirit which compels them to o write again and again, without fear of scorn or contradiction, but instead, to bravely try to share what it is that they have found. 

For Nietzsche, I think it is his insights into what we might loosely call the infinite that link together the spirit of all of his investigations.  My Dad is fond of saying that there is "nothing new under the sun."  For Nietzsche, if I may be permitted to vulgarize him for a moment, I think it is more like, "There is nothing finite under the sun."  This is why Nietzsche bothers to trace genealogies, why he talks about awful truths, why he disdains "German culture," why he would write about tragedy, good and evil, and yet still find the space to write what might seem asides on their being "no greater fallacy than that of duplication."  Nietzsche is provocative, cunning, and daring, but he seems to push us to confront the fact that our generalities are parlor tricks.  Human ingenuity to better make a home in an infinitely changing and unpredictable, and in very real ways, an unknowable world.   The fact that Nietzsche seems right to me, validates the project of science and mathematics rather than threatens it.  While Nietzsche may threaten the abstract values assigned to the epistemic value of generalities that a devout logical positivist may old to be true, he does not threaten science itself.  If we can not really know the world itself, than it is important to come to terms with our generalities, because they are all that we share. 

Am I on Some Sort of a List?

I tried to post a reply on NiT to this post and I got the following message:

In an effort to curb malicious comment posting by abusive
users, I’ve enabled a feature that requires a weblog commenter to wait
a short amount of time before being able to post again. Please try to
post your comment again in a short while. Thanks for your patience.

Ouch!  Was it something I said?  Anyway, here’s my rejoinder, published here for all the world to see.

The idea that "science is science" was pretty much thoroughly debunked in the middle part of the 20th Century with Thomas Kuhn’s "The Structure of Scientific Revolution."  We can, according to contemporary epistemology, only learn what is revealed to us, and we can only make sense of what is revealed to us by placing it in our mental ordering in ways that make sense (To see how this works in interpreting images, see E.L. Gombirch’s "Art and Illusion" – a great book).  This is why major changes in scientific discovery (like the fact that the earth is not the center of the universe – by the way, Kuhn also has a great book on the history of that debate called "The Copernican Revolution") are slow to be accepted by people, because by presenting such things, you are not asking someone to simply recognize fact, you are asking someone to change their entire mental arrangement of how they perceive everything – which is something that college students think is neat, but by the time one has slowly built up this mental picture over ears and years of effort, it starts to feel more and more like the rug has been pulled out from your whole life, and hence people resist. 

As for Tman’s argument about the fact that we cannot even predict the weather for one year, so why should we trust such predictions in the long run: you are partially right inasmuch as no one can possibly forsee the future.  However, your criterion for what counts as reliable measurement for something as complex as weather systems seems wholly unreasonable, and I’m guessing this is intentionally so.  The amount of random variance in weather patterns versus the non-random variance is going to make any single year projection of the effects of global warming an entirely unpredictable affair.  So yes, you are correct that there measures are not reliable on this scale.  However, global warming is not measuring marginal daily temperature change, it is measuring temperature change over decades, and if we look at global temperature increases over decades, my guess is that the measurements look much more reliable.

A way to think about it would be to think about the stock market.  Your broker cannot tell you how you will do tomorrow, or even over 1 year or from any given year to the next.  However, over a decade or multiple decades, they have very reliable projections.  Even then there is no absolute certainty, but there is no absolute certainty that the laws of physics will work tomorrow the way they did yesterday.  At some point, we have to engage in a reasonable discussion about where we draw the line for acceptable inference.  For my part, the trends seem pretty clear to me.  But as always, I can be convinced. 

“Lisa, What’s a Skeletor?”

I’ve been tagged for a meme, and since it’s by a blog with infinitely more readers than my own, I feel obligated to comply, lest Julian (who along with NiT and Andrew, or the only blogs who increase my traffic with links) stop linking to my site.  The topic of what counts as "most people" for "five things most people don’t know about me" is less of an issue for me when it comes to the question of "is most people friends or readers?"  I have no illusions that anyone reads this out of anything besides feeling obligated to do so as my friend. 

1.  I had to look up what "meme" meant before writing this post.  I have gotten by for years pretending what it means but not really having any good idea about it. 

2.  I have a recurring dream that I am playing for the US Men’s National Soccer team and then in the middle of the match, I remember that I am actually a horrible soccer player.   I usually play up front, so, if you know anything about the US Men’s team, you could see how they might not notice until the big game. 

3.  When I go and visit my parents, I sneak off and pick up my mega-gavel from the 2000 Columbia University Parliamentary Debate Tournament, and hold it for about five minutes, letting the memories of that part of my life (which I have pretty much shelved) wash over me.

4.  I have an idea for a book that I have picked at in very tiny amounts on and off again for about five years that sort of twits together a post-1984 world with a post-1989 (real) world.  I want to cram it with Pynchon-esque references to things I know and places I have seen, just because it feels less burdensome to keep such experiences to myself.  The working title has always been "Down With Oceania," though I’ve never written more than five pages of it at a time.  I would not dare work on a novel with my dissertation left to work on, and besides, how hard would it be to love literature so very much and find out that you are, in fact, quite bad at producing it?

5.  I recently went back to the dentist for the first time in quite a while.  I have had some rigorous, and not entirely comfortable cleanings done, and all of my fillings are too old and will be replaced in January.  While the dentists was cleaning the roots of my teeth, I blocked out the feeling of intense heat by trying to keep "Spem in Alium" in my head.   I was also told that I should have a positive thought in my head while going through this, and mine is not one my dentist would approve of.  My positive thought is that once all this repair work is done, I’ll be able to sit out on my porch with a nice cigar, some Maker’s Mark, and listen to Ivan Khandoshkin on my porch without any fear that my teeth will hurt from the smoking. 

Well, I hope that wasn’t too stupid.  I’d deflect my own weak efforts by simply mocking the very idea of meme’s in and of themselves… if only I was comfortable that I fully understood what they are.

UPDATE:  Ooops!  I forgot the other part of the game!  I tag Andrew Daniller, Brittney Gilbert, Josh Miller, Sadie Dingfelder, and Jason Koepke (because he’ll hate that he got tagged).

Nashville Nutcracker

On Saturday, I went to see the Nashville Ballet’s annual performance of "The Nutcracker."  Overall, it was a very enjoyable experience.  I have to say, that to my untrained eye, the dancing seemed somewhat lacking.  Now, I don’t really know heads from tails when it comes to ballet, but it seemed like the spacing in the dances wasn’t always great, nor was the coordination between dancers, and, in general, the dances seemed a little too forced… which is a big problem for Act II, since it pretty much gives up all pretense of a narrative and becomes just a sequence of several dances, which isn’t surprising, it IS a ballet after all.  But the dancing (and I should mention that we watched the Ballet’s B team do a matinee show) seemed lacking.   

And Act I was, by an large, quite enjoyable, but the only strength that really carries over from Act I is the music.  Once again, the set design was inspired and beautiful, the colors of the costumes brilliant and quite pleasing to the eye.  The Christmas party was a feast of color and activity, and was extremely well done.  The reveal from the House to Clara’s fantastic world was magnificent, and was again a tremendous credit to the set design team.  The problem is that once Clara is in her dreamworld, we no longer have beautiful sets and colorful costumes in quite the same richness anymore.  All this must move aside for the dance, and the space and freedom of movement the dancers need.  The truth is that Clara’s dream world feels as if it is a much more drab place than is her home!   

That being said, the music was beautifully played by NaSO, and it really showed off why this was the work that Tchaikovsky claimed to be most proud of.  The music moves you from dream to dream, setting a different tone that seems to belong to an entirely different world than the one before did.  My guess is that the various dance performances are supposed to have the same effect, but in this case they did not.  I did not expect to go to the ballet to have the symphony receive the loudest ovation, but that is precisely what happened at our show.  They did a great job, and were a great credit to such wondrous music.  Of all the faults I found in reading J. Robert Oppenheimer, none stuck out more than not liking Tchaikovsky.  For the love of God, why?

To sum up, the show was very nice overall.  Again, to be fair, we went to a matinee show with the second unit performing, that was the day set aside to entertain the children.  And there were lots of children, though they were mostly girls.  Not that there is anything wrong with lots of girls being in attendance, I simply wish that it was more acceptable for boys to go and do things like the opera and the ballet.  At any rate, my guess is that many of the little children did not have the jaded critical eye I had and were swept away by the music, sets, costumes, and dancing.  If that’s the case, one would have to consider the performance a great success regardless of any problems grown-ups might be able to see. 

By the way, for a nice piece of "home listening" for The Nutcracker, I recommend this recording by the Kirov.   It’s a little fast, you couldn’t do the ballet at this speed, but for listening at home, I find it has a little more "zip" to it, and I think it makes for a better listening album than at full speed (though you’ll find many negative reviews who feel quite the opposite).