Week 31: Libraries Gave Us Power
Making my way to Oslo, and appreciating the city's new grand public works.
This week I’ve been making my way down from Tromsø in the Arctic Circle to the immaculate city of Bergen on Norway’s east coast, and then across to Oslo via train. The Bergensbanen is one of the great train trips of the world, and Europe’s highest route as it traverses the mountains of southern Norway. Over seven hours the route passes through fjords, forested hills and snowcapped peaks, with rivers and waterfalls that flow down and through these landscapes.
Being in Norway over the past week and a half I may have developed spectacular landscape fatigue, so I put the camera away for most of the journey. It was also nice to simply enjoy the ride without the incessant need to document it on social media.
In Oslo the past few days I’ve been catching up on work in the amazing new Oslo Public Library (known as the Deichman library – named after Carl Deichman, an 18th Century book collector whose initial endowment formed the basis of the first Oslo Public Library).
The public library building (opened in 2020), is one of a trio of striking new cultural buildings that sit next to each other in Oslo port area. The other two are the Opera House (opened 2008), and the Munch Museum - dedicated to the works of Edvard Munch (opened in 2021). As a waterfront redevelopment project these three cultural centres are an extraordinary investment in public space. An approach to city-planning that has been distinct from other major waterfront redevelopment projects in Western cities that have prioritised apartment complexes.
Housing, of course, is important, and any new land made available for denser living is desperately needed in many Western cities, but cultural spaces are also essential for the life of cities. The two can – and should – exist in unison and close proximity. Although it shouldn’t be overlooked that Norway has the financial capabilities to invest in great public works that other countries may lack. Although in praise of Norway, what countries do with their wealth is a reflection of their priorities and social health.
This Week’s Reading and Listening:
Australia Moves Toward Vote on a Voice for First Nations People
Grant Wyeth – The Diplomat
“Referendums often carry great risks. Because they are dealing with constitutional issues, their impact can extend beyond general governance. Some referendums in Australia’s past have concerned merely procedural issues – ways to overcome issues that the constitution’s framers couldn’t have foreseen – but other have far greater reach and speak to the soul of the country.
This is one such referendum, and given it concerns some of Australia’s most disadvantaged groups a negative result will have major ramifications for not just First Nations groups – who may rightly feel that they are being silenced and sidelined – but also it may signal a disinterest within the broader Australian public to address poor outcomes and structural inequalities within the country. However, a positive response to the referendum question will symbolise that the country is capable of acknowledging the brutalities of the past and the persistent disparities that have flowed on from this for First Nations peoples, and a desire to find methods to rectify these.”
Charles Edel – Foreign Affairs
“Extraordinary efforts and extraordinary expenditures require clear, urgent, and forceful explanations if they are to succeed in breaking down outdated processes and be sustained in the long run. All three leaders have discussed how ambitious the deal is and have noted its potential to spur significant new growth in their industrial and technology sectors. But they have not yet made a sustained public case detailing either the purpose or the strategy behind AUKUS. In Washington, this is a conversation that demands more detailed focus on deterrence and competitive advantage. In Canberra, it entails more explicit discussion of China and the types of activities Australia would like to forestall. And in London, it requires a more sustained argument for why the Indo-Pacific is worthy of the United Kingdom’s time, attention, and resources.
Whether AUKUS will deter China from further acts of aggression and provide stability to the Indo-Pacific region is a question that can likely only be answered by the Chinese leader Xi Jinping. After all, deterrence resides in psychological spaces—something that takes place in a government’s calculations about its adversary’s intent and capabilities. AUKUS is a bold and ambitious initiative. It is also an enormous gamble to create, in Biden’s words, “more partnerships and more potential” that can produce “more peace and security in the region.” Providing answers to the questions that continue to challenge the deal’s implementation will be essential to realising these larger goals. Giving the United States and its allies more capabilities and demonstrating their readiness to run more bureaucratic, political, and ultimately strategic risks is also the surest course for altering Xi's calculations.”
What If We’re The Bad Guys Here?
David Brooks – New York Times
This piece by David Brooks has sent social media into a frenzy this week. There’s been an obvious defensiveness towards many of his arguments. Yet elite classes have always created economic and social structures that have favoured themselves over others. Nothing could be less controversial to state. The problem is that historically these classes have been recognisably conservative in the way they have ring-fenced their privileges. What upsets people today is that many within today’s elite classes consider themselves progressive, creating a cognitive dissonance.
Rather than fly into a rage, Zach Beaumont responded more thoughtfully on Vox with an article titled “I Regret To Report The Economic Anxiety Theory Of Trumpism Is Back.” He makes some good points about Brooks not showing his work, but his counter-argument that it is cultural anxiety, rather economic anxiety that drives the attraction to Trumpism, doesn’t quite understand the complexity of human organisation. The economy and culture are conjoined twins. There’s no creating a strict firewall between the two. Everything we do with both economic and cultural. Especially when considering economic and social change the two advance together, or more accurately, economic change takes the first step forward and social change follows.
Can Prosecutors Convince a Jury Trump Means Every Bonkers Thing He Says?
Michael Wolff - New York Times
“It is precisely this behaviour, unconcerned with guardrails or rules, unmindful of cause and effect, all according to his momentary whim — an overwhelming, almost anarchic instinct to try to invert reality — that prosecutors and much of the political establishment seem to most want to hold him accountable for. The chaos he creates is his crime; there is, however, no statute against upsetting the dependable order. Breaking the rules — often seemingly to no further purpose than just to break the rules as if he were a supreme nihilist or simply an obstreperous child — is not much of a grand criminal enterprise, even though for many, it’s infuriating coming from someone charged with upholding the rules.
Many Democrats have come to assume that the dastardly effect of Mr. Trump’s political success must mean that he has an evil purpose. During his trials, prosecutors will try to establish that precise link. But that might not be such a trivial challenge. He is being pursued under several broad, ill-defined statutes like the Espionage Act, RICO, conspiracy and obstruction of justice. Without an exchange of money or quid pro quo, proving his crimes will largely come down to showing specific intent or capturing his state of mind — and with Donald Trump, that’s quite a trip down the rabbit hole.
The larger pattern, clear to anyone who has had firsthand experience with the former president, is that he will say almost anything that pops into his head at any given moment, often making a statement so confusing in its logic that to maintain one’s own mental balance, it’s necessary to dismiss its seriousness on the spot or to pretend you never heard it.
His unwillingness or, as likely, inability to play by the rules or even understand them creates a chaos often in his favour. Indeed, the prosecutors’ story of his grand scheming will most likely require them to present a figure of the former president — calculated, methodical, knowing and cunning — that none of his supporters or anyone who has ever met him or reasonable jurors and perhaps even the world at large would recognise.”
The Rest Is Politics - Leading (audio)
Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart
‘We are facing spiritual and moral destruction.’
Is Israeli democracy facing the most dangerous moment in its history? Yuval Noah Harari joins Rory and Alastair to discuss his first-hand experience of the protests against the government of Benjamin Netanyahu during this politically existential moment for the country.”
Natan Sachs – Foreign Affairs
“Since December, the Biden administration has responded to the formation of Netanyahu’s governing coalition with a calibrated policy of compartmentalisation: working with Israel on urgent matters while trying not to seem too friendly to the new government. The White House applied an undeclared no-contact policy with the most extreme elements of the coalition. At the same time, it conducted mostly quiet engagement with the Israeli government over issues it deemed important, including the danger of further escalation of violence in the West Bank. Finally, after some hesitation, the U.S. government started to voice public opposition to Netanyahu’s proposed overhaul of the Israeli judiciary. Biden himself has taken a vocal stance against the judicial overhaul—with the White House stating that "as a lifelong friend of Israel, President Biden has publicly and privately expressed his views that major changes in a democracy to be enduring must have as broad a consensus as possible," a consensus clearly lacking in Israel today.
The erosion of democracy in Israel also undercuts the shared values that both countries frequently tout as a basis for their relationship. Unchecked executive power in Israel would also exacerbate the risk on the Palestinian front, especially when coupled with the annexationist ambitions of the current Israeli government. Although Israeli courts have been generally permissive of settlement activity in the West Bank, they have limited settlements on privately owned Palestinian land, and at times checked administrative decisions to include Palestinian concerns. In 2004, the Supreme Court ordered adjustments, albeit minor, to the path of the “security barrier” between the West Bank and Israel, saying that its route caused too much harm to the Palestinians who lived nearby.”
Soft Power Is Making A Hard Return
J. Alex Tarquinio – Foreign Policy
“Although the modern vernacular of soft and hard power implies opposition, since the earliest civilizations it has been more of a continuum. In ancient times, Hellenisation spread throughout the known world in the wake of Alexander the Great’s army. Proselytizing priests followed in the footsteps of Spain’s conquistadors. Imperial China presented a cultural wall against the steppe as powerful as any fortifications. The information age has modified the nature of soft power but not human nature. As Russia’s full-scale war in Ukraine grinds on and governments in West Africa fall to coups, it’s evident that no surfeit of wishful thinking will reduce the appeal of hard power for some.
Today, many world leaders still reach for sports, language, food, music, and movies to advance their interests. These efforts aren’t inherently more persuasive than bullets or blockades, but it’s a much more pleasant and humane way of seeking to influence world events. Occasionally, soft power seems to work like a charm. The United Kingdom is widely viewed as having benefited from the recent royal pageantry, despite it coinciding with some messy political infighting in London’s Parliament. India certainly benefits to some degree from the widespread popularity of yoga and Bollywood, but the country’s status as a rising Asian nation and counterweight to China explains much of its appeal in the West.”
The BBC and the Decline of British Soft Power
Simon J. Potter – Foreign Affairs
“The British government seems torn between its hostility to the BBC at home and its realisation that the World Service offers a key tool of global soft power, one that keeps the United Kingdom central to how many listeners imagine the world and helps to subtly promote British perspectives on international affairs.
One solution might lie in cutting the cords that bind British domestic and international broadcasting together, splitting the World Service into a separate organisation funded directly by the state. Such a separation could make international broadcasting less vulnerable to domestic political pressures. But it would also almost certainly dilute the appeal of those services to global listeners. The BBC’s brand name and reputation for truthfulness remain major assets. Keeping the World Service under the umbrella of the BBC protects its status as an independent voice reflecting the plurality of British democracy. Under direct government control, it might instead appear to be simply an organ of state propaganda, merely a British iteration of Voice of America. Its global reach and influence would surely decline.
It seems likely that, in the short term, the World Service will continue to operate in its current guise, reliant on ad hoc funding extracted from a government unconvinced of the sustainability or desirability of public service broadcasting. Eventually, the government may implement root-and-branch reform of British broadcasting, with profound consequences for the World Service. Or perhaps the current muddle will continue, to the further detriment of British soft power and global influence, already dwindling after the country’s departure from the European Union.”
How Bronze Age Pervert Charmed The Far Right
Graeme Wood - The Atlantic
“But Garsten said liberalism had some of his best students hopping into rafts and paddling in other intellectual directions. He said they had been “captured” by the belief “that to be morally serious, one faces a choice.” The choice, he said, is not between liberalism and illiberalism. Liberalism had already lost. Its greatest champion, the United States, had run aground after pointless wars, terminal decadence, and bureaucratic takeover by activists and special interests. Garsten said his best students were choosing between the protofascism of Nietzsche and a neomedieval, quasi-theocratic version of Catholicism opposed to Enlightenment liberalism. These students considered liberal democracy an exhausted joke, and they hinted—and sometimes did more than hint—that the past few centuries had been a mistake, and that the mistake should now be corrected.
Many of the participants knew that Garsten was talking about the threat posed by Bronze Age Pervert, though his name was uttered with great reluctance. Partly this reluctance came from political philosophers’ unwillingness to admit that they browse the Twitter feed of a genocidal nudist. Partly it was their worry that they had unwittingly been complicit in BAPism’s spread by sending their students to intern in Washington, and to staff offices on Capitol Hill and in conservative institutions such as the Heritage Foundation.
From there, BAPism reached members of the right who lack philosophical training—young men whose main interest is not in the rise or fall of the American civic religion but in something more primal, an urge they themselves hardly understand, let alone control. “There is a level of self-loathing, chronic-masturbating anger out there among adolescent and early-20s fucked-up males,” one Republican operative told me. To them the world is dry, purposeless, and designed for the flourishing of anyone but them. Conservatism in the old way—not Bronze Age old, but Reagan old—does not satisfy them. “BAPism essentially involves re-enchanting the world and giving purpose to these young guys,” the operative told me. “And for some reason we can’t.”
Erika Weisz & Sarah Stamper - Nautilus
When Lee Ross, a professor of psychology at Stanford, explained to his students what his term “fundamental attribution error” meant, he loved to quote George Carlin. “Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?” The late comedian perfectly captured our tendency to attribute the world’s problems to other people and not ourselves. I’m the only good driver on the road. Everybody else should drive like me.
Ross and his colleagues demonstrated that the fundamental attribution error was fed by the illusion of personal objectivity. In a 2016 Ted Talk, Ross joked that people “believe that their take on the world is the objective one, and what has to be understood or explained is, ‘What is it about those other people that seem to get it wrong?’” Ross came to call this “naïve realism,” the tendency for people to think they see the world objectively, as it is, free from personal bias.1 Ross established three characteristics of the “naïve realist.”
First, the naïve realist believes that their perceptions are realistic and “objective.” Accordingly, other people (at least, reasonable other people) should share their beliefs, preferences, and convictions. Second, the naïve realist expects that any reasonable, open-minded person will be persuaded to agree with the naïve realist if there is disagreement between parties. If there is disagreement, and if the disagreeing party is a reasonable person, presenting the “real facts” should restore harmony. Third, anyone who disagrees with the naïve realist after the presentation of real facts is unreasonable, biased, or irrational.