Off the Page: The Harvard Press Author Forum

Teaching the Torture Presidency

PARTICIPATING AUTHOR: THOMAS L. DUMM

Thomas L. Dumm is Professor and Chair of the political science department at Amherst  College. His new book, Loneliness as a Way of Life, will be published by Harvard University Press in September 2008.

Currently, I'm preparing my American presidency course for this fall's semester. I've not taught this course since 2004, so I've been updating the syllabus. But there is something different about my preparations this time. I am finding myself waking up in the middle of the night, worried about how to explain to my students what has been revealed about the presidency since the last time I taught this course.

Over the past several years, it has become clear that there has been systematic and deep violation of law and Constitution by President Bush and members of his administration. In the wake of 9/11 the Department of Justice issued memo after memo giving cover for domestic spying and the abandonment of the Geneva Conventions. They advised the CIA and Department of Defense on the use techniques of interrogation that everyone except themselves would call torture. The CIA used such cover to vastly expand the already dubious foreign rendition program, kidnapping "persons of interest," sending them to dungeons in countries like Syria and Egypt, where police use brutal techniques to elicit confessions. That these policies were made at the behest of the Vice President and the President is now no longer even news. But it will be to many of my students.

How do I tell my students that our President ordered the torture of hundreds of prisoners? How do I explain that our President, Vice-president, and their key advisors implemented policies that resulted in the beating, shocking, drowning, terrorizing and sometimes the deaths of human beings? How do I teach the torture presidency?

Bureaucratic battles between the CIA and FBI for control of terror suspects, turf wars between the departments of Defense and State for control over implementation of policy, all overseein by the Vice-president and his assistants, these are classic examples of the politics of bureaucracy, power politics, all the ordinary stuff of any presidency course. The difficulty is that there was nothing ordinary about the substance of the matter.

I will try to explain how this happened. We will examine John Yoo's theory of "the unitary executive," comparing it to the relevant Federalist Papers and the history of Supreme Court decisions that contradict it. I will detail power struggles within the Bush Administration, the use of secrecy, executive statements, and other devices to frustrate Congressional oversight. I will review the climate of fear that enveloped the country following the terror attacks of 2001, how the early response by the Bush administration reflected genuine worry concerning the possibility of another, even more massive attack on the country, how this fear fomented policy choices that resulted in water-boarding and an entire panoply of torture techniques.

I will also explore with students how the system of checks and balances, so praised and honored as the core of American political genius, was tossed overboard during a period of panic, not only by an administration that came to office to reassert executive power, but by a Congress that put political expedience over loyalty to the Constitution. I will compare the Congress of the past eight years with that of the previous eras of executive abuse, especially the Congress of the Nixon era, when concern for the Constitution eventually trumped loyalty to Party.

We will discuss the silence of the Democratic and Republican nominees for the Presidency concerning the need to restore the Constitution, and roll back policies of torture; we will review the refusal of the Democratic leadership of Congress to use the one instrument available to it to reset the course of our polity, namely, the impeachment power. We will evaluate the political shrewdness of this silence, and the possibly harmful long-term consequences for our polity.

I will treat the terror presidency as a "teachable moment," as we sometimes say in the academy. But unlike other times I have taught and worried about abuses of power, overreaching, and executive arrogance, this time I will have a specific image in my head: a hooded prisoner, precariously balanced on a box, wires extending from his body. I will try get my students, to the extent that they are able, to see and feel that image, deciding each in their own way how to respond to this new condition. Sadly, this is what it means to teach the American presidency in our time.

Painting Over Mao

—Notes on the Inauguration of the Beijing Olympic Games

PARTICIPATING AUTHOR: GEREMIE BARME

Geremie R. Barmé is Professor of Pacific and Asian History at The Australian National University. His latest book is The Forbidden City from the Wonders of the World series (HUP, May 2008).

Read the Bldg Blog interview with Mary Beard about the Wonders of the World series (Part I and Part II)

Read supplementary material prepared by Geremie Barmé

A shorter version of this article appeared in Sydney Morning Herald on 11 August 2008

The ancient city of Beijing was literally turned on its head to help achieve the effects of the Olympic opening ceremony on Friday 8 August 2008. Six hundred years ago the city was designed around a north-south axis that runs from the south of the old city through the Forbidden City and on north. Along this axis the spectacles of imperial times would unfold (including the imperial "Tours of the South" or nanxun that were a major feature of the reigns of the Kangxi and Qianlong emperors in the Qing dynasty). Since the 1910s, however, Chang'an Avenue, now a multi-laned highway that runs east-west through the heart of Beijing, became the focus for military parades. From the 1950s, mass rallies organized by China’s ruling Communist Party have paraded along the avenue past Tiananmen, the most recent of these grand demonstrations being held in 1999 to mark the 50th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic (see my online essay "Let the Spiel Begin". http://www.danwei.org/2008_beijing_olympic_games/let_the_spiel_begin_by_geremie.php).

As part of the makeover of the city in the last decade the long-disused north-south imperial axis has been revived with a rebuilt city gate far in the south and a new park at Yongding Men, as well as a lengthy shopping mall at Qianmen that abuts Tiananmen Square. On Friday night as a prelude to the start of the Olympic opening ceremony a line of fireworks exploded in a series of ‘footprints’ along this axis describing a path to the Bird’s Nest National Stadium.

Far in advance of this the ceremony designers created a digital mock up of the fireworks so that TV viewers in China and internationally could see an idealized version of Beijing’s central axis. To achieve the desired effect they even edited out the pollution-haze that generally covers the city despite years of effort and billions of dollars. The show that followed was also one of canny artifice, stunning design and digital wizardry. Zhang Yimou, the renowned filmmaker and overall director of the show, used a quotation from Mao Zedong to describe the thinking behind the opening: "using the past to serve the present and the foreign to serve China."

Most observers noted that Mao, the Party Chairman who founded the People’s Republic in 1949 and led the country until his death in 1976 (launching the disastrous Great Leap Forward in the late 50s and the decade of disruption of the Cultural Revolution from 1966) was entirely absent from this paean to China’s past civilization. Of course, they might have missed the pregnant absence of the dead leader in the heavily rewritten "Song to the Motherland" (Gechang zuguo), in which he originally featured, that was sung by nine-year-old Lin Miaoke that opens the show. However, in reality, the Great Helmsman did get a look in, if only obliquely.

On the unfurled paper scroll that features centre stage early in the performance, dancers trace out a painting in the "xieyi", or impressionistic, style of traditional Chinese art. Their lithe movements create a vision of mountains and a river, to which is added a sun. It is a something of a stock scene of the kind seen in countless Chinese ink paintings. However, to my mind at least, it is an image that also evokes the painting-mural that forms a backdrop to the statue of the Chairman in the Mao Memorial Hall in the centre of Beijing (another version of this image hung prominently in the Great Hall of the People from the 1960s). That picture, designed by Huang Yongyu, a noted artist persecuted during the Cultural Revolution, is, in turn, inspired by a line from Mao’s most famous poem ‘Snow’ (February 1936) that reads ‘How splendid the rivers and mountains of China’ (jiangshan ru ci duo jiao). The poem lists the prominent rulers of dynastic China and ends by commenting on how all these great men fade in comparison to the true heroes of the modern world: the people. The poem is generally interpreted as being about Mao himself, the hero of the age (for a discussion of this, see my book Shades of Mao, 1996).

In their opening ceremony design, what Zhang Yimou and his colleagues achieve (among many, sometimes too many, other things), be it intentional or not, is a rethinking of this reference. Eventually, the painting is coloured in by children with brushes and the sun becomes a jaunty ‘smiley face’. In the remaining blank space of the landscape the athletes of the world track the rainbow of Olympic colours as they take up their positions following their entry to the stadium. Thus, a Chinese landscape, with its coded political references (after all, what does a sun usually mean in modern-style guohua?), is transformed into something that is suffused with a new and embracing meaning by the global community. It offers a positive message for the future of China’s engagement with the world, not only to international audiences, but perhaps also to China’s own leaders, who, apart from Premier Wen Jiabao, for the most part sat stony-faced through the extravaganza. It is also significant that many of the high-points of the opening ceremony were the result of a collective collaboration of designers working closely with Chinese artists who have returned from long years overseas, as well as with British and Japanese creators.

But after the spectacular highlights of traditional China that feature the Four Great Inventions (the segment on moveable type, in particular, is a triumph), powerful images jostle with each other, or appear momentarily only to be crowded out as one mass scene after another presses in, or some vignette comes and goes in a flood of fleeting glitz. The Chinese voice-over on CCTV1 spoke repeatedly about traditional aesthetics and the language of understatement and elegance, but after an enthralling and uplifting introduction and paean to the achievements of dynastic Chinese civilization, as the show enters the present age a certain failure of artistic coherence becomes increasingly obvious.

Thus, one could argue that the extraordinary landscape painting contains another, quite unintended, message. The ‘xieyi’ style of Chinese art particularly values emptiness or lacunae (kong  or xu): those pregnant spaces untouched by the brush that bring the composition to life, the ‘vacuum’ in which meaning finds full expression. In the second half of the show that inaugurated the XXIXth Olympiad with its increasing number of rapid highlights—the problematic use of the intense close-up drowned by the massing of performers—there is scarce room and an unsteady rhythm in what could have been, and in parts still is, a breathtaking work. The exciting promise of the opening sequences remains sadly under-realised.

While Zhang Yimou had overall directorial authority for the design and staging of the opening ceremony, Zhang Jigang deputy minister of propaganda in the PLA General Logistics Department who had worked on the Chinese ceremony at the Athens Games, was in charge of the first half of the show. The second half (including the entrance of the athletes and the torch-lighting ceremony) was overseen by Chen Weiya , artistic director of the generally stodgy Song & Dance Ensemble of the East. He has also designed the closing ceremony. Chen is known for the designs he has made for Tiananmen Square mass gatherings, the 2001 World University Student Games and the opening ceremony of the 2005 East Asia Games. Apart from the push-and-pull of directorial intent created by this leadership team, there were other expectations that had to be met. For example, the Beijing Olympic Games is also a vehicle for the promotion of the au courant Party line of ‘harmony’ (hexie , be it local or global. The original show was to feature a scene comprising a massed army of huge ‘piying'(screen puppet) Terracotta Warriors made in the style of Shaanxi Qinqiang  Opera puppets. Images of these figures featured in the media following the first rehearsal of the show in July this year. Recalling not only the era of the First Emperor of the Qin, but also Zhang Yimou’s 2002 film ‘Hero’, the phalanx of puppets was designed to perform a victory march in the stadium. They were cut from the show on advice from the Beijing Olympic Committee who deemed that they were too martial in tone. The internationally recognized Qin Warriors were replaced at the last minute by puppets made up as Beijing Opera performers. They feature in a lacklustre scene that has been widely derided by Chinese bloggers and Beijing viewers.

So, to my mind, while there was much to commend the performance in terms of scale and synchronized collective performance, after we leave the retrospect on pre-modern China (one in which the narrative about millennia of peace, exchange, harmony and friendship is problematic in other ways) coherence is sacrificed for the sake of a number of designed-by-committee themes. Meanwhile, the sardonic wit, irony and general raffishness of Beijing humour is noteworthy for its complete absence from the festivities.

The general busyness of the action and the overall bling that detract from the moments of magic in the show contain perhaps a significant cultural message in their own right. Quotations from Confucius or the repeated talk of harmony do little to disguise a paucity that is not about either ‘xu’ or aesthetic restraint, a vision in which less is allowed to be more. At least China has the wherewithal to talk about the value of pregnant pauses and the richness of the empty space, in previous Olympic opening ceremonies, such as those held in the US and Australia, there was simply too much clamour and horror vacui. 

Immediately after the Beijing ceremony one Chinese web blogger commented, ‘We’ve been waiting for this banquet for a long time. Instead what we got was hot-pot in which all the flavours have ended up confused’. People will debate the contents and significance of this particular visual banquet for some time to come. Despite all this what does remain is a Chinese painting in which the whole world, through its athletes, has helped co-create.

Beijing opening ceremony

What was missing from the opening ceremony?

PARTICIPATING AUTHOR: MICHAEL DUTTON

Michael Dutton is author of Streetlife China, the prize-winning Policing Chinese Politics, and Beijing Time (HUP May 2008) with Hsiu-Ju Stacy Lo and Dong Dong Wu. He is Professor of Politics at Goldsmiths University of London.

The opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics was a theatricalised depiction of China’s own account of itself..It was a history lesson. Like a Chinese history textbook, the performances at the opening ceremony staged a China of the future (with the pyro-techniques, stadium structure and the high tech visuals) that was built on an ancient venerated culture. The greatness of the past was now about to be rekindled.  But what of the period in the middle that actually comes to define so much of this contemporary China?  Here was a period that, in many respects, reorganised China and "morphed" these ancient customs into newer and more socialist habits. This difference is even etched onto the surface of Beijing’s urban landscape but more importantly, it has been central to the constitution of new post revolutionary communities that have come to represent what is now being called, "Old Beijing." Now torn down under the once ubiquitous character "Chai"--that is, the character meaning ‘demolish’ written on walls just before their destruction--these traditional neighbourhoods may have had pre-revolution housing stock, but the occupants, are in the main, a product of the communist period. It was when the communists came to power that these neighbourhoods filled up. They produced certain types of affect, judgement, and modes of thought, that were built on the logic of life of the system economic reform has swept away. This is the bit of history that the opening ceremony didn’t address. That which is repressed, Freud once noted, is not destroyed, only encrypted.

The opening ceremony might have been a history lesson from "spin city," but out on the street there are different lessons to be learned. Out on the backstreets are the little old lady or man of the neighbourhood committee. These days, they may be campaigning for a clean neighbourhood or a secure Olympics, but in the past they were the conveyor belts of everyday socialism in China. All too evidently there is another China and another Beijing that is lived but was not performed at this opening ceremony. <em>Beijing Time</em> takes the reader to these neighbourhoods and tries to understand the dynamics of these communities in a period when market development is destroying them.

Our future and our evolutionary history

PARTICIPATING AUTHOR: JACK HAILMAN

Jack P. Hailman is Professor Emeritus of Zoology, University of Wisconsin, and Research Associate, Archbold Biological Station. He is the author of Coding and Redundancy: Man-made and Animal-Evolved Signals (May 2008)

Ever since popular literature and media began dealing with the subject of sex, there has been explicit recognition that the so-called hourglass figure of women is an important, if somewhat idealized, sex attractant. Even before popularizations, of course, women knew this at leastimplicitly, which fact gave rise to devices of exaggeration such as bustles and "falsies."  The higher tech equivalent of the latter, surgical implant, is still popular despite some health risks it entails. The interesting question is not what the signs are but why large buttocks and breasts are attractive to men.  The long-known likely answer is that these traits once signaled important survival and reproductive conditions.  Fat reserves of the buttocks, for example, could see one through times of famine, and ample milk production is critical to survival of infants.  Males were selected to mate with females who would most likely produce successful offspring, thereby perpetuating the male's genes.  These feminine traits no longer predict the likelihood of reproductive success in a modern, developed country yet the ancestral masculine preference persists.

Natural selection shaped behavior of our evolving hominid species to its particular ecology, but if selection is still working at all today, it has not keep pace with demographic trajectories and technological advances.  Explosive population growth overwhelms selective forces, and technology isolates us from many problems so that our behavior is not so closely adapted to the brave new worlds we have created.  For example, people still crave carbohydrates and fats as if they needed to identify scarce energy-rich foods in a harsh environment.  Partly as a result of this preference--€”and, probably, also pollutants that disrupt endocrine and metabolic functions--€”obesity is epidemic.  These victims of our evolutionary history don't have to outrun lions to survive.  And modern medicine prolongs the lives of many that in an ancient age would have died young of heart failure or a variety of other problems exacerbated by obesity.

Our evolutionary history affects our perceptions and behavior in many subtle ways.  I have neighbors who have surrounded their house with gorgeous horticultural plantings including rare and expensive tropical varieties.  Not a blade of grass grows on their property so the annoying sound of mowing machines never emanates from their surrounds.  Yet some other neighbors have let slip occasional snide remarks.  Why is that? Psychologist Charles Snowdon told me of an unpublished study in which subjects rated television commercials that included outdoor scenes.  The favorites were those where the scene resembled a typical suburban yard of trees providing less than a full canopy and with lawn beneath.  The natural habitat most closely matching these characteristics is savannah, such as on the plains of Africa where Homo sapiens originated.  We seem to try unconsciously to replicate our ancestral environment in suburbia, and as a result alternative yards (no matter how tasteful) may seem strangely inappropriate to us as places of habitation.

A recent study that was summarized in a health magazine found a new benefit of time in the out of doors, adding to the many we have all heard.  Autistic children improved in many ways, including their communicative behavior, as a function of spending time outdoors.  One factor in the mechanism may be higher production of vitamin D, which is created by radiation of sterols, although there may be a whole complex of factors.  In my generation, mothers urged their kids to "go out and play," which wasn't entirely an attempt to get them out from under foot. The motivation included an unconscious awareness that growing children need to be outdoors, thus paralleling many home health remedies that have proven their worth when investigated experimentally.  Ancestral children grew up in the out of doors; it is the environment to which their development is adapted.

The Executive Director of the Rocky Mountain Nature Association, Curt Buchholtz, relates the following anecdote in a recent newsletter. He was showing friends (a couple with two sons) around Rocky Mountain National Park.  The boys had their faces buried in battery-powered electronic game machines and could be persuaded to look up only once during the whole tour--to note briefly a herd of elk near the car. The child and family psychiatrist Douglas Kramer recently published an essay reminding us that an individual emerges from childhood as a result of complex interactions of genetic and environmental factors.  He points out that if the environment is abnormal--i.e., not the one the genes were adapted to interact with—then the product will also be abnormal.

In sum, many things about human behavior make little sense except in light of the species' evolution.  Failure to take seriously the fact that we are products of natural selection can have adverse consequences. Among other things, we must strive, in my opinion, to "leave no child indoors."  People will want to save the planet and its biologically diverse riches if they grow up having frequent contact with the natural world.  It is, after all, our real home.

Should we worry about Chinese patriotism?

PARTICIPATING AUTHOR: GLORIA DAVIES

Gloria Davies was born in Singapore and trained in Australia, where she teaches Chinese Studies at Monash University. She is the author of Worrying About China: The Language of Chinese Critical Inquiry (HUP October 2007)

There is nothing new about Chinese citizens shouting anti-foreign slogans. The triggers for these spectacles of communal outrage are always actions or decisions taken from outside China that are perceived as impacting on China’s well-being or international standing. In the last decade protest triggers have included NATO’s accidental bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999 and Japan’s 2005 bid for a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. In the turbulent period between March and May this year, Chinese patriotism has loomed once more into international view.

This year the relevant trigger has been the perceived bias in Western media reports over the unrest in Lhasa. Self-declared Chinese patriots volubly denounced the Western press as being “anti-Chinese”, expatriate Chinese protestors demonstrated outside CNN in Los Angeles, while a few even sent death threats to Western journalists. All of this has fostered a growing apprehension towards China amongst the international reading public. Western antipathy deepened even more when it became clear that these xenophobic denunciations were coming largely from students and educated young professionals both within and outside China. Western media commentaries began to take on a particularly worrying tone when the protest-encumbered Olympic torch relay wended its troubled way to the accompaniment of patriotic cheers from huge Chinese crowds in each of the host cities en route.

This worrying enthusiasm of the Chinese people for their Olympics was further confirmed when photos of the Olympic torch’s triumphant tour of Guangzhou and Shenzhen in early May appeared on televisions all over the world as well as on the Internet. In these bustling Chinese cities of commerce, the millions of people who not only thronged the streets but climbed trees and clambered onto any higher perch to afford themselves a better view, presented the local authorities with unprecedented problems of crowd management. But just four days later on 12 May, a disastrous earthquake struck the city of Wenchuan and surrounding areas in Sichuan province and the international media focus suddenly changed.

After the earthquake, the international media brought into view a very different picture of China. The Chinese government was loudly commended for showing admirable efficiency and transparency in the management of disaster relief. The enormous public support for the earthquake victims, with people all over China rushing to donate their time and money as well as essential supplies, medicine and blood, enabled Chinese patriotism to acquire a far more salubrious complexion in the international limelight.

It is important to grasp that “anti-foreign feelings” and a “love for the national family” are but different shades of Chinese patriotism and we should never lose sight of their proximate positions along a common cultural continuum. It is also important to grasp that both are essential elements in the constitution of the modern Chinese identity - an identity that is always remembered in terms of belonging to a nation that was hurt into being.

In Worrying about China, I draw attention to how Chinese intellectuals, despite their different persuasions, nonetheless share a common attitude of cultural defensiveness. As members of the educated Chinese elite, they also reflect a sensibility to the enduring Confucian virtue of bearing responsibility for “all under Heaven”. This characteristic cultural defensiveness has become part and parcel of “being Chinese” and while there have always been different articulations of this attitude, an ambivalence towards the West has remained a constant element of them all. This is because the West remains perceived, on the one hand as the cause of China’s civilizational decline, while on the other as an important aid to China’s redemption through modernization. Accordingly, the cosmopolitanism of Chinese thought tends to be couched in the problematic of showing the right kind of hospitality to foreign ideas.

To gain an appreciation of Chinese patriotism in our time, then, we need to reflect on the profound sense of cultural loss that animates contemporary Chinese intellectual life. From the 1890s onwards, that sense of loss became vital to the forging of a communal feeling in the Chinese-speaking world. Among other things, it was kept alive through revolutionary anthems that turned wounded Chinese pride into a battle cry. A century later, educated Chinese speak proudly of their nation’s economic prowess and modern achievements. Their unabashed patriotism is understandable, given that “loving the nation” (aiguo) remains scripted in mainland public discourse as the “natural attitude” of any Chinese person.

We should not fear Chinese patriotism because of this. Rather, we should note that while the hate speech of the more extreme Han chauvinists is worrying, it nonetheless remains largely rhetorical and ephemeral. It would be more productive for us to reflect on the complex asymmetries that have shaped and continue to shape the relations between China and the West. This would help us acquire a keener sense of why such historical injustices as coerced trade concessions, the Opium Wars and the Treaty of Versailles are kept alive in Chinese public discourse. This collective remembrance of historical injustices is much the same sentiment the incumbent American president attempted to articulate, namely “Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me.”

In Worrying about China I argue that the present trend in contemporary Chinese thought reflects a similar sentiment, “Because we have been othered, we must now learn once more how to be ourselves”. Consequently, as China rises to become a twenty-first century superpower, it is the synthesizing idea of salvaging the traditional Chinese past alongside a mastery of Western techniques of theorizing that excites and animates prominent Chinese thinkers. Thus while their destiny-inspired discourse remains oriented toward achieving China’s civilizational perfection, it is nonetheless also deeply cosmopolitan.

This cosmopolitanism, amply demonstrated in the impressive familiarity of Chinese intellectuals with an extensive range of contemporary Western ideas, bodes well not only for contemporary Chinese culture but for us all. We would do well to also remember that China’s public intellectuals, despite their comparative lack of freedom of speech, still command an authority and social relevance that exceeds the role of public intellectuals in the West today. Thus, rather than worry about Chinese patriotism, we might want to reflect on the kind of hospitality we are prepared to accord Chinese ideas, while reminding ourselves that educated Chinese have long accorded hospitality to Western ones.   

Beijing Olympic Torch relay and its implications for China and the rest of the world

PARTICIPATING AUTHOR: XU GUOQI

Xu Guoqi holds the Wen Chao Chen chair in History and East Asian Affairs, Kalamazoo College and is the author of Olympic Dreams: China and Sports, 1895-2008 (HUP, May 2008).

For the 29th Olympiad, Beijing has many ambitious plans including its Olympic torch relay which will traverse the longest distance, cover the greatest area, and involve the largest number of people in Olympic history. The Olympic flame has even reached the peak of the Mt. Everest. Beijing also designed its torch to be so-called “lucky cloud” and chose the theme and slogan of the torch relay as “the journey of harmony” and “light the passion, share the dream,” respectively. However, since the start of the torch relay, it seems that many Westerners did not share the same dream and the torch routes were nothing harmonious. The torch seemed also to have lit anti-Chinese passion among some Western media and politicians. The torch relay legs in London, Paris, and San Francisco were turned into fiascos. Free Tibet groups and human right groups, among others, seemed determined to use the torch relay and the coming Olympic Games to humiliate and shame Beijing and to squeeze concessions from China. Yes, the Olympic flame or “sacred fire” described by the Chinese was heroically brought to the peak of Mt. Everest by Chinese torch bearers on May 8. But the Chinese seemed unable to enjoy the historical moment due to the Western criticism.

For more than a century, China have been obsessed with its dream of joining the West-dominated world system as an equal and respected member. To host the Olympic Games is an important part of this obsession. Through the Olympics, including the ambitious torch relay, the Chinese wanted to prove to the West that they could compete and they were not “Sick Man of East Asia” anymore, and wanted to demonstrate to the world that a new, open, prosperous, and internationalized China has emerged. However, despite the breathtaking fast growth of its economy and rising international power in the last three decades, the Chinese seemed to have suffered what I called in my recent book Olympic Dreams  a “syndrome of can-do spirit and inferiority”. The Chinese are not self-confident and have cried for Western acceptance, recognition, and due respect. To organize the most impressive and ambitious torch relay clearly reflects this seemingly paradoxical feeling. But to the dismay of both the Chinese government and its people, the West seemed not to be impressed by or hostile to the Chinese accomplishment or share the same dream of having a strong and powerful China. Through their coverage and handling of the Beijing torch relay, the West seemed to remind the Chinese they were still not equal and they were still not good enough.

However, perhaps surprising to many ill-informed Westerners, their humiliation of China through politicizing the torch relay and the coming Olympic Games seems to have backfired. Instead of undermining Beijing’s legitimacy and credibility, the torch relay has become a rallying force to mobilize Chinese at home and abroad to support their government and defend China’s honor and has lead to the rise of outpouring of patriotism and nationalism. By trying to use the torch relay and the coming Games as leverage to force China to change its behavior and score political and diplomatic points, the West seems to have alienated the majority of Chinese and lost its credibility among the well-educated young Chinese. Instead of undermining Beijing’s legitimacy, Western misuse of torch relay and the Games has strengthened the Communist regime’s power and support base among its own people. The arrogant attitude of the western politicians to use the torch relay and the coming Games to humiliate and shame China was treated by many Chinese at home and abroad as a collective insult and forced many Chinese to ask whether it is still a good idea for China to follow the Western ideas and norms. In other words, due to the West’s self-inflicted wounds, the Chinese government seems to start to enjoy some popular support and the Chinese people seem to share the government’s dream to make the Games a great success regardless of the West responses and criticisms.

Regardless of their good wish and hope, the year 2008 has seemed to be a year of bad luck for the Chinese before the Olympic Games even start. The terrible snow storm early this year froze most of the nation and destroyed many Chinese celebration plans for spring festival. Then the Tibet unrest in March turned China into a target of world denunciation. In April, there was a deadly train crash, and now in May China was hit with the most deadly earthquake since the PRC was founded. But the year 2008 may prove to be the year of most significance in China’s relations with the world in the long run. What happened to their torch relay in the Western countries will fundamentally change Chinese perception of the West and 2008 may mark the beginning of a fundamentally new way of thinking about themselves and the West. Many thinking Chinese, if they can overcome disasters like this earthquake, and if both government and the people can work together to turn the shared dream into reality, don’t feel they have to prove anything to the West. Rather, they only have to prove to themselves. If the Chinese can successfully overcome the deadly earthquake, they definitely will be able to host a most successful Olympic Games. The Olympic Games is an opportunity for China, but it is also an opportunity for the West to prove to the Chinese that it still has some credibility and still can be trusted. What happened to the torch relay may symbolize the beginning of the end of Chinese romantic feeling for the West and provide a starting point for China’s search for more suitable national identity that is independent of western influence and pressure. If that is the case, the year 2008, in the long run, may indeed be a pivotal and a lucky year for China.   

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.