Fairness and Freedom: A History of Two Open Societies: New Zealand and the United States

Posted on July 5, 2021 by Luke Ford

Here are some highlights from this 2012 book by David Hackett Fischer:

* When one compares these many accounts, one notices that the same language of description tends to occur. Karl Popper described New Zealanders as “decent, friendly and well-disposed.”

* In 1977, an Australian journalist wrote, “While we don’t exactly hate New Zealanders, we’re not exactly fond of each other. While they regard us as vulgar yobboes, almost Yank-like, we think of them as second-hand, recycled Poms.”

* After 1974, annual immigration from Great Britain fell from more than 90 percent of all arrivals to less than 10 percent, and other ethnic groups rapidly increased.

* Another explanation of New Zealand’s culture has stressed physical factors of distance, remoteness, isolation, and insularity. Its nearest neighbor is 1,200 miles away—a geographic condition that is unique among nations. Many visitors from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century described New Zealanders as an “insular people, isolated from the world,” as one observed. A leading example was political scientist Leslie Lipson, who wrote in 1948, “The mental world of New Zealand has been, on the whole, as self-contained as its insular geography.”

Since 1960, New Zealand’s place in the world has been transformed by a continuing revolution in global communications.

* Since 1984, New Zealanders have dismantled large parts of their welfare state with the same energy that they brought to its construction. While preserving a safety net, they led the world in privatizing public institutions and in a great wave of restructuring.

* At first sight, much of New Zealand’s history seems familiar to an American. Both nations were founded by English-speaking people in distant lands. Both began with a heritage of the English language, law, and customs. Both entered into complex relations with native populations, Indian and Maori. Both developed what Frederick Jackson Turner called frontier societies, received large numbers of immigrants, and became more diverse in ethnicity and religion. Both industrialized and urbanized, and had reform movements in the Progressive Era and the era of the Great Depression, and in the restructuring of the late twentieth century. Both were allies in the great wars of the twentieth century and underwent comparable processes of restructuring in the 1980s.
The people of these two nations are also similar in some of their most cherished beliefs. Erik Olssen, our colleague and friend at Otago, had some of his schooling in the United States and knows America well. He told us with a laugh of his discovery that both countries cherish exactly the same sense of national uniqueness. The classic example was one of New Zealand’s great characters, Richard “King Dick” Seddon. On a voyage home in 1906, he sent a radiogram: “Just returning to God’s Own Country.” The next day King Dick died at sea, but his message traveled on. New Zealanders began to call their country “God’s Own,” or “godzone” as it would be written by another generation who stridently mock this idea even as they secretly believe it. Americans think the same way. The slums of New York were “God’s Crucible.” Even the desolate plains of West Texas are called “God’s Country”—by West Texans.
Both people also share the attitude that H. G. Wells called optimistic fatalism. In the United States, this is the teleological idea that history in general—and American history in particular—is an inexorable march of progress that no mortal power can arrest, though many have tried. On another level, optimistic fatalism also appears in the “American Dream” of individual improvement. Even in eras of economic disaster, American strivers continue to be optimistic fatalists. It is a source of our striving. 38 New Zealanders share this optimistic attitude, and express it in another way. “Never mind!” they often say. “She’ll be right!”
Most important for this inquiry, New Zealand and the United States are both what Henri Bergson and Karl Popper called open societies. They share democratic polities, mixed-enterprise economies, pluralist cultures, individuated societies, a respect for human rights, and a firm commitment to the rule of law. In all these ways, the United States and New Zealand are very much alike.

* Then suddenly it dawned on us that Selwyn’s many candidates had little to say on the subject of liberty and freedom. In the United States, the rhetoric of a free society is heard everywhere. Liberty and freedom were the founding principles of the American republic. Through many generations, public discourse in the United States has been a continuing debate over contested meanings of those great ideas.
Selwyn’s candidates had more to say about another value, which is not so prominent in American politics. Most of them talked urgently about the idea of fairness. It was discussed by politicians of every major party and analyzed by journalists and scholars who were looking on. “Fairness may not be everything,” Jonathan Boston wrote during the Selwyn campaign, “but it is an extremely important value—and one which has been in short supply for too long.”
The Selwyn election became a sustained debate on the subject of fairness, and in a very large-minded way. Candidates did not merely demand fair treatment in particular ways for themselves and their supporters. They discussed fairness as the organizing principle of an open society, which happens rarely in the United States.

* Fair dinkum or square dinkum or straight dinkum means an honest, fair-minded account, as in Frank Sargeson’s short stories in the Listener : “Everybody always said the butcher was exaggerating. … The butcher would say no, it was the fair dinkum truth.” Fair dinkum is very common in Australia and New Zealand, but rare in Britain and unknown in America.

* Another example is the New Zealand idiom Yankee start , which is defined as an unfair start in a race, or any unfair advantage. Yankee grab is a disreputable gambling game played with cards or dice, where players seize whatever unfair advantages they can obtain. A Yankee tournament is a pell-mell sporting event where contestants compete not in teams but individually, each against all, and anything goes. A Yankee shout is a party where the host refuses to pick up the tab and guests are forced to pay their own way. These expressions betray a belief on the part of some New Zealanders that Americans suffer from a chronic condition of ethical impairment. It is a prejudice that is reciprocated by some Americans toward New Zealanders in regard to liberty and freedom.

* In regard to fairness as the organizing principle of an open society, two countries are similar to New Zealand: Canada and Australia. Australian writer David Malouf observes, “The one word that sums up what Australians demand of society, and of one another, is fairness, a good plain word that grounds its meanings in the contingencies of daily living. It is our version of liberty, equality, fraternity and includes everything that is intended by those grand abstractions and something more: the idea of natural justice, for instance. It’s about as far as most Australians would want to go in the enunciation of the principle.”

* In America, liberty and freedom were the founding principles of the great republic. Most Americans today agree on the central importance of those ideas, even as they understand them in different ways—sometimes in opposite ways. New Zealanders went another way. They gave central attention to values of fairness and “natural justice,” which explicitly appears in their Bill of Rights. Ideas of freedom and liberty were never absent from New Zealand’s culture. Ideals of fairness and justice have long been present in the United States. But priorities have been very different in these two countries for many generations.

* Every major group in America’s great colonial migrations shared a particular concern for liberty and freedom, and those founding purposes are still a national obsession. New Zealand’s British colonists had a special concern for justice, equity, and fairness—three ideas, not one.

* The people of New Zealand had a very different imperial experience, mainly because the second British Empire (that part of it with British colonists) was founded on new principles and managed in a different spirit.

* It was one of the very few colonies in any empire that had no system of race slavery, no penal settlements, no plantation serfdom, no encomienda, no indentured servitude in the eighteenth-century sense, and no contract bondage, which was spreading widely through the world in the nineteenth century. This new tendency was not a function of New Zealand’s climate, terrain, or any material condition. It was a deliberate act of moral choice by British statesmen. Systems of forced labor never developed in New Zealand, because by the time it was colonized, slavery was strongly opposed by British governments in general, and by Sir James Stephen in particular. New ideas of nationalism also made a difference in the administration of the second British Empire. In its youth, nationalism was more liberal than conservative. It was often linked to ideas of democracy and self-determination. A policy of the second empire was to encourage unification or confederation of British colonists into incipient English-speaking nations. This happened in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand during the nineteenth century, but not in India or Africa until the mid-twentieth. Before 1776, imperial leaders in London had opposed attempts at colonial confederation in America, even resisting the Albany Congress, which was an attempt to support the empire. After 1783, British leaders acted very differently. Economic attitudes in the second British Empire were also different from those in the first. In the nineteenth century many British statesmen turned away from the dogmas of mercantilism on which the first empire was founded. They were converted to the economic gospel of free trade and embraced the principles of classical economics.
Perhaps the most important change was a new idea of social justice that was developing in Victorian Britain, despite the harsh and cruel reality of British society in that era, and in some ways as a reaction against it. These ideals took many forms. One version was utilitarianism, an idea of social justice as the greatest good for the greatest number. Another was an ideal of fairness and decency and social justice, which was all the stronger for its contrast with the unfairness of social conditions at the same time. An ideal of fairness was deployed in the novels of Charles Dickens, mainly by the method of harrowing descriptions of unfairness in England.
Those ideas of fairness and social justice were put to work in New Zealand by men such as Sir James Stephen, even as he never went there. They were both substantive and procedural ideas. In the administration of New Zealand they appeared most clearly in the character and acts of the men who were sent to govern the colony and to shape its institutions. The result, for better and for worse, was an imperial system in New Zealand that became a school of natural justice and fairness during the second British Empire.

* “When you see a man who is exactly like an Englishman, but who abuses the English, you may know he is from New Zealand or Australia.”

* In Britain’s first empire, the great ethical questions centered on power, liberty, and freedom. In the second British Empire, they were about power, justice, and fairness. Many generations later, the people of the United States are still actively engaged in the pursuit of liberty and freedom. The people of New Zealand are still absorbed in problems of fairness, equity, and natural justice. In large measure, two very different British Empires helped to make them that way.

* In New Zealand, Maori have thought of themselves as an immigrant people, and they did not regard the arrival of others as illegitimate.

* By the time that Captain Cook explored New Zealand in 1769–70, a thought-revolution had occurred in the Western world. The values of the Enlightenment inspired a universal idea of humanity. Before New Zealand’s great colonial migrations began in 1840, the Evangelical Movement also overswept the Protestant nations.

* The first encounters between Europeans and Indians happened in America before the spread of humanist ideas from the Italian Quattrocento, and long before the Enlightenment and the Evangelical Movement. First encounters between Maori and British explorers came after these great ethical events.

* Where Americans made many Indian treaties and forgot them, New Zealanders made one treaty and remembered it: the Treaty of Waitangi, February 6, 1840. Since 1974, that day has become New Zealand’s national holiday.

* More than half of the land in New Zealand has a slope greater than 30 degrees. But the surface area of the United States also includes vast areas of mountain, desert, tundra, swamp, and inland seas. In 2001, after many centuries of settlement in the United States, only 5.5 percent of its surface area had been developed.

* New Zealand’s independence happened in another way. Historian David McIntyre writes, “When and how their country gained their independence is not a question New Zealanders ask themselves. If they did, few would have an answer. Unlike Americans with the Declaration of Independence, or Indians with the ‘transfer of power,’ New Zealand was a British colony which became an independent nation very gradually. … The landmarks are not dramatic and the process is suffused with paradox and ambiguity.”

* Many individual New Zealanders told us that a sense of national independence did not fully emerge until the late twentieth century. Some believe that the major break came on January 1, 1973, which James Belich calls “a black-letter day in New Zealand history.” It was the date when Britain entered the European Economic Community and unilaterally ended long-standing economic relations with her colonies. 25 As late as 1950, Britain had bought nearly 70 percent of New Zealand’s exports. After Britain joined the European Community in 1973, that number fell to 7 percent. New Zealand farmers found themselves competing at a disadvantage for markets in the “mother country” as Britain and other European economies aggressively subsidized their own farmers.

* Colonists came early and their numbers were few. Immigrants came later and their numbers were many. Colonists founded new societies and established cultural hegemonies in new worlds. Immigrants joined societies in being and adapted themselves to established cultures. In English-speaking settlements, colonists largely controlled the flow of immigration, but not just as they pleased. At the same time, immigrants changed the colonial societies, but not always as they wished. All of these things happened in New Zealand and the United States, but not in the same way.

* America’s political parties have always divided on immigration policy. In general, Federalists, Whigs, and Republicans tried to keep people out, or stop them from voting. Democrats wanted to let them in, and marched them to the polls.

* Immigration as a process of social filtration had other important consequences for both New Zealand and the United States. In some ways its effects were diametrically opposed. In New Zealand, Megan Hutching did a survey of assisted immigrants and found that “in the end, people often chose New Zealand because it seemed non-threatening.” One woman explained that she selected New Zealand because it was “small and comfortable.”

All of this was very different from American immigration. In the United States, a voluntary and largely self-driven process selected immigrants who were restless, autonomous, ambitious, aggressive, entrepreneurial, and highly individuated. They tended to be more tolerant of risk, in the hope of greater profit. America’s open and voluntary system of immigration selected a population that lived for liberty and freedom.

In New Zealand, fairness was a frequent theme. Programs of assisted migration were founded with the explicit purpose of giving people a fair chance that was denied to them in Britain.

* In one of the great ironies of modern history, the first sustained argument for innate racial differences appeared in 1776, when Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine proclaimed that all men are created equal. That same year Johann Friedrich Blumenbach published On the Natural Variety of Humanity, which argued that all were unequal. He divided humanity into five races, which he was the first to call Caucasian/white, Mongolian/yellow, Malayan/brown, African/black, and American/red. His thesis was that skin color and skull size correlated with variations in mental intelligence and moral judgment.

* In New Zealand, capital and labor shared the same culture and ethnicity. They thought of themselves as one people. In America, labor violence was compounded by racial hatred, ethnic jealousy, and religious strife, and deepened in the South and West by ingrained folk traditions of regional violence. Kentucky’s “Bloody Harlan” County was violent in ways that had existed in the American backcountry for two centuries, and the British borderlands for a thousand years before. All this makes a dramatic contrast between the two nations.
Another great question is to understand why workers in New Zealand, Australia, Britain, and western Europe formed strong socialist movements and “mass-based parties of the Left,” while workers in the United States did not. To this classic problem, many solutions have been suggested: (1) the divisive effect of ethnicity, region, and race on class consciousness and labor movements in America; (2) the impact of individualism on American workers; (3) higher rates of mobility and internal migration in the United States; (4) American abundance and higher standards of living—the idea that socialism foundered on “shoals of roast beef and apple pie”; (5) America’s middle-class majority; (6) the strength of opposition; and (7) the violence of repression in the United States.
Another approach to this problem is put forward by Erik Olssen and Jeremy Brecher, in a close comparison of American workers in the brass factories of Connecticut and New Zealand workers in the railway shops of Otago. Mainly it is a tale of two factories, the Hillside Railway Workshops in Dunedin and the Scovill Manufacturing Company in Waterbury. In the American case, Olssen and Brecher found evidence of fierce competition in a large market, which put a premium on productivity gains. Corporations moved rapidly toward labor-saving devices and a reduction of labor costs. Layoffs were widely and increasingly used. “In the United States,” the historians write, “they transformed the old factory system and destroyed shop culture; in New Zealand, by contrast, shop culture survived and enabled skilled men to preserve key elements of the old factory system.”
Olssen and Brecher observe that in New Zealand “under the old system the skilled men planned the work to be done and decided who would do it; they hunted up their own tools, borrowed them if necessary, or even made them; they drove their planes and lathes at the speed they deemed appropriate; and left their tools where they last used them when they finished a job.”

* New Zealand led the world in four areas of social legislation: gender rights, land reform, social insurance, and compulsory arbitration. Here it built upon its values of fairness and equity. In at least three areas the United States led the world: schools, public libraries, and national parks. Where the Progressive movement in America worked to expand liberty and freedom, it won; where it found itself in conflict with these ideas, it lost.

* The trouble came to a head in 1985, when the U.S. Navy proposed a routine “goodwill” visit to New Zealand by the aging destroyer USS Buchanan . In 1979, Buchanan had been welcomed there. Everyone knew that she was not equipped with nuclear weapons, but the U.S. Navy (like others) refused to make public statements about the armament of individual ships or aircraft. The radical wing of the Labour Party, led by Helen Clark and Margaret Wilson, seized that issue as a way of shattering the ANZUS alliance and driving their party and the nation to the left. After a large demonstration in Auckland, Prime Minister Lange yielded. The Labour government refused to admit USS Buchanan to New Zealand ports on the entirely fraudulent ground that she was “nuclear-capable” and might possibly be carrying nuclear weapons. 92
The United States was caught by surprise. President Ronald Reagan and Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger believed that the Cold War was approaching its climax, and that American efforts to destroy the Evil Empire of Communism were undercut by peace movements in Western nations. Their responses were as passionate as the attacks upon them. Only in New Zealand did the peace movement gain control of a national government. When its ruling Labour Party continued to exclude American warships from New Zealand ports, the United States announced that New Zealand’s actions had breached the terms of the ANZUS treaty. It terminated military relations, stopped exchanges of intelligence, ordered New Zealand officers to leave the United States, and reduced diplomatic relations to low-level contacts. The Reagan administration virtually broke relations with New Zealand. 93
Australia, Japan, and other Pacific nations supported the American position, but New Zealand’s Labour Government was unrepentant. It enacted its antinuclear policy into law and banned all nuclear-armed or nuclear-powered ships. New Zealand’s antinuclear policy symbolized a diplomatic revolution. In the 1980s, New Zealand had developed a new unilateral approach to international affairs.
Lange’s Labour government did not only break fundamentally with the United States under Reagan. It also moved farther apart from Britain under Margaret Thatcher. New Zealand troops were withdrawn from Cyprus and Singapore after a presence of thirty years. For many decades, big New Zealand warships had been built in British yards, as sister ships of vessels in the Royal Navy. In 1988–89, New Zealand decided to purchase two new ANZAC-class frigates of Australian construction and signed an option for two more—a heavy loss to Britain’s shrinking shipbuilding industry.
Part of this policy arose from a deeply felt objection in New Zealand to the habitual bullying of small nations by big powers. People who believe deeply in fairness and justice do not take kindly to bullies of any persuasion. Even moderate and conservative leaders were outraged by the actions of the Reagan administration, and not thrilled by Margaret Thatcher. Sir John Marshall, who had long been supportive of the American alliance, observed that the United States adopted “a high-handed and uncompromising attitude, which has antagonized many New Zealanders who were in other respects pro-American.”
On the other side, Mr. Reagan and Mrs. Thatcher believed that New Zealand leaders had betrayed the cause of liberty and freedom, disrupted a system of alliances that was vital to world peace, and attempted to destroy the American policy of containing of Communist aggression through nuclear deterrence. They complained that New Zealand’s freedom was protected through military alliances and that Labour leaders were happy to enjoy the benefits of peace but unwilling to pay the cost. Prime Minister David Lange was perceived as weak, duplicitous, and vacillating.
The nuclear issue was itself urgently important to both sides. It was deepened by another conflict between two sets of ethical principles. America’s militant and uncompromising defense of liberty and freedom in the world clashed fundamentally with New Zealand’s ideals of equity and justice in international affairs and its antipathy to bullies even of a friendly persuasion. By the late 1980s, New Zealand’s formal alliance with the United States had gone the way of its special relationship with Britain. In 1986, New Zealanders were asked what nations posed a “military threat” to their country. To the amazement of many Americans, one in six mentioned the United States.

* American foreign policy was driven by two great purposes: to promote its national interest, and to serve the cause of liberty and freedom in the world. New Zealand has steered its policy by another constellation of guiding stars. Its conduct of external relations is guided by powerful values and purposes: national interest and regional hegemony, independence and collective security, a strong antipathy to bullies of all persuasions, and a continuing attachment to ideas of justice, equity, and fairness in the world.

* In combat, New Zealanders tended to be highly aggressive, but in ways that limited casualties. One method was a distinctive use of mobility, which played a major role in their tactics, with sudden advances by sea or land, swift retreat in the face of superior force, and then another advance. Another was a tactical doctrine long used by British forces from Clive and Wellington to Montgomery and Slim: advancing into a strong defensive position, then drawing the enemy upon them. This was done repeatedly in North Africa. A third method was to make use of surprise attacks at night with the bayonet, a weapon rarely employed in combat by American armies in World War II. “We almost always attacked at night,” Major-General Sir Harold Kippenberger wrote. Americans almost always attacked in daylight, when their material resources could be deployed for maximum advantage. 46 New Zealanders were also proficient in infiltration and improvisation, as at Cavendish Road in the Cassino campaign, where they managed to create a tank track through mountainous terrain that was thought to be impassable. A British officer who served beside them observed that New Zealand troops were exceptionally “self-reliant and able to act independently … natural improvisers, and improvisation is fifty per cent of infantry fighting.” 47
The New Zealanders, like the British Army, were not so successful at integration of arms. Colonel Hans von Luck observed that “as almost always with the British they carried out their tank attacks without accompanying infantry.” Communications in the field were a chronic deficiency, with grave consequences in many campaigns from Crete to Arnhem. But the infantry was superb.

* When Americans and New Zealanders met, they were surprised by differences in their systems of command. American leaders were no less brave and loyal, but in World War II they operated differently. Once, Kippenberger was quartered with an American regimental commander and was amazed by the distance of senior officers from the men under their command. “It was plain that none of them had been forward or were at all in touch with their men,” he wrote. The American commander of the 143rd Infantry told Kippenberger that “his divisional commander never came forward as far as regimental headquarters, that he never went farther himself than to his battalion headquarters.” Kippenberger concluded, “All this revealed a very different system of command.”

* What European officers called good order and discipline, New Zealanders derided as “swank” and American GIs called “Mickey Mouse” and “chickenshit.” The two nations were similar that way, New Zealanders more so. Even officers expressed a casual and good-humored contempt for the rituals of military order, and woe to a commander who stood on ceremony. Officers received little deference to their rank; they had to earn the esteem of their men. Many did so and were remembered with high respect. Too many were killed or wounded before their men got to know them and were replaced by others. Some of the best officers rose from the ranks with battlefield commissions, a practice that became increasingly common.

Freyberg strictly enforced rules of fairness among officers and men, in a way that happened in no other army. In Italy he made a point of ordering that in hotels and rest areas all New Zealanders should have equal access to the same facilities without regard to rank. Once again, an idea of fairness was linked to a spirit of belonging and a sense of cohesion. This was one of the greatest strengths of New Zealand’s infantry, and a source of its legendary status.

* In 1939, [Captain Charles Hazlitt] Upham went to war, not because his friends did so but “out of conviction that the Nazis had to be stopped.” 77 He enlisted as a private, and rose through the ranks to become captain and company commander. Always he thought of his men as his mates and lived close to them. Jock Phillips writes that he “called his men by their Christian names, he swore at them, he even got drunk with them,” and “was noted for his extreme almost obsessive modesty and his insistence on transferring credit from himself to his men.” 78
Upham always led from the front. At Crete he stayed with his men even after he was wounded twice and came down with jaundice, dysentery, and pneumonia. He was known not only for his valor but for his kindness, even to animals who were also the victims of war. At one desperate moment in the long retreat in Crete, he went back over the rugged hills to set free some mules that had been tethered without water or forage.
In Africa, at the bloody infantry fight on Ruweisat Ridge, Upham’s company suffered heavy losses from a German 88 assault gun. He led his company against the German gun, destroyed it, and killed or wounded its entire crew. In combat he fought with a blood-lust that sometimes appalled his men, but after the fight they were astonished to find him moving among the German wounded. One remembered that “Charles was bending over the wounded men, one after another, and was giving them a long draught from his own water-bottle. The Germans drank gratefully.”
Upham was never a parade-ground soldier. He could not remember the proper commands at drill, or get his uniform quite right, and he became a legend for showing up to receive the Victoria Cross wearing a mismatched pair of yellow socks. He is remembered for many things: two Victoria Crosses and his mismatched yellow socks, his bloodlust in battle and chivalry to his enemy, his courage as a child, and his “modesty of a natural gentleman.” He represented a New Zealand ideal of manhood: hard but gentle man, and fair.

* The most prominent American warriors were portrayed as heroic loners, often far beyond the fact.

* In 1942, the Afrika Korps captured a famous character in the war, New Zealand’s Brigadier G. H. Clifton. He was taken to the German commander, General Erwin Rommel, who found the New Zealander to be “a brave man and very likeable,” but the German officer could not understand why Clifton had come halfway around the world to fight a German army in the middle of an African desert. “Why are you New Zealanders fighting?” Rommel asked. “This is a European war, not yours. Are you here for the sport?”
Clifton was amazed by the question. Later he wrote, “Realizing that he really meant this … I held up my hands with the fingers closed and said, The British Commonwealth fights together. If you attack England, you attack Australia and New Zealand too.” Rommel was as baffled by that answer as Clifton had been by the question. He made no comment, except to wish his prisoner the best of luck. Immediately after the interview, Brigadier Clifton politely excused himself and escaped from a lavatory window (much to Rommel’s amusement), made his way back to his unit, and went on to other adventures in the war. 84
The same questions that Rommel put to his New Zealand captive were also asked of Americans who were fighting far from home. Their answers tended to be similar in spirit but very different in substance from those of Brigadier Clifton. Somebody asked Sergeant York why he kept fighting in France. He said, “Liberty and freedom are so very precious that you do not fight to win them once and stop.” Americans and New Zealanders both explained their acts by appeals to principle, but even on a battlefield those principles were not the same.

* We discovered one of them when a friend suffered an injury in an athletic event. To our amazement, she was compensated by the government. New Zealand’s Accident Compensation Act is a system of no-fault compensation and rehabilitation for all New Zealanders. It was proposed in 1967, enacted in 1972 by the ruling National Party, and expanded in 1973 by a Labour government to cover all accidents, no matter how or why they happened. The program is run by a public agency called the Accident Compensation Corporation and funded by taxes on employers and employees according to the danger in their work, from a low of 0.2 percent for teachers to a high of 8 percent for professional rugby players. The cost of injury in automobile accidents is covered by a share of revenue from gas taxes and registration fees. In the period from 1994 to 1999, the program paid out approximately NZ$1.4 billion on 1.4 million claims. About one-third were work-related. Roughly 6 percent were motor vehicle accidents. More than 10 percent were sporting injuries. 82
As part of this program, the right to sue for damages was limited.

* In the United States accidents are also compensated, but in a different way—mainly by private insurance, and sometimes by protracted tort litigation. The American system yields large payments to a few accident claimants. In 1987, for example, a railroad tank car filled with a dangerous chemical caught fire in New Orleans, and a cloud of vapor passed over a nearby neighborhood. Residents were evacuated in time, and nobody was killed or seriously injured, but a small army of lawyers appeared, and the neighbors brought suit against five transportation companies, not for physical injuries (there were none) but for punitive damages. Ten years later, after much extravagant legal maneuvering, a jury awarded eight thousand plaintiffs the sum of $3.5 billion for “mental anguish.” Lawyers stood to gain one-third of that amount.

* New Zealanders are appalled by the American system of tort law. Americans in turn are astonished by New Zealand’s system of public accident compensation. They believe that if people are paid for having accidents, they will have more of them. New Zealanders reply that their system is rarely abused. Whatever the truth may be, it is clear that the American and New Zealand systems were grounded in different ethical principles. The American system rests on an idea of individual freedom. The New Zealand system is based on an idea of fairness.

* In 2010, for example, public debt as a proportion of gross domestic product was 65 percent in the United States and 11 percent in New Zealand. Annual public deficits in national accounts by the same measure were 11 percent in the United States and 3 percent in New Zealand. In 2010, American unemployment rates were near 9 percent and slow to improve; in New Zealand they were below 6 percent and improving more rapidly. In terms of inequality, the United States achieved the highest level of income concentration of any developed nation. New Zealand had among the lowest, though inequalities were rising there as well. In surveys of political corruption, New Zealand achieved one of the best records of 188 nations and in 2008–9 rose to first place for honesty in government; the United States was well down the list, and falling. Similar contrasts appear in trends and measures of political partisanship, legislative stalemate, judicial dysfunction, infrastructure decay, home foreclosures, family stress, drug consumption, and social violence.

* The ethical idea of fairness, with all its many virtues, has sometimes been corrupted into a set of attendant vices. One such vice has been so widely perceived in New Zealand that it has its own name in common speech. New Zealanders call it “the Tall Poppy Syndrome.” It might be defined as envy or resentment of a person who is conspicuously successful, exceptionally gifted, or unusually creative.
More than that, it sometimes became a more general attitude of outright hostility to any sort of excellence, distinction, or high achievement—especially achievement that requires mental effort, sustained industry, or applied intelligence. All this is linked to a mistaken idea of fairness as a broad and even-handed distribution of mediocrity. The possession of extraordinary gifts is perceived as unfair by others who lack them. Those who not only possess them but insist on exercising them have sometimes been punished for it. 22
New Zealand lexicographers believe that tall poppy is an Australian expression, which appears in the Australian National Dictionary with examples as early as 1902. It is also widely used in New Zealand, where it has given rise to a proper noun, an adjective, and even a verb. Successful people are called “poppies,” and when abused for their success they are said to be “poppied” by envious others. In 1991, a Wellington newspaper reported that successful businessmen “are being ‘tall-poppied’ by other New Zealanders.” 23
We were told by many people in New Zealand that the Tall Poppy Syndrome is not as strong as it used to be, and that it never applied to all forms of achievement. One New Zealander observes that “there’s no such thing as a tall poppy playing rugby.” 24 Nearly all New Zealanders take pride in the music of Dame Kiri Te Kanawa and in the mountaineering of Sir Edmund Hillary, who were rarely tall-poppied. 25
But other bright and creative New Zealanders have been treated with cruelty by compatriots who appear to feel that there is something fundamentally unfair about better brains or creative gifts, and still more so about a determination to use them. This attitude is linked to a bizarre and destructive corruption of fairness, in which talented young people are perceived as tall poppies and are severely persecuted. Perhaps the most deleterious work of the Tall Poppy Syndrome is done in schoolyards and classrooms among the young. In any society, nothing is more destructive than the persecution of children because they exercise gifts that others lack. 26 It discourages not only excellence itself but the striving for excellence.

* Another vice sometimes appears in a society where fairness and justice are thought to guarantee everyone a steady job and fixed wage without regard to merit or achievement. One result is that there is no reward for industry or penalty for sloth. Another is that some lazy people ride on other people’s backs. In the mid-twentieth century this pattern was observed repeatedly in New Zealand by visitors from other countries.
Evidence appears in survey research and interviews of emigrants from the United Kingdom who settled in New Zealand in the period from 1946 to 1975. They were amazed by attitudes toward work that they found in their new country. Megan Hutching did the interviews. She writes, “Many recall being told to slow down because they were working too hard.” One immigrant said to her, “English people were used to working harder,” and in New Zealand “my day’s work was done by lunchtime.” Another commented on the “slower pace of life.” A third remembered that New Zealanders worked very slowly at their regular jobs, then hurried home and toiled at a terrific rate in their “leisure” hours. 27
Others from abroad made similar observations. American servicemen in World War II were astonished by work habits of New Zealand “wharfies,” stevedores who worked in Wellington harbor. In the summer of 1942, United States Marines were frantically preparing for their assault on Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands and were combat-loading their supplies and gear in transports and cargo ships. Lieutenant Colonel Merrill B. Twining, the division operations officer, remembered that even in this moment of high urgency the Wellington wharfies worked very slowly, and often not at all. Twining wrote in his memoir that the wharfies were “a likeable, manly group,” but “there was a constant series of strikes, or work stoppages, as they called them. None were serious or of long duration, but in total they had the effect of slowing unloading operations to a snail’s pace. ‘Raining’ and ‘they hadn’t got their mackintoshes’ were favorite reasons for ceasing operations. The ships furnished refreshments to the night shift. They enjoyed the way we made our coffee. Then came the night I was notified, ‘They’re off the job again. They want tea instead of coffee.’ We had none. More time lost. The highest daily record was fourteen strikes in twenty-four hours.”

* many studies show that Americans work very hard at their jobs, harder than most people, too hard for their health and happiness. They work longer hours, take shorter vacations, and often do it by choice—most of all when they are working for themselves. A British visitor who stayed with us was appalled by what he called the American obsession with work. “Why is everyone so driven?” he asked.

* Attitudes were different in New Zealand during the mid-twentieth century, where visitors observed that striving was “not on.” People who tended to strive hard to get ahead were not admired. It ran against the grain.

Posted in America, Australia, England, English, New Zealand | Comments Off on Fairness and Freedom: A History of Two Open Societies: New Zealand and the United States

Auburn

Posted on July 5, 2021 by Luke Ford

I don’t think I ever heard the terms “redneck”, “cracker”, “white trash” and “white flight” until we moved to Auburn in the fall of 1980. I had to have them explained to me by middle class neighbors. We were surrounded by people fleeing from blacks.

Michigan Wave tweets: “Get the sense that films like Deliverance, Easy Rider & tv such as the Geraldo Rivera, Maury Povich, & Jerry Springer shows helped to propel this term. They certainly boosted the archetype of the cruel White, backwoods lowlife into pop culture.”

David Hackett Fischer writes in Albion’s Seed:

Another term for this rural proletariat was redneck, which was originally applied to the backsettlers because of their religion. The earliest American example known to this historian was recorded in North Carolina by Anne Royall in 1830, who noted that “red-neck” was “a name bestowed upon the Presbyterians.” It had long been a slang word for religious dissenters in the north of England. A third word for this rural proletariat which also came from Britain was cracker, which derived from an English pejorative for a low and vulgar braggart.

I’m trying to figure out why I associate Auburn and Sacramento with sadness. On the rare times I’ve been back (1999 and 2000, I think were the last times), I get distinctly melancholy driving north on I-5 from Los Angeles, particularly once I start to smell the farm land around Sacramento. Once I turn around and head south, I get increasingly happy. LA is the place where I will make my dreams come true. Auburn, there’s nothing wrong with you, but I wasn’t at ease with myself when I was with you.

I met a new type of white in Auburn in 1980. They were rougher, tougher, meaner, and more ready to fight than the previous white people I’d known (who tended to be the children of Seventh-Day Adventist professors).

High school was not unpleasant, but to be honest, I had the overwhelming conviction up through the fall of 1988 that my life hadn’t really taken off yet, that it would only take off once I got to university. Then, when I finally made it to UCLA at age 22, I was hobbled by Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, spent most of the next six years in bed back home around Auburn, and then upon making a partial recovery, I lit off for Los Angeles in March of 1994.

If I was to chart an emotional history of my life, I would say that my years up to age 11 (in Australia and England) were sad and mad, that from 11 to 14 at Pacific Union College in the Napa Valley I experienced some times of sustained happiness (particularly in the first six months of 1980, the end of 8th grade, I felt normal), then 9th grade was miserable (the transition out of Seventh-Day Adventism), by tenth grade (my first time in public school) on through age 25 I was striving but insecure, and that Los Angeles was a paradise that even I couldn’t completely spoil, with happiness settling in for me from 2016 onwards.

(Between 1980 and 1993, the smog steadily thickened and climbed up I-80 from Sacramento and enveloped us in the foothills. My primary view of Sacramento was as smudge seen from our deck. In Los Angeles, by contrast, the air seems to keep getting cleaner from my first residence in 1988. Back then, the air burned. I rarely feel that now.)

So I think I associate Auburn as the intermediate stage between my happy years at Pacific Union College before and Los Angeles after.

The biggest cause for how I feel about a place, I think, is the quality of my relationships there.

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Talking Nationalism With The Rabbi

Posted on July 5, 2021 by Luke Ford

00:00 Rabbi Judas Maccabeus, https://twitter.com/JudasMaccabeus7
02:00 Rabbi’s Youtube channel, https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLgG…
04:00 Sephardic Jewry, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sephard…
05:00 Jewish Day Schools, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_…
09:30 Attitudes toward America
10:40 Average IQs among Mizrahim, Sephardim, Ashkenazim
11:00 Judas believes IQ is primarily the result of genetics
14:10 Syrian Jews in Brooklyn
16:00 Reform Judaism’s gay pride
25:00 Brooklyn Jewish attitudes towards homosexuality
27:30 East Asians
31:00 Rav Kook, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham…
37:00 Zionism, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zionism
38:00 Da’as Torah, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Da%27as…
43:00 When the Torah commands genocide
51:00 Haavara Agreement, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haavara…
1:02:00 Judas vs Syrian Girl, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-5M_…
1:03:00 Syrian Girl, https://twitter.com/Partisangirl
1:04:00 Black Hebrew Israelites, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_H…
1:07:00 The kernel of truth in the Alt Right
1:14:00 The funniest members of the Alt Right
1:19:00 Adam Green
1:21:00 Thirteen Principles of the Jewish Faith, https://www.chabad.org/library/articl…
1:22:00 Rambam, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maimonides
1:27:00 Rambam’s view of revelation
1:29:00 Judas views Chabad as idolatry
1:30:00 The Rebbe, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menache…
1:32:00 Kabbalah, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kabbalah
1:44:00 The Guide for the Perplexed, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gui…
1:48:00 Scholar of Religion John Z. Smith, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonatha…
2:10:00 The Dean’s Craft of Teaching Seminar, Winter 2013, with Jonathan Z. Smith, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRDLB…
2:38:00 The Judeo-Christian tradition
2:50:00 Jason Kessler’s UTR Charlottesville trial, https://youtu.be/iDrwmUQxAdU?t=8232
2:52:00 Unicorn Riot (anti-fascists) published Alt Right discord chats from League of the South, Identity Evropa
2:54:00 They cry persecution as they sell illegal drugs
2:56:00 Rethinking Jewish Philosophy: Beyond Particularism and Universalism, https://newbooksnetwork.com/aaron-w-h…
3:23:30 E. Michael Jones on CRT, https://youtu.be/1lrIY98fOmI?t=2449
3:27:00 The rise of Russian nationalism and Stalin’s show trials

Posted in America, Israel, Nationalism | Comments Off on Talking Nationalism With The Rabbi

Beyond Good And Evil (7-4-21)

Posted on July 4, 2021 by Luke Ford

00:00 Can we move beyond good and evil? https://rumble.com/vjbk1r-saving-private-godward-7-1-21.html
03:00 Godward on Justin the Martyr, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justin_Martyr
25:00 Scholar of religion, John Z. Smith, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Z._Smith
45:40 Richard Spencer gets mean about Christianity and Judaism, https://youtu.be/RLVVrmbm1bc?t=5860
49:00 What does Judas Maccabeus want for his people?
1:02:00 In-group solidarity
1:10:50 If you get rich, you can have your own ethno-state, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_fIOjJQ13k&t=1421s
1:13:00 Billionaires have their own ethno-states
1:14:00 Racists are poor, the rich live in their own ethno-states
1:15:40 J.Z. Smith taught a university seminar on the Yellow Pages
1:24:00 Contingency, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contingency_(philosophy)
1:26:00 Do religions other than Christianity struggle with sin and evil?
1:28:00 Jason Kessler names his supporters
1:32:30 Europeans are the villain says RS
1:36:00 Why Did Charles Murray Vote For Joe Biden? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sni86jkLFkA&t=1178s
1:41:00 JZ Smith says there has never been a monotheistic religion
1:43:00 Monotheism as a term developed out of Christian polemic (Unitarians vs Catholics)

Posted in Christianity, God | Comments Off on Beyond Good And Evil (7-4-21)

Acting Jewish: Negotiating Ethnicity on the American Stage and Screen

Posted on July 2, 2021 by Luke Ford

From the 2005 book by Henry Bial, Acting Jewish: Negotiating Ethnicity on the American Stage and Screen:

* At 8:00 P.M. on the evening of Thursday, 14 May 1998, the Jewish Museum in New York City hosted a panel discussion entitled “Young Jewish Writers” featuring novelists Allegra Goodman (The Family Markowitz), Marcie Hershman (Tales of the Master Race), Thane Rosenbaum (The Golems of Gotham), and Aryeh Lev Stallman (The Illuminated Soul). The conversation, moderated by Ellen Pall (Among the Ginzburgs), focused in part on how the writers’ perceptions of their own Jewish identity did or did not affect their professional craft. As part of the museum’s inaugural “Live at the JM” series, the event was specifically intended to attract a younger, “hipper,” Jewish audience than the institution’s typical public programs. Although the discussion was lively, the hall was sparsely filled. Many spectators left early. The real interrogation of contemporary Jewish American identity was taking place elsewhere.

At 9:oo p.m. Eastern Daylight Time on that very same evening, the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) broadcast the final episode of its top-rated comedy Seinfeld (1989-98). The self-billed “show about nothing” features comedian Jerry Seinfeld as a comedian named …Jerry Seinfeld. The character of Jerry is explicitly identified as Jewish in selected episodes, and this identification is reinforced through a variety of visual and linguistic performance codes: Jerry has dark hair, dark eyes, and a stereo typically Semitic profile. His accent (especially in the early episodes) betrays his real life upbringing in Queens and Long Island. He resides on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, a largely Jewish neighborhood. His last name, Seinfeld, is unmistakably “different” from the Anglo-Saxon norm and is recognizable to a Jewish audience as German-Jewish in origin. Yet, while Jewish critics and viewers alike identify Jerry Seinfeld as unambiguously Jewish, his religious and ethnic background is essential to the narrative in only a handful of episodes scattered over the show’s nine-year run on NBC. The vast majority of episodes contain no explicit reference to Jews or Jewishness. The episodes that do acknowledge his Jewishness tend to downplay its importance. For example, in one episode Jerry suspects that his dentist has converted to Judaism so that he can tell Jewish jokes without being labeled a bigot. When a priest asks Jerry, “This offends you as a Jewish person?” he replies, “No it offends me as a comedian.”

* My argument is based on the concept of double coding, the specific means and mechanisms by which a performance can communicate one message to Jewish audiences while simultaneously communicating another, often contradictory message to gentile audiences. As the late performance theorist Dwight Conquergood explained, “Subordinate people do not have the privilege of explicitness, the luxury of transparency, the presumptive norm of clear and direct communication, free and open debate on a level playing field that the privileged classes take for granted.” Jewish American artists in theater, film, and television, while certainly enjoying access to the “means of production” at a level far from subordinate, nonetheless have tended to approach their creative work from just such an outsider’s point of view. Because of real or perceived anti-Semitism, Jewish characters and themes are frequently “reformed” for performance.

* Ethnic studies as it has developed in the United States owes its greatest debt to African American studies and Marxist epistemology. A byproduct of this genealogy is that ethnic studies, or in some departments cultural studies, tends to assume that there is an adversarial relationship between the ethnicity under consideration and the so-called dominant culture. In other words, to be a minority, whether ethnic, racial, or religious, is to be by definition marginalized, oppressed, victimized.

* Jews are anything but marginalized in American theater, film, and television. Indeed, the success of Jewish writers, actors, and directors (not to mention producers, agents, and network executives) is legion, to the point where “Jewish control” of America’s entertainment media has achieved almost mythic status among both Jews and antiSemites: a source of pride for the former, an instrument of demagoguery for the latter.

* Judaism is a particularly performative religion; that is, unlike most forms of Christianity, Judaism is more concerned with process than product, more concerned with actions than interior reiterations of faith.

* Theater historian Brooks McNamara suggests, on the other hand, that Jewish dominance of Broadway is largely a historical accident. Popular entertainment, he argues, has always been looked down on by so-called respectable people. In the nineteenth century, the Irish, the largest working-class ethnic group, dominated theater and vaudeville. With the vast immigration of eastern European Jews to the United States around the turn of the century, the Jews became the new underclass and moved into the performing arts largely because no other group was willing to humiliate itself. 16 But, as one of the many Jewish
stand-up comics of the 1950s might have put it, a funny thing happened on the way to the theater. As Jews experienced upward mobility throughout the twentieth century, they did not leave the performing arts behind; rather, theater and film also climbed the social ladder. This was partly due to the emergent technologies of radio, film, and television. Mass market entertainment turned the performing arts into a cash crop…

* While Jews account for less than 4 percent of the U.S. population, in the New York and Los Angeles metropolitan areas, the historical centers of theater, film, and television, Jews make up closer to 25 percent of the population.

* Whatever the cause of this “overrepresentation,” the binary, dominant versus oppressed paradigm of ethnic and cultural studies lacks a vocabulary that can address the phenomenon of a dominant minority. As a result, Jews as an ethnic group are frequently left out of the ethnic/ multicultural studies conversation. This is especially true in theater and performance studies. Contemporary performance theory holds that performance’s political potential lies largely in its power to disrupt the existing social order. Therefore, it is the responsibility of the minority performer (female, gay, ethnic, communist) to use performance to call attention to the inequities of late capitalism and/or present a rehearsal for social change. The former usually means a sort of Brechtian alienation or estrangement, which often finds its expression in performance art that explicitly critiques the so-called dominant or hegemonic culture.

* But the Jewish minority, which we might call a dominant minority, is not looking to overturn the entire applecart. Its political activism as played out in theater is limited largely to addressing issues of racial or ethnic discrimination. The Jews are decidedly not planning the revolution. In fact, as Neal Gabler points out, Jewish artists are largely responsible for-some critics would say complicit in-the promotion of the myth that America is a meritocracy. While there have been many self-identified leftists among Jewish theater, film, and television artists (e.g., Lillian Hellman, Zero Mostel, Tony Kushner), their political messages have always been wrapped in the audience-friendly trappings of well-constructed emotional drama. Is this protective coloration? Is this part of the secret plot to control America that is alleged by anti-Semitic hate groups? Or is it a genuine belief that the system works? After all, the so-called meritocracy in America has worked out better for Jews than for almost any other definable ethnic group over the last century.

* The familiar Hollywood narratives of rags to riches, taming the frontier, and suburban domestic bliss, argues Gabler, reflect not a self-satisfied gentile culture but the fantasies of Jewish artists seeking an escape from the literal and metaphorical ghettoes of early-twentieth-century urban Jewish communities.

* Many feminist scholars have productively challenged this notion by pointing out that the preponderance of media depictions of women’s bodies as spectacle has impeded rather than advanced the cause of women’s rights.

* the high concentration of Jews in the American television industry has led to Jews “policing each other’s visibility and, in some cases, striving for invisibility.”27 Hence, we have seen the entrance into popular usage of the phrase “closet Jews,” which stands as a more sympathetic and strategic reading of what others have called “self-hating Jews.”28 To put the matter in colloquial terms, it seems to be Jews, rather than an anti-Semitic culture industry, who are most concerned about performances that are “too Jewish.”

* In the early 1990s, the French writer Alain Finkielkraut proposed the term imaginary Jews to refer to those Jewish children of the post-Holocaust years who identify themselves as an oppressed people yet suffer no genuine oppression. He writes: “They are unwavering Jews, but armchair Jews, since, after the Catastrophe, Judaism cannot offer them any content but suffering, and they themselves do not suffer.”

* In communities with strong religious affiliations, writes [Haym] Soloveitchik, the yeshiva (Jewish religious school) became the focal point for imparting Jewish religion and culture to new generations. In less affiliated homes, popular drama has become increasingly more important as a source of information on how to act Jewish. Stephen Whitfield, for example, in In Search of American Jewish Culture, writes, “No epicenter of American Jewish culture exists …. But if there were such a locale, it would be Broadway.” Egon Mayer, expressing optimism about the future of American Jewry writes, “We see this longing for Jewishness reflected time and again in Jews who flock to Woody Allen movies.”42 Literary critic Arnold Band perhaps sums up the proposition best: “[O]nce we ask the basic question: What shapes the identity (in the sense of self-image) of a Jew in the post-Enlightenment period?, we are compelled to treat Exodus, Maryorie Morningstar, and Fiddler on the Roof-and dozens of other works of this genre-with the same scholarly respect as a truly epic work like Graetz’s History of the Jews…”

* Like the tortured spirit in S. Anksi’s classic Yiddish drama The Dybbuk (1914), the modern American Jew is trapped between two worlds: the “Old World” of our ancestors and the “New World” of America.

* I would also contend that the development of the American Method is inclusively Jewish to a degree unmatched by previous approaches to acting. First and foremost, Method acting from its inception has been a cultural process for which Jewish American artists can claim a birthright, much as African Americans claim jazz music. Its arrival and subsequent level of acceptance in the United States coincides with their own.

This is partly because so many members of the influential Group Theater (generally credited with the Method through their work in the 1930s) were Jewish. But what is often overlooked is that the Jewish members of the Group, even those who did not speak Yiddish themselves, grew up in homes where Yiddish theater was the primary source of dramatic entertainment. Harold Clurman, for example, writes that “from the age of six, when I had been taken to see Jacob Adler in Uriel Acosta at the Grand Street Theatre, I had a passionate inclination toward the theatre.”

As Nahma Sandrow notes, Stanislavsky’s Moscow Art Theater was the fin de sicle art theater that “most directly influenced Yiddish theater, which was attuned to the intellectual life of its East European environment…. In interpreting modern realistic drama, Stanislavsky’s group evolved a vividly lifelike method of acting which was to have a widespread effect on modern Western theater, especially in America, where Yiddish immigrants helped to spread it.” Thus, while most European (and many American) theater historians attribute the Group’s psychologically based and emotionally driven manifestation of the Method to Americans’ desire for individual glory, it would be more accurate to say that the American Method differs from “pure Stanislavsky” because (at least in part) the “system” arrived in the United States filtered through the emotionally and politically charged
Yiddish theater.

Of course, the Jewish members of the Group were, in part, reacting against the contrived plotlines, star turns, and overly theatrical staginess of the Yiddish theater. Nonetheless, they found the deeply felt emotion and working-class consciousness of the Yiddish theater more appealing than either the bourgeois vapidity of the commercial stage or the aloof and self-consciously artistic style favored by the Theatre Guild and other art theaters.

So while it is fair to say that in the course of its translation from Russian to Yiddish to American the Method became less “authentically” Stanislavskian we should also note that it took on a decidedly political tone. Strasberg’s emphasis on the specificity of the actor’s emotions is based not on self-aggrandizement but on a liberal assumption of universal humanism. The Method actors believe that their own emotions can be appropriate to the character because people of all races, religions, and nations experience similar emotions in similar ways; otherwise they are limited to playing characters substantially like themselves. Indeed, it was the Group’s resistance to typecasting that initially distinguished its repertoire from those of its contemporaries…

But the fundamental premise on which the Group operated was that a talented actor could pass as anything, precisely because, at the level of deeply felt emotion, all human beings are essentially the same. Obviously, the Method actor must likewise believe that the audience shares this common humanity. This is why the actor’s interior evocation of emotion in performance can be “read” correctly with a minimum of theatrical mechanics. Yet cultural and psychological specificity is essential to the naturalistic mode of production that dominated the latter two-thirds of the twentieth century. Indeed, the Method virtually equates specificity with truth. Realism demands specificity because a real individual is never generic. Thus, a playwright may argue, as Miller does, that “Where the theme seems to require a Jew to act somehow in terms of his Jewishness, he does so. Where it seems to me irrelevant what the religious character or cultural background of a character may be, it is treated as such.” And yet the actor playing the role, in building his or her character, must reconsider the question of “religious
character or cultural background”-especially when the playwright consciously omits such information from the written text. As part of this reconsideration, the actor will scrutinize the information provided by the text, with an eye toward an overall “objective” or “motivation” that will shape the performance.

* Performance theorist Jos Esteban Munoz argues that “majoritarian” American performance is distinguished by a “national affect, a mode of being in the world primarily associated with white middle-class subjectivity, [which] reads most ethnic affect as inappropriate.” Overt displays of emotion or excitement are configured as incorrect or declasse. Munoz further suggests that “the affective performance of normative whiteness is minimalist to the point of emotional impoverishment.” In other words, to the degree that an audience perceives a character’s
behavior as emotionally excessive that character is seen as Other-different from the nonethnic norm.

* Like spic, anti-Jewish epithets such as kike, yid, and sheenie connoted a J ewishness that exceeded the bounds of white middle-class good taste. Consider Miss Wales in Gentleman’s Agreement, who seeks to distinguish “good Jews” like herself from “the kikey ones” who “ruin it for the rest of us.” The “other kind”-a phrase once common among acculturated American Jews-as Miss Wales explains, talk too loud, dress too outlandishly, wear too much makeup, and, worst of all, talk too much about being Jewish.

* This rhetoric of ethnicity as excess offers another way to think about the mechanism and function of double coding. Method acting (and, to a lesser degree, all forms of emotive performance) demands emotional affect that the actor provides in excess of the written play text. And to the degree that the actor’s emotion exceeds the written text, the performance challenges the emotionally impoverished “national affect” theorized by Munoz.

Posted in Jews | Comments Off on Acting Jewish: Negotiating Ethnicity on the American Stage and Screen

Saving Private Godward (7-1-21)

Posted on July 1, 2021 by Luke Ford

00:00 Saving Private Ryan, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saving_Private_Ryan
01:30 Justin Martyr’s Dialog with Trypho, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spv_T4QE9Ow
03:00 Justin the Martyr, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justin_Martyr
05:00 Fruit of the Holy Spirit, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruit_of_the_Holy_Spirit
36:45 Justin Martyr by Andrew Hayes, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=scmdaGIteNo
1:07:00 Justin Martyr and the Jews, https://www.jstor.org/stable/1453625
1:14:00 The motivations of Leo Strauss, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=140778
1:53:00 Germany’s neo-nazis and the Far Right, https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/germanys-neo-nazis-the-far-right/
2:29:00 CNN: “Anti-Semitism Gaining Traction in the US”
2:37:00 Rabbi Stabbed Outside Shalom House Synagogue In Brighton
2:39:00 Stephen Kotkin: Taiwan, geopolitical tension and China’s inevitable rise in indices, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fFxhqT7d4Y
2:51:00 Goddess Dr. Jill Biden
3:04:00 Charles Murray Uncut, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8mWxWfblfw
4:03:00 Richard Spencer vs Judas Maccabeus debate Zionism on the Killstream, https://odysee.com/@theralphretort:1/richard-spencer-vs-judas-maccabeus-killstream:a

Posted in America, Christianity, Jews | Comments Off on Saving Private Godward (7-1-21)

‘Considering an Author’s Background in Relation to His Unstated Motivations’

Posted on July 1, 2021 by Luke Ford

Godward writes:

Yes, we should think about Melville & Heraclitus’s personal background if we really want to understand their thinking. Yet, for some reason, if we apply this same logic to someone like Leo Strauss, people get a lot more sensitive. Where was Strauss from? What major events in politics & war defined his early & middle life? How might his Jewishness, for example, shape his interpretation of Plato and of Thucydides — and how might his exile from his birthplace, and his being unable to find work in England because he was Jewish, have shaped his teaching when he finally found work in academia in America?

These seem like reasonable questions to me — but if we arrive at a hunch that his personal experience gave him cause to subvert or work to change certain definitions or even to deceive students for his own benefit, or for the benefit of other exiles, etc., well — that seems all the sudden more controversial.

There are many books and articles about Leo Strauss that examine these very questions. Did Godward look at them? Did he even look for them? If he did, he should state that. If he did not, he should state that. The honest man won’t proclaim we can’t talk about things that many scholars publicly discuss.

Leo Strauss was from Germany, he escaped the Nazis, and he wanted to create a world safe for Jews. Strauss praised religion but was an atheist and did not practice Judaism. He praised Zionism as he thought it was wonderful for Jews to pursue their ethnic interests, but he had no interest in living in Israel and he thought it would be awful if Europeans pursued their ethnic interests. Strauss thought that Jews being conscious of their race was wonderful but if Europeans were conscious of their race, that was terrible. Strauss thought that Christianity, in moderation and so long as it did not inconvenience Jews, was good. His thinking boiled down to — is it good for the Jews?

Stephen Turner notes: “One cannot really understand the Frankfurt School, or Leo Strauss, or Hans Kelsen, or Hans Morgenthau, without understanding what they both absorbed and rejected from [Carl] Schmitt.”

In his book Persecution and the Art of Writing, “Strauss sets forth the thesis that many philosophers, especially political philosophers, have reacted to the threat of persecution by disguising their most controversial and heterodox ideas.” That sounds like Godward.

Steve Sailer wrote in 2005:

…the importance of extra-rational charisma in the appeal of egomaniacal, messianic intellectuals like Marx and Freud to younger Jewish students. Over the last 150 years, secular Jewish intellectuals have repeatedly reproduced the traditional brilliant rabbi-student relationship in launching powerful cults. Among the more recent examples have been Ayn Rand (see Murray N. Rothbard’s hilarious 1972 article “The Sociology of the Ayn Rand Cult“), Susan Sontag (see Terry Castle’s hilarious 2005 article “Desperately Seeking Susan“), and Leo Strauss (see the unintentionally hilarious 2003 article “What Leo Strauss Was Up To” by two true believers, William Kristol and Steven Lenzer).

From the book Leo Strauss and the Conservative Movement in America by Paul Gottfried: “This book offers an original interpretation of the achievement of Leo Strauss, stressing how his ideas and followers reshaped the American conservative movement. According to this study, Strauss and his disciples came to influence the establishment Right almost by accident. The conservative movement that reached out to Strauss and his legacy was extremely fluid and lacked a self-confident leadership. Conservative activists and journalists felt a desperate need for academic acceptability, which they thought Strauss and his disciples would furnish. They also became deeply concerned with the problem of “value relativism,” which self-described conservatives thought Strauss had effectively addressed. But until recently, neither Strauss nor his disciples have considered themselves to be “conservatives.” Strauss’s followers continue to view themselves as stalwart Truman-Kennedy Democrats and liberal internationalists. Contrary to another misconception, Straussians have never wished to convert Americans to ancient political ideals and practices, except in a very selective rhetorical fashion. Strauss and his disciples have been avid champions of American modernity, and “timeless” values as interpreted by Strauss and his followers often look starkly contemporary.”

Posted in Leo Strauss | Comments Off on ‘Considering an Author’s Background in Relation to His Unstated Motivations’

New York’s Mayoral Race (6-30-21)

Posted on June 30, 2021 by Luke Ford

00:00 Election Experts & The New York Voting Fiasco, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=140750
21:00 New York Times investigates Jan. 6 Capitol Hill riots, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/30/us/jan-6-capitol-attack-takeaways.html
25:00 The Politics Of The Word And The Politics Of The Eye, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=140729
1:56:20 Tucker Carlson on New York mayoral election
2:08:00 Mark Levin Launches BRUTAL Attack On Tucker Carlson, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3KzPqLIT5U
2:17:00 Jason Kessler
2:20:00 Ramzpaul responds to Karlyn Borysenko on CRT

Posted in New York | Comments Off on New York’s Mayoral Race (6-30-21)

Election Experts & The New York Voting Fiasco

Posted on June 30, 2021 by Luke Ford

Something awful happens. Do you immediately jump to conspiracy thinking? Or do you first suspect incompetence? I first suspect incompetence (unless there’s strong evidence to the contrary, such as two planes crashing into the Twin Towers on 9-11).

I am not an expert on voter fraud but I do like the challenge of reading what the experts say, and then comparing their views with one another and with popular accounts.

I notice that many skeptics of the 2020 election results are seizing on New York City’s latest vote counting problems as evidence that the voter fraud experts quoted in the media are not up to snuff.

A friend says:

It’s pretty clear that the experts who claim there was no substantial result changing fraud in the 2020 presidential election fail from a failure of imagination. They are applying their standards of the past to things which may have been without precedent. The fact that 135,000 votes run as a test were maintained in the computerized total and would have remained undiscovered except that Adams started questioning them (and was roundly criticized for doing that) says it all. I am not saying that Trump won the election. All I am saying is that those who unqualifiedly say nothing happened are expressing opinions based on their own preconceptions and not necessarily fact based. That specific claims of fraud were debunked don’t seem to get anywhere near the issues that occurred in the NYC mayoral election.

You were appropriately skeptical of the Trump claims of fraud, but you have uncritically accepted the assertions of the election integrity’s defenders. Of course that is inconsistent with the attacks on the 2016 results in which Trump won and with the criticisms of computerized voting which Democratic senators raised a year before the 2020 election. The experts you relied on may be right on particular claims by those who challenge the results, but on the broader claim that the election in fact reflected the will of the voters, they might be wrong.

When I looked at the most prominent claims for massive voter fraud in the 2020 American elections, I found that all the claims fell apart upon examination. I don’t claim that voter fraud has not played a significant role in American elections, rather, I propose that all arguments that voter fraud has played a large role in recent American elections fall apart upon examination. I’m waiting to read a strong case for massive voter fraud in 2020.

“Voter fraud” means many things to many people. For example, “voter fraud” is often used to describe mistakes that are endemic to all large human enterprises. You show me any activity that is largely staffed by amateurs and involves counting millions of pieces of paper, and you will always find lots of mistakes. Mistakes in processing ballots are not voter fraud. Taking weeks to count votes is not evidence of voter fraud.

It seems to me that there is one definition of voter fraud that makes more sense than the others — that voter fraud is a crime. The recent mistake in the counting of the New York election is not, I believe, a crime. I am unaware of any evidence that the mistaken counting of 135,000 test votes would have remained undiscovered except that Eric Adams challenged the count.

Regarding this: “It’s pretty clear that the experts who claim there was no substantial result changing fraud in the 2020 presidential election fail from a failure of imagination.” All the expert analyses I have read were responses to allegations of voter fraud that did not add up. I’m not sure what role imagination should have in this type of analysis. If someone imagines ways that voter fraud might be massive, that could be the beginning of a useful investigation, but to say something important, one needs to uncover evidence supporting your imagination. Fantasies about voter fraud in and of themselves and without any supporting evidence have no importance and they need no analysis.

“They are applying their standards of the past to things which may have been without precedent.” No, they were examining claims of voter fraud in 2020 and finding that these claims fell apart upon examination.

Mail-in balloting is not without precedence in America. Five states do voting exclusively by mail and we don’t have evidence that these states have higher rates of voter fraud. There may be such evidence, but it has not been presented as yet.

“All I am saying is that those who unqualifiedly say nothing happened are expressing opinions based on their own preconceptions and not necessarily fact based.”

I am unaware of any voter fraud experts who say nothing happened. Instead, they say the allegations that voter fraud happened on a massive scale do not hold up to scrutiny. They say that the evidence does not indicate massive voter fraud.

It shouldn’t be hard to make a case for voter fraud in 2020. Simply point out counties and states where the voter returns were anomalous. I am unaware of such counties and states. In 2018 and 2020, there was a 2% swing against the Republicans in the suburbs. That little swing accounts for the election results in 2018 and 2020.

Regarding “on the broader claim that the election in fact reflected the will of the voters, they might be wrong”, I’d just like to see evidence for this claim. Everyone might be wrong on anything. We all have to make judgments based on imperfect information. I find it fun to try to make sense of imperfect information.

I agree with this analysis by Philip Bump of the Washington Post:

This is the first year New York City will use ranked-choice voting to pick its leaders. So far, it isn’t going great.

The Democratic primary election for mayor was held last week, on June 22, with initial results favoring Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams by a healthy margin. But ranked-choice voting means determining the winner of the primary will require several rounds of vote-counting. Each voter was able to pick up to five candidates who they hoped might win. If their preferred candidate is eliminated by being the lowest vote-getter in a round, the voter’s ballot shifts to their next preference down the list, until either the race is down to two candidates or until that voter’s ballot lists no more viable candidates.

For some inexplicable reason, the city’s Board of Elections (BOE) decided on Tuesday to run through how that ranked-choice system would work using the ballots it had received and counted. That tally showed Adams’s lead narrowing — and the second-place slot shifting from lawyer and activist Maya Wiley to former city sanitation director Kathryn Garcia. But while that trial run of ranked-choice voting did reveal generally how the eventual results might shift, it didn’t offer much insight into how that shift might occur, given that there are still more than 124,000 absentee ballots to count. That’s about 10 percent of all the votes cast — an obviously significant number.

Then things got worse. It turns out that the results the city released also included a number of dummy ballots, used to test the system — ballots that should not have been included in the initial count. The mistake was caught soon after the trial-run results were announced, so the Board of Elections ended up pulling its totals and announcing its mistake.

No observer of New York City politics was surprised to learn that the Board of Elections had messed things up. It’s common knowledge the board is at best inept, as a report from the city’s local paper documented in late October. The city’s politics broadly are byzantine and dishonest, often relying on a system of patronage that those in power — generally the system’s beneficiaries — are loath to challenge. It’s an embarrassing situation, but usually one that does its embarrassing thing out of the spotlight of national attention. A mayor’s race in the country’s most populous city, though, tends to draw a spotlight.

It will still be a few weeks before we know who won the primary, given those absentee ballots (which are likely to aid Garcia) need to be counted. But in the meantime, the snafu at the BOE has been seized upon by allies of former president Donald Trump as evidence that elections in Democratic areas are corrupt and dishonest, just as Trump has been claiming for months…

Look, it is obviously the case that there is no connection between reality and Trump’s insistence that the 2020 election was stolen. For nearly eight months, he and his allies have been trying to claim rampant fraud occurred and they have the evidence to prove it, without actually providing credible evidence and without offering any reason to assume that the claims of rampant fraud are worth taking seriously.

But it is nonetheless worth explaining why this argument is no better.

There is an apt analogy between what happened in New York City on Tuesday and the 2020 election. That error was akin to the miscounted ballots in Michigan’s Antrim County, an error that election administrators quickly caught and corrected. In that case, a change to the ballot wasn’t accounted for properly, so vote tallies were shifted between candidates. It’s as though you announced the order of horses in a race and, at the last second, slotted a new horse in the middle, shifting all the numbers. Suddenly, all the existing bets get wonky — a correctable but embarrassing mistake.

According to the BOE — which, again, is a mess, so assume this might also change — the mistake on Tuesday was similarly technical. It was a thing that should not have happened, but did, and officials announced the mistake and are correcting it. It was not some effort to throw the election. Unlike in Antrim County, these weren’t even intended to be final results! If the idea was to somehow allocate a number of ballots to all the candidates and hope no one would notice, it seems weird to inject them in a preliminary trial run of the results.

Damon Linker writes:

With its massive screw-up in counting and reporting preliminary results in New York City’s Democratic primary for mayor, the city’s Board of Elections has managed to vindicate the self-serving and politically corrosive mendacity of Donald Trump.

No, reporting hugely inaccurate preliminary results in the Ranked Choice Voting primary held last week doesn’t demonstrate that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Trump — or that, as the former president continues to claim, voter fraud was rampant in the swing states that delivered the election to Democrat Joe Biden. But there was always a more sweeping and more dangerous claim underlying those baseless assertions — namely, that American elections in general are corrupt and unreliable, producing untrustworthy results. That’s what Trump alleged during the summer and fall of 2020, before any ballots has been cast or counted. And that’s what the shambolic Democratic primary in New York City has now vindicated.

The primary involved only Democrats. It pioneered the use of RCV in order (supposedly) to deliver fairer, more representative outcomes. The Board of Elections is overseen by bipartisan commissioners. For all of these reasons, last week’s vote should have served as a demonstration of what a clean and corruption-free election looks like. Instead, it’s shown that NYC’s BOE is too incompetent to be trusted with counting the votes. And the shadow of its bungling will haunt whatever results it announces going forward, opening the door to fully justified challenges to the outcome.

From Politico:

NEW YORK — For months, President Donald Trump has made baseless claims of voter fraud, insisted he would only lose an election that was “rigged” and said he is rushing a Supreme Court nominee ahead of a potential legal challenge to the results.

Democrats and published media reports have widely disputed his assertions and officials have promised a valid voting process, despite the unprecedented challenges brought by the pandemic.

Then along came the New York City Board of Elections.

The notoriously dysfunctional entity has given ammo to Trump’s charges by mailing some 100,000 ballots with erroneously marked return envelopes to voters in Brooklyn. The latest screw-up from the bipartisan board — whose members are appointed by local party leaders and approved by the City Council as one of the last vestiges of old-school machine politics — became an immediate talking point for Republicans….

Susan Lerner, of the good government group Common Cause New York, said the president is misrepresenting the issue at stake. Rather than providing an opportunity to cast extra votes for his opponent Joe Biden — as the president has claimed mail-in voting would do — the mix-up in Brooklyn would have the opposite effect by bringing vote totals down if it is not remedied.

“Not only is the info being used in a negative way, it is being misused,” she said. “The problem is not what the White House is making it out to be.”

The sanctity of mail-in ballots is not the only uncertainty facing New York City voters ahead of the momentous presidential election in November. The board hasn’t even instructed voters on how much postage to use for sending their ballots in, according to city and state officials. And last week, Ryan indicated a final count of all the votes may not come until well into December.

A friend says:

The failure of imagination is that as far as I know none of experts considered that test ballots, which may have been entered favoring a particular candidate, were not deleted but added to the legitimate votes. I had no idea that election boards ran test ballots, but experts on elections who claim to know every aspect of elections should have known about it. That’s what I mean by failure of imagination. The biggest experts on election law are Sabato and Hasen, I am unaware that either of these persons considered the possibility..

The issue is not the 2% swing of voters, but if there was such a swing at all. A relatively small number of ballots such as those in New York “mistakenly” left in the voting machines could account for the swing. Instead the experts rely on polling (which is notoriously inaccurate) to confirm the numbers which under their application of knowing how past election fraud works, they categorically denied. That is their preconceived notions, ignoring a possible wholly new method. Most lay persons, including those who follow elections, such as you, have no idea how such a thing can happen and can’t conceive of it, but the experts should. The difference between intelligence and wisdom is that the wise person can foresee consequences that the smart person cannot. The experts have proven themselves with their opinions to be smart, but not wise.

Anyone remotely acquainted with American mail-in ballots knows that voters are sent test ballots. Anyone with voting expertise would know the potential for test ballots to get counted as real ballots (as I understand it, the experts say there is no evidence that this has happened in significant numbers). What happened in New York was a test run of a system never used before. It did not purport to be a final count.

Larry Sabato and Richard Hasen would not rank in the top ten of voter fraud experts, but they do get interviewed a lot in the media, just as Carl Sagan was often interviewed about space, but he had no significance to the discipline of astronomy. Even Larry Sabato and Richard Hasen know about test ballots and they know that there are infinite number of mistakes that vote counters can make. There is no evidence that a “relatively small number of ballots such as those in New York “mistakenly” left in the voting machines account[ed] for the swing” to the Democrats in 2018 and 2020. Contrary to this assertion, “Instead the experts rely on polling (which is notoriously inaccurate) to confirm the numbers which under their application of knowing how past election fraud works, they categorically denied”, academic studies of claims of voter fraud that I have read do not mention polling.

In the absence of evidence to the contrary, it seems to me that a 2% swing in the suburbs against Republicans accounts for the 2018 and 2020 election results.

“That is their preconceived notions, ignoring a possible wholly new method.”

There is nothing new in sending Americans test ballots though there is something new in the number of mail-in ballots and test ballots mailed out in 2020. I am unaware of any evidence that either of these produced increased voter fraud in 2020.

A friend says:

I don’t think Trump won the election, but I do think it is possible he won. As you know a swing of under a total of a hundred thousand votes in certain states would have given Trump an electoral college victory. If in a relatively small election with a relatively small turnout in a community that watches its elections closely, you can “inadvertently” add in 135,000 votes, it certainly raises the possibility that the experts you relied on might be wrong… These experts claim to have some sort of superior knowledge about election procedures so that they can opine on whether the election is open to question. If they limited their conclusions by stating that there may be other means of committing fraud which may have occurred which we aren’t considering, that would be one thing. If they specifically said that although registrars testing the machines with test ballots there is no way that could end up skewing election results that would be something else. But if you are relying on them to conclusively state that there was no fraud, that seems to be a big stretch.

You can’t conclusively prove there is no voter fraud. You can conclusively prove that shoddy arguments for massive voter fraud are shoddy.

James Joyner writes:

The drive to make voting easier, which I support, has had the pernicious effect of making it less trustworthy.

Eric Adams seemingly won a plurality of the vote on Election Day. But, of course, Election Day no longer exists. Some people vote early. And a lot of people, effectively, vote late because they can send their absentee ballot in on the last day and we allot an inordinate amount of time for ballots to arrive.

We used to get election results almost immediately. It was rare that we went to bed on Election Day without knowing the outcome of the race. Now, we’re expected to wait days—in this case, an entire month!—for results. Yet, over the same evolution, we have become to getting our information instantaneously.

Even absent malfeasance such as the Republican Party leadership’s attempt to falsely claim the 2020 Presidential election was somehow stolen, partisans are not going to trust a system in which their guy seemingly has the lead and then watch it slowly disappear through a mysterious process in which new votes are found and old ones are thrown out because errors are discovered.

Incompetent administration—as seen here an in the most recent run of the Iowa Caucuses—certainly don’t help. It just feeds the conspiracy theorists.

And the addition of ranked choice voting to this particular contest—which, again, I support in theory—complicates matters further. While there’s no obvious reason why a computer program can’t eliminate the votes for the bottom candidate and reallocate second place votes and so on and so forth, this particular election board somehow didn’t get its act together ahead of time. And, again, it’s feeding the conspiracists.

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The Politics Of The Word And The Politics Of The Eye

Posted on June 30, 2021 by Luke Ford

Stephen Turner wrote in 2003:

* Weltanschauung is a term that best fits commonalities of opinion and belief that are the product of words, and particularly printed words, and even more particularly, printed words used in connection with a particular set of social technologies. Weltanschauungen are a product of the information technology of the 19th century, particularly of newspapers, a technology marked by its lack of reliance on images, and therefore on seeing.

Contemporary politics, however, is a politics of the eye. The politics of the eye is different from the politics of the word: images work in different ways than words; they make claims on our primordial sense of solidarity that words do not make. Our own political world is increasingly a world of images, or more broadly of virtual experiences, often partly constituted by images. I give some examples of this, suggest some ways in which the politics of the word and the eye interact, and, rather than to propose a theory of the eye, plead for the irreducibility of the eye to the word, and reject attempts to ‘theorize the eye’ as a new ideological formation or worldview.

* ‘If the embryo is held to be a fetus, then it becomes socially permissible for women to subordinate their reproductive roles to other roles, particularly in the paid labor force’; holding an embryo to be a person ‘is to make a social statement that pregnancy is valuable and that women should subordinate other parts of their lives to that central aspect of their social and biological selves’ (1984: 8). A decision about the status of the embryo ‘enhances the resources held by one group and devalues the resources held by the other’.

* A worldview is erected on a base of interest. The interests, however, are not material interests, but are ‘deeper, broader, and more subtle. People see in the abortion issue a simultaneously pragmatic, symbolic, and emotional representation of states of social reality – states that they find reassuring or threatening’ (Luker, 1984: 7). Different people find different things reassuring or threatening, and the interests in this dispute are essentially in seeing their lives valued. Thus people with different kinds of lives are differentially threatened or reassured by different beliefs about the status of embryos. Their interest is in a belief that validates them, reassures them about the kinds of lives they have chosen…

* The totalitarians, as Carl Schmitt so nicely pointed out, caused trouble for parliamentary democracy while they were still ‘parties’ competing in a nominally liberal political system because they created a world in which a totalizing social experience was supplied by a party. Everything from automobile clubs to childcare was available in party-specific forms. These efforts were designed to protect party members from intellectual contamination. The striking similarity to the present is in the reemergence of what might be called viewpoint-specific social institutions of this kind in common with niche politics: gay traffic violation schools in California and feminist daycare facilities. But these are hardly comparable. The social insulation of niche identities is incomplete; the attempt to provide a comprehensive account of the world and its events is feeble. Instead, a comfort zone is enforced, and a slant on salient issues is precariously constructed.

Party papers were unable to make a transition to the postwar period in Europe without making very substantial concessions to the machinery of the production of world events, events which were the product of state actions which were themselves increasingly didactic, actions designed to serve as ideological object lessons. States thus usurped the ideological functions of parties and newspapers, but by replacing acts needing interpretation with acts that carried their own interpretations. But state action was typically accompanied by images that gave the lie to the intended meanings. The sheer availability of images of burning Buddhist monks in Vietnam, for example, made it impossible for defenders of the war to give a convincing interpretation of the events of Vietnam. The power of images has a technological base, closely related first to the rise of photojournalism and second to the rise of television. The availability of these media proved to be a powerful equalizer in a sense that the opponents of a dominant mode of representation need only to produce an arresting image to undermine interpretation. The production of ideology or worldviews is curiously weak in the face of these images. Anything that requires talk, concentration, belief, and so forth as both fascist and communist ideology did, and which their paler imitations in the Cold War period also did, cannot compete cognitively with the sheer visual impact of a tank running down a Chinese student in Tian an Men Square or a monk immolating himself. These images, however, do very little to create ideologies, much less worldviews.

* The movement in the United States for the protection of legalized abortion has concerned itself with the suppression of images of fetuses, knowing that the images are a potentially powerful means of undermining its own accounts of such questions as when does life start. Yet images are not merely corrosive of ideology. They are in a complex way a surrogate for ideology. It would be too reductive to say that the ideology of a Clinton or Thatcher was constructed on visual images and visual expressions woven together to provide justification for policies, a set of definitions of enemies and victims, and so forth. Visual images obviously are only part of the story. But it is less implausible to suggest that the constructions that politicians and ideologists provide in an age of visualization (and perhaps more importantly of emotional immediacy) are driven by the images (and the demand for emotional immediacy that the images provide).

* Statecraft is essentially constrained by these images; worldviews are rendered fragile by them. The show trials of Stalin, one suspects, could not have taken place on television. The ordinary humanity of the individuals involved could be made to vanish in print; seeing the faces of the victims would have sufficed to delegitimate the process. Even Milosevic can appear as a sympathetic person, and indeed has come to seem more complex and perhaps even to seem justified as a result of his televised trial.

* The problem for would-be hegemonic worldviews is this uncontrollability of images and the potential that images have for disrupting and undermining the sympathies and dissympathies on which worldviews in some sense rest. Images do not always work in predictable ways when they engage our sympathies, and they do not always engage our sympathies in a single direction. The repeated picturing of the horrors of the Oklahoma City bombing represent an image that could have gone either way. It broke against the militia movement and the mentality it represented, allowing them to be stigmatized, just as the very compelling, images of the government destroying the Koresh complex failed to produce sympathy for the authorities. All these failures result from the uncontrollability of images, the uncontrollability that needs to be understood at the level of the emotional roots of solidarity. The politics of the eye produces its own characteristic forms of solidarity and its own novel political possibilities, because it produces new possibilities of solidarity.

* The kinds of thin ideologies that it is possible to construct today are dependent on these vividly emotional contents, particularly of suffering and victimhood and the capacities of empathetic identification that are invoked by these images.

* All politics, all worldviews, have an emotional, solidaristic core. The emotional core is often, in a sense of injury, a sense of justice denied, a sense of right, an agonistic sense. Rudolph von Ihering taught this lesson many years ago in his greatly influential 19th century work The Struggle for Law (1915). The motive force for the evolution of law was in the recognition of injury and the consequent demand for rights to protect against the injury. This is a model with limitations, but fundamentally useful, in that the process of formulating demands of recognition begins at an inchoate and emotionally chaotic level in which contradictions, such as contradictions between explicit ruling doctrine and felt realities, are most strongly felt. Obviously the pinch of these contradictions happens at a particular point, most strongly in the experiences of a particular marginalized group whose response to the order may well be largely visceral and unintellectualized.

Gradually these hurts acquire ideologists. The technology of the word is spread by them to others whose sympathies could be engaged. Solidarity, beyond the solidarity of the face-to-face world, was closely bound up with ideology, or with shared identities that depended on print. It is no accident that modern nationalism followed print and is characteristically associated with national literatures. There is no sharp line between the literary and visual production of sympathy and solidarity. The production of sympathy itself is often a matter of the creation of intermediate images, images or ideas that do something to transcend the gap between those with whom we have face-to-face and intimate relations and those we do not.

Its very effectiveness works against it as a political weapon, simply because the demands that it places on our sympathies are so varied, unrelenting, and contradictory. Yet this I think is the key to the present state of the emotional core of politics. What is difficult to grasp is the existential situation of functioning in a world in which constant and contradictory demands are placed on one’s sympathy. But one can identify some features of this situation. The first is that the person subjected to these varied solidaristic appeals becomes a consumer rather than a simple ‘sharer’ of worldviews.

In the United States, it was traditional for candidates to eat ethnic food, wear bits of ethnic costume, and the like. Clinton, in contrast, told the people he spoke to that he felt their pain – not a mere generalized pain, but the specific pain of a form of shared experience of victimization. This is telling. The virtual recreation of experience, of sympathetic identification, is extraordinarily effective with experiences of injustice and victimhood. The Anita Hill testimony, for example, brought forth a complex response – a thin sense of solidaristic identity over sexist workplace slights which the male Senatorial questioners of Hill ‘did not get’, in the language of the time, but also a thicker, more nuanced sense of identity among black males, many of whom saw Hill along with those who testified in support of her as representative of the traditional enemies of black males, something that the women’s movement did not get.’

* The politics of the word provides very little comfort against the flood of images demanding our sympathies. Ideological politics seems phoney, inadequate, and emotionally dishonest. The production of ideology or of ‘word’ politics can adapt to the demands of this market, but typically survives by marketing to niches…

* The politics of the eye is a solvent of worldviews. It is also an engine of tolerance, tolerance dictated by the sympathetic pull of the various images that arise in the flood of images constitutes the politics of the eye.

* The visual representations of the act itself [9-11] were also widely distributed in the Islamic world, and produced, or illuminated, a kind of thin, nonideological solidarity. Spontaneous demonstrations with the demonstrators holding up reproductions of Bin Laden’s image took place, and T-shirts were sold with his picture. The ideological unreadability of this solidarity was its most striking feature. Although there is a large and confusing Islamist literature, and Bin Laden was an ideologist of the return to the Caliphate, this had little or no connection to the sense of solidarity in the Islamic world. The solidaristic sense was based on a much more visual sense of revenge, outrage, and pride at having bloodied the nose of those who had failed to give Islam the deference it was due.

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