Harvard University Press Blog

Marking the 75th Anniversary of Independence from British Rule

August 14 and August 15 mark the seventy-fifth anniversary of independence from British rule for Pakistan and India, respectively. Inextricably linked to the birth of these two South Asian nations is the 1947 Partition of the subcontinent that tragically accompanied the end of British colonialism.

Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of independent India, described the moment of independence as a tryst with destiny. “At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom. A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance…” he said in his famous speech on August 15, 1947.

The world-renowned Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz, wrote in “Subh-e-Azadi” (“Dawn of Freedom”):

These tarnished rays, this night-smudged light —
This is not that Dawn for which, ravished with freedom,
we had set out in sheer longing.
(Translated from Urdu by Agha Shahid Ali)

The volumes below illuminate the lives of individuals, the politics, and the literary traditions that shape the rich histories of both nations. They are in the spirit of Nehru’s midnight and Faiz’s dawn alike.

Pakistan

Aqil Shah, The Army and Democracy: Military Politics in Pakistan
Faisal Devji, Muslim Zion: Pakistan as a Political Idea
Ayesha Jalal, The Struggle for Pakistan: A Muslim Homeland and Global Politics
Ammara Maqsood, The New Pakistani Middle Class
Bullhe Shah, translated by Christopher Shackle, Sufi Lyrics: Selections from a World Classic

India

Manan Ahmed Asif, The Loss of Hindustan: The Invention of India
Sugata Bose, His Majesty’s Opponent: Subhas Chandra Bose and India’s Struggle against Empire
Faisal Devji, The Impossible Indian: Gandhi and the Temptation of Violence
William Elison, Christian Lee Novetzke, and Andy Rotman, Amar Akbar Anthony: Bollywood, Brotherhood, and the Nation
Edited by Ramachandra Guha, Makers of Modern India 
Ruth Harris, Guru to the World: The Life and Legacy of Vivekananda
Ramin Jahanbegloo, The Gandhian Moment
Niraja Gopal Jayal, Citizenship and Its Discontents: An Indian History
Madhav Khosla, India’s Founding Moment: The Constitution of a Most Surprising Democracy
Neeti Nair, Changing Homelands: Hindu Politics and the Partition of India
Dinyar Patel, Naoroji: Pioneer of Indian Nationalism
Mircea Raianu, Tata: The Global Corporation That Built Indian Capitalism
Rabindranath Tagore, edited by Fakrul Alam and Radha Chakravarty, The Essential Tagore
Ananya Vajpeyi, Righteous Republic: The Political Foundations of Modern India
Steven I. Wilkinson, Army and Nation: The Military and Indian Democracy since Independence

Remembering Our Veterans during a Pandemic

Social distancing will make this Memorial Day quite different from what we are used to. Sarah Wagner, author of  What Remains: Bringing America’s Missing Home from the Vietnam War, shows the way she’s chosen to remember and honor veterans during these challenging times.

Dispatch from DC: Memorial Day weekend in the nation’s capital will be different this year. No motorcycles rumbling around the National Mall, no line snaking in front of the main gates of Arlington National Cemetery as tourists hope for a spot in the Memorial Amphitheater. Unfortunately for them, the cemetery is only open to family pass holders with mandatory face covers in their possession. 

The pandemic has changed how the nation will remember its fallen, in the sense that it will keep people physically distant from one another. But that doesn’t mean commemorations and rituals and traditions won’t be shared.

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial will host a virtual commemoration, incorporating short videos and written messages submitted by the public. Arlington National Cemetery has pivoted to embrace a “Commemoration through Education” series of online exhibits and educational resources.

For my own part, this year I would have returned to Bayfield, Wisconsin, to visit with friends at the Duwayne Soulier Memorial VFW Post 8239. I would have visited the local gift shop and bookstore, Keeper of the Light, for a book signing event. And I would have had a chance to help commemorate the lives of three men from Bayfield killed in the Vietnam War.

So instead, in honor of their memory, I share this storymap, which chronicles the homecoming of Lance Corporal Merlin Raye Allen.

Getting Through a Crisis

How do we respond when a crisis occurs? And how do we know what to do? Catherine Sanderson, a renowned psychologist who has done pioneering research on social norms and the author of  Why We Act: Turning Bystanders into Moral Rebels, tells us that we tend to look to each other for answers—and that’s why it’s important we model proper behavior for those around us.

In October of my senior year at Stanford, I was in a psychology class on the fourth floor of a building when the Loma Prieta earthquake hit. All of a sudden, everything changed. Classes were cancelled—and in 1989, there was no option for “online learning.” Students couldn’t reach their parents—and there were no cell phones. Some dorms were closed due to structural damage. I had a single room, but shared it that night with four friends—not wanting to be alone as aftershocks continued throughout the night. 

I’ve thought about that day repeatedly over the last few days, as multiple colleges, including my own and the ones my two sons attend, are sending students home. I’ve thought about what I needed at the time—as a 21-year-old 3,000 miles from home and totally freaked out—and what I want to do now to help ease anxiety—as a professor for my students at Amherst College and as a mom.

Here’s what research in psychology tells us about how people act in times of crisis—and how we can push people to act in more prosocial ways.

Ambiguity inhibits action. People are far more willing to take action in the case of a clear emergency than in an ambiguous situation. This finding explains why people rush to donate blood following mass shootings and send food and supplies to victims of national disasters. We recognize what’s going on, we want to help, and we have tangible ways to do so. But almost everything about the current pandemic is entirely uncertain: what causes it? how dangerous is it? how long will it last? That leads most of us to feel simultaneously like we are overreacting (they are closing colleges because of the flu?) and underreacting (I need to buy enough food to last for three months). And this ambiguity makes it hard to know how to respond. Is it safe to work out at the gym? Go out to dinner with a few friends? Get my hair cut?

In ambiguous situations, most of us experience evaluation apprehension, meaning a fear that our behavior will be judged by others. Our desire to do the right thing is therefore complicated, because we really don’t want to be seen as overreacting. So what do we do when we’re facing an ambiguous situation and we don’t know what’s going on or how to react? We look to how other people are reacting. 

Unfortunately, many high-profile people erred on the side of underreaction early on, which made it harder for others to take this threat seriously. Florida Representative Matt Gaetz wore a large gas mask on the floor of the House to illustrate how silly concerns were about the virus; he’s now under self-quarantine due to his own contact with someone infected with COVID-19. An NBA player ridiculed concern with the virus by deliberately touching all of the microphones during a press conference; two days later, he tested positive for the virus himself.  

But here’s the good news: psychology research can also tell us how we can act more rationally, even during times of great uncertainty. 

First, role models of all types—parents, professors, politicians—need to model the right behavior. That means elbow bumping or bowing instead of shaking hands or hugging. That means canceling travel plans, avoiding large crowds, canceling social engagements, and washing hands. When my college decided on Monday night to send students home for the rest of the semester, many people—students, parents, faculty—thought it seemed like a draconian response. After all, college students are a pretty hearty group, and no one on campus—or in the community—had tested positive. But three days later, this decision hardly seems like an overreaction, based on the social distancing recommendations now provided by the CDC.

Second, we need to emphasize that these norms are—at least for now—the new normal. Why?  Because people are highly motivated to follow norms—once they know what they are. In one study, researchers compared different types of messages given to hotel guests to encourage reusing their towels. Some guests received the standard pro-environmental message: “Help Save the Environment: You can show your respect for nature and help save the environment by reusing your towels during your stay.” Others received a similar message, but with a twist: “Join Your Fellow Guests in Helping to Save the Environment: Almost 75 percent of guests who are asked to participate in our new resource savings program do help by using their towels more than once. You can join your fellow guests to help save the environment by reusing your towels during your stay.” Guess which one was more effective? The second, by far: if we think that most other people are engaging in a certain behavior, then many more of us will decide that we should be, too. Research on messages that inspire voting shows precisely the same point: informing people about (high) rates of voting in their neighborhood is far more effective at increasing voter turnout than simply telling people that voting is a civic duty.

So what does research tell us about how to fight the corona virus? Our civic duty is to reduce the spread of the disease. But we push people to take preventative actions by emphasizing that’s the choice most others are making. And the sooner we all embrace the new normal, the better off we all will be.

Q&A with Thomas Piketty, author of Capital and Ideology

Thomas Piketty’s bestselling Capital in the Twenty-First Century galvanized global debate about inequality. In his audacious follow-up, Capital and Ideology, he exposes the ideas that have sustained inequality for the past millennium, reveals why the shallow politics of right and left are failing us today, and outlines the structure of a fairer economic system. We caught up with him to ask about his new book and to discuss the politics behind the long history of inequality.

Capital in the Twenty-First Century was an unusually ambitious book. What prompted you to write another major book so soon?

I’ve learned a lot since the release of Capital in the Twenty-First Century. I was invited to countries about which I knew little, met new researchers, and participated in hundreds of debates. All these exchanges pushed me to renew my reflections. To summarize Capital briefly, it showed how, in the twentieth century, the two world wars led to a very strong reduction in the inequalities inherited from the nineteenth century. I also pointed to the disturbing ascent of inequalities since the 1980s. But the book had two main limitations. The first is that it was very Western centered. In this new book, I widen my scope: I examine the history of “ternary societies” [organized into three classes: nobility, clergy, and workers] and societies of owners or proprietors, but I also study slavery societies, colonial regimes, communism, post-communism, social democracy, the case of castes in India, and inequality regimes in Brazil, China, and Russia. The second limitation is that Capital only scratched the surface of the deep question of the ideologies that support inequalities. It was a black box that I decided to open.

What is the fundamental argument you’re making about these ideologies?

I tell the story of many unequal regimes, and the conclusion that emerges is that dominant ideologies are always much more fragile than we imagine. Inequality is a political construction, not the product of “natural” forces of the economy or technology. Every society needs to tell itself a plausible story to show why inequalities are acceptable, to justify the organization of social groups, and to explain the nature of property, borders, the tax system, and education. Revisiting this story allows us to see our current ideologies from a different perspective. We often have the impression that inequalities from the past were necessarily unfair and despotic and that those of the present are necessarily meritocratic, dynamic, open. I do not believe a word of it. Macron's “leaders in the rope line,” the job creators of Trump, the glorification of fortune whatever its number of zeros: all this speech is as religious in its way as traditional and explicitly religious justifications for inequality.

In your account, history has lurched from one regime of inequality to another, but you’re nonetheless optimistic. Why?

History shows that it is impossible to predict the evolution of regimes of inequality. Take Sweden: we sometimes like to say that the Swedish social model feeds on a very old culture, going back to the Vikings. In fact, Sweden was for a long time an extremely unequal country. The census system until 1911 stipulated that the owners of the biggest fortunes could have up to one hundred votes per person! Political mobilizations have transformed the country. If someone had predicted in 1910 that Sweden would become a social democratic country, nobody would have taken it seriously. That’s why I do not believe that the current system is indestructible or cannot be transformed.

If inequality has been rising since the 1980s, why haven’t political parties mobilized to reduce it, as they did after World War II?

The main political parties have radically changed since the 1980s. In the social democratic era that followed the war, the poorest and least-educated classes identified with parties of the left, whether Democratic, Labour, Socialist, Communist, or Social-Democratic. But in the age of hyper-capitalism, parties of the electoral left ceased to make improving the lot of the disadvantaged their main focus. Instead, they turned their attention primarily to serving the interests of the winners in the educational competition. Left-wing political parties and movements turned themselves into representatives of the highly educated. We now have political systems dominated by two elites: what I call the wealthy “merchant right”—the Republicans, the Conservatives, and so on—and the highly educated and generally prosperous “Brahmin left,” represented by the Democrats, Labour, and Social Democrats. The least advantaged no longer see themselves in the electoral left. This has left an opening for nativists and other opportunistic politicians to seek their support. But this may be changing, even in the United States, as catering to the highly educated does not reflect the egalitarian values of an important part of the Democratic electorate.

You conclude the book with a series of recommendations for economic and social reform, which include the adoption of German-style co-management of businesses.

The real challenge of our societies is that of power: there has been a capture of economic power and politics by private money. I sketch in the book a form of “participatory socialism,” the opposite of hyper-state Soviet socialism, which led to disastrous results. Co-management offers this possibility. Only Germany and the Nordic countries have followed this path since the 1950s, but the Labour Party in the United Kingdom and the Democrats in the United States have begun to reflect on it. In Germany, employees are allocated half of the voting rights on the board of directors for large companies. In Sweden, it's a third, but this also applies to smaller companies. Such a system has made it possible to have less excess than elsewhere in the payment of executive salaries and a better investment in employees. I propose to go further, by limiting the voting rights of the largest shareholders to allow smaller shareholders to enter the game and form coalitions with employees.

You also want to reform property tax so that it funds a “universal endowment of capital”? What’s that?

Currently, half of the population inherits nothing at all. I imagine a kind of “legacy for all.” At the age of 25, all people would receive a capital endowment of something like 120,000 euros, which represents 60 percent of the average wealth per adult in France. This could be used to buy your home: this would stop society being divided between those who pay rents—often generation after generation—and those who, also over the generations, own and receive rents. It would also encourage people to create a business and motivate employees to buy shares in their company. This would be financed not only by the proceeds of the inheritance tax but also by a progressive tax on net wealth. This new form of progressive property tax would ensure the permanent circulation of property and guarantee that very large wealth holdings do not perpetuate themselves.

Another area you focus on is education.

If we look for an explanation for the halving of the rate of economic growth since the 1990s, I suggest we should be interested in educational underinvestment. Education expenditure has stagnated in all developed countries while the number of students has risen sharply.

Do you consider the book a blueprint for getting beyond capitalism?

We can’t promise the abolition of capitalism without debating long and hard about precisely what will be put in its place. I try to contribute to that debate.

You’ve said in French interviews that you prefer this book to Capital in the Twenty-First Century.

Yes. I think I’ve made some progress and that this new book is much better. If you read only one of the two, please read this one!

Core Values of American History

In his new book, The Will of the People: The Revolutionary Birth of America, prize-winning historian T. H. Breen provides the missing piece in the story of America’s founding, introducing us to the ordinary men and women who turned a faltering rebellion against colonial rule into an unexpectedly potent and enduring revolution. Here, he discusses the 400th anniversary of slaves being brought to America and how some people are trying to excuse this dark side of American history by using the claim of historical context.

Commemoration of the 1619 arrival of the first African slaves in Virginia has sparked passionate controversy over how to weave slavery and racism into our shared history. The major objection about giving human bondage a central role in the American story seems to be that it involves presentism. Critics claim that while white settlers once enslaved black people, contemporary Americans condemn such practices, and therefore, it is a partisan misreading of the past to project our values on earlier generations who viewed human property from a different perspective. We are advised to pay attention to the specific contexts in which whites justified slavery. We know that many Founders owned slaves—Thomas Jefferson, for example—but there is no reason to condemn them since they did not regard their behavior as morally wrong. The lesson here is that if we insist on rehearsing the failures of the past we shall inevitably discount how the nation’s leaders defended noble principles such as liberty and freedom.

The problem with this interpretative strategy is that it discounts a historical narrative that suffers not in the least from presentism. Appeals for greater sensitivity to context is, in fact, an evasive move that serves to privilege the interests of the masters over those of the slaves. After all, from their initial sale in Virginia, Africans in America have adopted a consistent view of slavery. Context makes not the slightest difference. It was wrong in the seventeenth century; it was wrong at the time of the American Revolution; and it is wrong now. No slave saw bondage as preferable to freedom. On that point there can be no doubt. From their first landing in 1619, slaves resisted their status, running away, breaking laws that aimed at controlling them, and when offered the opportunity to gain freedom through a process known as “self-purchase,” they toiled hard for liberty.  

The earliest records of colonial Virginia reveal that blacks aspired to the same goals as did their white neighbors. In a deposition taken in 1645 Edwyn Conway, the clerk of the Northampton County court reported that two men—“Anthony the negro” and Captain Philip Taylor—had viewed a parcel of land which they had purchased together. The partnership apparently had not gone well. When they returned from the field, Conway asked Anthony what had transpired. The former slave responded, “Mr. Taylor and I have devided our Corne And I am very glad of it [for] now I know my owne, hee finds fault with mee that I doe not worke, but now I know myne owne ground and I will worke when I please and play when I please.” Anthony spoke the language of other Virginia settlers. He had labored hard to obtain his “owne ground,” knowing that economic self-determination was the key to personal liberty.

Anthony gained freedom. By the end of the seventeenth century that achievement became more difficult. Slave codes tightened the grip of bondage. As more and more Africans arrived in the colony, some Virginia planters comforted themselves in the belief that the newcomers could never rebel. They spoke too many different languages, making communication among conspirators impossible. Governor Alexander Spotswood warned them against foolish complacency. He reminded them “freedom Wears a Cap which can without a Tongue, Call Together all Those who long to Shake off the fetters of Slavery.”

The siren of liberty inspired slaves during the American Revolution. In 1774, Caesar Sarter, a black man living in Essex County, Massachusetts, drafted a petition for the freedom of the colony’s slaves. He observed “this is a time of great anxiety and distress among you [the whites], on account of the infringement, not only of your Charter rights, but of the natural rights and privileges of freeborn men.” Could they not understand that slaves had the same goals? “Why,” Sarter asked, “will you not pity and relieve the poor distressed, enslaved Africans?—Who, though they are entitled to the same natural rights of mankind, that you are, [are] nevertheless groaning in bondage.” In June 1773, a group of blacks appealed to the governor of Massachusetts, “Your Petitioners apprehend that they have in common with other men a naturel right to be free and without molestation to injoy such property as they may acquire by their industry, or by any other means not detrimental to their fellow men.”

The archives contain many declarations of this sort. The point is black Americans countered racism and slavery in the same language of freedom and liberty that white Americans have so long celebrated. There is no need to argue that the context of slavery changed over time. From the earliest moments of settlement in Virginia, slaves appealed for liberty and freedom—for the right to determine the character of their own lives. To observe that they have given voice to the same principles that their white neighbors hold dear is not presentism. It is a fundamental truth of American history.

Q&A with Tom Siegfried, author of The Number of the Heavens: A History of the Multiverse and the Quest to Understand the Cosmos

In The Number of the Heavens, Tom Siegfried, the award-winning former editor of Science News, shows that one of the most fascinating and controversial ideas in contemporary cosmology—the existence of multiple parallel universes—has a long and divisive history that continues to this day. We spoke to him about the possible existence of a multiverse and the controversy surrounding it.

Trying to conceptualize something like the universe, let alone a multiverse, feels like a big undertaking. Where should people start in trying to comprehend the existence of something so vast?

You have to start small, say with the Earth. When H. G. Wells wrote his history of the world, he imagined shrinking the Earth to the size of a ball one inch across. The sun would then be a globe of fire, 9 feet across, a little more than 300 yards away. The planet Neptune, on this reduced scale, would be more than five miles away. The nearest star, the Alpha Centauri system, would be about 40,000 miles away. And the farthest objects observable in space would be something like 100 trillion miles away, even on the scale with the Earth smaller than a golf ball. Put another way, it takes light eight minutes to reach the Earth from the sun, four years to travel from the sun to the nearest star, and billions of years to travel to the farthest visible objects. That’s all within the universe we can see. If there’s a multiverse, countless other such spaces, of similar extent, exist beyond what we can see.

This book breaks down an eternal debate about whether there is one universe or many. You describe it like a long-running TV sitcom, where characters keep cycling out but common themes continue to reemerge. What are some of those common themes?

One common theme is that logic rules out more than one universe, because the universe contains everything so there can be only one. But the definition of “universe” at any point in time may turn out to be incorrect—it has often been the case that what people believed to be the universe was not, in fact, everything that existed. So the definition of universe needed to change.

Another common theme is that universes beyond our sight are not a proper subject for science—if we can’t see them, it is meaningless to believe that they exist. But advances in technology (such as better telescopes) can bring previously unseen objects into view. And in some cases the explanation for things that we can see unavoidably entail the existence of other things we cannot. Similar arguments were made against the existence of atoms—they could not be seen, so they could not be real. But plenty of evidence indirectly indicated their existence, and modern microscopes can image them. It’s not a coincidence, I think, that the ancient Greek philosophers who proposed the existence of atoms also believed in the existence of multiple universes. 

What is your favorite figure from this historic debate about the multiverse? Whose work have you found particularly compelling? 

Many to choose from. I guess I like Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle the best, because he was a popularizer of science like me. He articulated the 17th-century case for a plurality of worlds better than anyone. But I should also mention Ormsby MacKnight Mitchel. He single-handedly made Cincinnati the leading center for astronomy in America in the 1840s, and was a most enthusiastic advocate for the view that the distant fuzzy nebulae in space were “island universes” like the Milky Way.

You mentioned that many serious scientists today consider the theory of the multiverse to be unscientific. Please explain.

There is a widespread view among scientists that the multiverse is an idea that cannot be tested, or “falsified,” and therefore it is not scientific. Many other scientists challenge that view, however. For one thing, the requirement of falsifiability is no longer widely accepted by many scientists and philosophers. For another, the notion of a multiverse is not itself a theory, but is rather a prediction of other theories that can, in fact, be tested in various ways.

Books and movie often portray the idea of a parallel universe as this alternate reality, where another version of you is living a totally different life. Does this idea of alternate selves hold up with scientists, or is it wishful thinking?

The idea of alternate selves is most closely connected with the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics. In that interpretation, each of us does split into additional versions of ourselves as quantum measurements are made. Some physicists advocate strongly for this view, while others reject it. It’s a debate that will not be resolved anytime soon.

It’s also possible that the universe is infinite, and in a multiverse there could be an infinite number of universes. If so, and if the number is truly infinite and not just really big, all possible combinations of atoms will occur over and over again in different places. And so there would be other combinations of atoms identical to those that make up you (and me, and everybody else). Whether that would count as another version of you or just somebody exactly like you is a good question.

You write, “The possibility of a multiverse implies larger lessons about how science should be done” and “The rules of science that work well for explaining nature in a lone universe may not apply in a multiverse.” Could you speak more to this? How would science change by taking the rules of a multiverse into account? 

The traditional goal of science (or at least of physicists) is to explain the world by deduction from a small number of fundamental laws and principles. Ideally, in this view, one deep theory would enable calculations of all the physical features of the universe. This view implicitly assumes that the universe is governed everywhere (and at all times) by the same laws. If so, and there is only one universe, then this is a sensible approach to doing science. But rigorously applying the rules that stem from this approach deny the possibility of other universes from the beginning. If, in fact, other universes exist, the premises upon which the standard approach rests no longer apply. In that case the explanation for phenomena we observe may be that multiple possibilities are realized in different universes, and ours is the way it is because its peculiar features permit us to live here. It’s like the way no fundamental law determines the Earth’s temperature. It’s not the only planet—it’s one of many, and its temperature is what it is because that’s the temperature suitable for habitation. 

Why Gerrymandering Matters

As with many issues working their way through American courts, legal challenges to political gerrymandering have had their calculus upended by the retirement of Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy. Indeed, one expert offered that the odds of seeing the Court identify a standard for determining whether a political map has become unacceptably partisan “plummeted” with Kennedy’s announcement. But as long as American political representation appears not to reflect the politics of Americans, the movement to reform the drawing of districts will continue to find support.

Such reform is just one of many deemed necessary by Allan J. Lichtman in The Embattled Vote in America: From the Founding to the Present, forthcoming this September. To Lichtman, the failure to include a guaranteed right to vote in the American Constitution was an error that’s plagued the nation since its inception, and along with a rule combining anti-gerrymandering and the establishment of independent redistricting commissions, he identifies the elimination of felon disenfranchisement, expanded voter registration, and a move away from holding national elections on regular workdays as reforms that would transform voting in the United States. In the following excerpt from The Embattled Vote in America, Lichtman outlines some of the spiraling ramifications of the prevailing practice of politically-drawn districts.

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In America’s hard-fought and closely contested presidential election of 2016, only 59 percent of voting-age citizens cast a ballot, equaling about 86 million lost votes. Donald Trump won the presidential election of 2016 with 63 million votes, just 28 percent of America’s voting-age citizens. In the 2014 midterm elections, only 38 percent of American citizens participated, equaling about 140 million lost votes. In closely contested U.S. Senate races across the nation in 2014, candidates typically won seats with votes equal to about one-fifth of the state’s citizens of voting age. Turnout is yet lower in local elections. A 2014 study by two University of Wisconsin researchers found that turnout in 144 mayoral elections across the nation averaged only 25.6 percent of the citizen voting-age population. Thus, candidates could win mayoral elections with support from just over 10 percent of their citizen voting-age constituents.

Turnout is similarly bleak in primary elections that set the choices for voters in the general elections. In 2016, when both parties had spirited contests for their presidential nominations, about 28 percent of voting-age citizens participated in the Republican and Democratic presidential primaries combined. In states holding caucuses, turnout averaged merely 7 percent. Only about 8 percent of American citizens chose Hillary Clinton as the Democratic nominee and only about 6 percent chose Donald Trump as the Republican nominee. In midterm elections, primary turnout is yet lower. In 2014, just 28.4 million voters participated in the primary elections in forty-five states that had at least one contested statewide primary for both parties, equaling about 15 percent of the citizen voting-age population in those states.

In 1900, the United States led the democratic world in the voting participation of its citizens. Now roles have reversed and America trails most comparable democracies in voter turnout. According to a 2017 Pew Research Center study of thirty-five nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the United States ranked twenty-eighth in voter turnout.

The American Tradition of Torture

As expected, at this week’s Senate Intelligence Committee confirmation hearings for Gina Haspel, President Trump’s nominee to lead the Central Intelligence Agency, the C.I.A.’s post-9/11 “interrogation program” and Haspel’s own role in the program and its aftermath took center stage. Haspel sought to cast the program and its brutal techniques—many of which have since been outlawed—as an aberrant episode in the agency’s history, and vowed that under her leadership “C.I.A. will not restart such a detention and interrogation program.” Just as Haspel aimed to position that use of torture as an outlier in the history of the C.I.A., so too did the hearings propagate an understanding of the brutality of those years as a brief deviation from the long history of moral leadership demonstrated by the United States. Indeed, the majority of Americans would likely share such sentiment: we do not torture.

And yet.

In Civilizing Torture: An American Tradition, forthcoming this fall, decorated American historian W. Fitzhugh Brundage shows that alongside the long American lineage of denouncing torture there’s an equally enduring culture of both embracing and excusing barbarism. Brundage revisits a series of moments and practices—from the initial contact of Europeans with North America, to the early American republic, to slavery, to the American imperial project, to local law enforcement’s embrace of “the third degree,” through the Cold War, and up to the present—to demonstrate that behavior considered to have been torturous in its own time has been far more prevalent in U.S. history than we acknowledge. By threading this past into a cohesive story of debate and dismissal, Brundage reveals the ways in which the mythos of American exceptionalism has underwritten the narrative so evident this week on Capitol Hill.

The passages below come from the introduction to Civilizing Torture.

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In April 1858 Harper’s Weekly, one of the most popular American magazines of the day, published a gruesome article entitled “Torture and Homicide in an American State Prison.” Accompanied by graphic illustrations, the article dwelled on the so-called “water cure,” a punishment during which an inmate was stripped and seated in a stall with his feet and arms fastened in stocks and his head extended up into a tank that fit snugly around his neck. The prisoner’s head was drenched with freezing cold water that cascaded down from a height of a foot or more for several minutes at a time. The tank that encircled the prisoner’s neck emptied slowly, inducing a sensation of drowning while the prisoner struggled to keep his mouth and nose above the pool of draining water.

Thirty years later an investigation of practices at Elmira Reformatory, the most acclaimed American penal institution of the day, revealed that staff there continued to douse prisoners with cold water, in addition to confining them in darkened cells for weeks on end, shackling and hoisting them until their toes barely touched the floor, and “paddling” them with specially made boards. In 1899 American soldiers occupying the Philippines after the Spanish-American War sent home letters boasting of their routine application of a variant of the “water cure” to coerce information from Filipino guerrillas. To apply the “cure,” soldiers pinned their victim to the ground by his legs and arms and partially raised his head “so as to make pouring in the water an easier matter.” If he refused to keep his mouth open, his tormentors pinched his nose closed and used a rifle barrel or bamboo stick to pry his jaws apart. Then they poured water into his overextended mouth until he looked like “a pregnant woman.” According to witnesses, a few applications of the “water cure” usually elicited a flood of information.

A century later, the outlines of the “enhanced interrogation” methods adopted by the Central Intelligence Agency and military interrogators during the “War on Terror” became public. Americans learned that between 2003 and 2006 at least eighty-nine Middle Eastern detainees in CIA custody had been slapped, slammed against walls, deprived of sleep, stuffed into coffins, and threatened with violent death. The most severe method was “waterboarding,” a modern-day variant of the technique applied a century and a half earlier in American prisons. Waterboarding entailed pouring water over a cloth covering the face and breathing passages of an immobilized detainee, which produced an acute sensation of drowning. One detainee endured more than 180 waterboarding sessions.

Is Postal Banking Coming?

United States Senator for New York Kirsten Gillibrand has just introduced major new legislation to create a Postal Bank, which would establish a retail bank in all of the U.S. Postal Service’s 30,000 locations. As detailed by the Senator’s announcement, the Postal Bank “would effectively end predatory payday lending industry practices overnight by giving low-income Americans, particularly communities of color and rural communities, access to basic banking services that they currently don’t have. The lack of access to traditional banking services makes it nearly impossible for low-income Americans to escape the cycle of poverty because they are often forced to spend large percentages of their income to cash their paychecks or pay back high-interest predatory payday loans.”

Mehrsa Baradaran, author of How the Other Half Banks: Exclusion, Exploitation and the Threat to Democracy, has worked closely on this issue with both Gillibrand and Senator Elizabeth Warren. As Baradaran details in Gillibrand’s announcement, postal banking was once a great service to the American people, and can be so again:

Postal banking was America’s most successful experiment in financial inclusion. Today, there are many communities across the country that are banking deserts. The only financial service providers are fringe lenders and check cashers whose business model relies on the poor paying more for banking services than anyone else. This is a threat to our democracy. Yet post offices serve all of these communities regardless of cost and without exploitation. Postal banking can provide safe, accessible, and much-needed financial services to the most struggling communities in our country. It will make it less expensive to be poor.

Below, Baradaran details the predations of the fringe lending industry and the promise of postal banking:

Facebook Interruptus

In Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age, Bernard Harcourt assays the deeply troubling implications of pervasive surveillance in our age of lives lived online, and the degree to which we willingly trade our privacy for the fleeting rewards of digital affirmation. To Harcourt, a professor of law and political science at Columbia University and the author most recently of The Counterrevolution: How Our Government Went to War Against Its Own Citizens, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s appearance before Congress last week was a pageant that will do nothing to address the perilous dynamic of our society of exposure. Meaningful reform will come only when we recognize the libidinal allure of today’s digital platforms, as Harcourt explains below.

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The Facebook hearings last week were quite the spectacle. Mark Zuckerberg deftly deflected his inquisitors and misled them, while share price rose 4.5% in a single day. Senators and representatives postured for their constituents and got free prime-time media exposure. Privacy experts crowed and gloated that they had always been right, but unfairly ignored. The media and the Internet harvested abundant costless content. And social media lit up, abuzz. Between the schadenfreude and the glee, and the plain-old gawking and goggling, everybody seemed to pleasure themselves. It was win-win—except, perhaps, for the ordinary digital subjects who were left high and dry: pleasantly entertained, but totally exposed.

In the end, the Facebook hearings were nothing more than another tantalizing but anxious digital distraction. The greatest paradox, perhaps, is how much personal data and digital exhaust we all emitted and how many digital traces we shed watching Zuckerberg and simultaneously fretting over our privacy.

If anything, the Facebook hearings confirm the dreadful bind in which we find ourselves: social media and the Internet companies have us all in the palms of their hands because the digital experience itself is so seductive, consuming, and self-gratifying. Their Faustian business model works because their platforms tap directly into our pleasure centers and trigger deep reward circuits. Seeing our selfies online, tracking our likes and shares, counting our followers and retweets—these stimuli are almost more reinforcing than food or sex. We find ourselves going from one digital platform or device to another, swiping and clicking, pressing the levers like a rat in Skinner’s box, desperately seeking more stimulus and gratification.

And unless and until we come to grips with the place of desire and of our libidinal and at times narcissistic urges in relation to these new digital technologies, we won’t make any progress, we won’t get anywhere. Yes, the #DropFacebook campaign just gained Susan Sarandon and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. But the vast majority of the users of Facebook—as well as Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, etc.—will stay put because these platforms satisfy their desires, provide the gratification, and remain the easiest way to enjoy social relations today, even when they do make us anxious about our privacy.

The fact is, power circulates differently in the digital age, and the social media powerhouses have tapped deep into our pleasure centers and egos. The dark analogies to George Orwell’s 1984 or to Foucault’s “panopticon” just do not capture the present moment, nor will they alone stop us from sharing and liking.   

Today, we are no longer being coerced to give up our privacy, as Winston and Julia were by Big Brother. We are no longer confined to a panoptic cell, naked before the all-seeing guard tower. There is no telescreen forcibly anchored into our apartment walls. Instead, today we share our personal information jubilantly, out of love and desire, and for self-affirmation. We post selfies on Instagram, status updates on Facebook, screeds on Twitter. We invite Echo into our homes. We build personal websites open to all. And it feels so good, it’s so pleasurable, that even when we are warned about how much of our private information the social media and Internet companies have, we cringe but go on.