Bringing a Child Into a World Like This

April 26, 2022 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

_{(photo by Issac Quesade/Unsplash)}

Is having a child today—or a grandchild—an expression of fervent hope or an involuntary invitation that you’re handing down to someone who’s unable to refuse it?

It’s a fair question, relating to what are (perhaps) our first jobs: as parents, as caregivers, as either believers or non-believers in the world to come.

Because every newborn is an embodiment of hope, our answers make us grapple with the future as we see it today.

These days, Tomorrowland is no longer the Jetsons flying cars from their open-to-the-sky houses with friendly robots inside, impossibly dressed as maids. Today, it seems closer to Cormac McCarthy’s survivalist The Road or last year’s best picture contender, the farcical Don’t Look Up–harsh and cruel on the one hand, shallow and in-denial on the other.

I’d briefly thrown this question out to you before. That post was in the summer of 2017, years before a pandemic disrupted daily life, environmental collapse was something other than science fiction, or we had a 24/7 view of annihilation in a peace-loving country that often looked surprisingly like our own.

Even if you keep shutting off the news for the sake of your sanity, the brain still completes its gloomy pictures. But then we’re reminded, there have been victories too: those nurses in the terrible breach, that rebound in the numbers of whales plying our oceans, those Ukrainians serenading their fleeing breathern with folk songs and accordions in train stations. Bleak with shafts of sunlight I’d call it, but as the tribulation (a biblical word) piles on, still bleaker than it seemed only five years ago when people were already asking: “What if you decide to bring a child into this world? What do you owe her?”

Before reaching for the bottle, perspective helps. This is neither the first nor will it be the last time that the future looks bleak. In 1891, almost 25 years before the catastrophe of World War I, Oscar Wilde did what great artists always do. He looked out and realized that something was tragically missing in a world that was already marching off to war amidst destructive new technologies and social upheavals, with callow leaders and millions of oblivious bystanders along for the ride. As far as Wilde could tell, no one seemed to be envisioning a better world any more, even though that’s the only world any sane person should want to be heading towards. As he said at the time:

A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which humanity is always heading.

Isn’t utopia the future that we want for our children? Not some nostalgic past that never really existed but a sustainable place with wiser leaders, where humanity is enhanced by its technologies instead of subjugated by them, where we flourish by celebrating our common humanity instead of preying on one another. But none of us will ever reach such of place unless we can imagine it first.

One of my favorite writers is Michael Chabon (check out his marvelous Moonglow if you’ve somehow missed it) and I happened upon an essay of his this week where he (like Wilde before him) looked around, shortly after the turn of a different century, and noticed that something was terribly missing. His queries around “what that was exactly” were prompted by his discovery of an audaciously hopeful scheme that had been launched some time before. It was called the Clock of the Long Now. A tee-up to Chabon’s essay on Longreads described the powerful response that a few visionaries had made to “a disappearing future”:

One of the grandest gestures toward imagining the future is the Clock of the Long Now. Originally conceived by inventor, computer scientist, and Disney Imagineering fellow Danny Hillis, and expected to cost in the tens of millions of dollars, the clock is designed to keep time for 10,000 years. Besides being a tremendous feat of engineering, it’s also a tremendous statement of faith — building it is a bet that there will be humans around over the next 10 millennia to hear its bells ring.

To Chabon, the Clock of the Long Now seemed a utopian commitment, not to a destination on a map but to something that feels just as bold today: that we, our children and our children’s children actually have “a Long Now” stretching before us.

As Chabon quickly understood, the point of this invention was not to measure our passage of time into an unknown future or to celebrate the strange race of creatures that built it. No, it had little to do with our time-keeping or technical wizzardry. “The point of the Clock,” he writes, “is to revive and restore the whole idea of the Future.”

‘The Future,’ whether you capitalize it or not, is always just an idea, a proposal, a scenario, a sketch for a mad contraption that may or may not work. ‘The Future’ is a story we tell, a narrative of hope, dread or wonder. And it’s a story that, for a while now, we’ve been pretty much living without….

Can you extend the horizon of your expectations for our world, for our complex of civilizations and cultures, beyond the lifetime of your own children, of the next two or three generations? Can you even imagine the survival of the world beyond the present presidential administration?

No, we probably can’t—or think we can’t. But the Clock of the Long Now wants to recover that loss, quite literally, as an emblem of belief in horizons that extend beyond the screens that we’re holding in our hands and their always-in-the-present diversions.

Chabon laments that Americans (as a culture and a country) are no longer caught between the poles of “the bright promise and the bleak menace.” Now (and he wrote this 15 years ago) we seem to have mostly the latter and little of the former. I think it’s one reason why we’ve been so gobsmacked by the nobility of Ukraine’s resistance in the face of barbarism—all of these people (where did they come from?) so full of “the promise” in spite of “the menace.”

Asking similar questions, he ends up thinking about his young son, with a tremendous sadness, given how different Chabon’s own speculations about The Future had been when he was that age:

If you ask my eight-year-old about the Future, he pretty much thinks the world is going to end, and that’s it. Most likely global warming, he says—floods, storms, desertification—but the possibility of viral pandemic, meteor impact, or some kind of nuclear exchange is not alien to his view of the days to come. Maybe not tomorrow, or a year from now. The kid is more than capable of generating a full head of optimistic steam about next week, next vacation, his tenth birthday. It’s only the world a hundred years on that leaves his hopes a blank. My son seems to take the end of everything, of all human endeavor and creation, for granted. He sees himself as living on the last page, if not in the last paragraph, of a long, strange and bewildering book. If you had told me, when I was eight, that a little kid of the future would feel that way—and that what’s more, he would see a certain justice in our eventual extinction, would think the world was better off without human beings in it—that would have been even worse than hearing that in 2006 there are no hydroponic megafarms, no human colonies on Mars, no personal jetpacks for everyone. That would truly have broken my heart.

So in response, Chabon tells his son about the Clock of the Long Now, and while he did so his son “listened very carefully” before asking, “Will there really be people then, Dad,” ten thousand years from now? “’Yes,’ I told him without hesitation, ‘there will,” [although, to himself] I don’t know if that’s true.” Chabon confirmed this Truth to his boy because he felt that he didn’t really have a choice in the matter. “[I]n having children—in engendering them, in loving them, in teaching them to love and care about the world—parents are betting, whether they know it or not, on the Clock of the Long Now.”

Just think about that for a minute. What you believe, what you hope, and how you’d answer that child, who embodies “a far longer now” than you do, when she begins to wonder about what lies ahead.

Doomsday scenarios around climate catastrophe have lent a powerful sense of urgency to questions around giving birth or refusing to do so. If what’s ahead are more devastating floods, wildfires, famines, mass migrations, ferocious competitions over scarce resources, and increasing strife among nations, it sometimes appears that all we have to look forward to is an even more Hobbsian world of tooth and claw–and no place for children.

In my own travels through this quandary, I couldn’t help but notice that there are hundreds of articles out there trying to find the “fairness” to future children in our having them today, with most concluding that we should forego childbearing altogether. In particular, these debates have been catnip for philosophers, with one in The New Republic (“Is It Cruel To Have Kids In the Era of Climate Change”) beginning his take on it this way:

In one of his early works, the nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche relayed an Ancient Greek legend about King Midas pursuing the satyr Silenus, a wise companion of the god Dionysus. When Midas finally captures Silenus, he asks him what ‘the best thing of all for men’ is. ‘The very best thing for you is totally unreachable,’ Silenus replies: ‘not to have been born, not to exist, to be nothing.’

If that were in fact true it would simplify matters enormously, not only for those of us who are here now but for all the rest who might be coming. But is it really this black and white?

In a different essay, another philosopher (who specializes in the “ethics and metaphysical issues regarding birth, death and meaning”) invites us to weigh the plausible (as opposed to existential) risks that are facing both us and that future child.

Against “the near-certain” threat of a “global warming apocalypse” today, she recalls the failed predictions of Thomas Malthus in 1798 that a human population boom would outstrip the world’s food supply (“Imagine if everyone decided to stop having children back then to avoid the ‘inevitable’ famine?), and somewhat more humorously, The London Times’ prediction in 1890 that by 1940 there would be so much manure piling up after the horse drawn carriages that “every street in London would be buried in nine feet of manure.” (“Imagine if people had decided it was wrong to create a child to wade through the muck?”).  As a result, her analysis concludes more equivocally than Silenus’s. Her “tipping point” for the question ‘Is life a worthwhile risk?” is whether or not you happen to believe the climate-related forecasts.

And I suppose to some extent that’s true.  But it leaves us (unhelpfully) in the middle of the climate believer/denier debates, when I think what we need is a sign post that will get us to a more enabling place, to help us decide the matter “in our hearts” (if you will), that brings us to a stand that’s more embedded in human nature than in risk analysis as we consider whether “bringing a child into a world like this” is justifiable.

Which brings us back to Nietzche.  Because, as the New Republic essayist eventually tells us, the great German philosopher didn’t agree with the answer that the satyr Silenus gave to King Midas. In Nietzche’s worldview, you should never wish that you hadn’t been born, nor should you refuse to bring children into the world because of the miserable state in which you currently find it.

To some extent, this is because living has always involved both tragedy and triumph. Only today, amidst the cosseting and complacency of a society as rich as ours do we seem to have forgotten this basic tension in our existence. (Before Nietzche and long before Amazon and the Metaverse believing people called these deeply human realities “sin” and “grace.”)

So the Nietzche readers among you will also recall his “Will to Life,” his “triumphant Yes” to the question of human existence, his “affirmation of life even in its strangest and sternest of problems.” To be human is always to struggle to find ways to affirm the force of our lives in the full knowledge that death is also roaming among us.

That’s maturity. That’s what every parent who should be a parent understands.

As they make it “their own work” to fight against what’s unfair and unacceptable, these parents teach their children by their examples, standing right there alongside of them as their kids learn how to do the same thing.

These parents believe in The Future, which is why they answer “Yes” (without hesitating) when they’re asked, “Will there be a future ten thousand years from now?” even though we can never be sure. That hope is always tentative, contingent, and we’re big enough to handle its uncertainties.

All that good parents can be sure of is that they’ll be standing next to that child while he or she begins to claim his or her part of it, that no child in this family will ever have to face The Future alone. Likewise, it’s a standing-on-shoulders legacy that can continue as long as the young and their nurturers are giving a “triumphant Yes” to whatever tomorrow holds in the overlapping work of their lives.

Yes!, even when our streets are clogged with nine feet of sh*t and the warm sun of springtime has just come out.

This post was adapted from my April 24, 2022 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning and sometimes (but not always) I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe and not miss any of them by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

A Different Future Will Get Us Out From Under the Cloud

March 20, 2022 By David Griesing 2 Comments

It’s hard when you’ve been through a difficult time (like we all have since the coronovirus landed), finally feel that you’re coming out of it, and then discover that the promised relief has suddenly been snatched away. That’s how the last three months has felt: with the lull in vaccinations, the resurgence of the virus, and the lingering impact on schools, work and the ability to keep your chin up.

I’m writing this on the 20^th anniversary of 9/11, and the recaps around that day have been everywhere. I mostly stopped paying attention after the wake-up-call of one of them, Frontline’s review of the terrorist attack and the fear and disasters that followed (right down to the botched evacuation from Kabul’s airport two weeks ago). Their documentary, America After 9/11, made this passage of time feel “all of a piece,” twenty years when I’ve felt that we’ve mostly spiraled downward as a country, both here at home and out in the wider world.

It only made the cloud that was pressing down already feel that much heavier.

In thinking about recent debacles, I often “follow the money” as I look for the culprits in a saga like these post 9/11 years have been: the sheer, staggering cost to all of us (in dollars) and for more than a few of us (in post-traumatic stress, dismemberment, addiction, and lives lost on the battlefield or to suicide).  For example, I realize that my daughter has known almost nothing other than these sad 20 years.

Perhaps numbed by these human costs, my alarm only escalated when I saw (as you saw) America leaving behind hundreds of millions of dollars of vehicles, weapons, equipment, uniforms, indeed whole military bases when we departed from Afghanistan and nobody, nobody seemed to have made a list of it all so those of us who had paid for it knew we’d left behind, what it had cost us, and why we thought it was “Ok” to just pass it on to the Taliban.

Trillions of dollars were apparently spent in our foreign wars since 9/11. What does that level of spending even mean? It numbs the mind until you start breaking it down and realize that the cost of a single Humvee could support a family down the street (wherever you live “in our homeland”) for a year or more. No one seems to want the public of you and me to know the specifics beyond these unfathomable cost estimates—because then, presumably, someone would have to be held accountable, like you would a thief who’s gotten into your house (or shop or school) and is made to empty his pockets, one item at a time.

It’s a convenient slight of hand—this vaporous expense—because the industry behind the war machine we’ve abandoned near Kabul stands to become even richer if we “ditch the old stuff” and get to make a newer, shinier, even more expensive war machine the next time around.  Because after all, when we’re confronted with some new threat, we’ll say, as Americans always seem to say when we’re afraid: “Of course. Buy it. We’ll worry about whether we can afford it later.”

The cloud that presses down continues to grow as I appreciate how little discussion there’s been about this aspect of the bungled evacuation from Afghanistan, indeed our abandonment of all our post 9/11 nation-building and democracy-exporting efforts. The cloud further discombobulates when I realize that we’ll do it all over again if we don’t pause, re-think and ultimately re-group very differently as a result of these misadventures.

Of all people, it was Dwight Eisenhower, the Supreme Allied Commander during World War II and U.S. president during much of the 1950’s—this man who helmed our last great war—who said it most eloquently, perhaps because more than almost anyone he knew what he was talking about and had the gumption and stature to speak the truth. Something brand new had come out of WWII, a military-industrial complex, that was bigger and more worrisome than any commander-in-chief or even government could control. If we’re not mindful (Eisenhower warned), this new war machine will jeopardize the health of our country and its brightest prospects in the future.

Eisenhower put his warning into his farewell address to the nation at the end of his term—literally his last important words to us as president, and surely his most prophetic.

Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.
This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society….
We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

Over the past 60 years, Eisenhower’s worst fears have largely been realized, their frightful impacts “economic, political, [and] even spiritual.”

Moreover, it bears noting that the military-industrial-complex has grown beyond the companies, consultants and influence peddlers that had already joined forces by the 1960s. For example, attempts are increasingly being made to integrate the Silicon Valley tech companies more closely into governmental functions like data capture, surveillance, cyber-security and cyber-warfare. (See “As Google, Microsoft and Amazon Seek Bigger Defense Role, Some are Leery,” an article that appeared in the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday of last week.)

Of course, there are several reasons for the alarming rise of disruptive, profit-oriented “power centers” like this and similar ones that seem to always want to slow dance with our government. There are also reasons we never get around to pushing them away. The same pharmaceutical industry that rips the public off in most years comes to our rescue with a revolutionary vaccine—so it can’t be that bad. The military-industrial-complex (or MIC) that gorges itself on billion-dollar defense budgets saves us from more terrorist attacks after 9/11, so it too can’t be that bad.

These periodic reprieves make us (and our elected representatives) seem to forget all the bad stuff for a while and we never find the will to do all the post-mortems that we (and they) should also be conducting–like why prescription drugs are orders-of-magnitude cheaper in Canada or Mexico, or why the entire American government seemed to be hoodwinked into the Iraq war by “weapons of mass destruction.” Any impetus for reigning in these industries seems to be undermined by their occasional but far-too-expensive star-turns as “national saviors.”

Moreover, a megadon like the MIC operates in and provides high-paying jobs in every US city, state and territory. Because it’s a manufacturing and job machine too, it makes regular and generous campaign contributions to every elected official where it operates as “a cost of doing business,” or, more accurately, as “a cost to keep the business coming.”  Since most elected officials easily spend as much time fund-raising as governing, there are powerful financial incentives to refrain from “biting the hand that feeds them” and even cutting the MIC back down to where it already was when Eisenhower rang his alarm bell.

The difficulties of “oversight and management” of the MIC are further compounded by two other factors, locked without end into their own, counterproductive back-and-forth.

Millions of Americans work in companies that contribute to our seemingly perpetual war efforts (indeed, a few of you might be reading this now). Once again, it feels like “biting the hand that feeds you” to question the implications of your work, at least until your son comes home from war with traumatic brain injuries or you’re shocked into wondering “how it was all worth it” while watching something like our sad retreat from Kabul two weeks ago.

But even then, even with personal or citizen-based horror about the MIC’s impacts, the impetus to do something about it, to complain or protest, to agitate for a different way of conducting America’s affaris, is undermined (somewhat) by self-interest—it’s my paycheck, after all—but even more so by fear:  fear that if “I” want our country to spend less, do less, dismantle the-worst-of-the-MIC, then when the next national security threat appears (because of course it will, and of course we won’t be ready for it), “I’ll” be blamed for wanting us to cut back on our so-called “defensive and offensive capabilities”—like failing to manage a winning football team effectively. This vague concern about complicity silences the better angels that tell us: surely, there are higher motivations than fear that WE COULD AND SHOULD be responding to as individuals, as communities and as a country.

It all seems too big to do much more than stew about. But isn’t awareness that you’re a drunk or an addict (with the MIC as your fear-reducing drug) the first step towards a cure?

Despite new news cycles about virus patients triaged in Idaho hospitals or our kids being afraid to go back to school, I’ve been trying to linger over the SYSTEMIC imbalances (I think the word is right when used here) that the military-industrial-complex has introduced into my life and work because it seems to me that much of my life and work would have been different (and better) these past 20 (or more) years if we’d been working to achieve different priorities as a country—priorities with aspirations like the moon-landing a few years after Eisenhower spoke—instead of whatever shell-game we’ve been playing ever since.

Awareness of how our national treasure and bandwidth are being spent is, I think, the first step towards choosing to spend these scarce commodities more judiciously.

For example, some of us want to de-fund the police to allocate energy and resources to other community priorities. I think it’s far more complicated than that because police departments are (among many other things) just the tip of the MIC iceberg.  All you need to prove it is to see local police departments like ours in Pennsylvania taking to the streets with military grade equipment that they’ve gotten as surplus from our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

What we’re fighting, and shouldn’t be fighting, is all around us.

_{Pennsylvania police departments have received more than $6 millionin military ordinance over the past few years.}

I’m writing about this particular cloud today because, eventually, we’ll learn how to manage Covid-19 more effectively and because our 24/7 news cycles suddenly stopped covering the incompetent way that we just evacuated ourselves out of our country’s longest war. Our whole, sad, 20-year experience in Iraq and Afghanistan, from beginning to bitter end, merits enough of our attention to reach at least the beginnings of a judgment—and maybe, several judgments about it.

I think our experience requires following the money and wondering whether the priorities we’ve been financing are really worth as much as we’ve been paying (economically, politically and even spiritually) for them: because in a world of limits, if you’re paying for one thing you’re NOT paying for some thing else—and bearing the opportunity costs.

As I sat down to write to you yesterday, on 9/11, my plan was to acknowledge the cloud I’ve been operating under (that maybe you have been operating under too) for the past month or so and point in a more optimistic direction. I wanted to look back with you from 2050 and glimpse the world that even now we’re beginning to create to meet the demands of a healthier, more sustainable planet. (Instead, I’ll do that next Sunday, in a Part 2-post.) But as you’re suspecting from my shift from the objectives of a military-industrial-complex to those of a carbon-reduced environment, our priorities will need to change as we stumble towards a different and more necessary future.

In the meantime, we’ll start to confront our financial limits, how much we can put on the credit card without a pay-off, what we can and cannot afford. Even in a fear-inducing world, a free society can only afford so much security—and, after all is said and done, HOW MUCH MORE SECURE DO YOU FEEL in the wake of our government’s flushing trillions of your dollars away? If we’re serious about healing our home-planet, we’ll have to “right-size” the military-industrial-complex that purports to protect our corner of it.

There’s simply no alternative.

It will be a messy, polarizing discussion, two steps forward and one back, with gridlock for years at a time (because that’s what a democracy does), but a debate about our biggest most expensive priorities may already have begun at the Kabul airport—and the more voices that join in that debate the better.

Follow where the money’s been spent and where new dollars are going. Priorities are realized with budgets and by those with the wisdom to guide those budgets into accountable actions.

The debate that we’ve been needing to have for at least 60 years may finally be getting started.

(By the way, the illustration up top of a human under a cloud, was created by Simone Golob.)

This post was adapted from my September 12, 2021 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning and occasionally I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

An Instant History of the Past Week in Ukraine

March 7, 2022 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

This week, we’ve all seen the pictures of mothers with their children and old people fumbling in distress in Ukraine—to leave the bombing, to find refuge.

Maybe because they cut so close to the bone and because we’ve seen so many similar images from Syria, Greek islands, Afghanistan and Myanmar, our early warning systems kick in and we become numb before they can sink their teeth into us too deeply.

But we’re less likely to shut ourselves down when events fall outside familiar grooves, not “more victims/different country” but something it’s harder to recall seeing: like those clips of Ukrainian men (and more than a few boys) who’d been living safely in Europe but left their families, friends and jobs behind to board buses and trains for their homeland this week, drawn by some quixotic but irresistible impulse, even though they never held rifles before, had been warned away by their country’s on-going destruction, and knew they might never survive their rescue attempts.

We couldn’t take our eyes off uncommon valor like that, or stop wondering what we might do in their shoes.

When poet Stephen Spender recalled similar impulses almost a hundred years ago, it wasn’t a fool’s errand in a jaded eye but the fragrant whispers of a flowering nobility that he captured.

I think continually of those who were truly great.
Who, from the womb, remembered the soul’s history
Through corridors of light, where the hours are suns,
Endless and singing. Whose lovely ambition
Was that their lips, still touched with fire,
Should tell of the Spirit, clothed from head to foot in song.
And who hoarded from the Spring branches
The desires falling across their bodies like blossoms.

What is precious, is never to forget
The essential delight of the blood drawn from ageless springs
Breaking through rocks in worlds before our earth.
Never to deny its pleasure in the morning simple light
Nor its grave evening demand for love.
Never to allow gradually the traffic to smother
With noise and fog, the flowering of the spirit.

Near the snow, near the sun, in the highest fields,
See how these names are fêted by the waving grass
And by the streamers of white cloud
And whispers of wind in the listening sky.
The names of those who in their lives fought for life,
Who wore at their hearts the fire’s centre.
Born of the sun, they travelled a short while toward the sun
And left the vivid air signed with their honour.
(“The Truly Great,” 1928)

It shows how far we’ve come (or fallen) that the perfume of greatness seems so unfamiliar today, but also through the magic of our technology that it somehow got embodied by these heroes on our news screens this week.

Who fights for one’s country these days? Who leaves so much behind to step into the jaws of the beast in a vain or noble attempt to stop it from closing? Observers like us in the West saw and felt what Spender was describing this week.

And we couldn’t take our eyes off of it. It surprised, maybe embarrassed us, as we confronted our own convictions or their shallowness. But while those closest in, the French, Germans or Poles, wondered whether they’d do the same, they also looked to their fears as a world of ordered boundaries was upended. The unthinkable Bear at the door was all too thinkable now.

Exactly one week ago, as a result of the West’s changed perceptions about Ukraine and the heroism of its president and people, several “historic” things happened. I’d call it a kind of awakening. And while it usually takes the perspective of 20 or 50 or even 100 years to decide “what just happened,” I was persuaded—by sharing the perspective of an economic historian from Columbia and his interlocutor—that several developments in recent weeks really did change the historical arc that we’ve been traveling on. We realized certain things, made some momentous decisions as a result, and implemented them with lightening speed and lethal effect. As a result, I’m persuaded that nothing that follows will ever be the same as it was only a few short days ago.

In addition to the obvious pitfalls of writing an “instant history of the past week,” there are some advantages.

Informed historical judgments can place the rush of on-going events in a broader context. They can put characters like Putin, Zelensky and Biden, themes like sanctions, supply chains and energy interdependence, into a story that tries to make sense of its sub-plots.

And you don’t have to buy-in completely to this kind of storytelling. Instead, you can use such explanations as hypotheses to be proven or disproven by whatever happens next on the world’s stage. But this time you bring with you a few suspicions that you’ve almost nailed down.

_{Ukrainian civilians confront a convoy of Russian troops this week in a vain but valiant attempt to turn them back.}

I became interested in the explanations of history in college. Not as a professional interest but as a continuing sidelight that’s has made me follow “the world news” everyday and always wonder what it meant.

I took a course that became three courses about the sweep of historical events and I was hooked: trying to answer questions like “what explains” a Napoleon or a Hitler, or how “the Black Death” in Europe undermined feudalism? (The beginning of an answer to this last one: by helping increasingly scarce laborers to appreciate their economic value.)

I took this interest into what seemed to me the historic events of my lifetime. Globally, it was the end of the Cold War, the recent pandemic. (Why did they happen? What would follow?) And from a more localized, American perspective: the cultural shifts of the Sixties (involving the civil rights of African Americans and women, Earth Day and the environmental movement) and finally, 9/11. It was sometimes possible to see the Before-and-the-After side-by-side because the changes around each one of them were so profound.

A two-part conversation between Ezra Klein, at the New York Times, and Adam Tooze, an economic historian at Columbia, identified similarly transformative moments around the recent invasion of Ukraine. (This paywall-free link is to both a transcript of their exchange and a recording of their conversation.) It was compelling that Part-One of their get-together occurred almost immediately Before and Part-Two immediately After the unprecedented response to the invasion by a startlingly unified West last Sunday. Klein called Tooze back this past Monday to reflect on events that neither of them had predicted just nine days before.

I’ve separated my summary of their observations in Part One from the comments they made in Part Two of their conversation. Taken together, I’d argue that five historic changes either happened or can be confirmed around Russia’s invasion of Ukraine over the past several days.

PART ONE OF THE KLEIN/TOOZE CONVERSATION (FRIDAY FEBRUARY 25)

1. A Western-Liberal illusion was shattered.

Once Russian military forces crossed the Ukrainian border and invaded its sovereign neighbor, it was no longer possible to believe that the benefits of international peace, finance, law, trade and cultural exchange would outweigh national grievances and territorial imperatives that lingered from a previous age. No invading army had crossed a national border for 50 years. It could no longer be assumed that the mutual advantages of a global “community,” following an ideological Cold War with the West, would constrain either Russia’s desire to expand its sphere of influence against the constraints of NATO along its eastern flank or China’s claims on Taiwan or over the South China Sea to the beaches of Japan, the Phillipines and Vietnam.

Russia’s seizing of Russian-speaking Crimea and support of “breakaway “republics” in the Donbas region of Ukraine had not been enough to dispel the West’s illusion that all nations shared its dream of global prosperity and harmony. Neither had China’s subversion of Hong Kong, in violation of its 50-year treaty with the UK, or trade sanctions imposed by the Trump administration. But those rose-colored glasses finally shattered when Russia marched into Ukraine.

Tooze and Klein saw foreshadowing from Russia and China around 2008, after Russia had recovered from the economic devastation following the fall of the Soviet Union in the 1990’s and China pivoted from the Beijing Summer Olympics to the rise of a Xi Jinping. Back then, both China and Russia started chaffing publically about the dominance of the global framework that had been established by the U.S. and Europe a half century before. After the Russian invasion 10 days ago, the West could no longer operate on the assumption that free trade, open communications, and the greater prosperity of home populations would make Russia and China “just like us,” freer, more open and democratic. The world is divided again, less because of communist ideology and more because of national aspirations that cannot be denied.

2. Russia and China effectively used the West’s open, global framework of trade and finance to build “war chests” that could enable them to resist the West’s dominance within their geographical “spheres of influence.”

Since its near financial collapse in the 1990s, and particularly after the sanctions that followed its seizure of Crimea in 2014, Russia used its access to the international banking system to build its financial reserves through its energy and natural resource sales, reduce its dependence on foreign currencies like the dollar or Euro, and make itself more impervious to external interference, including economic sanctions. (Adam Tooze discusses the financial games that Russia played at length if you want to read more about them.) For its part, China also used free trade and access to a global financial system to enrich and strengthen itself at the West’s expense. Once again, wrapped in the illusion described above, the West was slow to appreciate the negative consequences that came with what it believed was “its benevolent dominance.”

3. Supply-chain security involving critical materials becomes a central feature of every country’s defense policy.

As a consequence of #1 and #2, the interdependence of energy and semi-conductor markets (to take just two examples), impose limits on Western sanction regimes and make the future take-over of a country like Taiwan (which leads the world in the production of semi-conductors) even more fraught. Only a couple of years ago, few observers in the West were concerned about these supply constraints and the necessity of home-grown accessibility to critical products and resources.

These three changes in Western perception all hardened with the invasion of Ukraine. Nevertheless, as recently as last weekend most observers believed that the invasion would quickly overwhelm its resistance, that Europe would continue to tolerate unpredictability around Russian energy supplies, and that Russia’s economic interdependence with Europe (i.e. the benefits of prosperity all-around) would continue to keep Europe safe and secure.

As a consequence, the West’s initial responses to the invasion—which had been telegraphed for weeks—“meant to sanction Russia, to cause pain to the country and particularly to its ruling class, but not to crack its economy, not to cause undue harm to their own economies, which are interwoven with Russia’s,” as Klein described it.

Then last Sunday, perhaps after viewing a week of Ukraine’s brave civilian resistance, watching its nationals return to fight, its grandmothers face tanks, and listening to the eloquent pleas of its president to NATO, the EU and the US, the West was ready to make even more fundamental departures with its past.

_{Throughout the invasion, Zelensky has maintained regular video contact with the people of Ukraine and the world outside, bolstering not only Ukrainian morale but also summoning Western solidarity and resolve that had never existed before.}

PART TWO OF THE KLEIN/TOOZE CONVERSATION (ON MONDAY MARCH 1)

4. The West declares economic war against another nation for the first time since World War II.

Last Sunday, the EU and US announced economic sanctions on Russia’s Central Bank and virtually all of its other financial institutions in a bid to bring the country to its economic knees as the punishing cost for its invasion of Ukraine. It’s an economic war that’s not only been brought to Russia’s leader and the oligarchs behind him. It’s an economic war that is likely to have devastating and long-lasting consequences for the Russia’s 145 million people. Adam Tooze:

[W]e are now applying Iran-style treatment to not just a nuclear power, [but to] the number two nuclear power in the world, the old Cold War antagonist, in the middle of an active shooting war in which we are taking sides [and] in which they are not making the progress they expect. And we are threatening by this means to deliver a devastating blow to their home front. I mean, panic in the streets, total disruption of the ordinary lives of tens of millions of Russians.

Today, every American going to the grocery store or looking for a used car is worried about price inflation. But in one fell swoop, the Western sanctions implemented by a united West on Sunday launched “a full out economic war” with far more profound “inflationary” consequences for every person who relies on the ruble to live day-to-day. Coupled with the EU’s unprecedented decision to send military arms to Ukraine (and Germany’s reversal of its earlier refusal to do so), Tooze accurately analogized these counterstrikes to the aggressive American posture immediately before it entered World War II (with its Lend Lease program in support of its European allies). Indeed, it was enough of a body-blow that Putin put his country on nuclear alert immediately thereafter. One result is that a nuclear war, unthinkable just a week ago, is today more of a possibility than it has been for over 35 (and maybe 60) years, depending on how you calculated the Soviet threat level in 1985 and 1960.

It doesn’t take boots on the ground to go to war today. While the West is struggling mightily to avoid a larger conflagration, the economic war it has launched is real and its consequences deep and possibly irreversible. And instead of taking weeks or months to mount, this kind of war began almost instantaneously, impacting a global network of trade, insurance and currency exchange fine-tuned to global disruptions that are far more modest than this invasion.

But another way to assess the damage is from the perspective of the average Russian. According to one report this week, “the fall of the ruble since Russia invaded Ukraine could add 4 to 5 percentage points to Russian inflation, which [already] stood at 8.7% in January.” That’s another order of magnitude reduction in what Russians could buy with their rubles a little more than a week ago. Tooze again:

[T]here is serious reason to worry about lower middle class Russian households [in particular]. They’ve been squeezed hard over the last five, six, seven years. Their incomes have not been going up. They’ve been piling up debt. One of the first things that happened today is the interest rates went to 20 percent. So that’s going to immediately bite into your income. So there is a serious risk here of major economic and social fallout.

We’re talking the destabilization of an entire economy from the ground up.

While it will take the Russian economy some time to “devalue” itself, the impacts on its citizens will escalate in the coming weeks and months with particularly grave consequences for these same lower-income folks who, until now, have been the bulwark of Putin’s “democratic” support. Couple that blow to its citizenry with the escalating costs to the country of an invasion (that was supposed to be over by now) and of fighting a Ukrainian insurgency (if it ever succeeds), and Russia could soon be flirting with the same economic bankruptcy that it faced after the Cold War. And from what Tooze, Klein and others seem to be saying, China either can’t or won’t come to Russia’s rescue.

So however much it is obscured by the daily blizzard of “news” and our other diversions, for the first time in most of our lifetimes, we in the West are on “war-footing,” and have no way of knowing where this confrontation will go next.

A final Before-and-After event also happened last Sunday.

5. The defeated countries in World War II—Germany and Japan—are either bolstering (or considering bolstering) their military capabilities for the first time since they were pacified 75 years ago.

In this regard, Germany announced (in some shame over its lack of preparedness) that it is authorizing an unpredented increase of $110 billion in its defense budget. Moreover, for the first time since its creation, the EU (as a unanimous block of 28 nations) has authorized the delivery of $500 million in weapons to a country that’s not an EU member. This is on top of armaments and military supplies provided by the US and NATO. (The icon of St. Javelin, up top, is Ukraine acknowledging one of America’s most appreciated military contributions, namely the Javelin anti-tank missile.)

Moreover, as China engages in saber-rattling in the South China Sea, Japan is also actively contemplating its rearmament. With these developments, the so-called Pax Americana that was promised after the Cold War but already wobbly before Sunday, was surely dead thereafter.

Five developments that have likely changed the course of modern history.

After the terrible loss of blood and treasure in Afghanistan by many of these same Western countries—economic losses that have yet to be quantified for those of us in these democracies who have covered them—it (sadly) appears that we are off to the same bloody and costly races again, with hardly a pause to take a decent breath.

Of course, the consequences are not only to where the West spends its money but also to where it doesn’t (either because of massive new defense expenditures or the lack of available band-width to consider anything other than national security concerns). For example, how do we also fight a war against global warming and biodiversity loss and on behalf of a habitable planet? Is this battle now, somehow secondary to our survival?

What really happened over the past seven days is that half (or more) of the world suddenly changed its priorities—and it’s not at all clear that in that flash, enough of the citizens of the West have even noticed.

This post was adapted from my March 6, 2022 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning and occasionally I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

For the Birds

January 5, 2022 By David Griesing 3 Comments

I’d be lying if I told you that the first sounds I hear when I take Wally out in the morning are bird sounds. Instead, it’s the soft roll of tires on one of the streets that crisscross my neighborhood or urban beats booming louder than seems possible behind the windows of a passing car. But especially when it’s early enough, those sound-trails tend to fade into a quiet distance before too long, and the next things I usually hear are the local birds.

This time of year it can be the urgent squawking of Canadian geese, formed in a vee directly above us, after leaving the reservoir nearby and heading north by north-east in their annual migration. Or the tittering sparrows and wrens. But it can also be our talkative crows. They live in social groupings that have been called “murders” for as long as anyone can remember. While many explanations have been given, it seems that their name originated in folklore when many animal groups were described for dramatic effect by their characteristics, like an ostentation of peacocks, a parliament of owls, a knot of frogs, or a skulk of foxes.

Crows are highly social, mate for life, protect one another (including unfamiliar crows that are looking for help), and vocalize by using upwards of 250 different calls. This last character trait may actually go some distance towards explaining why crows are called a “murder” when they start chattering. Informal English has always accused the lower classes of “murdering” the common tongue.

Until a huge tree fell from an old neighbor’s yard and onto the new one’s next door, the resident murder would roost in its canopy and converse for hours. Wally would bark back at them when he was out and I’d also say “hello” if I thought of it. I’ve come to appreciate that our crows know exactly who we are and that we’re in some kind of conversation with them too.

Since they’ve been particularly noisy this week, their chatter made me take a second look at a book I read and reviewed here this time last year: Colum McCann’s Apeirogon, a word that means an object or, in this instance a story. with an infinite number of sides. McCann’s book is about the endless conversations, memories and illuminations that characterize the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and, in particular, how those relevancies and asides add dimension to a dialogue between two real-life fathers (one Israeli, one Palestinian) who has each lost a daughter to the murderous violence and struggles to transcend his loss. In the jumble of images, fables and impressions that he assembles, McCann continuously returns to the birds who also live in this elemental place, or pass through it on their annual migrations. “Our” crows made me want to re-revisit their stories-within-stories.

For example, this is the third of “the thousand-and-one” (or endless) digressions and reflections that make up Apeirogon:

Five hundred million birds arc the sky over the hills of Beit Jala every year. They move by ancient ancestry: hoopoes, thrushes, flycatchers, warblers, cuckoos, starlings, shrikes, ruffs, northern wheatears, plovers, sunbirds, swifts, sparrows, nightjars, owls, gulls, hawks, eagles, kites, cranes, buzzards, sandpipers, pelicans, flamingos, storks, pied bushchats, griffon vultures, European rollers, Arabian babblers, bee-eaters, turtledoves, whitethroats, yellow wagtails, blackcaps, red-throated pipits, little bitterns.
It is the world’s second busiest migratory superhighway: at least four hundred different species of birds torrent through, riding different levels of sky. Long vees of honking intent. Sole travelers skimming low over the grass.
Every year a new landscape appears underneath: Israeli settlements, Palestinian apartment blocks, rooftop gardens, barracks, barriers, by-pass roads.
Some of the birds migrate at night to avoid predators, flying in their sidereal patterns, elliptic with speed, devouring their own muscles and intestines in flight. Others travel during the day to take advantage of the thermals rising from below, the warm wind lifting their wings so they can coast.
At times whole flocks block out the sun and daub shadows across Beit Jala: the fields, the steep terraces, the olive groves on the outskirts of town.
Lie down in the vineyard in the Cremian monastery at any time of day and you can see the birds overhead, traveling in their talkative lanes.
They land on trees, telegraph poles, electricity cables, water towers, even the rim of the Wall, where they are a sometime target for the young stone throwers.

You see, the birds also get caught up in the violence that inflicts this corner of the Levant, one of the birthplaces of the human world. But at the same time, they give wing to the aspirations that can also emerge from the grief of many of those who live there today.

_{Two bird masks that I bought, several years ago, from a couple of backpackers who had set up shop in an Upper-West Side parking lot, just back from Latin America and financing their return to life in NYC.}

It’a probably not “five hundred million birds” in Apeirogon‘s migrating sky anymore. While the enormous bio-diversity loss is not what preoccupies me most about birds this morning (it’s more their soaring possibility), the decline in their numbers is still alarming.

For example, in 1970 there were nearly 3 billion more birds in North America than there are today, a decline of nearly a third. It’s impossible to wrap one’s head around a number like that, easier to simply notice how many fewer birds you’re hearing or seeing wherever you are today. They’re another of our dwindling resources.

Confronted by murder on this scale, I always want to go beyond noticing and “do” something about it. But as I learned (and reported here) after listening to a couple of wildlife experts, the next time I come upon, say, a baby bird who’s out of its nest, it’s better, almost every single time, to assume that it’s fine, that mom knows exactly where it is, and that it will be happier and far less afraid without my “help.” Usually, the better lesson is to simply notice, or to double-down on what I’m already noticing about the world I’m trying to inhabit: like how much it’s worth to me knowing that the birds I’m encountering already know about good parenting and that maybe what I need to do most “in order to save them” is to understand them better and appreciate them enough.

Which is why I wanted to share with you a groundbreaking tool that, for the first time, enables us to identify the birds that are still around us by their songs and other forms of vocalizing. A bird-song identifier that’s as accurate as this one has never been generally available before.

Over the summer, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology released its Merlin Bird ID app, which enables its users to identify some 400 North American birds (and counting) by the sounds that they make. According to one armchair reviewer, the app doesn’t claim to be 100% accurate, but “it comes very close.” It’s developers relied on a crowd-sourcing initiative that continues to draw upon a database of notes and recordings contributed by tens of thousands of citizen scientists through the Lab’s eBird Initiative. In what Fast Company called “a Shazam for bird songs,” the Merlin app turns a Babel of voices into one-on-one concerts that tell you exactly who’s playing a particular instrument.

I couldn’t agree more with that armchair reviewer when she wrote: “Love can’t save the environment, but when enough voters fall in love [with pieces of it like this], they can surely shift the political winds….”

We can’t fall in love with what we’re unaware of, or know almost nothing about.

_{When I was 3 or 4, I took this book with me on the first vacation I can remember, beginning with our drive from Connecticut to Florida. Along the way, I tried to match the birds I was seeing outside our car with the pictures in the book, but I still remember how hard it was to never know (except for the robins and the crows) whether I had gotten it right.}

While falling in love with birds again or for the first time are two of “the why’s” behind the Merlin app, here are some other things that are worth knowing about it.

You can find out more about the app, including where to download it for use with your smart phone, here.

You’ll need to be outside when using it. After opening the app, once you hear a bird talking or singing, choose “Sound ID” in the menu and hit the microphone button. You will immediately begin to see a “spectrogram” of sound waves scrolling across your phone screen, effectively “taking a picture” of its vocalizing. By using its algorithms to compare that picture with others in its database, the app will provide you with the bird’s identity. Clicking “This is my bird” after recording the date and their geographical location will save the sighting and share its specifics with the underlying database to improve the app’s future performance—effectively turning all app users into data gatherers and collaborators.

Using another feature in the app called the Bird ID Wizard comes at bird identification more incrementally. It asks you three questions about the bird you’re hearing (and hopefully seeing) before narrowing the likely possibilities: what size is it, what are its principal colors, and where did you see it (e.g. at a birdfeeder, on the ground, soaring or flying?). The app then provides you with a list of possible matches, which you can narrow further by using Sound ID or by taking and uploading a picture of the bird you’re seeing. The Wizard feature expands on the specifics you notice along the way to your identification and introduces you to other birds making similar sounds, adding more layers to your appreciation and to the thousand-and-one stories that you’re telling yourself about the birds around you.

Finally, if all of this listening and looking has peaked your interest even further, there is ebird, an inter-related app that feeds and utilizes the same database of bird sounds. With ebird, it’s possible to share your most unexpected sightings with an extensive community of birdwatchers as well as to track the sightings that others have had of particular birds you’ve become interested in.

This last adjunct to bird song ID reminds me that as winter approaches, neighbors of mine will be conducting their annual bird census. They ask people with birdfeeders like me whether they can observe what’s happening in my yard and whether I’ve been seeing any unusual visitors this year. These are the folks who came long before the Merlin app but are likely a part of its data gathering now. They’re invested in noticing as much as they can about the birds around here during a barren time when leaving seeds for them brings them closer, makes them more visible, and encourages them to keep us company.

Particularly as the days get shorter and colder and the overall muck of daily life starts to pull you down. it may be as good a time as any to let the wing’d updrafts and cacophony of bird sounds help to lift you up too.

This post was adapted from my October 24, 2021 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning and occasionally I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

Mobs Are Like Weapons Pointed at All of Us

November 30, 2021 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

For years now, I’ve been drawn to the mind of Robert D. Kaplan. It’s not that I’ve always agreed with him, but his insights have rarely failed to pull me in.

Maybe it’s for all the reasons that I wrote last week’s post, A Deeper Sense of Place is an Anchor in Turbulent Times. For much of his lengthy career, Kaplan has written about geography’s influence on politics and national power. He believes that where a people are located,” the place they “call home”—it’s proximity to powerful nations, it’s access to river systems, the extent of its undeveloped frontier, its natural resources (or lack of them), whether they’re protected by mountain ranges or oceans—has “a determining effect” on how these people view themselves and the world around them.

The importance of place was my way into Kaplan’s writing because, in my gut, I always felt he was right.

Three years ago, I wrote about a book by Kaplan called Earning the Rockies: How Geography Shapes America’s Role in the World (2017). It was another illuminating read. This was a time when the executives helming America’s tech companies were still using their prominence and financial clout to lecture the rest of us about “what progress should look like” from their ideological points of view. In that post, I wondered how their rugged individualism, honed on technology’s frontier, jived with Americans skepticism about ideologies and their commandments, another take-away from the “frontier mentality” that Kaplan ascribed to most Americans.

Frontiers [like America’s] test ideologies like nothing else. There is no time for the theoretical. That, ultimately, is why America has not been friendly to communism, fascism, or other, more benign forms of utopianism. Idealized concepts have rarely taken firm root in America and so intellectuals have had to look to Europe for inspiration. People here are too busy making money—an extension, of course, of the frontier ethos, with its emphasis on practical initiative…[A]long this icy, unforgiving frontier, the Enlightenment encountered reality and was ground down to an applied wisdom of ‘commonsense’ and ‘self evidence.’ In Europe an ideal could be beautiful or liberating all on its own, in frontier America it first had to show measurable results.

In the tumultuous years that have followed, my question has been answered in part by a populist, Know-Nothing revulsion aimed at “thought-leaders,” big-shots and experts of all kinds who think they know better.

So perhaps it’s not a coincidence that this same three years has brought Kaplan to the short essay that appeared in the Wall Street Journal this week. It’s called “The Tyranny of the 21st Century Crowd” and it came with the following elaboration: “Mobs that form from the bottom up may prove even harder to defeat than totalitarian regimes.” (Here’s a link that makes his essay available beyond the usual paywall.)

What does any of this have to do with our work next week, the work that all of us should be doing, or the over-all quality of our lives at this place and time? As it turns out, quite a lot.

I had dinner this past week with a small business owner whose office is indirectly buffeted on a regular basis by mob-related mentalities. One of his longtime employees—someone who happens to have an advanced degree—is from a family of anti-vaxers, refuses to send her child to a school that requires vaccinations, and is pushing hard for an accommodation to move her work (from live to remote) to another state where she thinks the schools will be more lenient. A second longtime employee is a member of two oppressed groups (based on age and on race). This employee apparently doesn’t feel like working any more, but also holds the implicit (if meritless) threat of a discrimination action if he is either disciplined or fired. Of course, getting an 8-hour workday out of either of these “disgruntled employees” has turned into a daily minefield.

I couldn’t help but sympathize.

Who needs the expense and aggravation of being dragged by either of these people into a courtroom because they believe (and therefore can claim, without evidence) that their employer is treating them unfairly by refusing to give them what they want?

How can my friend (indeed how can anyone) run a business today when employees can assert the abridgement to some freedom- or identity-based right when all he is demanding is that they come into the office and do the work that they’re being paid to do?

I got a close-to-the-ground view of the mobs that loomed behind my friend’s two employees over dinner this week. But beyond examples like these, Kaplan foresees today’s mob-based threats causing wider, deeper and even more troubling consequences for a way of living and working that we assume is far more resilient than it actually is.

_{Pavlov’s dog parade is by a favorite artist, the late cartoonist and social commentator Saul Steinberg. (If it looks familiar, I also featured it in my post, We’re All Acting Like Dogs Today, on the refusal by regulators (and the public behind them) to confront the user manipulation and mob tendencies that are an inherent feature of dominant tech platforms like Google.Twitter and Facebook.)}

While Kaplan implicitly acknowledges the American peoples’ general hostility to foreign ideologies like communism and fascism, along with its “heartland’s” hostility to the progressive ideologies of the East and West Coasts, he certainly recognizes the populist impulses that bubble beneath all of these debates.

For Kaplan, the Peoples’ arguments over their deeply held political beliefs usually represent “a profound abasement of reason.” In other words, populists of all stripes generally feel the rightness of their views instead of reasoning themselves into the convictions that they hold. Under these circumstances, it’s difficult if not impossible to foresee how America willl be able to maintain its democratic way of life when every quadrant of our politics is being actively overtaken by its own version of a mob. (While Kaplan doesn’t delve into these divisions, George Packer recently described “the four political belief systems” that are operating in the U.S. today in “How America Fractured Into Four Parts,” an article of his that I discussed here in June.)

What Kaplan does do is quote liberally from a book about mobs that I’d never heard of: Crowds and Power by Elias Canetti.

The crowd, Canetti says, emerges from the need of the lonely individual to conform with others. Because he can’t exert dominance on his own, he exerts it through a crowd that speaks with one voice. The crowd’s urge is always to grow, consuming all hierarchies, even as it feels persecuted and demands retribution. The crowd sees itself as entirely pure, having attained the highest virtue.
Thus, one aim of the crowd is to hunt down the insufficiently virtuous. The tyranny of the crowd has many aspects, but Canetti says its most blatant form is that of the ‘questioner,’ and the accuser. ‘When used as an intrusion of power,” the accusing crowd ‘is like a knife cutting into the flesh of the victim. The questioner knows what there is to find, but he wants actually to touch it and bring it to light.’
The tyranny and violence of the mob reaches its crescendo when it exercises the monopoly that it believes it has on virtue. ‘If you don’t agree with us,’ Canetti says of them, ‘you are not only wrong but morally wanting, and as such should not only be denounced, but destroyed.’ Then he deploys notions about nations and their exercise of power to provide historical perspective as well as a glimpse into the future of America’s power. Where once America’s (and the West’s) power resided in its political, educational and media institutions and in the civic cohesion they produced, today that foundation is increasingly undermined not by counter-institutions (that seek social change for the better) but by mob power (whose primary interest is in weakening, when not actively seeking to destroy, the institutions that once bound us together).
Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were defeated by U.S. military and industrial power. Civilizations rest not only on intellectual and cultural foundations but also on coarser aspects of strength and power. The historic West, which is ultimately about the freedom of the individual to rise above the crowd, survived the 20th century thanks to American hard power, itself maintained by a system of individual excellence in the arts and sciences, in turn nurtured by an independent and diverse media. But that media is now becoming immersed in the crowd, where it demands virtue in its purest ideological form, so that much of the media too often plays the role of Canetti’s accuser.
The lust for purity combined with the tyranny of social-media technology in the hands of the young—who have little sense of the past and of tradition—threatens to create an era of the most fearsome mobs in history. The upshot of such crowd coercion is widespread self-censorship: the cornerstone of all forms of totalitarianism….
This ultimately leads toward a controlled society driven by the bland, the trivial and the mundane, wearing the lobotomized face of CNN weekday afternoon television. Outright evil can surely be dealt with, but a self-righteous conformity is harder to resist. Left unchecked, this is how the West slowly dies.

The self-censorship that this kind of tyranny causes and the masks it forces us to wear are more isolating than any restrictions that were imposed during the pandemic. Reasonable people withdraw from free exchange for fear of having their livelihoods and reputations challenged by self-righteous mobs. Effectively “lobotimizing ourselves,” we mask up to avoid being “destroyed.”

_{One of the Saul Steinberg and Inge Morath images from The Mask Series (1959-1963).}

Reading Kaplan’s essay reminded me of a book that I hadn’t read since college, The Revolt of the Masses by Orega y Gasset, a Spanish essayist.

Sounding like an Old Testament prophet 85 years ago, Ortega wrote about the undermining of “liberalism” by mobs of communist and right-wing agitators. He feared the “tyranny of [any] majority” and the “collective mediocrity” of the “masses” (and the so-called “mass-men” that populated them). Ortega believed they threatened both individuality and freedom of thought with annihilation. Much like Kaplan, he wrote:

The mass crushes beneath it everything that is different, that is excellent, individual, qualified, and select. Anybody who is not like everybody, who does not think like everybody, runs the risk of being eliminated. And it is clear that this ‘everybody’ is not ‘everybody.’ ‘Everybody’ was normally the complex unity of the mass and the divergent, specialized elite groups. Nowadays, ‘everybody’ is the mass alone.

Twenty years later, in Homage to Catalonia (George Orwell’s sobering account of his own time fighting for the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War), the eventual author of 1984 and Animal Farm reached the same conclusion as Ortega about the mobs of the left and the right that were squeezing the life blood our of their homeland. It was an experience that eviserated the romanticism that an idealistic young man had once felt for his own republican principles.

Even with their differences, Orwell, Ortega and Kaplan would probably agree that it was the power of America and the West—the only champions of “liberal” values left standing—that liberated at least some of the civilized world from the mobs that were overtaking it before World War II. As we sit here today, it’s hardly misplaced to wonder: Who, if anyone, will do so again?

In the course of his essay, Robert Kaplan doesn’t mention the mob that attempted to interrupt the Electoral College vote in Washington last January; not a woke mob enforcing its virtue from prominent positions in the nation’s media and universities, but a MAGA mob that was encouraged by a president who’d just been defeated at the polls.

The “insurrection” was another side of the same coin.

In a post from a month before the Capitol assault, I wrote about “the big lie” that was told to the German people following their defeat in World War I. “You didn’t actually lose,” conspiracists told them. “Our terrible surrender was the result of a plot by leftists, Jews, bankers and others who stood to gain from it.” That it was a lie hardly mattered, because it fed so seamlessly into the resentment, anger and economic hardship that many German soldiers, their families and communities were already feeling. It was these “regular people” who fed the mobs that led to national socialism and, only twenty years later, a second world war.

I think the wrong question to take from these historical similarities is whether Donald Trump is another Adolf Hitler. Instead, as I wrote a year ago:

Are there genuine parallels between Germany in the 1920s and 30’s and the U.S in the 2020’s and 30’s?
Were there political leaders (both then and now) who were willing to tell “a big, almost preposterous lie” if it could stoke existing grievances and rally their supporters so they could gain additional power?
Did the German people permit their leaders to send fellow Germans who were supposedly to blame for their tribulations to concentration camps?
How could so many free people, who had enjoyed democracy and the right to determine their futures, been overtaken by such a lie?
Surely, they knew then (as we know now) what was happening around them, as reporters today are called ‘enemies of the state’ and election officials are targeted for assassination.
Did they pretend (and are we pretending now) not to see the breakdowns in the fabric of our society that continue and only seem to get worse?
To paraphrase [the poet, W.H.] Auden: “Did the best among us on both sides really lack conviction, while only the worst / were full of passionate intensity”?

In a new HBO documentary about last January’s revolt of the masses, called “Four Hours at the Capitol” (link to the film’s trailer), a police officer who was interviewed recalled a piece of advice that he had gotten during his military training as he thought back to where he found himself that day:

Individuals aren’t usually a problem. But when they get together and create a mob, then, the mob is the weapon.

Too few in America and in the West today are actively trying to disarm these weapons, which are being stoked every day by social media, by too many in the legacy media, and by the demagogues who give voice to every flavor of them.

Will we need the purifying force of another world war—another battle to the death for the best and against the worst in our civilization—in order to break the hold that mob rule increasingly exerts over our politics, our freedom of speech, and our ability to be anything more than mass-men or -women in one frenzied crowd or another?

Maybe Kaplan and his intellectual forebears give us an alternative vision to hold onto: a view of America and the West that once again has the fortitude to stand up against every kind of mob in the world–not because of our theoretical beliefs about democracy and our Enlightenment traditions, but because we cherish our freedom and individuality for their practical benefits and refuse to give them up because weapons keep being pointed in our direction.

This post was adapted from my October 17, 2021 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning and occasionally I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe by leaving your email address in the column to the right.