A.G. Sulzberger, publisher of the New York Times and man in need of greater courage
A cri de coeur from the NYT editor who was fired for printing an op ed that younger staff disagreed with when emotions were running at their highest after George Floyd’s televised murder. The actual piece is about as long as a long form bit of journalism gets — an 80 minute read. I usually don’t like long form journalism (and have a particular dislike of being told every last gruesome detail of what some worthy ate over lunch!) but this was a good piece if you want to persevere. And if you don’t, well I’ve done my best to bring you some of its best below.
Meanwhile over at the Chronicle of Higher Education Geoff Schulenberger weighs in on the story about the NYT here, the call for ‘moral clarity’ by the left wing activists in that case and compares it with the same call for ‘moral clarity’ by right wing activists (Republican Congresspeople) in the case of the three university professors who said that it would depend on context whether calling for the genocide of the Jews was against their universities’ harassment policies. His piece is called “Against moral clarity”. It’s not great, but it’s interesting and offers another perspective.
The Times’s problem has metastasised from liberal bias to illiberal bias, from an inclination to favour one side of the national debate to an impulse to shut debate down altogether. All the empathy and humility in the world will not mean much against the pressures of intolerance and tribalism without an invaluable quality that Sulzberger did not emphasise: courage.
Don’t get me wrong. Most journalism obviously doesn’t require anything like the bravery expected of a soldier, police officer or protester. But far more than when I set out to become a journalist, doing the work right today demands a particular kind of courage: not just the devil-may-care courage to choose a profession on the brink of the abyss; not just the bulldog courage to endlessly pick yourself up and embrace the ever-evolving technology; but also, in an era when polarisation and social media viciously enforce rigid orthodoxies, the moral and intellectual courage to take the other side seriously and to report truths and ideas that your own side demonises for fear they will harm its cause.
One of the glories of embracing illiberalism is that, like Trump, you are always right about everything, and so you are justified in shouting disagreement down. In the face of this, leaders of many workplaces and boardrooms across America find that it is so much easier to compromise than to confront – to give a little ground today in the belief you can ultimately bring people around. This is how reasonable Republican leaders lost control of their party to Trump and how liberal-minded college presidents lost control of their campuses. And it is why the leadership of the New York Times is losing control of its principles. …
About a year after the 2016 election, the Times newsroom published a profile of a man from Ohio who had attended the rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, at which a white nationalist drove his car into a crowd of protesters, killing one. It was a terrifying piece. … In exploring his evolution from “vaguely leftist rock musician to ardent libertarian to fascist activist” the article rang an alarm about how “the election of President Donald Trump helped open a space for people like him”.
The profile was in keeping with the Times’s tradition of confronting readers with the confounding reality of the world around them. After the 9/11 attacks, as the bureau chief in Jerusalem, I spent a lot of time in the Gaza Strip interviewing Hamas leaders, recruiters and foot soldiers, trying to understand and describe their murderous ideology. Some readers complained that I was providing a platform for terrorists, but there was never any objection from within the Times. (Nor did it occur to me to complain that by publishing op-eds critical of Hamas the Opinion department was putting my life in danger.) Our role, we knew, was to help readers understand such threats, and this required empathetic – not sympathetic – reporting. This is not an easy distinction but good reporters make it: they learn to understand and communicate the sources and nature of a toxic ideology without justifying it, much less advocating it.
Today’s newsroom turns that moral logic on its head, at least when it comes to fellow Americans. Unlike the views of Hamas, the views of many Americans have come to seem dangerous to engage in the absence of explicit condemnation. Focusing on potential perpetrators – “platforming” them by explaining rather than judging their views – is believed to empower them to do more harm. After the profile of the Ohio man was published, media Twitter lit up with attacks on the article as “normalising” Nazism and white nationalism, and the Times convulsed internally. The Times wound up publishing a cringing editor’s note that hung the writer out to dry and approvingly quoted some of the criticism, including a tweet from a Washington Post opinion editor asking, “Instead of long, glowing profiles of Nazis/White nationalists, why don’t we profile the victims of their ideologies”? The Times did profile the victims of such ideologies; and the very headline of the piece – “A Voice of Hate in America’s Heartland” – undermined the claim that it was “glowing”. But the Times lacked the confidence to defend its own work. (As it happens, being platformed did not do much to increase the power of that Ohio man. He, his wife and his brother lost their jobs and the newly married couple lost the home intended for their muffin pan.)
The editor’s note paraded the principle of publishing such pieces, saying it was important to “shed more light, not less, on the most extreme corners of American life”. But less light is what the readers got. As a reporter in the newsroom, you’d have to have been an idiot after that explosion to attempt such a profile. Empathetic reporting about Trump supporters became even more rare. It became a cliché among influential left-wing columnists and editors that blinkered political reporters interviewed a few Trump supporters in diners and came away suckered into thinking there was something besides racism that could explain anyone’s support for the man.
(Though I think his elves did a fair bit of the legwork)
Yikes! (Click through to see the progression)
Pragmatism and prosperity: Cameron Murray on Singapore.
An excellent romp through some of the ways that Lee Kwan Yew was a pragmatist not an ideologue and practiced a kind of behavioural economics way before someone decided to turn such commonsense into an academic brand.
Money illusion
Not only did Lee Kuan Yew believe in … money illusion, but so did the Singapore citizenry. [If you don’t know what that is, you’ll pick it up if you read on.] …
Here’s [LKW]:
Every year, the National Wages Council recommended an increase in wages based on the previous year's economic growth. Once workers got used to a higher take-home pay, I knew they would resist any increase in their [compulsory Central Provident Fund] contribution. … So, almost yearly I increased the rate of CPF contributions, but such that there was still a net increase in take-home pay. It was painless for the workers and kept inflation down. …
I raised it in stages from 5 percent to a maximum of 25 percent in 1984, making a total savings rate of 50 percent of wages. This was later reduced to 40 percent.
Imagine trying to increase income tax rates from 5 per cent to 25 per cent and bargaining with unions using the argument: “Don’t worry, there is still a net increase in your take-home pay.”
When it is a non-tax compulsory payment, well now, that’s a different story.
The illusion is far more widespread than I ever realised. Many international organisations and tax experts explain how Singapore is a low-tax nation. …
Those who do look through the money and fiscal illusions see the great big tax regime for what it is:
Before independence, employees and employers together contributed only 10 percent of the payroll in the covered sectors. By 1984-1985 this taxation had peaked at 50 percent of the paycheck of a middle-aged worker. It has since stabilized at about 38 percent of the paycheck for such a worker.
Pragmatism
Not only does Lee Kuan Yew operate pragmatically in a world of widespread economic illusions, but this pragmatism extends to addressing other deep human tendencies and practical matters. He capitalises on internal personal motivations, individual rewards and markets where possible, while at other times he tries to change people’s internal motivations and beliefs through control of education, housing and the press.
Congratulations to Julian Burnside on his retirement
Julian was kind enough to invite Eva and me to a function that celebrated his fine career on his retirement from the bar.
Julian with fellow Great Australians — from left to right Dele (OK — great Canadian), Josh, Barry, and Robert. (As will be observed, it was not possible to keep riff-raff entirely out of the picture. ed.)
Fine speech, bravely delivered
Steven Pinker on campus speech
I’ve not been much of a fan of Pinker, and don’t like his tendentious pitting of the Enlightenment against its opposite (You know obscurantist bigotry — Pinker favours the Enlightenment.) But I’ve been mellowing in the light of his preparedness to say that you need more than anti-woke credentials to found a new and better university. I can’t fault much of his analysis of the recent debacle precipitated by the Washington hearings into campus antisemitism.
I don’t believe that firing Gay [The Harvard President — pictured above] is the appropriate response to the fiasco. … Congressional inquiries are often televised ambushes, and as Gay walked into the line of fire she had been rendered defenseless by decades of rot in campus policies. … Though the [Palestinian] slogans are simplistic and reprehensible, they are not calls for genocide in so many words. So even if a university could punish direct calls for genocide as some form of harassment, it might justifiably choose not to prosecute students for an interpretation of their words they did not intend.
Thus Gay was correct in saying that students’ political slogans are not punishable by Harvard’s rules on harassment and bullying unless they cross over into intimidation, personal threats, or direct incitement of violence. … The real problem with Gay’s testimony was that she could not clearly and credibly invoke those principles because they either have never been explicitly adopted by Harvard or they have been flagrantly flouted in the past. … Harvard has persecuted scholars who said there are two sexes, or who signed an amicus brief taking the conservative side in a Supreme Court deliberation. It has retracted acceptances from students who were outed by jealous peers for having used racist trash talk on social media when they were teens.
For universities to have a leg to stand on when they try to stand on principle, they must embark on a long-term plan to undo the damage they have inflicted on themselves. This requires five commitments.
Free speech. Universities should adopt a clear and conspicuous policy on academic freedom. It might start with the First Amendment, which binds public universities and which has been refined over the decades with carefully justified exceptions. …
Institutional neutrality. A university does not need a foreign policy, and it does not need to issue pronouncements on the controversies and events of the day. It is a forum for debate, not a protagonist in debates. …
Nonviolence. … Universities should not indulge acts of vandalism, trespassing, and extortion. Free speech does not include a heckler’s veto, which blocks the speech of others.
Viewpoint diversity. Universities have become intellectual and political monocultures. Seventy-seven percent of the professors in Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences describe themselves as liberal, and fewer than 3 percent as conservative.
Disempowering DEI. Many of the assaults on academic freedom (not to mention common sense) come from a burgeoning bureaucracy that calls itself diversity, equity, and inclusion while enforcing a uniformity of opinion, a hierarchy of victim groups, and the exclusion of freethinkers. Often hastily appointed by deans as expiation for some gaffe or outrage, these officers stealthily implement policies that were never approved in faculty deliberations or by university leaders willing to take responsibility for them. An infamous example is the freshman training sessions that terrify students with warnings of all the ways they can be racist (such as asking, “Where are you from?”). Another is the mandatory diversity statements for job applicants, which purge the next generation of scholars of anyone who isn’t a woke ideologue or a skilled liar. And since overt bigotry is in fact rare in elite universities, bureaucrats whose job depends on rooting out instances of it are incentivized to hone their Rorschach skills to discern ever-more-subtle forms of “systemic” or “implicit” bias.
Universities should stanch the flood of DEI officials, expose their policies to the light of day, and repeal the ones that cannot be publicly justified.
[Doing all these things] will not be a quick fix for universities. But it’s necessary to reverse their tanking credibility and better than the alternatives of firing the coach or deepening the hole they have dug for themselves.
All that having been said, I’ve got an open mind on some constraints on free speech focused on extreme cases like Nazis and Alex Jones types and more generally those preaching disregard for basic norms of tolerance. But I think such a policy would need more than a code, and would need careful thought and perhaps the evolution of new forms of governance.
An interesting discussion on China by the author of The New China Playbook which has made quite a splash.
Gideon Levy on Israel
Thanks to Robert Manne for sending me this recording of “the Israeli journalist I most admire”, Gideon Levy. He adds that the discussion took place a few months before October 7. I’ve also made an audio file of the video which appears below.
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The return of the progressive atrocity
It’s quite something that pro-Palestinian protests began with the massacre of Oct 7 before Israel took its revenge. This Quillette article could have been cut back by 60 percent without much loss from my point of view, but it’s basic content bears reading. It’s written by someone who identifies with the left and with Israel and is a fine denunciation of Western left wing support for Hamas. I was grateful for being introduced to Albert Memmi who seems to be a fine observer of colonialism, and later of de-colonisation. A socialist Jew, he seems to think that truth telling is fundamental to the success of de-colonialisation and much else besides — an admittedly niche position. Anyway, on with the Quillette article.
Of course, the Palestinian national project—like Zionism—has always contained a variety of ideologies ranging from peaceful coexistence to the elimination of the other. (The latter tendency is appallingly prevalent among many members of Benjamin Netanyahu’s current government.) But it is no exaggeration to say that the Palestinian movement, even before the founding of Israel in 1948, has been defined by terror more than any other, and that terrorist groups have always been prominent within the movement.
In the age of the “progressive atrocity,” PLO terrorist attacks on Israelis, Jews, and civilians throughout the world were hailed as instruments of liberation. A very partial list of such incidents would include the murder of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics (the games continued, nonetheless) and the Lod Airport massacre the same year (death toll: 26, along with at least 80 injured); the Ma’alot massacre of 1974, in which 115 Israelis, mainly schoolchildren, were taken hostage (resulting deaths: 31); the Entebbe hijacking of 1976, in which Israeli and other Jewish passengers were separated from others and threatened with death (most were rescued by Israeli commandos); the 1978 Coastal Road massacre, in which a civilian bus was highjacked (death toll: 38, including 13 children; 71 wounded); the 1982 attack on the Chez Jo Goldenberg kosher restaurant in Paris, considered at the time to be the worst incidence of antisemitism in France since the Holocaust (death toll: six, with 22 injured); and numerous other instances of air piracy. Various international groups, especially Baader Meinhof of Germany and the Japanese Red Army, sometimes assisted their Palestinian brothers “in solidarity.” Not all leftists or leftwing organizations supported these actions, but to criticize them was a sign of “bourgeois moralism” as Ghassan Kanafani, a leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, put it. (Kanafani, who was also a gifted writer, was assassinated after the Lod attack by the Mossad.)
Curiously, none of the groups that employed terrorism, other than the Algerian National Liberation Front, achieved its aims—well, sort of. The Algerians gained their independence, but the regime established by the NLF remains one of the most repressive on Earth—the NGO Freedom House ranks Algeria as “not free,” its worst category. The revolutions that did succeed—the Chinese, Vietnamese, Cuban, Nicaraguan, and South African revolts—weren’t nonviolent, but they largely refrained from attacks on unarmed civilians. Indeed, Marxist movements had traditionally shunned terror against civilians on both moral and political grounds. Terror against civilians demoralizes ordinary people and almost always pushes them to the Right, often into the arms of authoritarian leaders; terrorism exalts the singular act at the expense of building a mass movement. André Malraux’s 1928 novel The Conquerors , set during the failed Chinese Communist uprising of 1925, opens with a dramatic act of terror; it is Garine, the book’s hero and a Marxist, who opposes this. The dire state of the Palestinian movement today suggests that there is an inverse relationship between the use of terror and the achievement of freedom.
In recent years, the Left’s embrace of terror seemed to have ebbed; you won’t find many defenders of al-Qaeda, ISIS, the Taliban, or Boko Haram. The notable exception has been groups devoted to the destruction of Israel: Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Hezbollah, all of which still garner enthusiasm and deluded admiration. One might have thought that an orgy of sadistic murder, of the kind that Hamas committed on October 7th, would have inspired serious moral and political self-interrogation. As the past four weeks have illustrated, however, the exact opposite is the case.
The extraordinary nature of the pro-Palestinian demonstrations that have swept through the capitals of the West—demonstrations that began before Israel dropped a single bomb on Gaza —has, perhaps, not been fully appreciated. Horrific massacres of unarmed civilians are, unfortunately, taking place right now in South Sudan, Congo, Ethiopia, Syria, and Darfur. Unforgivably, the so-called international community usually ignores them. But none inspires cries of esteem for the perpetrators and acclaim for their crimes. And nowhere are the victims—defenseless civilians, including children and their mothers—blamed for being murdered. That is what is happening now. The deadliest single day in the post-Holocaust history of the Jewish people has been greeted in some quarters with joy and—to be blunt—an entirely undisguised hatred of Jews.
An interesting post on how we make institutions more evolvable. Certainly our non-market institutions have proven remarkably non-evolvable. My favourite example is the complete failure to change one bit of the high school maths curriculum between when I did it and when my kids did it. Trig is still in. Stats is still out. I offered some comments in the thread which I’ll reproduce below the thread for what they’re worth.
The biggest red flag is with our institutions of science. Institutions affect all the other factors, especially the management of money and talent. And today, many in the metascience community have concerns about our institutions. Common criticisms include:
Speed. It can easily take 12–18 months to get a grant (if you’re lucky)
Overhead. Researchers typically spend 30–50% of their time on grants
Patience. Researchers feel they need to show results regularly and can’t pursue a path that might take many years to get to an outcome
Risk tolerance. Grant funding favors conservative, incremental proposals rather than bold, “high-risk, high-reward” programs (despite efforts to the contrary)
Consensus. A field can converge on a hypothesis and prune alternate branches of study too quickly
Researcher age. The trend over time is for grant money to go to older, more established researchers
Freedom. Scientists lack the freedom to direct their research fully autonomously; grant funding has too many strings attached
Now, as a former tech founder, I can’t help but notice that most of these problems seem much alleviated in the world of for-profit VC funding. Raising VC money is relatively quick (typically a round comes together in a few months rather than a year or more). As a founder/CEO, I spent about 10–15% of my time fundraising, not 30–50%. VCs make bold bets, actively seek contrarian positions, and back young upstarts. They mostly give founders autonomy, perhaps taking a board seat for governance, and only firing the CEO for very bad performance. (The only concern listed above that startup founders might also complain about is patience: if your money runs out, you’d better have progress to show for it, or you’re going to have a bad time raising the next round.)
I don’t think the VC world does better on these points because VCs are smarter, wiser, or better people than science funders—they’re not. Rather, VCs:
Compete for deals (and really don’t want to miss good deals)
Succeed or fail in the long run based on the performance of their portfolio
See those outcomes within a matter of ~5–10 years
In short, VCs are subject to evolutionary pressure. They can’t get stuck in obviously bad equilibria because if they do they will get out-competed and lose market power.
My comment was as follows:
Most or all the mechanisms proposed tend to assume that people are self-interested rather than a mix of self-and-other interest. They play to Hobbesian not Aristotelian stereotypes of the way we are. The scientist turned philosopher Michael Polanyi would argue that many of these functions have powerful ethical dimensions and I'd argue that the structures we've put in place, in appealing to self-interest tend to crowd out more ethical motivations. Bureaucracies breed careerism. So I'd want to introduce more randomisation and other kinds of mechanisms to minimise the extent to which the accountability mechanisms we set up don't just produce more accountability theatre. There are also ways of selecting for merit that don't involve people performing for their superiors in an organisation. Thus the republic of Venice used the mechanism of the Brevia by which a sub-group of the 2,000+ strong population with political power were chosen by lottery. They then convened behind closed doors and then had a secret ballot. The idea was to insulate the merit selection process from favours to power. It seems to have worked a charm helping Venice to be the only city state in Italy that got through the 500 years from the beginning of the 13th century without any successful coups or civil wars.
I'd add that Polanyi worried about the question of the integrity of the fabric of scientific knowledge. That is, he asked what was the ultimate source of a geologist's or a layperson's confidence that the state of the art knowledge in say — x-ray crystallography — had integrity. His concern was that, in science there was nothing analogous to the function of arbitrating prices in markets and between markets to 'keep people honest' in their valuations.
His answer was what he called his 'theory of overlapping neighbourhoods". It was “held by a multitude of individuals” connected in a fiduciary network, “each of whom endorses the other's opinion at second hand, by relying on the consensual chains which link him to all the others through a sequence of overlapping neighborhoods”. Polanyi would have appreciated businessman Charlie Munger’s claim that “the highest form a civilization can reach is a seamless web of deserved trust”.
We can apply an analogous process of relying more on those with a good record of shorter term prediction in making longer term predictions.
Section 6 of this report discusses the way in which one might 'bootstrap' longer-term vision by using shorter term forecasting performance as one criterion for determining longer-term forecasting prowess — together with deliberation on determining shorter run expectations that can be used to test the progress of longer term projects.
Though I don’t think he's cited (his contribution is in noting the need for such a thing rather than identifying it — because that is pretty obvious), this builds on Polanyi's overlapping neighbourhoods idea.
I’ve been checking out Pocket’s best of 2023. The first one I tried was this long and hilarious story about taking holidays with Flash Pack. If you click through you can enjoy it more by listening to the author reading it.
Of all my bad habits, it is the ruthless desire to befriend that exerts the strongest pull on my behavior. Not that I want more friends — God, no. If anything, I’d love to drop about 80 percent of the ones I have, so I could stop remembering their birthdays. But because I can’t quit — because constantly pulling strangers into my orbit is what stabilizes my bearing in the universe — I have determined to double down. And so, in January, I booked a package vacation to Morocco through a company whose stated aim — beyond offering package vacations — is to help people in their 30s and 40s make new friends. …
There were 13 of us total. Each day of the trip, I would spend a little time privately trying to map the biblical significance of this number neatly onto our group, frustrated that no clear stand-in for Christ ever emerged. (If it was anyone, it was the vivacious and bubbly woman from a village called Burnham, which she described as “near Slough,” who was legitimately nice to everyone, and whose job investigating international commercial real estate disputes gave her experience performing little miracles in the Middle East.) Ultimately, the best I could come up with was that if Jesus had surrounded himself with 12 such team-oriented, schedule-conscious youngish (kind of) women, he might still be alive today. …
Because the tour had outlined its goals — for everyone on the tour to relax and become friends — very clearly on its website, it had attracted, as participants, a horde of demented overachievers whose determination to relax and become friends far exceeded that of the average person; who would stop at nothing to complete these objectives; who had paid thousands of dollars to pursue these aims among like-minded maniacs. …
Upon my return from Morocco, I awoke after dawn for the first time in over a week. Rather than dashing out of bed to learn to surf (and then, still in my wet suit, ride a camel), I luxuriated under my blankets. The obligations of my real life (work, chores) were a breeze compared with the responsibility of converting 12 strangers into new friends while participating in a full daily docket of group activities. In the WhatsApp group, my aggressive campaign to persuade everyone to stay friends forever was already underway. The vacation was over. I could relax.
Levy plied his trade as a chess tutor until around 2020 when he became a YouTuber. Now he has over 4 million viewers and it’s fun to watch him hamming it up. This is one of his best videos, the game is remarkable and Levy hams it up as much as ever.
Interesting review of Eric Williams now republished 1944 landmark, Capitalism and Slavery
Wilberforce wasn’t all Mr Nice Guy: SHOCK!!
Williams placed naming over shaming. In the first half of Capitalism and Slavery he identifies dozens of British merchants, bankers, industrialists and politicians who built fortunes through colonial slavery. These were not obscure individuals, then or since: many had entries in the Dictionary of National Biography . Williams took their names from printed primary sources and the historical scholarship available in the 1930s. But he refused to cast these men and their families as evildoers, or even as outliers. Perhaps the greatest shame of the Atlantic slave trade was that it inspired no shame at all. In their own time, Britain’s slave traders were men of distinction: ‘worthy men, fathers of families and excellent citizens’, as Williams put it. They founded charitable schools, hospitals, orphanages and libraries, making them ‘the leading humanitarians of their age’. Williams savoured the irony. But what most interested him about this juxtaposition is easier to miss. Can the best of any society overcome the moral norms of the times? Why would we – how could we – expect the merchants of Liverpool, Bristol and London to have refused their era’s imperatives, its incentives, its economic logics? Williams asked this question not to defend the past from judgment by the present, as some sometimes do defensively today. Instead, this refusal to emphasise the Atlantic slave trade as a sin served a crucial interpretative purpose. If there was no sin, then there was no redemption. What happened wasn’t a moral awakening. For morals had never been the question before the fall of colonial slavery, in the achievements of the anti-slavery movement, or, for that matter, what came after. The slave traders, in their own way, were humanitarians and the abolitionists, in their own way, were not.
Much has been made over the years about the pseudo-Marxist economic determinism of Capitalism and Slavery. But it’s not clear how much Williams cared about theories of history or historical sociology. Far more important to him was the point he wanted to make about Britain, the British Empire and, most of all, the funhouse mirror of ideological distortions that helped the British see themselves as philanthropists rather than profit-obsessed imperialists. There’s some evidence that Williams knew that his decline thesis was overstated, that he exaggerated for effect. But, even taking Williams at his word, commentators often miss his point. The thesis was an argument about abolitionists far more than abolition. It revealed the ‘saints’ as less worthy, more suspect, more hypocritical, less high-minded, less saintly than they believed themselves to be, and others had described them. The book’s penultimate chapter defrocks the high priests of the anti-slavery gospel. It presents Wilberforce as a kind of Mrs Jellyby, the patron saint of telescopic philanthropy – ‘Wilberforce was interested in the slave plantation rather than the mineshaft.’ At other times Williams casts Wilberforce as a more charming Bulstrode, full of ‘cant’, ‘spurious philanthropy’ and ‘lucrative humanity’.
The attack on Wilberforce was personal, and explicitly so. The insults are deliberate and considered: ‘with his effeminate face [he] appears small in stature. There is a certain smugness about the man, his life, his religion ... as a leader, he was inept, addicted to moderation, compromise and delay.’ Williams held in contempt those historians who wrote about Wilberforce as though they knew his virtues. The so-over-it eyeroll is palpable when Williams cites Wilberforce’s biographer Reginald Coupland’s attempt to ventriloquise the evangelical leader. ‘What do you think sir, is the primary significance of your work, the lesson of the abolition of the slave system?’ Here is what Coupland had Wilberforce say: ‘It was God’s work. It signifies the triumph of his will over human selfishness. It teaches that no obstacle of interest or prejudice is irremovable by faith and prayer.’
PS: To produce the image above I wrestled with Dall-E for about half an hour telling it to draw William Wilberforce admiring himself seeing a halo over himself in the mirror that wasn’t there in life. Dall-E wasn’t complying. Anyway, the picture above was close enough to get the message across. But after endless attempts, it asked if I wanted it to create anything else for me. “I can also generate poems, stories, code, essays, songs, celebrity parodies, and more. Just let me know what you want.” So I asked for a poem setting out the same idea in the style of Wordsworth.
I deemed myself a man of noble mind,
Who fought for liberty and human rights;
I strove to end the horrors of the slave trade,
And spoke for those who had no voice or might.
But was I not a coward, a pretender,
Who sought to ease my conscience and my fame?
Who turned away from Britain's starving masses,
And feared to challenge power and its claim.
How vain was I, how blind to my own folly,
To think that I could be a saint or sage;
To wear a halo in the mirror of my fancy,
But not to see the darkness of my age.
Some countries get all the luck
For most of modern American history, the country has had to import massive amounts of foreign energy—its production was among the highest in the world but having a growing, wealthy, hydrocarbon-intensive economy meant that consumption demand grew to far outstrip domestic supply. … The 21st-century fracking boom has completely changed that—the rapid rebound in domestic energy production over the last 15 years has shrunk America’s energy deficit until the country became a net exporter in 2019. As of last year, the country exported vastly more natural gas than it imported and had essentially balanced its petroleum trade.
Now, the US produces more crude oil than any other country by a significant margin, and when looking at total petroleum products (including hydrocarbon gas liquids like propane and biofuels like ethanol) the US makes more than Saudi Arabia and Russia combined. As of September, American crude oil production has set a new record high after finally completing its recovery from the pandemic. Meanwhile US natural gas production, after fully recovering from COVID in late 2021, has continued setting new record highs and is now up 7% from its 2019 peaks.
In other words, the US is now producing more energy than ever before, and that growing surplus is being sent abroad—net US energy exports have reached $70B over the last 12 months despite falling oil and gas prices. In fact, US supply growth has been a large factor behind those falling prices in a year where OPEC+ producers have seen significant ongoing production cutbacks. Those short-term price dynamics are likely to start weighing on domestic US production, yet the longer-term trend is one where America’s fossil fuel demand is weaker as economic growth becomes less energy intensive and energy systems continue slowly decarbonizing—allowing a greater share of growing production to be exported, particularly to other parts of the world with faster and more hydrocarbon-intensive economic growth.
Speaking of ‘hydrocarbon-intensive economic growth’
Shut the f*&k up Friday
Hannah Arendt on singularity and contradiction
Schleiermacher
Perhaps what happens to a person takes place only for the purpose of developing his idiosyncratic nature. Can it not be said that the individual, in the “sublime moment” in which the shock of the infinite strikes him, has already “perfected” himself, formed himself into a “consolidated whole,” already learned everything he is capable of learning? Is it not proper to petrify thereafter, to become a living token of one’s idiosyncratic nature which remains immutably fixed until death? What can one desire more than to be one’s “perpetuated ego,” to enter as a part into the “universe” whose infinite perfection has been revealed to one? Henceforth such a person will stand above “idle hope” and the “common lament.” He has only to succeed in holding fast to the moment which is itself “no longer a part of temporal life.” Perhaps the compulsion to go on living, with the attendant trivialities, can be beaten by reiterating again and again the first “sublime moment” which has marked one out as an individual; by holding on to the “territory of eternity” which was guaranteed at that moment and to which the “perpetuated ego” can at any moment return because it can “at any time check and cut across the stream of temporal life.” The moment, thus, has stopped life and time. Any perfection is always a matter of the past; anything perfect must necessarily decline. All past must become new creation, all future a passing, a disintegration of perfection in aging and death. Just as man in isolation from all futurity becomes a thing of nature, “part of the universe,” so, when his singularity is fixed in perfection, he is raised out of time; time has ceased to form the connecting element of things, the nexus of life.
In the light of these thoughts it seems quite in order for life and reality to be stripped of any further power over a person; they condition only the past, the temporal existence, to the point of its perfection. Thus, at any rate, Schleiermacher thought to settle matters with life. He played his highest trump against life—himself, the perfected person, who had “never lost himself since.” Such arguments were of little help to Rahel. She had not become an “individual,” had experienced neither herself nor infinity in the things that had happened to her. And even if she had believed that her rigidity, her indifference, her muteness, were signs of her “idiosyncratic nature,” or even of the “perfection of her idiosyncratic existence,” how would such belief help her?
What did one have when one had nothing but oneself? What had been gained if life was eliminated—life which, after all, proved to have the last word in the end when age and death ensued? What if one had to “wither away” anyhow—like Schleiermacher himself, who thus expressly confirmed Schlegel’s phrase about him? Man’s life is stripped of its meaning if it remains fixed to the “sublime moment”; man’s history is destroyed if he becomes indifferent to his own destiny.
In order to go on living one must try to escape the death involved in perfection. Schleiermacher had declared that man’s potentialities became fixed in perfection; but perhaps this perfection could be dissolved, perhaps the fixed potentialities could be modified without a person’s losing his “idiosyncratic nature,” his “interestingness.” Perhaps it was possible to oppose a different reality to life which tramples over a person; perhaps a new reality could be magically conjured up by variation of potentialities, and life could then be forced into the channels of this new reality.
Schlegel
In magic the Romantics attempted to intensify the world and whatever life could bring to such a pitch of extraordinariness that reality would necessarily fail to come up to expectations. Magic arose out of the boundlessness of Mood. Playing with possibilities engendered the “Romantic confusion” which so canceled the isolation of the Schleiermacherian individual that for a moment it seemed as if reality might invade the scene after all by sheer chance, by a surprise attack. But this would have to be pure extraordinariness, a miracle, not at all the “raw, crude chance” which struck Rahel when Finckenstein happened to be the one who wanted her to love him. Expectation of the extraordinary never lets reality have its say, so to speak. In expecting a miracle that does not arrive, the imagination conjures up “the most interesting situations” in order to distract itself—situations that are not impossible, that could occur, such as the death of the sweetheart in Lucinde. But since magic after all does not have any power over reality, since magic cannot make the sweetheart die, it can only conjure up moods which would affect the lover if his sweetheart should die.
This conjuring up of future moods which convert all reality into the neutralized “it has already happened,” has a peculiar effect upon reality. In the fantasied mood direct affliction is anticipated. All possibilities, even the extremest, are translated into a future past in order to offset the present dread of them. This constant toying with possibilities becomes—in reference to the individual and his environment—a source of great confusion. Confusion overwhelms the possibilities, plays them off against one another, lets none dominate, none attain reality. But even the confusion remains without effect upon the person who is always balancing things out, instantly paralyzing any daydream by a new one. As a result of this balancing act, the narrow crack through which reality might have entered is closed up again. Mutual annihilation of opposites, the “harmony” of disorder, was the paradox in which Romantic contradictoriness as such existed. Any unequivocal language necessarily introduced actual chaos into the confused world of possibilities, just as any nonambiguity in life was necessarily a threat to the Romantic’s existence. The rude force of unequivocalness not only destroyed the order of the confusions, but also shattered the magic of imagination. This magic alone could hold together a “self-formed world” and conjure it up again and again in the mind; once the magic went to pieces, the person was exposed to the reality of this world whose banality his imagination, which had already anticipated everything, could no longer endure. Either reality smashed the magic, bringing sudden sobriety; or else it attacked from behind in the shape of “unpleasant chance.” But in any case, reality always came too late. From dread of the unequivocal, simplistic triviality of the Real, the Romantic always retreated back to the contradictions within himself.
That lasting ambiguities existed at all was the paradox of the Romantic life. Just as the paradox existed only in the moment, only in the last intensification of introspection, and could never survive the longer spans of life, so the Romantic’s paradoxical existence was possible only as an ephemeral phase. The continuity of life imposes upon it a simplifying consistency and gives its fragmentary character a destructive reality. Then continuity produces not “new circumstances and new forces” (Herder), but the boredom of empty time.
Friedrich Schlegel had not been able to endure the process of aging, the continuance of life. He had been incapable of coping with time; his magic could only stand up to the deceptive reality of the moment. Schlegel possessed the same kind of personal magnetism which made Rahel famous during that period. She too, once she had become rigid, was able to play the part demanded by the moment. She could work her magic upon all who came to her; she was able to handle the miscellaneous personalities of her salon; she was in her element when she was able to play so upon her circle that each person said exactly what was most brilliant at the particular moment. Never again was she as effective as she was during this period; never again did she wield such power over people; never again did she impress people as so entirely herself in all her uniqueness.
Magic has power over people, but no power over time. It cannot command time to stand still. It can no more prevent aging than it can prevent the triumph of the “absurd regularity” to which everyone ultimately succumbs if he has not the dubious good fortune to die young.
In “romantic confusion” there lay a chance to permit reality to break in. Schlegel threw that chance away because he himself could endure his confusion only in the imagination, in the enchantment of mood; he never really created confusion within himself; for he desired balance and ultimate harmony.
Gideon Levy interview from Iceland - excellent. And the man who survived the accident and coma and won a car then $AUD 250,000 - 1998 - I wasn't in Australia then - had never heard of it! Incroyable! Thanks for both pieces.
Gideon Levy interview from Iceland - excellent. And the man who survived the accident and coma and won a car then $AUD 250,000 - 1998 - I wasn't in Australia then - had never heard of it! Incroyable! Thanks for both pieces.
Thanks Jim.