Over at the SSRC’s Transformations of the Public Sphere, Stephen Walt, Rogers Smith and Lisa Anderson discuss the role that scholars of international affairs should play in the public sphere. Walt:

Social scientists are far from omniscient, but the rigor of the scientific process and the core values of academia should give university-based scholars an especially valuable role within the broader public discourse on world affairs. At its best, academic scholarship privileges creativity, validity, accuracy, and rigor and places little explicit value on political expediency. The norms and procedures of the academic profession make it less likely that scholarly work will be tailored to fit pre-conceived political agendas. When this does occur, the self-correcting nature of academic research makes it more likely that politically motivated biases or other sources of error will be exposed. Although we know that scholarly communities do not always live up to this ideal picture, the existence of these basic norms gives the academic world some important advantages over think tanks, media pundits, and other knowledge-producing institutions.

Yet the precise role that academic scholars of international affairs should play is not easy to specify. Indeed, there appear to be two conflicting ways of thinking about this matter.

On the one hand, there is a widespread sense that academic research on global affairs is of declining practical value, either as a guide to policymakers or as part of broader public discourse about world affairs.

Smith:

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Peter Berger in The American Interest:

In phase one, lasting up to the early 1980s, he [Jurgen Habermas] still viewed religion as an “alienating reality”, a tool of domination for the powerful. In good Marxist tradition, he thought that religion would eventually disappear, as modern society comes to be based on “communicative rationality” and no longer needs the old irrational illusions. In phase two, roughly 1985-2000, this anti-religious animus is muted. Religion now is seen as unlikely to disappear, because many people (though presumably not Habermas) continue to need its consolations. The public sphere, however, must be exclusively dominated by rationality. Religion must be relegated to private life. One could say that in this phase, at least in the matter of religion, Habermas graduated from Marxism to the French ideal of laicite—the public life of the republic kept antiseptically clean of religious contamination.

Phase three is more interesting. As of the late 1990s Habermas’ view of religion is more benign. Religion is now seen as having a useful public function, quite apart from its private consolations. The “colonization” of society by “turbo-capitalism” (nice term—I don’t know if Habermas coined it) has created a cultural crisis and has undermined the solidarity without which democratic rationality cannot function. We are now moving into a “post-secular society”, which can make good use of the “moral intuition” that religion still supplies. Following in the footsteps of Ernst Bloch and other neo-Marxist philo-Godders, Habermas also credits Biblical religion, Judaism and Christianity, for having driven out magical thinking (here there is an echo of Max Weber’s idea of “ the disenchantment of the world”), and for having laid the foundations of individual autonomy and rights.

Alix Spiegel at NPR:

In November 1941, two ships crossed paths off the coast of Australia. One was the German raider HSK Kormoran. The other: an Australian warship called the HMAS Sydney. Guns were fired, the ships were damaged, and both sank to the bottom of the ocean.

The loss of the Sydney in World War II was a national tragedy for the Australians, particularly because none of the 645 men onboard survived. In the years that followed, there was intense interest in finding the wrecks, particularly the wreck of the Sydney. The idea was that doing this might give the families of the lost sailors some measure of peace, a sense of closure and certainty.

The problem was that the only witnesses to the battle and the sinking were about 300 German sailors who had abandoned their ship after it had been hit. They were eventually picked up by the Australian military.

After their capture, most of these Germans were interrogated and asked to identify where the ships had gone down. But the Germans seemed quite fuzzy on this point.

Bob Trotter, a former director of the Finding Sydney Foundation, a nonprofit group established to help find the Sydney, says their ignorance isn't all that surprising.

“Particularly in a wartime situation, the position of the ship is really kept in the bridge area,” Trotter says. “It would not be normal that the rest of the ship's company would be told.”

Still, in the course of their interrogations, about 70 Germans did come up with a location. But those locations, taken together, didn't make much sense — the positions were spread out, smeared over hundreds of miles. One survivor even placed the sinking almost halfway to Antarctica.

More here.

Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

Everybody is talking about ruins these days. That could be a bad sign. Detroit, in particular, seems to have captured the fancy of the ruin enthusiast. Detroit has experienced a 25 percent reduction in population over the last 10 years or so. Whole areas of the city have been abandoned. You can see entire neighborhoods in ruin, skyscrapers in ruin, a vastly depopulated downtown area. Camilo José Vergara, a photographer specializing in urban decay, once suggested in the mid-1990s that large sections of downtown Detroit be turned into a “skyscraper ruins park.” It would be a testimonial to a lost age, preserved in stone and metal and glass. Today, people sometimes travel to places like Detroit and other Rust Belt locations for the sole reason of gazing upon the ruins.

There have been the dissenters, too, the people who do not take or do not want to take aesthetic pleasure in industrial and urban ruins. The phrase “ruin porn” has made its way into popular parlance. Noreen Malone wrote a piece for The New Republic this year about our love of pictures of the abandoned streets and buildings of Detroit. She argued:

These indelible pictures present an un-nuanced and static vision of Detroit. They might serve to “raise awareness” of the Rust Belt’s blight, but raising awareness is only useful if it provokes a next step, a move toward trying to fix a problem. By presenting Detroit, and other hurting cities like it, as places beyond repair, they in fact quash any such instinct.

Malone is right about one thing: Vergara’s photographs do not suggest a next step.

More here.

A son of the Middle Border, born and raised in Nebraska before his parents moved to Chicago, Lasch, writes Eric Miller, “was a surveyor, taking the measure of the wilderness.” The wilderness was modern America. What Lasch discovered there were pathologies advertised as “progress,” promoted by elites for their own benefit with little regard for the common good. Miller, who teaches history at Geneva College, has written a biography of Lasch, with the evocative title Hope in a Scattering Time. A fine, thoughtful, and even moving book, its appearance could hardly be more opportune. In our own day, the politics of progress have passed the point of exhaustion. Were there any lingering doubts on that score, the vast disparity between the expectations raised by President Obama’s election and the dispiriting reality of the Obama Era has dispelled them once and for all. Only knaves and fools will look to Washington to devise solutions to the problems afflicting American society today. Indeed, further deference to established centers of power, on issues domestic or foreign, will surely perpetuate and even exacerbate those problems.

more from Andrew Bacevich at Anamnesis here.

Almost all of Antunes’s books revolve around the Portuguese Colonial War—a crucial bit of Portuguese history that is little-known to Americans. Admittedly, this is one of the challenges of reading an Antunes book—a fate he shares with plenty of international authors—but I’d say that Antunes in particular deals with an obscure point of history. He benefits quite a bit from the omnipresence of smartphones capable of looking up cities, revolutionary groups, events. To paint broadly for a moment, the basic background to all of Antunes’s novels is this: “Prime Minister” Salazar has been in control of Portugal for some three decades, right up until Portugal’s colonies—namely Angola and Mozambique—rise up and fight for independence. Salazar—like every dictator and Republican president known to man—benefitted the wealthy and sent the lower-middle classes to fight in his war. He benefitted from being not quite as bad as neighboring Franco, but his secret police kept the people in check until he was overthrown in 1974, in the middle of the Colonial War. So you have people like Antunes stationed in Africa, trying to repress the natives on behalf of a dictator that only the wealthiest strata of society believed in, and who is suddenly deposed in the Carnation Revolution, a fairly bloodless uprising. At this point the war-broken soldiers come home to a country that’s moved on, that doesn’t really accept them back into the fold, so to speak.

more from Chad Post at The Quarterly Conversation here.

With Adonis the front runner for the Nobel Prize in Literature again, I was reminded of this article by Adam Shatz in the New York Times almost a decade ago:

“I am among those who seek the ills of the Arabs in their own history, not outside of it,” he said. An outspoken champion of secular democracy and a ferocious critic of organized religion, Adonis has published many studies of Arab culture and history, notably the book “The Changing and the Fixed: A Study of Conformity and Originality in Arab Culture.” In that volume, banned in certain Arab countries as heresy, Adonis accused Islam's clerics of perpetuating what he calls past-ism — a stubborn tendency to cling to what is known and to fear the new. According to Adonis, even apparently secular forms of politics in the Arab world, notably Arab nationalism and Marxism, are religious in structure, presenting themselves as revelations — absolute truths that confirm received wisdom instead of fostering debate.

“We live in a culture that doesn't leave a space for questions,” he said, puffing on a cigarillo. “It knows all the answers in advance. Even God has nothing left to say!” He let out a high-pitched giggle, as he often does after saying something particularly ominous or apocalyptic. What the Arab world needs, more than anything, he said, is a “revolution of subjectivity” that would emancipate people from tradition. Until this inner revolution occurs, he warned, Arabs would know only a secondhand modernity, a dangerous brew of hollow consumerism, rigged elections and radical Islam. “There is no more culture in the Arab world,” he said. “It's finished. Culturally speaking, we are a part of Western culture, but only as consumers, not as creators.”

To American readers of Fouad Ajami and V. S. Naipaul, Adonis's criticisms of Arab society may have a familiar ring. But what sets him apart from these men is that he writes in Arabic for an Arab audience, and that he is equally critical of the West, particularly the United States. “What strikes me about the States,” he said, widening his arms as if he were conducting the Berlin Philharmonic, “is the richness of American society on the one hand and, on the other” — he brought his hands together as if he were measuring a grain of sand — “the smallness of its foreign policy.”

Horst Bredekamp on Josef H. Reichholf's The Origin of Beauty: Darwin's greatest Dilemma in Sign and Sight:

Well-meaning critics struggled to conceal their perplexity, behind which laid a thick wall of denial. The second part of “Descent of Man” published in 1871 contained Charles Darwin's treatise on “sexual selection”, which presented perhaps his greatest failure. Darwin was confronted with the problem of not believing that nature, which was literally exploding with variety and diversity, could be explained solely with the aid of “natural selection”. To resolve this conflict he came up with the theory of “sexual” selection, making the female eye the agent of evolution. “Female choice” as he called it, was in no only way solely obligated to follow a commitment to strength and guaranteed survival; the female interest essentially followed another principle, one that could be described as the desire for variation. This meant that Darwin was defining nature, to a certain extent, as a history of erotic form – or even art. In regarding the bodies of animals as self-produced images, he defined his second pillar of evolution as an astonishing pictorial theatre which arose out of the interplay of the female eye in the search for variation and the readiness of the male to mutate.

Fellow naturalists like Alfred R. Wallace were so dismissive of Darwin's theory because they could not accept the existence of a variational drive independent of the pressure to conform to the environment.

Evolutionary biology has never managed to shake off this discomfort, even if the theory of sexual selection continues to be picked up by outsiders and has been cautiously integrated into and developed by the mainstream. The misgivings were also culturally determined. Unlike Darwin's 1859 treatise “The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life” which hit a nerve at a time when the struggle for survival was being unleashed under the conditions of burgeoning capitalism, his concept of sexual selection inadvertently struck at the neurotic core of the Victorian obsession with controlling drives. This provoked a resistance whose unacknowledged psychological roots made it virtually invincible.

Bruno S Frey and Jana Gallus make the case for religion as happiness insurance:

Modern happiness research leaves no doubt that religious people are happier than their contemporaries. And the causality runs from religion to happiness (though it might also be possible that religious people are less interested in material aspects and, therefore, less affluent).

* One of the studies supporting this assumption was provided by Headey et al. (2010). Based on data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, they find that individuals who turn to religion over time become, ceteris paribus, more satisfied, while those turning away from it suffer a loss in their quality of life.

* A comparison of multivariate estimates of happiness functions shows that, even when controlling for other influences, deism is highly positively correlated with life satisfaction across all countries (Frey and Stutzer 2002, Dolan et al. 2008, Frey 2010).

In the US, for example, 48% of those who describe themselves as “very happy” attend church service at least once a week; this compares to a share of merely 26% made up by those who never go to church (Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life 2007).

But the relevance of these results is not only restricted to the individual level. Focusing on whole countries as units of measurement, receding religiousness could be a predictor of a decline in life quality, all other factors held constant. Given the fact that life satisfaction eventually also influences productivity, it becomes clear why the topic should be policy relevant.

Ingrid Robeyns reviews Martha Nussbaum's Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach, in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews:

The publication of this book should be much welcomed, since apart from An Introduction to the Human Development and Capabilities Approach, which has been edited by Séverine Deneulin, no book-length introduction to the capabilities approach was available up until now. Creating Capabilities succeeds well in providing an accessible introduction. Yet introductory books, especially those written by leading scholars in the field, tend to skew the understanding of a theory toward their own favorite interpretation. It is important to highlight that other understandings are also around. In my discussion of the chapters I have already pointed at some aspects where not everyone would agree with the interpretation that is given inCreating Capabilities. Yet in my view the most significant point of disagreement may well be the description of the capabilities approach itself. Nussbaum sees it as a theory with two legs — theorizing about social justice on the one hand, and comparative quality of life assessment on the other. In the former she is the most prolific author, in the latter Sen is the most canonical figure. Yet I think it is possible to describe the capability approach in more general terms, namely as a theoretical framework that entails two core normative claims: first, the claim that the freedom to achieve well-being is of primary moral importance, and second, that freedom to achieve well-being is to be understood in terms of people's capabilities, that is, their real opportunities to do and be what they have reason to value.

This general description can then be developed into a variety of more specific normative theories, including, most famously, Nussbaum's (partial) theory of social justice and Sen's account of comparative quality of life assessment and development, but also as the basis for (or part of) social criticism, ethnographic studies, policy design in the area of family policies in welfare states, or even — potentially — as part of the design of a revolutionary blueprint of a post-capitalist economic system. By describing the capability approach as being either focused on social justice or on comparative quality of life issues, Nussbaum is not sufficiently recognizing the large variety of ways in which the approach is currently already used and is underestimating its potential. To my mind, the capability approach should be defined in more general and abstract terms, as a theory with a scope potentially as wide reaching as utilitiarianism. Philosophers should consider thinking of the capability approach as 'capabilitarianism'.

Jason Burke in Guernica:

Not much happened in Islamabad in 1998. Not much happened in Pakistan, in fact—or at least not much that troubled editors, viewers, readers, or policy makers in Europe or the United States. The country had slid inexorably away from international attention since the end of the war fought by the mujahideen against Soviet troops in neighboring Afghanistan almost a decade before. Most media organizations covered Pakistan from India. It was not a big story. The rediscovery of Pakistan and Afghanistan would come, with breathless haste, on September 12, 2001.

Just behind my apartment in Islamabad that year was a plot of land covered in mimosa trees, wild cannabis, and scrub. It was a graveyard, and though no one tended it or came to grieve at the dozen or so mounds of earth that lay among the rubbish under the trees, no one built on it either—though the potential for profitable development of such a prime piece of urban real estate was high. To one side of the graveyard was the substantial embassy of North Korea, to whom, it was whispered, Pakistan sold blueprints for nuclear bombs. These rumors were later proved to be at least partially true. Watching the embassy were two plainclothes intelligence agents, who usually sat on the pavement in the shade below a eucalyptus tree and read popular local-language newspapers. I knew them quite well after a while, and they smiled sheepishly when we greeted each other.

On the other side of the graveyard was the home of Benazir Bhutto.

More here.

Alexander Nazaryan in Salon:

America wants a Nobel Prize in literature. America demands it! America doesn’t understand why those superannuated Swedes haven’t given one to an American since Toni Morrison in 1993. America wonders what they’re waiting for with Philip Roth and Thomas Pynchon. America wonders how you say “clueless” in Swedish.

OK, enough. But the literature Nobel will be announced this Thursday and if an American doesn’t win yet again, there will be the usual entitled whining — the sound of which has been especially piercing since 2008, when Nobel Academy permanent secretary Horace Engdahl deemed American fiction “too isolated, too insular” and declared Europe “the centre of the literary world.”

Boy, were we upset. Over at Slate, Adam Kirsch penned a scathing essay declaring that “the Nobel committee has no clue about American literature,” arguing that Philip Roth should have won the prize. New Yorker editor David Remnick said, “You would think that the permanent secretary of an academy that pretends to wisdom but has historically overlooked Proust, Joyce and Nabokov, to name just a few non-Nobelists, would spare us the categorical lecture.” He added John Updike (then living) and Don DeLillo to the mix of worthy laureates.

It’s true that the Academy, like any body of judges, has made some ill-informed decisions. And they’ve not done themselves any favors with some George W. Bush-era selections that plainly had more to do with politics than literature.

More here.

Anyone driving from Pulkovo Airport into St Petersburg today passes an enormous memorial to the siege of Leningrad at the edge of the city. A vast obelisk is fronted by ranks of soldiers and workers, men and women who march out fearlessly in the direction of the front line only a few kilometres to the south. Erected in the early 1970s, the monument symbolises an official Soviet and now largely unaltered Russian narrative of the selfless and united blokadniki defending their besieged city. Leningrad does not seek to overturn this powerful story of heroism completely but it does argue that the reality of the siege was a good deal more complicated and ambiguous. In a magisterial telling of the story that is by turns inspiring and appalling, Reid reconstructs the lives of those caught up in one of the key conflicts of the Second World War and one of the twentieth century’s greatest human tragedies. The siege need not have been quite so devastating. The Soviet leadership had been caught unawares by the speed of Army Group North’s extraordinary, violent advance through the Baltic and failed to coordinate a proper evacuation of the city in the crucial window in August 1941 before the Wehrmacht closed in. Reid argues that while responsibility for the mass death lies squarely with the Germans, its lethal power was magnified by Soviet ‘denial, disorganisation and carelessness of human life’.

more from Daniel Beer at Literary Review here.

Pay attention to the poetry world, and you’ll notice a kind of false advertising: most of published criticism is positive even though so much of published poetry is bad. (This is probably why a lot of people don’t pay attention to the poetry world.) One reason for the dearth of critical comeuppances is that even bad poems are often hard to understand and harder to understand conclusively, so negative critics risk missing something and looking like fools. They misinterpret what they malign, they butcher what they slander. A way to acknowledge the problem without giving in to it is to qualify criticisms with an implicit “unless I’m missing something.” As in, unless I’m missing something, the line “At the end of one of the billion light-years of loneliness” sounds like a parody of a pop song. It describes an emotion without conveying it, exaggerates images without making them interesting. “His super-outfit is made from handfuls of oil and garbage blood and pinned together by stars.” Unless I’m missing something, that’s vaguely whimsical but impossible to visualize at all. Blood, toil, sweat, and tears are also ethereal, I get it, but the words are tossed together like a collage I can’t actually imagine—is there oil and bloody garbage floating near the Milky Way, in which case how can the poet see it? How does it look to him like a superhero’s outfit? How is the line not sappy, trite, and nonsensical?

more from Adam Plunkett at Bookforum here.

Terror (Welcome To No Man's Land)

All the signs read, SMILE . . . YOU’RE ON CAMERA, Welcome to No Man’s Land, you’re standing on Terra Firma, that some explorer once coined Terra Australis, and another explorer then retouched with Terra Nullius, that stole this land’s dreams, Terra Firma could be the next target in the War on Terror, from Terra Australis, to Anti-terror Laws, SMILE . . . YOU’RE ON CAMERA, Welcome to No Man’s Land, Terra Australis, with it’s Terra Firma, deemed Terra Nullius, embroiled in the War on Terror and everyone is governed by Anti-terror Laws, SMILE . . . YOU’RE ON CAMERA, Welcome to No Man’s Land, population under observation, you gotta love a sun-burnt country with a dry, split personality. Terra Australis, under Terra Nullius, right where you’re standing on Terra Firma with its beauty and its Terror, Terror, Terror . . . Welcome to No Man’s Land.

by Samuel Wagan Watson
Publisher PIW, © 2006

(1) Spoiler alert. John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is an allegorical western that I am now going to totally pretzel into an allegory for something else entirely. Actually, I’ll reverse it: The original allegorizes the taming of the western frontier, the coming of modernity in the form of the law book and the locomotive, and memorializes what was lost (a loss the film sees as inevitable). My version allegorizes the holding at bay, for the special province of literary fiction, of contemporary experience in all its dismaying or exhilarating particulars, as well as a weird, persistent denial of a terrific number of artistic strategies for illuminating that experience. The avoidance, that’s to say, of any forthright address of what’s called postmodernity, and what’s lost in avoiding it (a sacrifice I see as at best pointless, an empty rehearsal of anxieties, and at worst hugely detrimental to fiction).

more from Jonathan Lethem at The Believer here.

Ulrich Beck in Eurozine:

When a world-order collapses, then the analysis of it starts. Though that doesn't seem to go for the type of social theory currently prevalent, which with universalist aloofness and somnambulant certainty levitates above the low-ground of epochal change: global warming, financial crisis, the crisis of democracy and national institutions. Today this kind of universalist social analysis, be it structuralist, interactionist, Marxist, critical- or systems-theoretical, is antiquated and provincial. Antiquated because it excludes what is patent: a paradigm shift in modern society and politics. Provincial because it falsely absolutizes the path-dependent scope of experience and expectation in western European and American modernization, thus distorting the sociological view of its particularity.

It would be an understatement to say that European sociology needs to understand the modernization of other societies for supplementary reasons, in order to complete its world-view. More the case is that we Europeans can understand ourselves only if we “deprovincialize” – in other words, if sociologically and methodologically we learn to see through the eyes of others. This is what I call the cosmopolitan turn in sociological and political theory and research.

John Gapper in the FT (registration required):

Yasmine El Rashidi’s first-hand account of the Egyptian revolution, The Battle for Egypt, which drew on her reporting for the New York Review of Books, was published by Random House as an ebook in May, four months after the uprising started. Among its competitors was Tweets from Tahrir, a collection of short observations on Twitter by witnesses to the revolution. It was released in April by OR Books, which specialises in rapid publication of current events titles in electronic and print-on-demand form. OR has also produced books on the BP Gulf of Mexico oil spill and the Gaza flotilla.

This evolution raises big questions about the trade-off between immediacy and accuracy – or at least perspective. The historian sits down long after the events have occurred with no need to please or flatter the participants to gain access, since most are dead, and the freedom to study a wide variety of sources. A journalist working at high speed has only what he or she witnesses and the details that others – some with an agenda – choose to divulge.

“None of us has the right perspective, given how quickly these events unfolded, and we won’t know how to think about them for 30 years,” says Andrew Ross Sorkin, The New York Times journalist and author of Too Big To Fail (2009), which reconstructed the climactic events of the 2008 financial crisis in New York and Washington. “If you try to write a great analytical book now, you will either be wrong or lucky.”