Off the Page: The Harvard Press Author Forum

Presidential rhetoric in historical perspective

PARTICIPATING AUTHOR: BRYAN GARSTEN

Bryan Garsten is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Yale University, and author of Saving Persuasion: A Defense of Rhetoric and Judgment (Harvard University Press 2007). It has won the 2005 Thomas J. Wilson Prize of Harvard University Press and the 2006 First Book Award from the Foundations of Political Theory Section of the American Political Science Association.

When President Andrew Johnson was brought before the Senate on impeachment charges in 1868, one of the official accusations against him was that he did “openly and publicly and before divers assemblages of citizens of the United States…make and declare, with a loud voice, certain intemperate, inflammatory and scandalous harangue…amid the cries, jeers and laughter of the multitudes then assembled in hearing…” Johnson had gone on tour around the country for more than two weeks, giving speeches to crowd after crowd in an effort to gain popular support for his Reconstruction policies, and--astonishing as it may seem--this is part of what he was impeached for.

True, Johnson also had a reputation for being drunk during public appearances (including his own inauguration), and he sometimes used language inappropriate for a president when talking about his foes in Congress. But these improprieties were not his fundamental crime.  The basic impropriety motivating this particular article of impeachment was that he stooped to address crowds directly in the first place, that he had reduced himself to the demeaning position of trying to whip up enthusiasm for his preferred policies by the ethically dubious practice of holding popular rallies. In Johnson’s time, making a speech to a crowd on policy questions was thought to be contrary to the dignity proper to the office of the presidency. Sitting presidents avoided doing this, and so did candidates for the presidency.

But who could imagine a presidential campaign today without public rallies and popular rhetoric? And who would think of impeaching a president for giving impassioned speeches and trying to whip up support for his programs? Public norms and expectations about this have changed, as Jeffrey Tulis’s essential book The Rhetorical Presidency reveals.

The political culture of the early republic was shaped by men who were deeply suspicious of popular rhetoric. The framers of the Constitution were steeped in the early modern philosophical tradition that I explore in my book Saving Persuasion, and they designed many of the structures of our government with an eye to minimizing the influence that charismatic, powerful speakers could have on policy. Even the basic plan to create a large country filled with different states was defended as a means of resisting demagogues: “The influence of factious leaders may kindle a flame within their particular States,” wrote James Madison, “but will be unable to spread a general conflagration through the other States.”

Today we have a different name for such a “general conflagration”--we call it a “movement” and we generally welcome it. The prospect of many young people being drawn into politics fills most of us with hope rather than dread, and we treat the arrival of a powerful and eloquent speaker as an occasion for celebration. Is this simply because we are more democratic than the founders, less prone to worry about the dangers of over-enthusiastic mobs?

In part, yes; but there is something more: We have also become accustomed to the idea of a very powerful presidency.

The reason that presidents address us directly is that it permits them to claim a mandate that they can use against the other branches of government. Andrew Johnson’s speaking tour, Teddy Roosevelt’s “bully pulpit,” Woodrow Wilson’s campaign to ratify the League of Nations, the civil rights leaders’ speeches of the 1960s, and Ronald Reagan’s work as a “great communicator” were all efforts to circumvent legislative opposition to their policies by appealing over the heads of the legislators directly to “the people.” In allowing themselves to be addressed in this way, the people willingly participated in this strategy of presidential self-aggrandizement.

The alliance between the people and the presidency has often had the salutary effect of pushing much-needed change through a system too prone to gridlock, but it has also brought us back to a mode of politics that would have been familiar, in its broad outlines at least, to early modern subjects of the British crown, or even to those living under princes in Renaissance Italy. When Machiavelli recommended that princes put their faith in the people, he did so partly because history had already shown that alliances between princes or kings and the people were a good way for monarchs to consolidate their authority and outmaneuver their rivals in the nobility.

And it must be admitted that there is something monarchical about the popular style of presidential politics today. The tours around the country that candidates and presidents take to shore up support resemble in some ways the King’s Progresses in early modern Britain; the intrigue that is stirred by first families today resembles nothing more than court gossip; and the propensity to put family members of past presidents into the presidency has certainly not diminished in the time since popular campaigning became acceptable. Democratic peoples seem to like subjecting themselves to monarchical figures and families.

More substantively, many of us fall into the habit of discussing presidential elections as if our choice of candidate were a choice of what policies will be enacted--as if whoever is elected will merely wave his or her hand and give the orders--as if the rest of our government were just a mere formality. Our language too often suggests that we regard the chief executive not as just one of the three branches of government, but as that government’s head. If campaign rhetoric today draws us closer to the candidates in one sense, it also signals our acceptance of their seeming sovereignty. Is there something submissive in our willingness to occupy the role of an audience?

The speeches and rallies that we take for granted in today’s presidential campaigns help to cement the powerful alliance between the people and the president. No one can ignore the benefit that this alliance has brought to the executive branch, which today enjoys more power and latitude than ever before. The question we should keep our eye on is whether the alliance continues to benefit the people.

What are the cultural uses of boredom?

PARTICIPATING AUTHOR: AVIAD KLEINBERG

Aviad Kleinberg is Professor of History at Tel Aviv University and the author of Prophets in Their Own Country: Living Saints and the Making of Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages and Flesh Made Word: Saints' Stories and the Western Imagination (HUP April 2008).

Think of one of those mundane situations we all know too well--you try to read a book that all the critics hail as a masterpiece. You would be happy to join the chorus of applause, if only you weren't so terribly bored. Your mind wanders; your vision blurs; you feel very tired all of a sudden. You're bored silly.

Now think again. Boredom may not be as harmless as it looks on first sight. It is not a conscious critique, perhaps, but its effects can be as devastating as open revolt. Parents, teachers, preachers, party apparatchiks can order us to sit still and behave ourselves. But they cannot keep us from feeling bored. The Bible? Boring. The Talmud? Boring, the Holy Quran? Boring. Das Kapital? Boooring.

Boredom's deceivingly innocuous nature may be its greatest strength. Boredom is a particularly effective weapon of cultural resistance. It is one of the very few that do not cause escalated aggression toward the powerless, but actually induces the powerful to change themselves. Anything to avoid gaping yawns and glazed eyes. The medieval Church, for example, allowed its preachers to season their edifying (but, alas, so boring) messages with amusing stories, full of delicious gore and horror. They coated bitter Church dogma with the sugar of romance and melodrama. They offered their bored flocks entertaining tales of adventurous saints--often barely Christianized folktale characters—and repentant sinners. It worked. Saints' stories became hugely popular. But, as I have shown in my Flesh Made Word, there was a price to pay. Saints' stories conveyed confusing messages. In fact they gradually developed an alternative theology, often at odds with the official one. The consumers may have become interested, but not necessarily in the expected moral. Sometimes the medicine is every bit as bad as the disease.

But if boredom can be a subversive force, it can also be the very essence of conformism. If it can be the spontaneous little iconoclast within us, it can also be the secret agent of the powers that be. For, contrary to our intuitive assumptions, boredom can be artificially induced. One can learn to be bored—bored with old clothes, with old products, with dangerous ideas. The citizen of the post-Gutenberg galaxy learns to be bored. He is carefully conditioned to have a short attention span and to be fed up quickly.  If you grew up watching commercial television—the most important cultural conditioner in the post-Guttenberg world—you got used to instant, mostly emotional, gratification.

This does not mean that in the past most people's idea of fun was reading the tomes of Proust's In Search of Lost Time or that nowadays nobody reads hefty works of scholarships. There have always been patient and impatient individuals, lovers of short stories and enthusiasts of epic tales. But as a culture we are becoming increasingly impatient. Hooked on constant entertainment, we need frequent fixes to maintain our high. We get bored faster.

Boredom does not affect only the way we consume entertainment. It affects the way we consume anything and everything. Most significantly perhaps it affects the mechanism that could change things—politics. Democracy requires knowledge, because democracy is about rational decisions. Our channel-surfing culture, however, marks politically-significant knowledge as boring. To make rational political decisions, you must know things that are neither entertaining nor moving. You are expected to listen to and draw conclusions from long arguments about ideology and action. In the past, popular assemblies listened to and debated very long arguments; political pamphlets were eagerly read by the "common" people. No more. It's boring.

The new politicians are well aware of this. Boredom is good for bad politics. Audiences expect a punch line every 5 or 6 minutes. Off the record, decision making goes on. The few who control the market weigh, measure, debate, and decide. In front of the cameras, politicians entertain. All they need are a few good one-liners and a repertoire of touching personal stories. If they also look good (and nowadays they usually do), they're fine. The show must go on. The show does go on.

It's often a good show, but it is rarely good politics. And just like the reshaping of medieval Christianity, it had happened almost inadvertently. The media is no longer the town crier. It educates, it conditions, it shapes our mental world and answers expectations it had itself created. Yet, in spite of its active role in the game, it pretends to be a bystander. It decries any attempt to regulate it as a threat to the freedom of speech. But a society in which speeches are empty and citizens ignorant is not truly a democracy. Democracy requires respect for "boring" things—an interest in processes and a willingness not to jump too quickly to the bottom line. It demands a serious rethinking of the deep consequences of the commercialization of primetime. Beware of boredom. It can make you silly.

The Romance of John and Abigail Adams

The Romance of the 18th Century?

PARTICIPATING AUTHOR: MARGARET A. HOGAN

Margaret A. Hogan is Managing Editor of the Adams Papers at the Massachusetts Historical Society and Coeditor with C. James Taylor of  My Dearest Friend: Letters of Abigail and John Adams

The Romance of John and Abigail Adams John Adams, a 24-year-old lawyer in Braintree, Massachusetts, first met the teenage Abigail Smith in the summer of 1759 at her father’s home in Weymouth. John’s initial impressions were less than complimentary: “Not fond, not frank, not candid” was the overall assessment in his diary. But from these inauspicious beginnings a romance developed that would sustain this most famous of American couples through fifty years of marriage, five children (three of whom they outlived), multiple homes in numerous cities and towns across three countries and two continents, lengthy separations, and all the rigors of eighteenth-century life—not to mention a revolution, wars, and a wide array of political and diplomatic crises.

What we know of John and Abigail’s relationship stems largely from the letters they wrote to one another, of which some 1,160 have survived to the present day. Their earliest extant note, written from John to Abigail in October 1762, shows just how much had changed between them in the three short years since they first met. “Miss Adorable,” John wrote. “By the same Token that the Bearer hereof satt up with you last night I hereby order you to give him, as many Kisses, and as many Hours of your Company after 9 O Clock as he shall please to Demand and charge them to my Account.” In time their flirtatious correspondence evolved to reflect a deeper, more abiding relationship, but they never lost what Abigail described as “that unabated affection which has for years past, and will whilst the vital spark lasts, burn in the Bosom of your affectionate A Adams.”

Along with that affection and intimacy, Abigail and John proved to be kindred spirits, with shared interests in and a common outlook on the world around them. Abigail had never received a formal education, but her access to some of the finest libraries in Massachusetts and her voracious love of reading gave her a wide-ranging knowledge that allowed her easily to serve as John’s equal in any intellectual debate. Her place as John’s primary political advisor was merely a logical extension of her role as wife and manager of their household in a partnership of equals.

Their letters not only reflected this emotional and intellectual interdependence; they also became symbols of it. Abigail found writing to John “the composure of my mind.” John, even more strikingly, asked, “Is there no Way for two friendly Souls, to converse together, altho the Bodies are 400 Miles off?— Yes by Letter.— But I want a better Communication. I want to hear you think, or see your Thoughts. The Conclusion of your Letter makes my Heart throb, more than a Cannonade would. You bid me burn your Letters. But I must forget you first.”

In the 1770s and 1780s, as John’s work toward the creation of a new American nation expanded—from first representing Massachusetts in the Continental Congress, to spearheading the move toward independence, to representing the United States in France, the Netherlands, and Britain—he and Abigail faced longer and longer periods apart. This naturally strained their relationship, especially when John’s preoccupation with business caused him to fail to write as frequently or as fully as Abigail demanded. He brought even worse trouble upon himself when he foolishly heaped praises on the “handsome, and…exceedingly brilliant” French ladies he met in Paris. Abigail could hardly let that stand; she fired back with a lengthy missive expounding on “how much female Education is neglected… tho I acknowled it my happiness to be connected with a person of a more generous mind and liberal sentiments.”

No quarrel, however, lasted for long and they soon resumed addressing one another as “My Dearest Friend.” Through all the difficulties of John’s time as vice president and president, they found respite from politicking and social obligations in their time together. When the moment arrived for John to leave the political scene, after his defeat in the election of 1800, he wrote to Abigail, “I am very glad you consented to come on… It is fit and proper that you and I should retire together and not one before the other.” Partners to the end, they spent the remainder of their lives in Massachusetts. They wrote no more letters to one another. There was no need—they were together. 

Ivory Tower or Hall of Mirrors?

Are the top leaders of today's universities increasingly corporate and narcissistic?

PARTICIPATING AUTHOR: C. K. GUNSALUS

C. K. Gunsalus, former Associate Provost at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is Special Counsel in the office of University Counsel and on the faculties of Law and Medicine at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is the author of The College Administrator's Survival Guide (Harvard University Press 2006). Read an excerpt.

A recent study of CEOs in the computer industry raises some interesting questions for universities.  Chatterjee and Hambrick of Penn State looked at signs of narcissism in CEOs, such as frequent use of “I” in communication and use of large personal photos in annual reports.  They found that the most narcissistic CEOs favor more volatile strategies than those who are less narcissistic.  They make a fascinating observation:  “[s]ince narcissism had no discernable effect on level of performance in the highly dynamic industries we studied, we might reasonably expect that it would have a more negative effect in more stable settings.”  Could this study be relevant to today’s university administrators?

Universities are said to be among our oldest institutions (along with churches and breweries), and their mission is generally stable:  to educate so their students become productive and contributing members of society.  These observations about narcissistic CEOs, along with other trends underway in higher education, are worth careful consideration by those concerned about universities today.  The corporatization of our universities and the increased importance placed on publicity as a means of fundraising are troubling developments.  There are reasons for both, but their combined effects are worth thinking about.

Have you noticed how often the advent of new leadership on a campus now regularly triggers a new strategic plan these days?  Google “university strategic plan” and see how many entries you find.  I found more than 45 million.  How is it that an institution that has existed for decades, if not more than a century, needs a new plan for its future every time the person at the top changes?  Does the fundamental character of the institution change?  The constituencies that it serves?  And why are so many of these strategic plans developed on an expedited basis?  My current favorite academic oxymoron is “emergency strategic plan.”  What, exactly, is such a beast, especially as they tend to be developed following the advice of external consultants, and have remarkable similarities?

The days of the reluctant academic leader—an accomplished scholar who took on the role to serve the institution or to give something back—what we used to call the servant-leader, have been washed away in a tidal wave of narcissistic, corporate-style leaders.  Characteristics of these leaders include highly personalized “branding” of leadership, often complete with a theme or tag-line and much publicity for the leader’s individual virtues.  Web pages often prominently feature images of the leader, including events where the leader has recently been feted or headlined.   

If you look carefully at the evidence-based management literature, you’ll see that many of the corporate fads our leaders are buying into, including huge status and salary disparities, financial incentives for the select few and centralization of decision-making, actually degrade productivity and performance in organizations.  This is especially the case in organizations where at least some of the work force is driven by intrinsic rather than extrinsic motivations, as is the case in those who self-select for careers in education rather than in more lucrative sectors.  Jeffrey Pfeffer, a Stanford business professor who has written extensively on evidence-based management, pointed out in Congressional testimony that lists of high performance work practices commonly include:  an egalitarian culture in which formal status distinctions are downplayed; delegation of decision-making responsibility so that skilled and developed people can use their gifts and skills to make real decisions; employment security; and a policy of mutual commitment.

If you work with department heads and deans, as I do, a frequent topic of conversation across the country these days is the erosion of faculty loyalty to institutions, with commensurate mercenary job-hopping and bargaining for perks.  While the messages of the larger society are surely affecting university environments, maybe we need to think more about the messages our own leadership trends are sending. Maybe it’s us, not them, driving these trends.  Maybe our waning interest in home-grown, mission-driven leaders has more pernicious effects than we’ve considered.  Maybe developing our own is a virtue the value of which we ought to reconsider, and find ways to bring back into the equation as part of our overall balance.

Maybe, even, we ought to start rewarding in our top leaders what the best department head training programs already inculcate—that leadership is about what’s best for the unit, not the leader—rather than its polar opposite.

We all know that leadership matters.  If, as asserted by other organizational researchers, “organizations become reflections of their top executives,” are highly narcissistic leaders really good for universities? 

Crisis in the Humanities? What Crisis?

Are the humanities in trouble in American universities?

James Simpson is Donald P. and Katherine B. Loker Professor of English at Harvard University (2004-). He was formerly based at the University of Cambridge, where he was Chair of Medieval and Renaissance English. His last book is Reform and Cultural Revolution (2002 Oxford University Press), a literary history of England between 1350 and 1547; his Burning to Read: English Fundamentalism and its Reformation Opponents will appear in November 2007 with Harvard University Press.

Since I arrived to live and work in the United States three years ago, I’ve regularly received invitations to conferences on a certain theme, always with the same title: “The Crisis in the Humanities.” Often the panels include the same speakers. I’m too busy to go to these conferences; I’m told that the topic is the dead end of theory and falling numbers in certain humanities disciplines. Whenever people discuss the fate of my discipline in particular (English Literature), they do so in somber tones; everyone is agreed that historical study of the discipline is threatened. And besides, it’s said mournfully, the discipline is balkanized. Novels written about English Departments (Richard Russo’s very funny Straight Man, for example) are always set in a minor key; the heroes are less deceived ironists salvaging scraps of dignity from the intellectual rust belts.

Well it’s true that some aspects of the scene don’t look so good. Apparently eighty per cent of American students are in business courses, and only four percent concentrate in English Literature. Some humanities fields have backed themselves into corners that are rather too tight, with standard corner features: coterie audiences; very short historical memory; and predictable sets of players (instantly recognizable good guys/bad guys). On the whole, though, I’m puzzled by talk of crisis in the humanities. Both my experience and my sense of the enormous opportunities for my discipline suggest no crisis whatsoever. At the very least, in the present conjuncture of the United States, “crisis” (let’s call it difficulty) is far outweighed by opportunity. This is a period of administrative dishonor for the United States, especially in the fields of law, intelligence and diplomacy. In such a moment, the opportunities are so large for movements that reaffirm the principles of both civic and international engagement. So too for the humanities, or what might be called the interpretive disciplines. The civic and intellectual opportunities exist, in fact, for the same reasons. The opportunities exist given the challenges to interpretive reading, challenges offered by two sources in particular.

First, though, what of our experience as teachers? Do we see bored and slack students in our classes? Not in the least. The teaching evaluations for courses in my university are made public: these tell a story of massively engaged students. If that’s a “crisis,” then we’ll need to invent some more words for the bad times.

What of the opportunities and challenges? The interpretive disciplines in the United States face an especially powerful tradition that dismisses the need for interpretation altogether, that of Biblical fundamentalism. Many of our students arrive at institutions of higher learning variously formed by this anti-interpretive tradition. A student recently told me that in her rural school in Maine, she was one of two students among 40 in her class who did not believe in creationism. Most liberals make the mistake of dismissing fundamentalism as “conservative,” whereas they’d be better placed if they recognized fundamentalism as a form of reading distinctive of modernity (see my book!), and a form of reading that aspires above all to escape the complexities of interpretation. We in the interpretive disciplines are in a position to transmit an understanding of the ways texts are always immersed in the flow of history. We need to transmit a sense of the ethical challenge and adventure posed by that immersion. Our opportunity is so rich (and so urgent) precisely because the alternative reading culture, the alternative modernity, is so vigorous.

Biblical fundamentalism isn’t the only challenger to the interpretive disciplines in the United States. A simplistic version of Enlightenment thought also aspires to vision beyond interpretation. Students informed by this tradition arrive at university with an efficient intellectual machine for crunching historical narrative into neatly packaged morsels. Such students come confidently persuaded that all human situations can be seen through with the x-ray of human rights. Most of the past is disposable as bad news, because most people in the past didn’t have human rights. Once people are invested with their human rights, then all other forms of identity will evanesce. The motives for this view are admirable and generous; more than ever we need to reaffirm human rights. But overconfidently translated into action, this simplistic vision produces disaster, precisely because it bypasses historical interpretation. This was the approach that, one way and another, produced the catastrophe that is Iraq (which is, by the way, a “crisis”). There, a few Enlightenment persuasions about political equality turned out to be incapable of dissolving identities produced by long histories. Well meaning students who bypass history in this way often say that they want to “make a difference.” Well the Neocons did make a difference in Iraq, but it was, predictably, the wrong kind of difference. With these students, too, we in the interpretive disciplines have a wonderful opportunity: we teach that understanding is inseparable from narrative and process. Our disciplines transmit a certain humility before the complexity of narrative experience; we don’t offer x-ray vision, but we do offer situated understanding.

Apart from anything else, the word “crisis” is just bad marketing: who wants to board a sinking ship? Talk of crisis is especially bad marketing when the ship isn’t sinking, and when its voyage is so promising and necessary.

Who won the Intelligent Design debate?

Is the debate on Intelligent Design over and did the evolutionists win?

PARTICIPATING AUTHORS: MICHAEL RUSE and J. SCOTT TURNER

Michael Ruse  is Lucyle T. Werkmeister Professor of Philosophy, Florida State University. He is the founder and editor of the journal Biology and Philosophy, and has appeared on "Quirks and Quarks" and the Discovery Channel. He is also the author of Darwin and Design: Does Evolution Have a Purpose?, Mystery of Mysteries: Is Evolution a Social Construction?, and most recently The Evolution-Creation Struggle.

The answer to this question is both “yes” and “no.”  if you are asking about actual successes in the debate, then the big clash was eighteen months ago in the town of Dover, Pennsylvania, where the insistence of the school board in introducing intelligent design into school classrooms was very firmly denounced by the federal court as unconstitutional.  You cannot get a much bigger “yes” than that.  Evolution won.  However, it would be very naïve to think that intelligent design (and other sorts of creationism) are now simply going to go away.  They haven’t in the past--for instance after a similar court case in Arkansas in 1981--why should they vanish now?  In this sense, I very much doubt that the debate has been won. 

The interesting question now therefore is why intelligent design will not vanish.  It is hardly because it is true or because it is sound religion.  It is neither.  Rather, I would argue--as I did argue in The Evolution-Creation Struggle--that intelligent design (and creationism generally) is more a litmus test for deeper divisions in American society, rather than something in its own right.  Nobody lies awake worrying about gaps in the fossil record.  Many people lie awake worrying about abortion and drugs and the decline of the family and gay marriage and all of the other things that are opposed to so-called “moral values.”  America is split between the modernists, who would go with science and technology and who think that these things lead progressively to a better future, and the traditionalists who think that thoughts of progress are delusional and who want to put their futures in the hands of Providence.  Two very different visions of what the right course of American history should be and very different prescriptions for action by us today. 

Unless and when these opposing viewpoints are softened and brought together, I believe that the intelligent design debate will simply go on and on, in this guise or some other.  It is not a matter of facts and science but of metaphysics and religion, and without being unduly pessimistic I suspect that in America the divisions will be with us for much time to come.

 
J. Scott Turner is Associate Professor at SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry, Syracuse. He is also the author of two Harvard books: The Extended Organism: The Physiology of Animal-Built Structures and most recently (January 2007) The Tinkerer's Accomplice: How Design Emerges from Life Itself

It is tempting to answer this question with yes, and yes, the debate was won about 150 years ago. Intelligent design theory, at least if one takes its core texts at face value, is essentially modernized Natural Theology: William Paley equipped with a computer and electron microscope. Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace decisively put paid to that idea, and thankfully so: by the mid-19th century, Natural Theology and the centuries of Platonic obscurantism it engendered had nearly choked natural history to death. It’s hard to imagine why anyone would want to bring it back.

And yet, here we are, a century-and-a-half later, and some want to do precisely that. So it seems the debate is not as over as we might wish. The signs are everywhere: the Discovery Institute is alive and well; Intelligent Design and Evolution Awareness clubs are springing up on campuses worldwide; ID conferences are being organized; its advocates buzz away in a busy corner of the blogosphere; Michael Behe’s Darwin’s Black Box has an amazon.com sales rank that’s better than mine!

So, the really interesting question is not so much is the debate over, but why isn’t it over? This new question evokes another dangerously tempting answer: what else could it be but recalcitrant stupidity or political cynicism, mere “stealth creationism?” It’s imperative that we not yield to that tempting answer, though. Not only is it demonstrably wrong, but relying on it as our only answer to the ID challenge will make it very likely that we evolutionists will lose the debate.

We are in danger of losing because the well-founded confidence in Darwinism’s truth has led us to imagine that we scientists are the sole owners of the issue. We are not: Darwinism is more than just a well-established scientific principle; it is also a radical philosophy of nature. To many, this philosophy’s most troubling aspect is its seeming denial of the living world’ most obvious trait--its apparent design and purposefulness. Natural theology, despite its many problems, was attractive because it seemed to provide a reasonable explanation for these attributes. It seems to still, as attested by the persistence of ideas such as Intelligent Design. Arguably, we have not made the case as well as we think we have, and until we do, the issue will not go away.

Communication technology and authoritarian regimes

Will the continued development of wireless, the Internet, and other communications technologies provide sufficient counterweights to authoritarian trends in countries such as Russia and China?

PARTICIPATING AUTHORS: BENJAMIN A. ELMAN

Benjamin E. Elman is Professor of East Asian Studies and History at Princeton University and Director of the Princeton University Program in East Asian Studies. He is the author of two Harvard books: On Their Own Terms: Science in China, 1550-1900 and  A Cultural History of Modern Science in China.

If we think that new technologies will on their own eventually unravel authoritarian trends in China, we should think again. The telegraph in China promised a speed-up of communications and wider access to information at the turn of the twentieth century, but Manchu and Chinese authorities under the last imperial dynasty controlled the new telegraph offices and ensured that the government and the police monopolized them. When the leaders of the Republican revolution unexpectedly gained the upper hand during October 10, 1911, demonstrations in the inland city of Wuchang, the "Chicago of China," they quickly took over the local telegraph office to broadcast their triumph. For example, they wired a revolutionary message declaring Sun Yat-sen the first President of the Republic of China. Sun was then in exile in the United States and riding a train to Denver when he heard the news while reading a newspaper. When Sun returned to Shanghai in triumph in December, he was appointed president of the provisional government. So far so good, but the telegraph could not stay out in front for good. In January, President Sun reached an impasse, and he resigned his position in favor of Yuan Shikai, a former general under the previous Manchu regime, who quickly extinguished the promise of the Republican revolt at Wuchang. Thereafter the Republic of China limited the public use of the telegraph to the government and accepted organizations. State-controlled media was the rule thereafter.

Yue Meng, professor of modern Chinese literature at the University of Toronto, is currently working on an interesting project that evaluates the impact of new technologies, such as the telegraph, for rapid communication at the turn of the 20th century in China. It is very sobering to learn how quickly the weaker Republican state, and the 1920s warlords it engendered, gained quick control over such new technologies. Meng compares the successful limits applied to the internet today by the much stronger Communist state to the reining in of the telegraph 90 years before by the weaker Republicans. Media technologies, such as telegraphs, telephones, faxes, and the internet do not exist independently of their social and political contexts. Faxes, like the telegraph, moved briefly out in front of the violent events surrounding the June 4, 1989, tragedy, but fax machines were quickly rendered harmless. Authoritarian political cultures must first change, as Japan’s and Germany’s have, before the new media technologies can enable permanent public counterweights to the return of autocracy. Under the reins of an authoritarian Chinese state, the information highway can just as easily be hijacked in the name of Chinese nationalism. Imagine if the internet had been available when Mao initiated the Cultural Revolution in 1966, and we can perhaps understand why the media is as prone to repression as it is towards free speech. The fault lies not in the media; it lies in us.

Classical history and the Iraq War

What useful lessons does Herodotus's Persian Wars have for the current events in Iraq? How is classical history used, misused, or ignored by current policy makers?

PARTICIPATING AUTHORS: MARY BEARD

Mary Beard has a Chair of Classics at Cambridge University and is a Fellow of Newnham College. She is the author of The Invention of Jane Harrison, The Parthenon, The Colosseum (co-author with Keith Hopkins), and the forthcoming The Roman Triumph (Fall 2007)

Look carefully at most of the rhetoric surrounding the current wars between West and East--and you’ll almost certainly find Herodotus somewhere. The Persian Wars (both book and event ) provide all of us with a model of  the conflicts of our own day. That’s true now,  just as it was forty years ago when the Persians were regularly cast as Soviet-style totalitarians rather than Islamist extremists. Different war, same reassuring historical antecedent. The classical world somehow legitimates our own struggles and hatreds.

It’s easy for professional classicists to blame the speech-makers and policy-advisers of the White House or Downing Street for this glaringly self-serving use of the past. But I am afraid that we are partly responsible for making the “us versus them” world of the fifth-century BCE city-state stand for the classical world as a whole, and for the lessons it might offer to the twenty-first century. Herodotus certainly in his revolutionary attempt to define the place of Greece in the world order  exploits a set of polar opposition between West and East, Greeks and Persians, freedom and slavery, right and wrong.  But later ages of classical antiquity had a more complicated vision and may provide more useful comparisons. There’s more to antiquity than the fifth-century BCE.

After the conquests  (massacres?) of Alexander the Great had spread “Hellenism” through vast tracts of  Western Asia, the so-called “Hellenistic Age” became a tremendous cultural melting pot. You can see this very clearly in the art and literature of Alexandria in Egypt.  But I’ve just visited a really eye-opening exhibition in Paris (due shortly in New York) of material excavated from the “Greco-Roman” cities and settlements in modern Afghanistan, lent by the Archaeological Museum in Kabul.

First of all it is a stunning show, and a timely reminder of how far the poppy fields of Kabul were once part of “our” world. But it was also a world defined by cultural mix and interchange between West and East. When the first century CE inhabitants of the town of Begram looked around, they saw Indian ivories rubbing shoulders with Greco-Roman bronzes; the divine Lakshmi taking her place next to Aphrodite and Zeus. In the rich graves of the nomad “princesses” from Tillia Tepe (the highlight of the show, and the cause of a long queue) Indian and Parthian coins sat next to a golden aureus of the emperor Tiberius.

It was hard not to reflect that this was a better classical model for thinking of Afghanistan (and of the world) today, than the Herodotean, “West or else”, approach we usually take.

The Long Tail, online communities, fame, and popular culture

Digital technology has enabled the proliferation of many niche markets and communities in the entertainment world--the Long Tail Effect. Will the notion of popular culture eventually cease to mean anything? Do you agree with the observation, paraphrasing Andy Warhol, that in the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people?

PARTICIPATING AUTHORS: GILES SLADE / MCKENZIE WARK

Giles Slade is an independent scholar and freelance writer and author of  Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America

To start with, take the premise of this question which derives from the phrase "the long tail" invented in October, 2004 by Chris Anderson of WIRED magazine. The phrase describes the marketing phenonomenon of a range, family or an extended line of products that have relatively low sales volumes, but that collectively make up a market share that rivals or exceeds bestsellers and blockbusters if the  distribution channel--not a mortar and brick store--is large enough. They can do this because there are now more niche markets than there are mainstream ones and this trend will continue in the future.

To my mind, the increasing segmentation of the market that Anderson describes has many correlates in the field of information distribution which is essential to the process of making fame or celebrity. This is the second part of your question. But that question seems contentious and overly cute since we crave both fame and the famous and are not going to give those things up any time soon.

To take Mr. Anderson himself as an example, he is popularizing an idea that applies across market segmentations or niches. Most people would find the conceptual map he is offering useful in order to live more effectively in our odd modern world. So, what he has done is read and understood the relevance of some original but fairly obscure research by Erik Brynjolfsson, Jeffrey Hu, and Michael D. Smith in 2003. It was these men who abstracted the phenomenon that would become know as "the long tail" from a mass of segmented or niche datum.

Cleverly, Anderson marketed and re-marketed information about this trend in highly effective ways...First he invented a memorable catchphrase unknown to Brynjolfsson, Hu, and Smith using it as the title of his initial essay in WIRED magazine. Then, Anderson began a series of successful talks about the subject that created demand among a growing number of niche markets. Finally, in 2006 Hyperion published his book length essay The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More (2006) to satisfy the demand Anderson himself had created.

By analysing data from a variety of separate fields, and then turning it into information and marketing that across a broad range of demographic interest groups by deploying a variety of formats directed towards decreasingly specific and increasingly general audiences, Chris Anderson has turned himself into a recognizable "author brand" known these days to far more than fifteen people. His specialized kind of fame will last a bit longer, I expect, than Warhol's fifteen minutes, since his popularization concerns an essential characteristic of our age. More to the point, however, is the irony that ever increasing specialization and segmentation creates greater and greater demand for generalization. This is the most relevant point for the changes that will occur in our concept of fame in the near future. People will achieve fame, celebrity or notoriety quickly in direct proportion to their ability to perceive and convey a meaningful pattern that makes sense of the tidal waves of separate information, products and experiences that will continue to beat down on our collective consciousness through increasingly intrusive and segmented media channels. Chris Anderson is one of the first of this new group of "pattern gurus" who make the vicissitudes of our polar inertia intelligible to us.

McKenzie Wark is Associate Professor of Cultural and Media Studies at Lang College, New School University. He is the author of several books, most recently Dispositions, The Hacker's Manifesto, and the forthcoming Gamer Theory (April 2007)

One of the paradoxes of network communication is that while it allows lots of obscure tastes to flourish, it also seems to do the reverse as well. In the network, the "big names" in any given field only get bigger. So what we have is a few stars who lots of people know, and lots and lots of small audiences for this, that and the other. There's a hollowing out of the middle. Some, like the new media analyst Clay Shirky think this is a "power law distribution". It's hard to explain. What may happen is that when people go off and explore their tastes in, say, North Korean gymnastic music, they find that they have few people with whom this can be a culture in common. So, to compensate, they also pay attention to whatever it is that everyone else pays attention to. So for example while I can name a lot of obscure media theorists, I also know who Paris Hilton is, and in many contexts I may choose to talk about Paris rather than some philosopher from Paris. In the blogosphere these phenomena are related. I may choose to get my opinion fix for the day from some obscure blog that reflects my particular foibles, but that blog is probably talking about Barack Obama just like everybody else.