Quote of the Month
"Once did She hold the gorgeous east in fee; And was the safeguard of the west: the worth Of Venice did not fall below her birth, Venice, the eldest Child of Liberty. She was a maiden City, bright and free; No guile seduced, no force could violate; And, when she took unto herself a Mate, She must espouse the everlasting Sea. And what if she had seen those glories fade, Those titles vanish, and that strength decay; Yet shall some tribute of regret be paid When her long life hath reached its final day: Men are we, and must grieve when even the Shade Of that which once was great is passed away." - William Wordsworth, "On the Extinction of the Venetian Republic"
My Recent Writing:
“Strange Days: A review of ‘Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness’”
“The Need for Speed, Part II: A review of ‘Top Gun: Maverick’”
“First as Tragedy, Then as Farce: The Return of the Internationalist-Isolationist Divide”
“A much-needed Middle East reboot: Why Biden's trip to the region is the right strategic call”
What I’m Reading:
1. War? What is it good for? Not much
Why you should read it: British strategy scholar Lawrence Freedman writes in Foreign Affairs about the limits of armed force as an instrument of national policy, as exemplified by Russia’s war against Ukraine.
“Military power is not only about a nation’s armaments and the skill with which they are used. It must take into account the resources of the enemy, as well as the contributions from allies and friends, whether in the form of practical assistance or direct interventions. And although military strength is often measured in firepower, by counting inventories of arms and the size of armies, navies, and air forces, much depends on the quality of the equipment, how well it has been maintained, and on the training and motivation of the personnel using it. In any war, the ability of an economy to sustain the war effort, and the resilience of the logistical systems to ensure that supplies reach the front lines as needed, is of increasing importance as the conflict wears on. So is the degree to which a belligerent can mobilize and maintain support for its own cause, both domestically and externally, and undermine that of the enemy, tasks that require constructing compelling narratives that can rationalize setbacks as well as anticipate victories. Above all, however, military power depends on effective command. And that includes both a country’s political leaders, who act as supreme commanders, and those seeking to achieve their military goals as operational commanders… For in launching the invasion [of Ukraine], Putin made the familiar but catastrophic mistake of underestimating the enemy, assuming it to be weak at its core, while having excessive confidence in what his own forces could achieve.”
“Russia’s problems with command in Ukraine are less a consequence of military philosophy than of current political leadership. In autocratic systems such as Russia’s, officials and officers must think twice before challenging superiors. Life is easiest when they act on the leader’s wishes without question. Dictators can certainly make bold decisions on war, but these are far more likely to be based on their own ill-informed assumptions and are unlikely to have been challenged in a careful decision-making process. Dictators tend to surround themselves with like-minded advisers and to prize loyalty above competence in their senior military commanders… As soon as the invasion got underway, the central weaknesses in the Russian campaign became apparent. The plan was for a short war, with decisive advances in several different parts of the country on the first day. But Putin and his advisers’ optimism meant that the plan was shaped largely around rapid operations by elite combat units. Little consideration was given to logistics and supply lines, which limited Russia’s ability to sustain the offensive once it stalled, and all the essentials of modern warfare, including food, fuel, and ammunition, began to be rapidly consumed. In effect, the number of axes of advance created a number of separate wars being fought at once, all presenting their own challenges, each with their own command structures and without an appropriate mechanism to coordinate their efforts and allocate resources among them… After an unbroken string of poor command decisions, Putin was running out of options. As the offensive in Ukraine completed its third month, many observers began to note that Russia had become stuck in an unwinnable war that it dared not lose. Western governments and senior NATO officials began to talk of a conflict that could continue for months, and possibly years, to come. That would depend on the ability of the Russian commanders to keep a fight going with depleted forces of low morale and also on the ability of Ukraine to move from a defensive strategy to an offensive one. Perhaps Russia’s military could still salvage something out of the situation. Or perhaps Putin would see at some point that it might be prudent to call for a cease-fire so he could cash in the gains made early in the war before a Ukrainian counteroffensive took them away, even though that would mean admitting failure.”
Why it matters: “One must be careful when drawing large lessons from wars with their own special features, particularly from a war whose full consequences are not yet known. Analysts and military planners are certain to study the war in Ukraine for many years as an example of the limits to military power, looking for explanations as to why one of the strongest and largest armed forces in the world, with a formidable air force and navy and new equipment and with recent and successful combat experience, faltered so badly. Before the invasion, when Russia’s military was compared with Ukraine’s smaller and lesser-armed defense forces, few doubted which side would gain the upper hand. But actual war is determined by qualitative and human factors, and it was the Ukrainians who had sharper tactics, brought together by command structures, from the highest political level to the lowlier field commanders, that were fit for the purpose… The ability to act effectively at any level of command requires a commitment to the mission and an understanding of its political purpose. These elements were lacking on the Russian side because of the way Putin launched his war: the enemy the Russian forces had been led to expect was not the one they faced, and the Ukrainian population was not, contrary to what they had been told, inclined to be liberated. The more futile the fight, the lower the morale and the weaker the discipline of those fighting. In these circumstances, local initiative can simply lead to desertion or looting. By contrast, the Ukrainians were defending their territory against an enemy intent on destroying their land. There was an asymmetry of motivation that influenced the fighting from the start. Which takes us back to the folly of Putin’s original decision. It is hard to command forces to act in support of a delusion.”
2. Why inflation won’t be as bad as in the 1970s
Why you should read it: Former Federal Reserve chief Ben Bernanke argues in the New York Times that as bad as recent inflation data are there’s no reason to fear a return to 1970s-style inflation and stagnation.
“Although the inflation of the 1960s and ’70s had higher peaks and lasted much longer than what we have seen recently, it’s true there are some similarities to what we are going through now… But there are critical differences as well. First, although inflation was very unpopular in the ’60s and ’70s, as it (understandably) is today, back then, any inclination by the Federal Reserve to fight inflation by raising interest rates, which could also slow the economy and raise unemployment, met stiff political resistance. President Lyndon Johnson, attempting to insulate the public from the economic costs of an unpopular war, put intense pressure on the Fed chairman, William McChesney Martin, to keep interest rates low. Johnson promised to raise taxes to pay for the war, and Martin accordingly refrained from raising rates for a time, but Johnson’s temporary tax surcharge in 1968 failed to cool an overheated economy, allowing inflation to gain a toehold.”
"In contrast, efforts by the current Fed chairman, Jerome Powell, and his colleagues to bring down inflation enjoy considerable support from both the White House and Congress, at least so far. As a result, the Fed today has the independence it needs to make policy decisions based solely on the economic data and in the longer-run interests of the economy, not on short-term political considerations… [T]oday’s monetary policymakers understand that as we wait for supply constraints to ease, which they will eventually, the Fed can help reduce inflation by slowing growth in demand. Drawing on the lessons of the past, they also understand that by doing what is needed to get inflation under control, they can help the economy and the job market avoid much more serious instability in the future.”
Why it matters: “Markets and the public appear to understand how the Fed’s approach has changed from the earlier era I described. Although the Fed has raised interest rates only twice this year (this week’s meeting will no doubt bring an additional increase), financial conditions have already tightened significantly (for example, mortgage rates have risen by more than two percentage points in the past year) as markets anticipate that policymakers will persist in their anti-inflation campaign. And while market indicators and surveys of consumers reveal that inflation is expected to remain high over the next year or two, for the most part, they suggest continued confidence that, over the longer term, the Fed will be able to bring inflation down close to its 2 percent target… The Fed’s greater policy independence, its willingness to take responsibility for inflation and its record of keeping inflation low for nearly four decades after the Great Inflation, make it much more credible on inflation today than its counterpart in the ’60s and ’70s. The Fed’s credibility will help ensure that the Great Inflation will not be repeated, and Mr. Powell and his colleagues will put a high priority on keeping that credibility intact.”
3. How the war in Ukraine changes climate politics and policy
Why you should read it: Ted Nordhaus makes the case in Foreign Policy that the energy policy aftershocks of the war in Ukraine will do more for the climate than anything climate activists propose.
“In the decades following the end of the Cold War, global stability and easy access to energy led many of us to forget the degree to which abundant energy is existential for modern societies. Growing concern about climate change and the push for renewable fuels also led many to underestimate just how dependent societies still are on fossil fuels. But access to oil, gas, and coal still determines the fate of nations. Two decades of worrying about carbon-fueled catastrophes—and trillions of dollars spent globally on transitioning to renewable power—haven’t changed that basic existential fact… A new era, marked by geopolitically driven energy insecurity and resource competition, is moving climate concerns down on the list of priorities. If there is a silver lining in any of this, it’s that a shift of focus back to energy security imperatives might not be the worst thing for the climate. Given the scant effect international climate efforts have had on emissions over the past three decades, a turn back toward energy realpolitik—and away from the utopian schemes that have come to define climate advocacy and policymaking worldwide—could actually accelerate the shift to a lower-carbon global economy in the coming decades.”
“The carbon intensity of the global energy system fell faster in the 30 years before the first major U.N. climate conference than after it—a result of rising energy efficiency, the spread of nuclear power, and the changing composition of the global economy. After 1997, when the Kyoto Protocol was adopted, both total and per capita emissions rose faster than before… The geopolitical, technological, and economic competition that characterized the Cold War had more success in reducing the carbon intensity of the global economy than climate policy efforts have had since. Emissions-free nuclear energy started as a spinoff of the arms race—a demonstration of technological prowess and the peaceful potential of the atom. The 1973 Arab oil embargo, an outgrowth of the superpower proxy war between Israel and the Arab world, sparked two decades of spectacular improvements in energy efficiency, the shift of power generation and heating away from oil, and the rapid build-out of nuclear power… Globally, the share of electricity from clean sources—nuclear, hydropower, and renewable energy—peaked in 1993, just after the Cold War ended. Hopes that the world would turn from brinkmanship to cooperation on the shared goal of reducing emissions proved illusory. Instead, peace, prosperity, and access to plentiful cheap energy in the post-Cold War era dramatically lowered national incentives to make major investments in energy security. In an integrated global economy free of major conflict, the world could run on Russian gas, Middle East oil, and, more recently, Chinese solar panels.”
Why it matters: “At a moment when democracy and liberalism are once again under threat, questions of energy security can no longer be separated from the question of whom we are doing business with. With Russia and China seeking to delegitimize liberal democratic norms more broadly both at home and abroad—including by waging wars of conquest—energy geopolitics cannot be understood outside broader conflicts over the rules of the global order. Our energy choices will either help or hinder our ability to resist these authoritarian regimes… In every case, the post-Ukraine energy emergency is likely to accomplish much that the climate emergency could not. The environmental movement’s fetishizing of regulatory solutions and its arbitrary technology preferences have always hobbled its ability to advocate for effective climate policies at the scale needed to have much effect on warming. Ironically, decentering climate and centering energy security, particularly in the West, is likely to do far more to address climate change than the climate movement could ever have accomplished.”
4. Why “eco-fascism” echoes certain strands of mainstream environmentalism
Why you should read it: Writer Leigh Phillips notes in Noema that “eco-xenophobia does not in fact conflict with many central ideas within mainstream progressive environmentalism.”
“Among people who follow right-wing terrorism, eco-fascism is often considered completely separate from most contemporary ecological philosophy and activism, and that the far-right is painting its usual anti-immigrant, anti-minority positions green to try to attract young followers… But the hard truth is that eco-xenophobia does not in fact conflict with many central ideas within mainstream progressive environmentalism, from Malthusianism and misanthropy to bioregionalism and the unscientific notion of a balance of nature. Leftist and moderate environmentalists have sometimes had a hard time seeing some of their goals (reducing consumption and industrial growth, combatting what they believe to be overpopulation) also championed by heinous terrorists after violent murder sprees. But if eco-fascism and other forms of rightist ‘environmentalism’ are to be defeated by those of us with genuine concern both for the environment and our neighbors, such ideas need to be confronted and excised from our discourse.”
“[The far right] has often been critical of capitalism, though its critiques of the market lean toward the anti-modernist, conspiratorial and antisemitic, distinct from leftist critiques of the market, which instead focus on exploitation, the profit incentive and class structure. The far-right was from the first and at its core a counter-Enlightenment rejection of modernity. Democracy, science and industry — the very notion of progress — had destroyed what these 19th-century romantics believed was the natural order of things… There are echoes here of the contemporary green left’s calls for decentralization, localism and bioregionalism — the belief that political, economic and cultural systems will be more sustainable if they are limited to biological borders, such as those of a watershed. This also rhymes with its desire for an end to globalization, as well as the small-is-beautiful ideology of E. F. Schumacher, and the neo-Luddism of the ‘appropriate technology’ movement inspired by anti-modernist theologians Ivan Illich and Jacques Ellul.”
Why it matters: “What we are witnessing in the growing prominence of far-right environmentalism of recent years is a revival of an older kind of ecological and political thinking, a traditional attachment to home, to soil, to blood. Eco-fascists are not co-opting the left’s environmental struggle, but rather the reverse. It’s the deep ecologists on the left who are embracing aspects of a counter-Enlightenment reactionist movement that’s been around for centuries… Eco-xenophobia remains a feature in both the right and the left environmentalist communities because neo-Malthusian, limits-to-growth lifeboat politics leads to population control and immigration restrictions, while bioregionalist, localist, decentralizing calls to return to traditional ways and local economies that retreat from global supply chains and thus from cosmopolitan influence are exclusionary and anti-universalist.”
5. Why we shouldn’t romanticize the so-called “global south”
Why you should read it: Financial Times columnist Janan Ganesh contends that the reaction of the so-called “global south” to the Russian invasion of Ukraine provides yet another piece of evidence against the knee-jerk tendency of many in the West to romanticize countries like India and South Africa.
“‘Third world' is rude. ‘Developing world’ implies that all countries have the same teleological destiny. 'Global south’, though it will have to do, is a geographic nonsense, encompassing as it does the northern hemisphere’s India and Middle East. In the end, the name of the place is less the issue here than the goodwill, the moral benefit of the doubt, that it tends to get from rich-world liberals… Or, at least, used to get. No event this century has done as much as the Ukraine war to expose the difference in outlook between the west and — another phrase that doesn’t fit — the ‘rest’. Anglosphere, European and Japanese sanctions should not be mistaken for a truly global front against Vladimir Putin. In the latest Democracy Perception Index, an international survey, Russia retains a net positive reputation in Egypt, Vietnam, India and other countries that arouse fuzzy feelings in a certain kind of western breast. As for Morocco, another staple of the gap-year trail, Ukraine recalled its ambassador in March after failing to extract enough support from it. Pro-Russia protests have flared up in west and central Africa.”
“In the aftermath of empire, it made sense to attribute special virtue to recently subjugated peoples, even if VS Naipaul saw through it. To keep it up forever starts to look like its own kind of paternalism… Decolonisation, apartheid, Live Aid, Drop the Debt: western liberals have been able to live a human lifetime without going against the global south on a large moral question. (The denialism about Aids in Africa around the turn of the millennium is the nearest thing to an exception.)”
Why it matters: “The past few months have ended that convenient run. To stand up for Ukraine now, one must be willing to knock the halo off a lot of countries. It means wading against half a century of postcolonial theory about where moral authority lies in the world. It is easy, and right, to implore the likes of France and Germany to do more for Ukraine. It is more transgressive to suggest that poorer nations are being cavalier in their attitude to the global order or selective in their opposition to imperialism… The ongoing project to find a collective name for poorer countries shows how sensitivities have got in the way of truth and plain-speaking. That this is a nuisance for the west hardly needs saying. The larger point is that the global south loses, too, by way of infantilisation. Nothing is as first-world as being treated as a grown-up.”
6. Why Democrats should change the rules that grant the Supreme Court so much power
Why you should read it: New York magazine writer Jonathan Chait surveys the options for Supreme Court reform available to Democrats after recent arbitrary rulings by the court’s conservative majority.
“Whatever qualms John Roberts has expressed about flexing the right’s legal muscle have been consigned to irrelevance; Roberts resides in the powerless liberal wing now, watching helplessly as the majority steamrolls decades of jurisprudence. The sweetest thing is that these victories are only the beginning of a line of conquest that stretches out far into the future given that conservatives are unlikely to relinquish their control for many years and possibly decades. What American government will look like after the Court has stacked new precedent upon new precedent is something current observers can only dimly perceive… At some point, the Democratic Party is going to have to decide whether to accept this state of affairs or whether to work within the constitutional system to change it. The path of least resistance is to rage in futility without organizing any plausible reform they can implement the next time they have control of government. In the absence of such a plan, the Democrats are drifting toward a future in which they may have no future.”
“Many liberals have taken to describing the Court’s current makeup as the result of one or more ‘stolen’ seats. This description is misleading. The right won its generational control of the Courts according to the rules of the game. The problem is the rules keep changing, and the rules are stupid…There are two ways to address the Court’s dysfunctional system. One is for Democrats to ‘pack’ the Court by first expanding the number of justices and then filling the newly vacant seats with Democrats in order to flip control… [I]f Democrats could credibly threaten to pack the court, they could gain leverage to bring Republicans to the negotiating table for some bipartisan reform. Theoretically, they could start by packing the Court, which would give their party a majority, at which point Republicans would have a strong incentive to negotiate a deal that would split control of the Court. Republicans have gained their current legal advantage by playing a very long game. The Democrats’ long game is going to have to involve reforming the Court’s structure.”
Why it matters: “Legal elites worry that implementing even modest reforms will blow up the veneer of nonpartisanship that the Court’s power requires. They should be more concerned the Court’s majority is doing this itself.”
7. Why Biden’s Saudi policy failed
Why you should read it: Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow Steven A. Cook explains in Foreign Policy why the Biden administration’s attempt to keep its distance from Saudi Arabia and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was destined to fail.
“Although Saudi Arabia was not quite the ‘pariah’ that candidate Biden had pledged to make it, the administration could claim that the president was changing the parameters of the relationship. The new approach also lent credibility to Biden’s vow to pursue a human rights-centered foreign policy that emphasized America’s democratic values. Human rights activists were disappointed that the administration did not sanction [Crown Prince] Mohammed bin Salman, but the problem with the policy was not that it did not go far enough but that it was bound to fail.”
“…there remained a rather broad constituency in Washington for downgrading Saudi Arabia. in part because analysts and officials assumed that the United States would reenter the Iran nuclear deal, resolving a source of regional tension and facilitating the U.S. retrenchment. Yet what seems reasonable in journal articles, op-eds, and think tank reports is actually harder in a messy world where politics often gets in the way of solutions to big problems… Biden now finds himself in the worst of all possible situations with Saudi Arabia. He allowed the Washington Post editorial board to dictate his policy, which both annoyed the Saudis and was never enough to satisfy anyone serious about protecting human rights. Now he looks like he is going hat in hand to people he once publicly called murderers with ‘very little social redeeming value.’"
Why it matters: “…Saudi Arabia’s crown prince may be odious, but that does not mean that folks can wish away the country’s importance to the geopolitics of the Middle East, the fact that a president’s political interests are intertwined with decisions made in Riyadh, or that there is no other country with the spare capacity to quickly make a difference in energy prices.”
8. How the absurdist Twitter account @dril became the voice of our times
Why you should read it: In the New Yorker, Colin Marshall examines the ways weird Twitter account @dril faithfully represents modern America in much the same way Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanack did in the late 1700s.
“Dril makes for an unlikely self-help guru. Though his character has been traced back to Something Awful, a humor forum popular in the two-thousands, he only took shape on Twitter, and has come to personify that roundly condemned but seemingly irreplaceable platform’s grandstanding, compulsive, solecism-prone, invincibly ignorant id. His haplessness far exceeds that of Franklin’s Richard Saunders, as evidenced by Dril’s frequent references to his own condition of beleaguerment (by employers, by womankind, by gas prices, by ‘trolls’) and humiliation. ‘trapped, fully nude, in restaurant bathroom,’ he posted in 2017. ‘boss & his wife will be here in 10mins. trying to see if i can make a tuxedo out of tolet paper.’ One of his most widely circulated tweets reveals his monthly budget: two hundred dollars on food, eight hundred dollars on rent, thirty-six hundred dollars on candles… These words have become more quotable than anything Benjamin Franklin ever wrote, at least on Twitter. There, the immediate recognizability of phrases like 'It’s the weekend, baby,’ ‘I’m trying to remove it,’ ‘The celebs are at it again,’ and ‘You do not, under any circumstances, “gotta hand it to them,”’ speaks to the clout that Dril has amassed in nearly fourteen years. He arguably wields even more influence than is reflected by his follower count, which, of this writing, has reached 1.6 million, far surpassing Chipotle at 1.1 million, Outback Steakhouse at 319,300, and Roy Rogers Restaurants at a paltry 8,110. Those are just three of the businesses lovingly tweeted about by Dril himself, who has exhibited a preoccupation with brands both real and fictitious, especially those flourishing at the commercial intersection of budget-priced food and entertainment… His appeal lies in the contrast between this tone of absolute sincerity, which often escalates into high dudgeon, and the nature of his obsessions, which run toward jarring combinations of the stupefyingly mundane and the elaborately scatological.”
“Yet what Dril satirizes is less a particular category of American than American civilization itself. He is the personality that has emerged two and a half centuries after the American Revolution: narcotized by convenient distractions and delusional ambitions, perpetually mired in trivial grievances, indiscriminately vehement about matters of church, state, and McDonald’s, and, above all, almost completely inarticulate. Much of the humor of Dril’s tweets owes to their erratic spelling and syntax, a style at times reminiscent of ‘Poor Richard’s Almanack’ and other eighteenth-century American writing. Attention has clearly gone into each misspelling, unsuitable preposition, and grocer’s apostrophe. (When reading ‘The Get Rich and Become God Method,’ longtime Dril enthusiasts will surely lose it when they reach the poem entitled ‘Boy’s Shoe’s.’)… No longer just an icon of ‘weird Twitter,’ Dril has become one of America’s most incisive ongoing works of social criticism. Alexis de Tocqueville saw the young United States and despaired of a future populated by ‘an innumerable multitude of men, all equal and alike, incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives,’ overseen by ‘an immense and tutelary power’ that seeks to ‘keep them in perpetual childhood.’ This is the future that Dril inhabits. A full-page art work in ‘The Get Rich and Become God Method’ depicts him as an adult baby, sucking on a pacifier, supervised by sinister, masked faces, and wired to the Internet through cables jacked directly into his brain. Another, spread across two pages, presents an influencer-infested scene from the year 2100, by which time ‘100% of content consumers are expected to evolve into content creators, due to shifting factors regarding labor automation, education and the economy.’"
Why it matters: “That same Tocqueville passage is quoted by the political scientist Francis Fukuyama in ‘The End of History and the Last Man,’ from 1992. That treatise famously posits that all humanity has been evolving toward the same political arrangement: American-style capitalist liberal democracy, which, as the titular ‘end’ of history, can be infinitely refined but never fundamentally surpassed. Fukuyama describes the diminished citizen of such a terminally settled society as the ‘last man,’ a concept borrowed from Friedrich Nietzsche. ‘Jaded by the experience of history, and disabused of the possibility of direct experience of values,” the last man is “secure and self-absorbed,’ content to stay home and engage only in the ‘pursuit of private comforts…’ Hence Dril’s endless feuds with his own Anthony Afterwits and Alice Addertongues, who operate under handles like EpicWayne and DigimonOtis; hence his quasi-religious devotion to video gaming. (‘Games lubricate the body and the mind,’ declares a quotation in ‘The Get Rich and Become God Method’ that’s attributed to ‘Benjamin Franken.’) The historian H. W. Brands, a participant in Ken Burns’s documentary, wrote a biography of Benjamin Franklin whose title calls him ‘the first American,’ an appellation that reflects not just Franklin’s participation in the campaigns for colonial unity and independence but also his distinctive combination of industry, self-improving instinct, community spirit, and wit. If Benjamin Franklin was the first American, then Dril—in his thralldom to cheap pleasures, his indulgence in self-righteous rage, his overstimulated isolation, his hopelessly mangled invocations of God and country—may be the last.”
9. Why great literature belongs to everyone
Why you should read it: British writer Tomiwa Owolade criticizes the vogue for “decolonization” in academia, arguing in Unherd that these fads patronize those they supposedly want to help.
“The OCR, one of the main exam boards in England, will remove the poetry of [Seamus] Heaney and [Philip] Larkin (among other poets) from its school syllabus this September. Their justification is simple: the syllabus needs to be more inclusive and exciting. Heaney and Larkin are male and stale. They reflect a bygone era that doesn’t speak to an increasingly diverse classroom…This change is part of a wider movement to decolonise the curriculum. For too long, supporters of this movement argue, schools have deliberately excluded people of colour from the English canon and History textbooks. Just as ethnic minority people are discriminated against across society, they are marginalised in the classroom, and the latter injustice reinforces the former. One way to challenge this state of affairs is to decentre white, male authors, replacing them with writers who fall into other categories… The viewpoint of the curriculum decolonisers is based on the assumption that black students resonate most with poetry written by black poets. That is nonsense. Why should a black African student, for instance, identify at all with a poem written by a West Indian man? Because of their shared race? Race is not the only thing that defines the life and experiences of a person; I used to think only avowed racists believed it does. At a more practical level, why should a poem be taught if it can speak to students only on the basis of their being black: what about the Asian and white and mixed-race students in the classroom? This is not inclusion; it is division.”
“Decolonising the curriculum takes place at a superficial level, whereas I taught Larkin to my students because his poems move me at a visceral level: they convey the sense that, yes, this is what it is like to be haunted by fear and loneliness and impotence. And they do so with artistic virtuosity, using the right words in the right order to express such feelings… If English is simply another variant of sociology or politics, why should the study of it be distinguished from these subjects? Sheffield Hallam University has recently been criticised for suspending its English Literature degree and incorporating it into a degree that consists of Literature, Creative Writing and Language. The justification for this proposal is that the study of English should serve a purpose, that it should have tangible benefits, such as enabling students to get a professional job. Many of the people who advocate for decolonising the curriculum might object to this, not recognising that they are also arguing that English should have a purpose — not getting students a job, but making them less racist. Even if they don’t officially want English to be assimilated into other fields of the humanities, like politics, in practice that is what they promote… Another problem with filtering literature through this rigidly ideological lens is that it disables the fundamental quality of any devoted lover of literature: curiosity. It stops us from reflecting on the particular cultural context of a poet or his poetry, and instead takes a reductive view of writers. Consider the case of Seamus Heaney: why should a poet who grew up in rural Northern Ireland, in a Catholic family, be seen as embodying the white, male British establishment? Ultimately, though, what matters to those who love Heaney and Larkin is not their identities; it is their expert manipulation of language.”
Why it matters: “Of course, a poet’s ability to do this does not depend on their race. The fact that great poets from non-white backgrounds are excluded from study is bad. But it is bad not because the identities of such poets are not being ‘centred’; it is bad because students are missing out on great poetry. Blindness to the artistic work of ethnic minority people is worthy of criticism, but assessing such writers on a tokenistic or ideological basis is another form of blindness: in both cases, the poetic merits of their work are ignored… The traditions of Western literature and culture belong just as much to black people as white people. It is part of my inheritance. And that is why I loved teaching those kids: I was sharing what belonged just as much to them as to the kids with hundreds of books in their family homes or a private education.”
Odds and Ends
How Minnesota World War II veteran Seiki Oshiro keeps alive the memory of the state’s schools for Japanese-American military linguists…
How climate change threatens archaeological sites across the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia…
Two profiles of train routes that once connected the Middle East - and that modern enthusiasts hope to revive…
A profile of the last gathering of Britain’s last remaining World War II-era Royal Air Force pilots…
When the San Francisco Giants used Portuguese water dogs to retrieve home run balls from McCovey Cove…
What I’m Listening To
Three songs from Corinne Bailey Rae:
“Put Your Records On” and a cover of Led Zeppelin’s “Since I’ve Been Loving You” from her 2007 debut album.
“The Skies Will Break” from her most recent effort, 2016’s The Heart Speaks in Whispers.
Image of the Month
