I need to establish better Twitter/Blog balance in my life. I switched over to Twitter because the kids know where it’s at. This Twitter joint is hopping and bopping. I do feel Twitter has been good for my writing style. That sounds strange. But I have these terrible, more or less Montaignean habits of starting in one place, arcing around, seemingly aimlessly, only to return to the one place. That’s not good, academic prose. And it doesn’t work on Twitter, so I’m forced to cut down. It has its literary charms, my loopy prose stye, but, late in life, I’ve decided I need to get better control over it. I should rule it, not it me! Yet long twitter threads, even if they are direct in their way, are such a mockery of literary form. Like serving a pint of beer in a long row of eyedroppers. So I’m swearing off the long stuff, on Twitter. So I’d better get back here to CT.

Right, to get back started in a traditional way, I’m going to complain about Rod Dreher, like it’s Old Home Week. (Just so you know I may be on Twitter now, but I haven’t changed.) It must seem strange I’m so fixated on Dreher, but, fact is, sometimes he looks to me like sort of my mirror universe opposite. Frequently he will report he’s reading authors I’ve read. We see the same things, just opposite-style. Today it’s Modris Eksteins. I read his Rites of Spring years ago and was really excited by it. Good book. Dreher likes it because he thinks it will help him shift the charge that he’s just too fussed about sex. [click to continue…]

Four years ago, some of you wondered whether there would really be that much of a difference between a Clinton and a Trump presidency. Imagine.

One thing I’ve found a bit more time to do under lockdown is to listen to more music, and on the back of reading Richard Powers’s The Gold Bug Variations, I’ve been listening to different recordings of Bach’s Goldberg Variations every day. Very calming and sometimes transporting. The trouble is, though, that as someone who likes music, who has read quite a bit about it, who goes to the occasional concert, I am also somewhat unmusical. My attempts in middle-age to learn the piano were not crowned with success and my elderly teacher was really quite vocal in his denunciations of my incompetence. (A welcome side-effect though was that my children have managed to become musicians.) So how, among the bewildering variety of performances on different instruments – all of which are available at the click of a mouse – to pick what is “good” to listen to? How far do you trust the experts and their recommendations? And what if you find yourself liking things that the musically competent condemn and disliking things that they praise as exsquisite. Such are the anxieties of the aesthetic inadequate faced with art and the judgement of the acknowledged cognoscenti.

So what have my listenings prompted so far by way of inexpert conclusions? First, that I am pretty allergic to the sound of the harpsichord — something I knew already — though I accept that you sometimes hear things in the music that you don’t when listening to a piano performace. Second, that neither of the celebrated performances by Glenn Gould really do it for me: the first sounds too dry, in the second I find the humming too distracting. Third, that there is an extraordinary degree of variation in the playing, such that it can seem like different pieces of music are being performed (most obviously in something like Wilhelm Kempff’s ornamentless performance of the Aria as contrasted with most others). Finally, that it turned out to be really important to me how a particular variation (XIII) is performed. Some of the renditions are extraordinarily soulful and affecting and some seem like technical exercises that lack such meaning. For what its worth, I’ve most enjoyed performances by Tatiana Nicolaeva (a concert in Stockholm), by Murray Perahia, and by Maria Tipo. I have on LP or CD the 1955 Gould, a Rosalyn Tureck and the Charles Rosen, but I haven’t revisited the last two yet. What do Crooked Timber readers suggest?

What to do when your body forgets how to be well

OK well this is going to be tricky to write because I’m not a doctor and it’s not medical advice, and the more I read around in the displacement activity I often do ahead of a difficult task, the more it becomes plain that striking the balance between speaking anecdotally from, in fairness, somewhat bitter experience, paying due heed to current but still unbelievably partial and fragmentary research, and employing the observational/confessional mode in an attempt to paint myself as a useful cautionary tale suddenly seems so much more complicated than it really needs to be.

Because I really only want to say one thing; if you have had Covid-19 (tested or not), and are getting to a month or two on and still feel like you’ve been hit by a bus, please, for the love of God, rest.

CONVALESCE.

Stop what you are trying to do and listen to your body as it tells you it needs to be quiet now. You will not ‘fight’ your way out of this. It is not a test of your character or your will. You need to stop and listen to the only body you will ever have.

Print out a fact-sheet from the Internet and press it into the hands of your loved ones whose patience with your infirmity is beginning to ebb – perhaps they are beginning to talk about it being ‘just stress’ or how ‘we’re all TIRED’, and withdraw in whatever ways you can to slowly, vitally heal.

If you can remotely afford it, and even if you can’t, really, take the time off work and school, church or party or volunteering of all kinds, withdraw indefinitely from every not-essential-to-life activity and commit an uncapped amount of time to your recovery. Maybe you can’t quite afford to, or maybe you really, really don’t want to ask for whatever financial help and longer timelines you need, but try and take the fatigue, brain-fog, sore throat, ringing in the ears, swollen glands, weird headaches, all-over body-ache and all manner of covid symptoms still lingering long after the blood-work says your body has cleared it, and, I’m sorry this is scary, but it may help try to imagine still feeling like this a year from now, or five years or even twenty, and think about the finances of that.

Now calmly regard that fear and ask what it demands. See how this re-orders your priorities. Now thank your fear and put it away.

Think of post-viral fatigue as climate change for the human body. It’s here but not here; you acknowledge the immediate effects but haven’t really got your head around their implications. You need to invest heavily up-front and in the face of widespread disbelief to avoid medium and long-term catastrophe. Understand the threat is both insidious and in your face. Some symptoms are obvious and acute, but others you’re too mired in to even fully see. As you’re dealing with the thing itself, you’re also enmeshed in a struggle of knowing, trying to figure out what is real. Understand that recognising and dealing with this illness with the urgency and seriousness it demands may give you the best chance of coming out strong and whole. Understand that whether this happens is not entirely in your hands. [click to continue…]

CB’s visit to Madison a couple of years ago coincided with a concert by the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain, which I had managed to convince my entire family to attend, so he came too. Also in attendance were the only two undergraduates whom I’d convinced to come along. They both said, later, that they only came to humour me, and had assumed it wouldn’t be very good. But during the interval they were both wide-eyed and one said “why doesn’t everybody come to this? Why aren’t they really famous?”.

Both those students graduated this month, having both taken the smaller class referred to here. They, and I, convinced a remarkably large number of their classmates to get tickets for a performance in late March. (I think they were more persuasive than I was: one of them insisted that “Harry Brighouse told me to go to this concert and now I know that I should always do what he tells me to do, and so should you”). The plan was to all go to dinner beforehand, and then attend the concert as a kind of field trip. On the final occasion we all met in person nobody was quite sure whether we’d meet again (maybe that’s not true — I think I knew, because I asked one of the seniors if it was the last time I would see her) but we all knew that the concert was vanishingly unlikely, and in subsequent zoom class sessions several people said, several times, that was one of the things they regretted.

I know that plenty of people deserve more attention than my students (though — while all of them are healthy, several of them have been through awful things this semester). But when I noticed that the UOGB was producing some wonderful lockdown performances on youtube, I thought I’d just contact them and ask if they’d consider dedicating something to my students, just to cheer them up. In my letter I gave them ample opportunity to decline — indeed, I deliberately wrote the letter so that it would be easy to ignore. But after a couple of weeks their manager got back to me saying she’d talked to several members and that although they never do request they were considering doing something. Then last week she told me that something would be posted online on Sunday and I should watch it. It did seem slightly awkwardly phrased and cryptic, but I just thanked her and prepared to watch it and send the link to my students. And its not exactly what I had expected. I got a text from a student after the video went live saying: “Hi wait I can’t believe you had already emailed the orchestra!!! I emailed them last week to give you a shoutout in the video! you were one step ahead of me!”

What follows is a manifesto that has been published today in its original in French in Le Monde and translated and published in 37 other places, which will be listed at the end of the text.

Working humans are so much more than “resources.” This is one of the central lessons of the current crisis. Caring for the sick; delivering food, medication, and other essentials; clearing away our waste; stocking the shelves and running the registers in our grocery stores – the people who have kept life going through the COVID-19 pandemic are living proof that work cannot be reduced to a mere commodity. Human health and the care of the most vulnerable cannot be governed by market forces alone. If we leave these things solely to the market, we run the risk of exacerbating inequalities to the point of forfeiting the very lives of the least advantaged. How to avoid this unacceptable situation? By involving employees in decisions relating to their lives and futures in the workplace – by democratizing firms. By decommodifying work – by collectively guaranteeing useful employment to all. As we face the monstrous risk of pandemic and environmental collapse, making these strategic changes would allow us to ensure the dignity of all citizens while marshalling the collective strength and effort we need to preserve our life together on this planet.

Why democratize? Every morning, men and women rise to serve those among us who are able to remain under quarantine. They keep watch through the night. The dignity of their jobs needs no other explanation than that eloquently simple term, ‘essential worker.’ That term also reveals a key fact that capitalism has always sought to render invisible with another term, ‘human resource.’ Human beings are not one resource among many. Without labor investors, there would be no production, no services, no businesses at all.

Every morning, quarantined men and women rise in their homes to fulfil from afar the missions of the organizations for which they work. They work into the night. To those who believe that employees cannot be trusted to do their jobs without supervision, that workers require surveillance and external discipline, these men and women are proving the contrary. They are demonstrating, day and night, that workers are not one type of stakeholder among many: they hold the keys to their employers’ success. They are the core constituency of the firm, but are, nonetheless, mostly excluded from participating in the government of their workplaces – a right monopolized by capital investors.

To the question of how firms and how society as a whole might recognize the contributions of their employees in times of crisis, democracy is the answer. Certainly, we must close the yawning chasm of income inequality and raise the income floor – but that alone is not enough. [click to continue…]

Among the many consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic, and the measures taken to control it, there has been an epidemic of whataboutery. The starting point is the claim “we have locked down the entire economy to reduce the number of deaths from Covid-19, but we tolerate comparably large numbers of deaths from X”. Popular candidates for X include smoking, road crashes and influenza. In most, though not all, cases, the inference is that we should accept more deaths from the pandemic. Indeed, the majority of those using this argument are also opposed to any proposal to do more about the various examples of X they cite

I’m going to take the contrapositive, and argue that the inconsistency pointed out here should be resolved by taking stronger action to reduce avoidable deaths from a wide range of causes, with the primary examples being road deaths and smoking.

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Nobody knows what will happen with US colleges and universities in the fall, but it’s a fair guess that at least some, probably most, and not unlikely all, teaching will be online. Whatever is online in the fall will be unlike what was online in the spring: on the one hand people will have had a chance to prepare and train; on the other, classes will lack the glue that in-person meetings prior to going online made possible.

I’ll post some thoughts soon about how we might think about going forward in the fall, but for now I’m just assuming that some or much of our teaching will be online. In the spirit that learning about what seems to have worked and what seems not to have worked for different people will help us prepare, here are some reflections on my experience. I’d welcome your advice, but also your reflections on your own experiences!

I taught two classes last semester. One was 150 students, with 2 TAs, the other was 30, no TA’s. Let’s start with the smaller one.

Although it is a 3-credit class, we had 4 full hours (120 minutes) of class time per week. This proved fortuitous: I scheduled 4 hours for 2 reasons. 1) The class involves a group project, and in my experience students find difficulty coordinating out-of-class time to work together, so this provided them with that. 2) The cap was 22 but I anticipated (correctly) that it might be raised to 30 and wanted to be able to meet with them in reasonable-sized groups. So my plan was really that I’d meet them for 4 hours most weeks, but most of them would meet me for only 3 hours most weeks.
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An addendum to my earlier post, to explain more directly why I am skeptical of the argument that public choice is a useful lens to understand the politics of the public during coronavirus. Shorter version: if the “public” is indeed some kind of equilibrium, then the underlying game is unlikely to be the kind of game that public choice scholars like to model. [click to continue…]

As some of you may know, Sweden tried a different approach to the Coronavirus pandemic by avoiding a lockdown and major closures. Did it work? Not so much.

While unfortunate for Swedes, it does offer a helpful example for other countries to address those skeptical of whether lockdowns were necessary. In the graph below, a few countries for comparison in terms of reported cases per population. In case you’re wondering whether this is just about reported cases, note that Sweden is also among the worst now in terms of fatalities by reported cases and deaths per population.

Do you have favorite resources for country-specific stats? If yes, please share in the comments! My source for the above info is the helpful corona-data.ch site. I have also been following Switzerland’s situation here.

The coronavirus has hit the City University of New York, where I teach, hard: more than 20 deaths of students, faculty, and staff, and counting. Yet the impact of the virus on CUNY has received almost no press coverage at all.

At the same time, the media continues to focus its higher education coverage, during the coronavirus, where it always has: on elite schools.

The combination of these elements—the unremarked devastation at CUNY, the outsized attention to wealthy colleges and universities—led me to write this piece for The New Yorker online:

It seems likely that no other college or university in the United States has suffered as many deaths as CUNY. Yet, aside from an op-ed by Yarbrough in the Daily News, there has been little coverage of this story. Once known proudly as “the poor man’s Harvard,” CUNY has become a cemetery of uncertain dimensions, its deaths as unremarked as the graves in a potter’s field.  

The coronavirus has revealed to many the geography of class in America, showing that where we live and work shapes whether we live or die. Might it offer a similar lesson about where we learn?…  

During the Depression, the New York municipal-college system opened two flagship campuses: Brooklyn College and Queens College. These schools built the middle class, took in refugees from Nazi Germany, remade higher education, and transformed American arts and letters. In 1942, Brooklyn College gave Hannah Arendt her first teaching job in the United States; an adjunct, she lectured on the Dreyfus affair, which would figure prominently in “The Origins of Totalitarianism.” In the decades that followed, CUNY built more campuses. Until 1976, it was free to all students; the government footed the bill.  

What prompted this public investment in higher education was neither sentimentality about the poor nor a noblesse oblige of good works. It was a vision of culture and social wealth, derived from the activism of the working classes and defended by a member of Britain’s House of Lords. “Why should we not set aside,” John Maynard Keynes wondered in 1942, “fifty million pounds a year for the next twenty years to add in every substantial city of the realm the dignity of an ancient university.” Against those who disavowed such ambitions on the grounds of expense, Keynes said, “Anything we can actually do we can afford.” And “once done, it is there.”  

Public spending, for public universities, is a bequest of permanence from one generation to the next. It is a promise to the future that it will enjoy the learning of the present and the literature of the past. It is what we need, more than ever, today. Sending students, professors, and workers back to campus, amid a pandemic, simply because colleges and universities need the cash, is a statement of bankruptcy more profound than any balance sheet could ever tally.

Since it came out on Thursday, I’ve learned of three additional deaths at CUNY, all students in their last year at Lehman College: Daniel DeHoyos, Zavier Richburg, and Lenin Portillo. The Lehman College Senate has voted that they all be awarded posthumous degrees. That brings the total number of deaths at CUNY that I know of to 26.

Speaking of the activism of the working classes, I also wrote for The Nation an essay on the communist, which doubles as a review of Vivian Gornick’s classic The Romance of American Communism, which has recently been reissued, and Jodi Dean’s excellent work of political theory, Comrade.

The communist stands at the crossroads of two ideas: one ancient, one modern. The ancient idea is that human beings are political animals. Our disposition is so public, our orientation so outward, we cannot be thought of apart from the polity. Even when we try to hide our vices, as a character in Plato’s Republic notes, we still require the assistance of “secret societies and political clubs.” That’s how present we are to other people and they to us.

The modern idea—that of work—posits a different value. Here Weber may be a better guide than Marx. For the communist, work means fidelity to a task, a stick-to-itiveness that requires clarity of purpose, persistence in the face of opposition or challenge, and a refusal of all distraction. It is more than an instrumental application of bodily power upon the material world or the rational alignment of means and ends (activities so ignoble, Aristotle thought, as to nearly disqualify the laborer from politics). It is a vocation, a revelation of self.

The communist brings to the public life of the ancients the methodism of modern work. In all things be political, says the communist, and in all political things be productive. Anything less is vanity. Like the ancients, the communist looks outward, but her insistence on doing only those actions that yield results is an emanation from within. Effectiveness is a statement of her integrity. The great sin of intellectuals, Lenin observed, is that they “undertake everything under the sun without finishing anything.” That failing is symptomatic of their character—their “slovenliness” and “carelessness,” their inability to remain true to whatever cause or concern they have professed. The communist does better. She gets the job done.

…

The left has good reason to be wary of the stern antinomies of the comrade. The freedom that goes by the name of discipline, the suppression of difference in the name of solidarity, the words of emancipation as window dressing for authoritarian constraint—we’ve been down this road before. We know where it ends, and neither Gornick nor Dean denies that ending. Nor do they provide an easy way around or out of it.

Gornick interprets the tragedy of communism through Greek myth. Helen awakens in Paris an intense love, one he never knew before. He is turned outward, directed to another soul in a way he is not accustomed to. He becomes larger than himself. Then the love takes on a life of its own, eclipsing its object. Love becomes the object, the feeling and need; Helen disappears from view. All manner of mayhem and destruction follow. Dean interprets the tragedy through psychoanalysis: The healthy ego ideal of the comrade becomes the ravenous superego. In the same way that the superego feeds off the transgressions of the id, growing ever more powerful from the punishment of impurity, so do comrades turn inward, generating a feeding frenzy of their own. Collective power, once a source of freedom, becomes a prison.

There’s a reason Gornick and Dean turn to myth and psychoanalysis, respectively. Each, in its way, is a story of unhappy endings, in which the conclusion is written from the start. Yet even if we don’t head down the path of authoritarian communism, even if we avoid that unhappy ending, we’re still left with other bad endings that neither psychoanalysis nor myth can account for. Not only has capitalism run rampant since the fall of communism, and not only has the left yet to find a replacement for the parties and movements that once created socialism in all its varieties, but even the contemporary left has not left behind the challenge of reconciling freedom and constraint….

You can read the rest of the piece here.

Since it’s been a while since I posted at Crooked Timber, I thought I’d alert folks to some other writing I’ve been doing recently at the New York Review of Books online: one, a piece on the Iowa Caucuses (remember them?) and minoritarian democracy; and the other, on what the isolation of the pandemic means for democracy.

Hope everyone is healthy and safe.

Despite the UK now having the highest death toll from COVID-19 in Europe and the second-highest in the world after the United States, the right-wingers of the Telegraph and the Spectator, abetted by the erstwhile Marxists of Spiked! and similar persist in denouncing lockdown as a tyrannical assault on freedom. It is clear that compulsory social distancing measures do indeed reduce people’s negative liberty by constraining the set of actions they can legally perform. Most people, however, view this as a sensible price to reduce the threat COVID-19 presents to each of us and to others, particularly the most vulneralble, the elderly, health workers, transport workers etc. After all, if you are dead then your freedom is worth nothing.

As students of freedom know, however, there is more than one way of understanding the concept. Libertarians who are extraordinarily sensitive to the least legal limitation on negative freedom are usually completely immune to the idea that structural features of capitalist society are coercive and freedom-limiting. In particular, they either fail to notice or deny that the workplace is coercive. After all, the people who work for the person to whom they are now subordinate freely contracted into that position, didn’t they? I don’t think I need to repeat the familiar points about choices, options, and structural oppression here.

Instead I invite you to consider what will happen if and when lockdown is lifted. Jerry Cohen made the point in his essay “Are Disadvantaged Workers Who Take Hazardous Jobs Forced to Take Hazardous Jobs?” that you can’t force someone to do what they are unfree to do. If workers are unfree to contract for less than the minimum wage or to work in unsafe conditions they bosses can’t (legally) force them to do those things. The same, rather obviously, goes for lockdown. People who are more-or-less confined to their homes can’t easily be forced to work in workplaces that expose them to the threat of COVID-19. (I know that even under lockdown many workers, such as health workers and bus drivers are effectively so forced, and COVID has rather powerfully exposed some of the divides that exist among different groups of workers.)
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