Spring Bazaar
The round up of what's around
Dear friends,
Somewhat less time for reading recently, so a slightly shorter Bazaar this time, but many of these pieces were too timely to hold off for the May edition. Regardless, there’s still more here than you’ll have time to read - but perhaps you’ll appreciate this snapshot of the broader discourse all the same!
Vatican City
You’ve doubtless heard of the passing of Pope Francis. Despite never having been a Catholic I, like many folks, had a mixed relationship with this extremely unusual pontiff. Yet unlike most, I always appreciated the very fact that he was unusual. Rather than giving you an obituary, I’d like to share this piece by Christopher R. Altieri entitled “What did Pope Francis say in Singapore about religions as paths to God?”, which discussed what the late Pope actually said to his audience (of mostly non-Christians) in Singapore. Here’s the key quote from Altieri’s piece:
What Francis said was: Tutte le religioni sono un cammino per arrivare a Dio. “All religions are path[way]s to reach God.” Msgr. Christopher Washington of the Secretariat of State’s English Section did an admirable job rendering the off-the-cuff remark in the moment, offering: “Every religion is a way to arrive at God.” Notate bene: He did not say they all get a fellow where he’s meant to go, not on their own. His use of an extended comparison likening religions to “languages” or “idioms” may have suggested something like the idea that it is a matter of indifference which path one takes or happens to be taking just now. Accounting for that as a misimpression is fairly straightforward, even if Francis will bear all the responsibility and some of the blame for it. Analogies limp, even the best-drawn of them, and this was not among those.
Far too many Christians (especially but not exclusively Protestants) make an idol out of the Gospel of John, perhaps presuming that one cannot make commit idolatry in the context of the scriptures. I have always disagreed on this point. And on this topic, I align very much with the late Pope Francis: all religions are pathways to reach God, paradoxically even those that cannot find a purpose for the word ‘God’. Where you set off, and where you reach, are two very different places.
Hungary
One of the major political battlegrounds right now is Hungary, with the Fidesz party locked in conflict with the European Union’s technocracy. Recent events have walked right into an ideological minefield sure to bolster critics of Orbán. Here’s Csongor Körömi at Politico with “Orbán bans Pride in Hungary as polls show rival surging”:
The move against the Pride march is one of the strongest examples yet of Fidesz’s efforts to snare marginalized extremist voters in order to reach a majority. If, for example, the party could attract the 6 percent of voters currently saying they will opt for the far-right Mi Hazánk party, that would be enough to catch up to Magyar’s Tisza. The majority of Hungarian voters, though, wouldn’t support a ban on Pride. According to a poll, only 36 percent of voters would support banning the march, while 56 percent would keep it open. Budapest’s liberal attitude is striking, with 78 percent of the capital’s residents wanting to keep Pride public.
I note that many of those objecting to this ban are invoking threats to freedom of assembly. However, during the Nonsense, Hungary (also under Orbán) disabled freedom of assembly, even though there were no legitimate reasons to do so. It is not a right if you can turn it off and on again on demand. As a matter of personal politics, I oppose both these cancellations of a supposed right. But as a matter of principle, I defend Hungary’s democratic mandate to establish how it will govern its own affairs, and I leave it to the Hungarians to resolve this dispute in their own way. I believe in them, and I know they can figure this out.
Japan
I very much enjoy Peter Hourdequin’s essays and rambles. Here’s one of the latter simply entitled “Observers”, riffing off of Roland Barthes and Byung-chul Han:
Han is correct to point out that ritual and play are both important in Japanese society, but aren’t they in every society? I had the privilege of visiting the U.K. recently, and I attended a thing called . . . ah yes, a play! I saw the attendees shaking hands and chatting in their own particular ways: ritual greetings, social graces, quiet and applause at all the right times, etc. How is this any different? Han may be correct to point out that patterns of ritual and play appear to be breaking down in some places, but I also wonder if some of Han’s heady flaneur’s view of ritual and play—and the crisis of its disappearance—partly just speaks of his own isolation and the sense of isolation that so many netizens and global nomads feel today.
UK
The excellent David McGrogan recently posted this salient discussion of the transition from human rights as I (or Kant) would understand them into a set of conditional privileges. It’s entitled “A Lesson in Authoritarianism”:
That things should move in the direction of a ‘right to participate’ - with the civic space being increasingly carefully curated in the interests of some conception of how best to maximise utility - is therefore simply natural when there is no underlying rationale for the State’s existence beyond satisfying needs and wants. If it must satisfy needs and wants it must in practice select which to satisfy, and this implies managerialism, not freedom.
United States: Trump vs Harvard
This barney has been the main event in news-entertainment in recent weeks - and it’s a fascinating showdown!
It all began with the letter Josh Gruenbaum, Sean R. Keveney, and Thomas E. Wheeler sent on behalf of the current Trump administration to Harvard University. Here’s a quote from the letter:
Harvard has in recent years failed to live up to both the intellectual and civil rights conditions that justify federal investment. But we appreciate your expression of commitment to repairing those failures and welcome your collaboration in restoring the University to its promise. We therefore present the below provisions as the basis for an agreement in principle that will maintain Harvard’s financial relationship with the federal government.
A large part of this letter contains the shocking suggestion that Harvard follow what is required by US law, but a lot of the proposed means of addressing these problems look highly problematic (see FIRE’s commentary, below).
Here’s the response of Harvard’s President, Alan M. Gerber:
No government—regardless of which party is in power—should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.
I agree with the quoted point above. Yet I fear what Gerber means is something like ‘we want to carry on breaking US civil law to hire faculty and accept as students those whom we have chosen to mark out as possessing preferential identity characteristics’. Harvard have most certainly violated Title VI… but still, this isn’t an appropriate way to bring them to account.
I encourage anyone interested in this dispute to read both letters. This is nowhere near as straightforward as the news coverage has suggested. Don’t forget, as just one relevant example, that in 1983, during the Reagan administration, Bob Jones University was denied federal funding for opposing interracial marriage. We’re definitely not in unprecedented territory here, and I find it hard to see Harvard as ‘the good guys’ for preferring racial prejudice in their hiring and admissions process, even if the Trump administration’s response oversteps any reasonable mark. But then… so did the Obama and Biden administrations beforehand, admittedly on an arguably smaller scale than this current furore. But still, the rot in university campus free speech is not new!
If you want a really good deep dive on the issues in Trump vs Harvard, check out FIRE’s commentary “Harvard in the Crosshairs” by Greg Lukianoff. FIRE blocked the Obama and Biden administrations when they tried to act unconstitutionally towards universities, and they’re blocking the Trump administration now. That’s what it’s like to have principles, something neither party in the US can manage any more. Here’s two quotes from Lukianoff:
As I mentioned above, Harvard is far from innocent. Perhaps more than any other institution (other than Columbia), it has cultivated an institutional monoculture — one that proved to be a fertile breeding ground for anti-Semitism. The predictable consequences of that monoculture are also at the root of Harvard’s last-place finishes in our student rankings. In addition, anti-Semitism is a real problem on college campuses — Harvard included. I have been adamant about that, and it is why I want religion explicitly added to the categories covered by Title VI. The government is not imagining the problem of anti-Semitism on college campuses, and it should take action. Just not this action.
And:
Could Harvard still be found to have violated Title VI, and possibly other laws, for its failure to stop anti-Semitism or their affirmative action efforts? Of course. But it is still entitled to due process. The government cannot freeze funding to impose punitive sanctions on an institution without determining, through the appropriate processes, that those punishments are warranted.
It’s also worth remembering that Harvard sits upon the planet’s largest academic' dragon hoard, $53 billion. If they don’t want to comply, they could easily decline the government funding (although this isn’t anything like what will actually happen). What’s being gambled here is far more than money, it is prestige. And in that regard, I don’t believe Harvard has a winning move. Because whether they fight or comply, they will not restore the damage they’ve already suffered in terms of its once-stellar reputation. We could even be witnessing the end of the so-called ‘elite universities’, which I would welcome… but I’m not holding my breath.
United States: Free Speech
As the previous section makes clear, the First Amendment is a major battleground right now - and thank God for that! Because I feared we’d all just decided to roll over and give up on free expression entirely. I have a few more pieces that are about free speech but aren’t about Harvard.
Let’s start with C.J. Hopkins provocative open letter to Jay Bhattacharya, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and J.D. Vance:
So, I am asking you all, please, stop this. Set an example by holding to your principles. Your democratic principles. Your American principles. Speak out, as you have for me. Speak out against your administration’s blatant crackdown on political dissent. Speak out against the Salvadoran gulag thing. Speak out against the increasingly totalitarian tenor of your administration’s messaging. Speak out against the dystopian spectacle it is feeding the revenge-hungry MAGA masses.
Meanwhile, Greg Collard at Racket reports on an enquiry by The Free Press that I would have shared but it’s behind a paywall. Collard’s piece is entitled “The Numbers Behind The Government’s Anti-Misinformation Explosion”:
However, I would say that the descriptions of programs on federal documents under Biden was a notable difference—as some appeared to more specifically align with the ideological priorities of the Democrats: using terms like “racial equity,” “Latinx,” or other left-leaning terminology championed by the Biden administration. Under Trump 1.0, in other words, the anti-misinformation circus quietly gained a foothold in the U.S. by advertising itself in broad strokes that, in theory, many might agree with: countering extremism or online harassment, for example. But in practice, the programs were far more complicated and often partisan.
US: Partisan Politics
Very much enjoyed Michael Baharaeen’s “How Perception Gaps Fuel America’s Political and Cultural Conflicts” at The Liberal Patriot:
America’s political and cultural conflicts are reaching a fever pitch, and something has to give. Most people surely don’t want to go the way of total ruin, marked by violence between neighbors and possibly even family members. We’ve seen that story before; it doesn’t end well. The only other option is for Americans who abhor the idea of that future to work together and chart a different one. This may be easier said than done—after all, as the Times analysis showed, the formation of our bubbles isn’t always intentional. But if we hope to keep the country’s experiment in self-government alive for another 250 years, working to puncture those bubbles and revitalize America’s civic spaces must be.
Amen to that!
The Nonsense
Great sympathy for the account of Serena Tinari via Trust the Evidence “Requiem for Journalism”:
The COVID era left journalism with broken bones: from Fourth Estate to microphone holder. Corporate press releases on the front page, CEOs tasked with pontificating on complex health policy policies. Verification? No. And while most of my colleagues were busy amplifying government press conferences, fact-checkers took care of the rest. As if analysis, evidence and verifications were not the salt of journalism, these extravagant figures were delegated the certification of Truth. As journalists lost themselves in the cult of the expert in a white coat, the Orwellian “Ministry of True Science” was born.
It cannot be mentioned often enough.
Philosophy
‘Nationalism’ has become equated with horror. Which is bizarre, and has led inevitably to an utter undermining of the nation state and thus of citizen democracy. There’s no avoiding the fact that to have a democracy, one must first have a demos. In this regard, I greatly appreciated Frank Furedi’s nuanced account in “The Nation State Returns But Nationalism Awaits Its Rehabilitation”, which is so good I didn’t even roll my eyes when Nazis were mentioned!
The rise of Nazi aggression, the catastrophe of the Second World War and the Holocaust are often perceived as the inevitable consequence of nationalist rivalries and ideologies. From this standpoint national attachments are interpreted as a cultural resource that are dangerous because they can be mobilised to promote exclusionary and racial causes. That is why in practice the classical distinctions drawn between patriotism, identification with the nation, republican, civic, cultural, religious and racial nationalism has lost some of its force. According to this teleological conception of nationalism, what at first appears as an innocent manifestation of national identity and loyalty in the 19th century inevitably crystallised into menacing political ideology, of which Nazism is its most barbaric manifestation.
And also from the same piece:
The war against the past has played an important role in weakening people’s national attachment and their identification with their nation. Consequently, all the important values that underpin nationalism as powerful motivating force – loyalty, duty, courage – have also been weakened. Whether or not nationalism can return as a powerful mobilizing force in the West depends on its ability to reconnect with past so that the values of loyalty and duty can retain its meaning to contemporary society.
Puppies and Kittens
Okay, not strictly a puppy, but I still want to leave you with this harrowing-but-heart-warming story that I found via Julia Gomez and Saman Shafiq’s reporting at USA Today: “Missing Arizona toddler found 7 miles from home with rancher’s dog: ‘He wouldn’t leave him’”:
The rancher, Scotty Dunton, said he had heard about the missing toddler and was headed to town when he spotted him. “When I was driving out the driveway, I noticed my dog was sitting down by the entrance,” said Dunton, who owns Dunton Ranch in Kingman. “I look up and the little kid’s standing there with my dog. I can’t believe that kid made it that far.”
There is much more joy and compassion in our worlds than the news corporations are prepared to show.
With unlimited love,
Chris.
