Woodhenge?
North Norfolk coast.
Quote of the Day
”Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.”
- John Maynard Keynes
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
DUG | Wheel of Fortune
Long Read of the Day
Absolute power can be a terrible weakness
Henry Farrell’s essay on the relative vulnerabilities of tyrants and crowds is interesting and sobering. His conclusion about the best way to resist Trump’s aspiration for total power seems sensible, if conventional:
Figure out how to generate common knowledge that will enable coordination. Protests – especially if they are widespread, and especially if they happen in unusual places, or involve surprising coalitions can help generate information cascades. But getting media coverage and broader conversation is important.
Welcome in the strayed sheep, and work on widening the cracks in the other coalition. Leopard-face-eating memes may feel personally satisfying, but they are usually not great politics.
If power involves coordination, coordinate! Help build your coalition as far as it can go. Do everything you can to minimize defections from it, and to maximize defections from the other side. Take advantage of the opposition’s vulnerabilities and mistakes – especially the trust problems that are likely to flourish in a coalition around an actor who aspires to untrammeled power and is deeply untrustworthy.. Assume that the other side is trying to attack your own vulnerabilities, and mitigate as much as possible. And do what you can now; things are likely to get much harder, very quickly, if the opposition’s victory becomes a self-confirming expectation.
At one level, the lesson for US universities seems clear. Do what Harvard is doing. Be prepared to take the pain of not bending the knee — and then see what happens.
BUT…The problem is that state universities (where most Americans study) are much more dependent on federal funds than the lavishly endowed Ivy League institutions. For them, not bending the knee may not be an option. Which is why the future for US academia looks pretty grim.
My commonplace booklet
The historian Simon Schama has a nice essay in the weekend edition of the Financial Times (doubtless behind the paywall) pointing out that Trump’s attack on universities is not entirely, er, un-American. They’ve been here before, though perhaps now their adversaries are more powerful. His piece has a neat coda about a new ‘cultural’ project of the Trump crowd — a ‘National Garden of American Heroes’, a collection of 250 statues providing an uplifting story of US history.
Just this month the National Endowments for the Humanities and for the Arts have both been informed that 85 per cent of their grants have been cancelled and that funds supporting countless projects of research and artistic expression across America would be diverted to the garden to meet the bill, reportedly coming in at between $100,000 and $200,000 per statue.
Among Trump’s original pick list, there is one unlikely hero (at least for the president). Alphabetically sandwiched between Susan B Anthony and Louis Armstrong is Hannah Arendt, historian, philosopher and author of, among many other things, a powerful essay on “Truth and Politics”. You must hope that her statue will feature the obligatory cigarette together with an ironic smile, knowing that she provides a plinth text that Donald Trump is bound to appreciate.
“Truth, though powerless and always defeated in a head-on clash with the powers that be, possesses a strength of its own: whatever those in power may contrive, they are unable to discover or invent a viable substitute for it. Persuasion and violence can destroy truth, but they cannot replace it.”
I wonder if they really see Arendt as an American heroine. In fact I wonder if they even know who she was.
Linkblog
- Something I noticed while drinking from the Internet firehose.
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