BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2023-07-13 Th
…why conservative authoritarians talk so much like liberal freedom-valuers, & Benjamin Constant’s ancient & modern liberty in þe shadow of Napoleon Bonaparte…
MUST-READ: France, & Diversity vs. Cosmopolitanism:
France is a diverse but not a cosmopolitan country. And, as John Burn-Murdoch observes, this is now a big problem:
John Burn-Murdoch: French riots show how entrenched inequalities have become: ‘The gulf between immigrants and those born in the country is larger than in almost any other developed nation…. In 2021, US unemployment was 5.5 per cent for those born in the country, and 5.6 per cent for those born overseas. Black and white employment rates are now neck and neck. In France, unemployment is seven per cent among those born in the country, but 12 per cent for immigrants, rising past 17 per cent among those who arrived in the last ten years…. Last Friday as the unrest escalated, the two largest police unions released a statement declaring they were “at war” with “vermin” and “savage hordes”. This culture of hostility has grown since Nicolas Sarkozy abandoned neighbourhood policing two decades ago, in favour of more repressive tactics…
Britain, also, is a diverse but not a cosmopolitan country, However, Greater London is a cosmopolitan city:
Janan Ganesh: Diverse is not the same as cosmopolitan: ‘Each [couple]… expresses an itch to move to London…. testifies that it is more “cosmopolitan”…. Now, if I tell you that one of the couples lives in Paris and the other in New York, you might perk up a bit. No one, after all, walks round those two cities and bemoans a lack of human diversity.… [But] being diverse is not the same as being cosmopolitan. One is a material fact…. The other is… a mental state… knowing about the world, and not much caring…. informed indifference. Some people fall down on the first point…. Their experience is narrow. Others flunk the second test. Their focus on ethnic or other group identities can be draining and even dehumanising to be around…. If a city can be diverse while not being cosmopolitan, can it be cosmopolitan while not being diverse?… Trieste or Venice…. To qualify as cosmopolitan, a place has to be multicultural, I think, not just multi-ethnic. A melting pot is a noble thing. So is assimilation…. But neither suggests a nonchalance about difference. No, that takes a special degree of self-esteem in the host territory to pull off. The unspoken statement is, “The essence of this place can survive all change”…
But a majority of the rest of England, at least, is jealous and suspicious of Greater London, and has been attempting to be at war with it for more than a decade. This is also a problem. Greater London is a cosmopolitan gem. But is it sustainable? The rest of England, a majority of it at least, does not seem to mind impoverishing itself if doing so causes bigger problems, or at least can be claimed to cause bigger problems, for the citizens of Londontown.
And you might express the same worries about New York—which, right now, seems, at least the pieces of it that I typically see, very cosmopolitan indeed.
The thing that makes me more confident about New York’s (and Los Angeles’s) future as a cosmopolitan city than about the other two’s future is that, while there is a frighteningly plausible way a group of grifters can play the ethno-nationalism card to construct a durable apparatus of rule in France and in England, it requires freakish mischance for such a bunch of grifters to gain even a momentary hold on national power in the United States because American nationalism cannot plausibly be given an ethnic core.
Those who try—well, Donald Trump did not think he would become president. And it was, paradoxically, the fact that people from FBI Director James Comey to Dean Baquet and his entire staff at the New York Times agreed with Trump, and so thought it would be beneficial for them and costless for the nation to spend 2016 trying to damage Hillary Rodham Clinton politically, that gave him his chance.
But is there a country other than the United States plus the British Dominions—Canada, Australia, New Zealand—and Singapore where nationalism does not have a dominant ethnic core? I used to say: India. But I do not say that any longer.
ONE IMAGE: Yes, I Am Ashamed of & for Clarence Thomas; Why Do You Ask?
Here is very smart commentary:
Scott Lemieux: The bullshit-originalist case against affirmative action: ‘Affirmative action has always been an area of law where Clarence Thomas has refused to even pretend to engaging in “originalist” jurisprudence, for the obvious reason that any “originalist” argument that the 14th Amendment prevented race-conscious efforts to remedy racial inequities is farcical. In SFFA v. Harvard, Thomas does refer to to attempts to gin up an “originalist” case against affirmative action, but as Adam Serwer observes, it would have been better if he had just continued to ignore the issue entirely. His argument is literally that the Freedman’s Bureau was “race-neutral” because while almost all freedmen were Black not all Black people where freedman…
ONE VIDEO: Jay Powell After June’s Federal Reserve Interest Rate-Hiking “Pause”:
Very Briefly Noted:
Paul Krugman: Why the dollar is still everywhere: ‘The Federal Reserve… finds that… dominance has “remained stable over the past 20 years” and that “diminution of the dollar’s status seems unlikely in the near term.” Why would anyone think otherwise?…
Mike Masnick: Seven Rules For Internet CEOs To Avoid Enshittification…
Dan Davies: taleb as miseducator (part 4): ‘An ending, for now…. In real world applications… you don’t know the odds and you might not even know the payoffs… [and so] the point of a lot of the mathematical appendixes… is that it never makes sense to take risks of the sort that can fundamentally impair your ability to come back…
Noah Smith: China at the peak: ‘The country’s rise is complete, but don’t expect a rapid decline…. How much greater would China’s peak have been if Deng Xiaoping had sided with the Tiananmen Square protesters?… How many great Chinese books, essays, video games, cartoons, TV shows, movies, and songs would we now enjoy if it weren’t for the pervasive censorship regime?…
Charley Johnson: Does generative AI have ‘emergent’ properties?: ‘AI chatbots are just knowledge sausages—read to understand what on earth I mean by that…. Theodore Kim…. “Claiming that complex outputs arising from even more complex inputs is ‘emergent behavior’ is like finding a severed finger in a hot dog and claiming the hot dog factory has learned to create fingers…
Adam Cohen: Stick or twist? Conservative Supreme Court justices have a choice: ‘We now have what one commentator has called a YOLO (“you only live once”) court whose six-member supermajority did not flinch…
Indigo: Small Change: The Complete Trilogy: ‘Farthing, Ha’penny, Half A Crown; by JO WALTON; Introduction by J. Bradford de Long…. Tor Essentials presents new editions of science fiction and fantasy titles of proven merit and lasting value, each volume introduced by an appropriate literary figure…
Robbie Whelan & Vibhuti Agarwal: Spider-Man’s Pavitr Prabhakar, Based on Peter Parker, Drives India Wild: ‘Sony Pictures’ “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse,” is smashing box-office records in India and generating unusual fervor because it features a character thought to be the first Indian superhero to appear in an American blockbuster…
James Fallows: ‘On a Friday in July, modestly played Pro Publica story effectively walking back their wildly trumpeted “Lab Leak” exclusive last fall (w Vanity Fair)…. No byline on this story…
Henry Farrell: Debt: ‘Graeber is… a writer of speculative nonfiction… wrong on the facts… push[ing] them farther than they really ought to be pushed… shallow foundations of evidence… [under] a heavy load of very strongly asserted theoretical claims. But… sometimes it is less valuable to be right than to expand the space of perceived social and political possibilities…
¶s:
States were often highly coercive. But so was the absence of a state. I think it is difficult to make the argument that it is in general worse to be under the hegemony of a state than to be under the hegemony of a very local powerful lineage. Is one’s life more constrained by hegemony in Edinburgh, near Rosneath Castle, or around Castle Hill Henge? There is a strong argument that where mercantile (and later industrial) capitalism get tied to staple plantation production for the market and with slavery things get very, very bad indeed. There is also a powerful argument that it was better to be a free farmer in the Seine or the Thames valleys under the Dominate of the successors of Domitian in the 300s than to be a thrall of the Saxons or a serf of the Normans 300 years later.
That said, there is a lot to learn from the history of the kingdoms of Africa. An imperial peace without the mercantile-plantation-slavery complex is a precious thing. And, often we think, African kingdoms managed to achieve that:
Alice Evans: Why was Ancient Nubia less controlling than Ancient Egypt?: ‘There is a fantastic new book on the kingdoms of Ancient Africa, including Egypt, Nubia, Sudan, Ethiopia, Yoruba, Asante, Kongo, Buganda and Zulu. Great Kingdoms of Africa begins with a very important premise. States were often coercive, so should not be celebrated as more ‘advanced civilisations’. I think this is a really important mentality. While grandiose palaces are aesthetically impressive, surplus was usually extracted from labourers who lived in squalor. This is a useful corrective to narratives that dismiss or denigrate small-scale societies, as well as to those who defensively hype-up small kingdoms…
Before I read this, I never understood the attractiveness of what they called “libertarianism” to people who otherwise seemed to be enthusiastic lovers of modes of domination—cultural, sociological, and land-based:
John Holbo: Vavilovian Philosophical Mimicry: ‘In a liberal democratic society… based on egalitarian principles… expressions of… animus [against egalitarian principles] will survive and thrive better if they mimic something that looks consistent with liberal democracy. So: the logic of philosophical conservatism is… distinct, basically anti-liberal impulses… [transformed by] a selection process through which they individually learn to express themselves so as to ‘pass’ as liberal…. You are proposing doing something that would keep African-Americans down… because that’s what you want. But you can’t say that…. You can plausibly pretend it’s a (merely temporarily uncomfortable) stage on the way to some sort of ideal libertarian night watchman end-state…. Nominal commitment to some distant, ideally liberal end-state covers a variety of present, anti-liberal sins. So philosophical conservatism… 1) an element of… animus against the agency of the subordinate classes…. 2) an element of Vavilovian, pseudo-liberal mimicry…[that,] because they are protective mimicry, are actually misleading…. 3) considerable liberal democratic DNA. It’s rare to run into a real, dyed-in-the-wool Joseph de Maistre-type. 4) 2 may result in 3, over time, via ‘fake it until you make it’, if you see what I mean…
Benjamin Constant has long been known for his contrast between the freedom of the Spartans—who were, individually, slaves to the harshest master made up of the laws of Lykourgos, but collectively mastered by none and the freeest city of all time—and the modern freedom of the liberal individual who pays his taxes and otherwise is free to live his (and it is a ‘“his”) life subject only to his ability to find counterparties and associates. But, as Jennings points out, Constant was terrified by the fact that modern freedom offers no defense against a takeover by a Bonaparte. Hence we need to recapture ancient collective freedom, as well as maintain the achivements of our modern liberalism:
Jeremy Jennings: Liberty in the Shadow of Bonaparte: ‘Benjamin Constant’s considered response not only to the mass murder inflicted by the French Revolution, but to the attempt to reduce the whole French population to the condition of willing slaves under Bonaparte’s First Empire, provides a diagnosis of the character of many subsequent totalitarian regimes…. The First Empire… was a novel form of usurpation… arbitrary and illegal power… centralisation… impos[ing] uniformity and unanimity… more to be feared than the traditional forms of absolut[ist] despotism…. ‘Despotism rules by means of silence, and leaves man the right to be silent; usurpation condemns him to speak… forcing him to lie to his own conscience.’… Constant concluded his lecture with the assertion that, rather than abandoning one or other of the two forms of liberty, we had to learn of necessity ‘to combine the two together’…. The individual and civil liberty we now treasured could only be guaranteed through the continued existence of [collective] political liberty. It was not to happiness alone but to our self-development that we were called, and political liberty was the most effective means of achieving that end….Fortunately, the mechanisms of representative democracy now made possible such political engagement in modern, large-scale societies…