View full sizePresident Barack Obama
presents rock legend Bob Dylan with a Medal of Freedom, Tuesday, May 29, 2012,
during a ceremony at the White House in Washington. (AP Photo/Charles
Dharapak)
WASHINGTON — Sketching impressive contributions to society in intensely
personal terms, President Barack Obama presented the Medal of Freedom to more
than a dozen political and cultural greats Tuesday, including rocker Bob Dylan,
astronaut John Glenn and novelist Toni Morrison.
In awarding the nation's highest civilian honor to 13 recipients, living and
dead, the president took note of the overflow crowd in the East Room and said it
was "a testament to how cool this group is. Everybody wanted to check 'em
out."
Obama then spoke of his personal connection to a number of this year's
recipients, calling them "my heroes individually."
"I know how they impacted my life," the president said. He recalled reading
Morrison's "Song of Solomon" in his youth and "not just trying to figure out how
to write, but also how to be and how to think."
In college days, Obama said, he listened to Dylan and recalled "my world
opening up, because he captured something about this country that was so vital."
Dylan's appearance drew the biggest whoops from the crowd, and he dressed for
the event — sunglasses, bow tie and black suit embellished with shiny buckles
and buttons.
Obama also recalled reading about union pathbreaker Dolores Huerta when he
was starting out as a community organizer.
"Everybody on this stage has marked my life in profound ways," he said.
Obama added that Pat Summitt, who led the University of Tennessee women's
basketball team to more NCAA Final Four appearances than any other team, had
helped pave the way for his two daughters, "who are tall and gifted."
"They're standing up straight and diving after loose balls and feeling
confident and strong," he said. "I understand that the impact that these people
have had extends beyond me. It will continue for generations to come."
The Medal of Freedom is presented to people who have made meritorious
contributions to the national interests of the United States, to world peace or
to other significant endeavors.
Other honorees:
—Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, the first woman to hold the
job.
—John Paul Stevens, former Supreme Court justice.
—Juliette Gordon Low, founder of the Girl Scouts, who died in 1927.
—Shimon Peres, president of Israel, who is to receive his medal at a White
House dinner next month.
—John Doar, who handled civil rights cases as assistant attorney general in
the 1960s.
—William Foege, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention, who helped lead the effort to eradicate smallpox.
—Gordon Hirabayashi, who fought the internment of Japanese-Americans during
World War II. He died in January.
—Jan Karski, a resistance fighter against the Nazi occupation of Poland
during World War II. He died in 2000.
Huerta co-founded the National Farmworkers Association, which later became
the United Farm Workers of America. Glenn was the first American to orbit the
earth. Dylan's vast catalog of songs includes such rock classics as "Like a
Rolling Stone," ''Blowin' in the Wind" and "Mr. Tambourine Man."
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From the first time we step into an English class, we’re told that the rules
matter, that they must be followed, that we must know when it’s appropriate to
use a comma and what it means to employ the subjunctive mood. But do these
things really matter? Outside of the classroom, what difference does it
make if we write “who” instead of “whom” or say “good” instead of “well”?
It does make a difference, at least sometimes. In
order to determine when those times are, the question must be asked: For whom
are you writing? Take that last sentence, for example. As Joan Acocella wrote recently in
The New Yorker, “Every statement is subjective, partial, full of biases
and secret messages.” The above sentence is no exception. Its ostentatious
structure and secret message says, “I am one of you.” It also says even sneakier
things like “I’m educated, an authority,” and “You can trust me about language
usage.” The average New Yorker reader recognizes the effort the sentence
exerts to maintain grammatical correctness, and in recognizing this, the reader
bonds with the writer. “I” becomes “we.” We share a secret now. We’re a team.
But how different would things be if I walked into the sports bar down the
street on a Sunday afternoon and asked, “For whom are we rooting today?” The
wording would not be likely to win me many pals at the pub. The most likely
response from the collective would be banishment to a far corner, a shake of the
head, and an astonished, “What’d ya mean, who’re we rootin’ for?”
Why did it go so wrong? In short, different audience, different dialect. The
key to linguistic acceptance is recognition and adaptation. Know thy audience,
know thy friends. It’s not a matter of which sentence is “correct”—“for whom are
we rooting” versus “who are we rooting for”—so much as which sentence is correct
for the given situation.
All of the complex linguistic theories of language acquisition and whether
grammar is universally hardwired or learned through practice don’t matter one
bit in practical everyday living. If “correct” is only a matter of situation,
then what we should really be asking is why we need to be able to use both
versions of the sentence. Why should we bother to learn prescriptive English—the
grade-school rules—if it isn’t our natural dialect?
Repugnant as it may be, the simple answer is that we need to learn
prescriptive English because that’s the way the people in power communicate. As
far as daily survival is concerned, it doesn’t matter whether the origins of
this linguistic power structure are racist, classist, or élitist, or whether
they’re based on the whims of dead white males. This is how the system works
right now, today, and in order to best get the attention of those in
power, to begin to effect change, we must be able to use their dialect. We must
know their rules.
People who say otherwise, who say that in all situations we should speak and
write however we’d like, are ignoring the current reality. This group, known as
descriptivists, may be fighting for noble ideas, for things like the
levelling of élitism and the smoothing of social class, but they are neglecting
the real-world costs of those ideas, neglecting the flesh-and-blood humans who
are denied a job or education because, as wrong as it is, they are being harshly
judged for how they speak and write today.
Furthermore, as David Foster Wallace points out in his essay “Authority and
American Usage,” it’s not at all clear that “society’s mode of expression is
productive of its attitudes rather than a product of those attitudes.” In other
words, Wallace continues, it’s bizarre to believe that “America ceases to be
elitist or unfair simply because Americans stop using certain vocabulary that is
historically associated with elitism and unfairness.”
This is not even to mention the descriptivists’ dirty little secret. When it
comes time for them to write their books and articles and give their speeches
about the evil, élitist, racist, wrongheadedness of forcing the “rules” on the
masses, they always do so in flawless, prescriptive English. Ensconced behind a
mask of noble ends, something obscenely disingenuous is happening here. How easy
it is for a person who is already part of the linguistic élite to tell others
who are not that they don’t need to be. Or, as Joan Acocella puts it, the
descriptivists will “take the Rolls. You can walk, though.”
These do-as-you-please linguists imagine themselves to be fighting for the
common man, but they don’t practice what they preach. Playing the game and being
able to deploy the rules has afforded them the luxury of a good education, a
steady job, and decent income. It has allowed them to have their noble voices
heard in the fight for linguistic equality. But they fight from a good, safe
distance. They’re not on the front lines, naked and exposed.
For the individual looking for a higher education or trying to secure a
decent job, what seems more humane: Admitting that, ugly, élitist, and unfair as
it is, prescriptivism is currently the dialect of power and being able to
manipulate that dialect can help you get ahead, or pretending that utopia is at
hand, that everyone is a revolutionary, that linguistic anarchy will set you
free? The choice to use our natural dialects whenever and wherever we please, to
live in a world free of language-based racism and classism, may indeed be a
worthy end for which to strive, but it’s also worth remembering that
individuals don’t live in the end. They live
now.
Author, 'The Great Divergence: America's Growing
Inequality Crisis And What We Can Do About It'
Why Edward Conard Is Wrong About Income Inequality
Posted: 05/29/2012 8:15
am
Edward Conard has gotten a lot of press lately for
writing a book that praises income inequality. Writing in the New York Times
Magazine, Adam Davidson described Conard's argument this way: "If we had a little
more of it, then everyone, particularly the 99 percent, would be better off."
Conard is a former partner at Mitt Romney's private equity firm, Bain Capital,
and a major contributor to Romney's presidential campaign. That gives readers of
Unintended Consequences: Why Everything You've Been Told About The Economy
Is Wrong the thrill of being privy to opinions Romney may well share but
dare not say out loud.
So the biggest surprise, on opening Unintended Consequences, lies in
discovering that this book isn't about income inequality at all. It's basically
a defense of the investment class, whom Conard is anxious to absolve from all
blame for the subprime crash of 2008. There's quite a lot in the book about
banks and regulators and taxes, but not very much about the middle class, the
logical focus of any serious discussion of the 33-year run-up in income
inequality. And while it's true that Conard believes America needs to shovel
more cash to the rich so they'll do the rest of us the great favor of investing
it, only at the end does he flesh out, in a chapter titled "Redistributing
Income," why he thinks redistribution is a lousy idea.
It feels a little unfair for me to write a column explaining what Conard
doesn't understand income inequality in America, because it's a topic he never
fully engages -- not even in the "Redistributing Income" chapter, which is
mainly an argument against providing government benefits to the poor. On the
other hand, income inequality is the subject about which Conard is talking as he
travels the country marketing his book, because it's a central issue in the
presidential campaign. That makes it hard to ignore the hasty and ill-informed
arguments he makes about inequality in Unintended Consequences.
As I explain in my own recent book, The Great Divergence: America's Growing Inequality Crisis And
What We Can Do About It (Bloomsbury), from the early 1930s through the
late 1970s incomes in the United States either grew more equal or remained
relatively stable in their distribution. Then, starting in 1979, incomes grew
more unequal. Middle class incomes stagnated relative to their growth in the
postwar era and also relative to productivity (i.e., output per man- or
woman-hours worked), which had dwindled during the 1970s but grew starting in
the 1980s and took off like a rocket in the aughts. Meanwhile, incomes for the
affluent, which had grown at about the same rate during the postwar years as
incomes for the middle class, started growing much faster, and incomes for the
super-rich started growing much, much faster. (Incomes for the poor actually
came up slightly over this 33-year period, but dropped precipitously when the
recession hit.)
The Great Divergence is actually two divergences. There's a skills-based
divergence between people whose education ended with high school and people who
went on to get college (and, increasingly, graduate) degrees. And there's the
divergence between the top 1 percent (especially the top 0.1 and 0.01 percent)
and everyone else. Policy wonks sometimes argue over which of these divergences
is more important, but looking back over 33 years it's clear that both have been
extremely important.
The skills-based divergence is the more complex of the two. One factor is a
shortage of skilled labor relative to the growing demand, reflected in the fact
that during the 1970s America's high school graduation rate stopped climbing
even as the computerization of the workplace increased skill demands. Another is
the precipitous decline of the labor movement, which has been much greater than
in other comparable countries because of anti-labor U.S. government policies.
Another is a variety of other things the government did, including the setting
of interest rates, raising or not raising the minimum wage, changes in taxes and
benefit programs, etc. (Interestingly, tax policy didn't loom nearly so large as
you might suspect.) Trade played a growing role, but it wasn't a major factor
until the early aughts, when China emerged as a principal trade partner.
The 1 percent versus 99 percent divergence is much easier to explain.
Compensation for top executives at nonfinancial firms became unhinged from
economic reality, and the under-regulated finance industry ate the economy.
A key question about both kinds of inequality is why they are growing today
when they didn't for most of the 20th century. Obviously part of the answer is
that the Great Depression and World War II were national crises that disrupted
the accumulation of wealth that had occurred during the 1920s. But that doesn't
explain why incomes failed to grow more unequal from the late 1940s through the
early 1970s, when the postwar economy prospered. Conard's answer is that "World
War II destroyed Europe's and Japan's infrastructure. This weakened their
ability to compete with the United States, and it took decades for these
advanced economies to catch up." That's true, but only up to a point. Europe and
Japan actually recovered from the war pretty quickly, thanks in part to the
Marshall Plan. Meanwhile, these other countries were experiencing the same trend
toward greater income equality observed in the U.S. More equal incomes weren't
just America's prize for being king of the hill.
During the Great Divergence, Conard argues, growing immigration put downward
pressure on wages. The timing works; immigration law was dramatically
liberalized in 1965. But the education level of most of these immigrants was so
low that economic studies have failed to demonstrate that expanded immigration
affected incomes for any native-born group except high-school dropouts. When it
comes to middle-class wages, which is what the Great Divergence is mostly about,
immigration has had no notable effect.
Further downward wage pressure, Conard opines, came when "baby boomers and
women flooded the workforce." But baby boomers are now well into middle and even
old age. Some of them are now retiring. Yet the inequality trend marches on.
Women's role is actually pretty murky. Although more women entered the workforce
in the 1980s, there had always been a lot of women who worked. The more notable
change was that women started getting better jobs, which should have resulted in
greater income equality. To be sure, some of these jobs might otherwise have
gone to men. But women didn't penetrate male-dominated Rust Belt industries very
far, and it was these industries' decline that proved especially devastating to
the middle class.
The most baffling and distressing aspect of the Great Divergence was the
decoupling of median income from increases in productivity. Why should we throw
money at the investment class, as Conard demands, if there's no benefit to the
middle class commensurate with the prosperity that results? During the past
decade median income has actually declined slightly while productivity has
increased briskly. How does that even happen?
Conard says the puzzle is simple to resolve. The U.S. employs a larger
proportion of its population than the European countries with which we are often
compared, unfavorably, with regard to income distribution. We employ
near-retirees, female part-time workers, young Latino immigrants, etc.
"Obviously this group has lower productivity than the average U.S. worker,"
Conard writes. It isn't so obvious to me. In my experience female part-time
workers are more productive than full-time workers, not less; most of the ones I
know end up doing as much work as their full-time counterparts in half the time
(and for half the pay). Near-retirees today are so robust that many people --
especially conservatives -- think we should raise the Social Security retirement
age. Granted, unschooled immigrants lack education, and therefore are limited in
the economic value they can contribute to the economy. But I wouldn't exactly
call them unproductive. They work like demons.
More to the point, the U.S. has always employed near-retirees, female
part-time workers, and at least some low-wage immigrants. Why would these "lower
productivity" workers drag wages down today when they didn't during the 1960s? A
much simpler and more logical explanation for why workers receive less economic
benefit from their productivity is that organized labor is on the ropes.
The decline of labor likely also helps explain the rise of the top 1 percent,
whose share of the nation's income has doubled during the Great Divergence.
Broadly speaking, the 1 percent can be thought of as Capital while the 99
percent can be thought of as Labor. Is the portion of Gross Domestic Product
going to labor smaller, relative to capital, than it used to be? Conard insists
not, citing some figures from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. I recognize
that there are differing ways to measure labor share versus capital share, but I
tend to believe studies (unmentioned in Conard's book) that say labor share has
declined. One of them, after all, was produced by the chief investment officer
at JP Morgan Chase, which has every reason to pretend otherwise. In a July 2011
newsletter for Morgan clients, Michael Cembalest wrote, "U.S. labor compensation
is now at a 50-year low relative to both company sales and U.S. GDP." From 2000
to 2007, Cembalest calculated, pretax profits for the Standard & Poor's 500
increased by 1.3 percent. Reductions in wages and benefits accounted for about
75 percent of that increase.
I could go on, but I won't. Conard is certainly right that a capitalist
economy needs some income inequality in order to function. Effort and skill must
be rewarded. The question is whether the U.S. needs to have so much more than it
used to have, and so much more than other advanced industrialized economies
have. Most especially we need to ask why income inequality must accelerate much
more rapidly in the U.S. than elsewhere. Conard doesn't want to face these
questions head-on, because he has a simpler brief. He wants America to reward
even more than it does now the brave souls who put capital at risk. Never mind
that at Bain Capital, Conard's former place of employment, capital was often
invested with no downside risk at all. If America can't prosper while the top 1
percent doubles its income share, you have to wonder whether the problem really
can be that these guys have too little cash to play with. I'm inclined to think
it's because they have too much.
This is the book I've been waiting for: a presentation of our divided country rooted in American historical perspective. We didn't get this way overnight. There are historical roots, and Dionne, a liberal journalist, is just the person to explain.
Did I miss
it, or does the author not explain the meaning of the title?
The book is
a magical mystery tour through the world of memory competition both US
competition and world competition. I had
no idea there was such a world. The
author enters and wins the US competition.
I understand
the mnemonic concept of the Memory Palace.
I can’t see myself utilizing such a technique. But then again, I have no desire to memorize
the Pelham phone book, a deck of cards in 90 seconds, or the first 10,000
digits of Pi.
One of the
refrains in the book is “anybody can do it.”
That is, anybody can master memory techniques to memorize huge mountains
of data. The question is: who wants to?
The possible
link between savants and people using mnemonic techniques is interesting. The human mind is capable of incredible
things, sure, whether because of genetics, brain damage, or learned techniques.
Cognitive
psychology, brain research, is all the rage these days and rightly so. Interesting stuff to be sure, but I don’t lie
awake at night thinking about the results of some memory research at Florida
State.
The old idea
that memory---the proper retention and ordering of knowledge---is a vital
instrument in the invention of new ideas is an provocative concept. P. 12
Yes, Baby
Boomers like me are always afraid of “losing their marbles.” P. 12
The book’s
history of memory and the importance of memory before printing is perhaps the
best part of the book for this history major.
I feel sorry
for S, the man who remembered too much.
Chapter Two
I can relate
to the idea that it is what we forget rather than remember that makes us
human. P. 37
The
“neuroplasticity” of the brain is much commented on these days. P. 38
The business
about chicken sexing is fascinating! The
way such expertise comes from experience is doubly fascinating. Chapter Three
The magical
number 7. P. 56
How chess
experts can look at the board quickly and make the correct move. It’s all in context, not in analysis. P. 65
Who we are
and what we do is largely a function of memory.
P. 66
Chapter
Four. The most forgetful man in the
world. What a sad story. How horrible it would be to be like this.
Once upon a
time every literate person had memory training---considered a centerpiece of
classical education on a par with logic, grammar, and rhetoric. Students were taught not just what to
remember but how to remember. Those were
the days! P. 95
The
difference between natural and artificial memory. P. 96
The loci
method. P. 97
Fast reading
vs. ruminating on what you’ve read. P.
110
The phrase
“in the first place” is a residue from the art of memory. P. 123
I enjoy the
discussion about Homer. Did Homer write
Homer? P. 125-129
Chapter
Seven. How we’ve externalized our
memories. Socrates disdained
writing. He was wrong. If someone had not written down what he said,
we today would not know what he said. P.
139
How
punctuation was invented. How
fascinating! P. 140-142
Reading is
an act of remembering? P. 143
Fascinating
discussion of the addition of TOCs and indexes. Less reason to remember
things. P. 144-145
The author
points out that we read quickly these days.
We value quantity over quality.
At least I do. P. 147-148
We read and
we read and we read and we forget what we read.
Yes, I am guilty. P. 148
I would hate
to record everything in my life like Gordon Bell. How awful!
P. 156
There is a
distinct “me” driving the bus. P. 161
Chapter
Eight: The OK Plateau. I understand and I understand the way to improve
is thru focused practice: deliberate practice which is very hard.
I take it
that students memorize less in school than they used to. The author traces this back to the influence
of Rousseau. P. 192
Then we go
thru William James and John Dewey. One
day I’ll read up on Dewey, that calcified old liberal. P. 192-194
Memory and
creativity are two sides of the same coin.
You need memory to be creative.
P. 202
“Memory is
how we transmit virtues and values, and partake of a shared culture. P. 208
The people
we admire have facts, anecdotes, quotes at their disposal. It enlivens their conversation. You can’t do this without remembering
things. P. 209
The
intertwining of senses of the little rainmen sounds non-appetizing to me. P. 216
I do not want to
be a savant. No little rainman in me!
No memory
competition for me. I just want to
remember names, faces, and things I’m supposed to remember in everyday life.
In the wake of a devastating financial crisis,
President Obama has enacted some modest and obviously needed regulation; he has
proposed closing a few outrageous tax loopholes; and he has suggested that Mitt
Romney’s history of buying and selling companies, often firing workers and
gutting their pensions along the way, doesn’t make him the right man to run
America’s economy.
Paul Krugman
Wall Street has responded — predictably, I suppose —
by whining and throwing temper tantrums. And it has, in a way, been funny to see
how childish and thin-skinned the Masters of the Universe turn out to be.
Remember when Stephen Schwarzman of the Blackstone Group compared a proposal to
limit his tax breaks to Hitler’s invasion of Poland? Remember when Jamie Dimon
of JPMorgan Chase characterized any discussion of income inequality as an attack
on the very notion of success?
But here’s the thing: If Wall Streeters are spoiled
brats, they are spoiled brats with immense power and wealth at their disposal.
And what they’re trying to do with that power and wealth right now is buy
themselves not just policies that serve their interests, but immunity from
criticism.
Actually, before I get to that, let me take a moment
to debunk a fairy tale that we’ve been hearing a lot from Wall Street and its
reliable defenders — a tale in which the incredible damage runaway finance
inflicted on the U.S. economy gets flushed down the memory hole, and financiers
instead become the heroes who saved America.
Once upon a time, this fairy tale tells us, America
was a land of lazy managers and slacker workers. Productivity languished, and
American industry was fading away in the face of foreign competition.
You can see why Wall Street likes this story. But none
of it — except the bit about the Gekkos and the Romneys making lots of money —
is true.
For the alleged productivity surge never actually
happened. In fact, overall business productivity in America grew faster in the
postwar generation, an era in which banks were tightly regulated and private
equity barely existed, than it has since our political system decided that greed
was good.
What about international competition? We now think of
America as a nation doomed to perpetual trade deficits, but it was not always
thus. From the 1950s through the 1970s, we generally had more or less balanced
trade, exporting about as much as we imported. The big trade deficits only
started in the Reagan years, that is, during the era of runaway finance.
And what about that trickle-down? It never took place.
There have been significant productivity gains these past three decades,
although not on the scale that Wall Street’s self-serving legend would have you
believe. However, only a small part of those gains got passed on to American
workers.
So, no, financial wheeling and dealing did not do
wonders for the American economy, and there are real questions about why,
exactly, the wheeler-dealers have made so much money while generating such
dubious results.
Those are, however, questions that the wheeler-dealers
don’t want asked — and not, I think, just because they want to defend their tax
breaks and other privileges. It’s also an ego thing. Vast wealth isn’t enough;
they want deference, too, and they’re doing their best to buy it. It has been
amazing to read about erstwhile Democrats on Wall Street going all in for Mitt
Romney, not because they believe that he has good policy ideas, but because
they’re taking President Obama’s very mild criticism of financial excesses as a
personal insult.
And it has been especially sad to see some Democratic
politicians with ties to Wall Street, like Newark’s mayor, Cory Booker,
dutifully rise to the defense of their friends’ surprisingly fragile egos.
As I said at the beginning, in a way Wall Street’s
self-centered, self-absorbed behavior has been kind of funny. But while this
behavior may be funny, it is also deeply immoral.
Think about where we are right now, in the fifth year
of a slump brought on by irresponsible bankers. The bankers themselves have been
bailed out, but the rest of the nation continues to suffer terribly, with
long-term unemployment still at levels not seen since the Great Depression, with
a whole cohort of young Americans graduating into an abysmal job market.
And in the midst of this national nightmare, all too
many members of the economic elite seem mainly concerned with the way the
president apparently hurt their feelings. That isn’t funny. It’s shameful.
Remember the furor over liberal political correctness? Yes, some of it was
over the top — but it was mainly silly, not something that actually warped our
national discussion.
Today, however, the big threat to our discourse is right-wing political
correctness, which — unlike the liberal version — has lots of power and money
behind it. And the goal is very much the kind of thing Orwell tried to convey
with his notion of Newspeak: to make it impossible to talk, and possibly even
think, about ideas that challenge the established order.
Thus, even talking about “the wealthy” brings angry denunciations; we’re
supposed to call them “job creators”. Even talking about inequality is “class
warfare”.
And then there’s the teaching of history. Eric Rauchway has a great
post about attacks on the history curriculum, in which even talking about
“immigration and ethnicity” or “environmental history” becomes part of a
left-wing conspiracy. As he says, he’ll name his new course “US History: The
Awesomeness of Awesome Americans.” That, after all, seems to be the only safe
kind of thing to say.
Actually, this reminds me of an essay I read a long time ago about Soviet
science fiction. The author — if anyone remembers where this came from — noted
that most science fiction is about one of two thoughts: “if only”, or “if this
goes on”. Both were subversive, from the Soviet point of view: the first implied
that things could be better, the second that there was something wrong with the
way things are. So stories had to be written about “if only this goes on”,
extolling the wonders of being wonderful Soviets.
CHECK OUT this fantastic vintage Tiger Theater photo from
1942! The billboard advertisement for The Major and the Minor (starring Ginger
Rogers and Ray Milland) got us wondering about YOUR favorite movie memories at
Auburn. Share, share share with us!
As if we didn't need further evidence of the decline of print in our culture, we get it today when we hear that our local paper, the Birmingham News, will publish only 3 times a week starting in the fall. Otherwise, the news will be digital. I am used to accessing my news online, but the decline of newspapers continues to depress me.
The latest developments in cosmology point toward the possibility
that our universe is merely one of billions
(Page 1 of 4)
“What really interests me is whether God had any choice in creating the
world.”
That’s how Albert Einstein, in his characteristically poetic way, asked
whether our universe is the only possible universe.
The reference to God is easily misread, as Einstein’s question wasn’t
theological. Instead, Einstein wanted to know whether the laws of physics
necessarily yield a unique universe—ours—filled with galaxies, stars, and
planets. Or instead, like each year’s assortment of new cars on the dealer’s
lot, could the laws allow for universes with a wide range of different features?
And if so, is the majestic reality we’ve come to know—through powerful
telescopes and mammoth particle colliders—the product of some random process, a
cosmic roll of the dice that selected our features from a menu of possibilities?
Or is there a deeper explanation for why things are the way they
are?
In Einstein’s day, the possibility that our universe could have turned out
differently was a mind-bender that physicists might have bandied about long
after the day’s more serious research was done. But recently, the question has
shifted from the outskirts of physics to the mainstream. And rather than merely
imagining that our universe might have had different properties, proponents of
three independent developments now suggest that there are other universes,
separate from ours, most made from different kinds of particles and governed by
different forces, populating an astoundingly vast cosmos.
The multiverse, as this vast cosmos is called, is one of the most polarizing
concepts to have emerged from physics in decades, inspiring heated arguments
between those who propose that it is the next phase in our understanding of
reality, and those who claim that it is utter nonsense, a travesty born of
theoreticians letting their imaginations run wild.
So which is it? And why should we care? Grasping the answer requires that we
first come to grips with the big bang.
In Search of the Bang
In 1915, Einstein published the most important of all his works, the general
theory of relativity, which was the culmination of a 10-year search to
understand the force of gravity. The theory was a marvel of mathematical beauty,
providing equations that could explain everything from the motion of planets to
the trajectory of starlight with stupendous accuracy.
Within a few short years, additional mathematical analyses concluded that
space itself is expanding, dragging each galaxy away from every other. Though
Einstein at first strongly resisted this startling implication of his own
theory, observations of deep space made by the great American astronomer Edwin
Hubble in 1929 confirmed it. And before long, scientists reasoned that if space
is now expanding, then at ever earlier times the universe must have been ever
smaller. At some moment in the distant past, everything we now see—the
ingredients responsible for every planet, every star, every galaxy, even space
itself—must have been compressed to an infinitesimal speck that then swelled
outward, evolving into the universe as we know it.
Direct evidence for the multiverse might come from a collision between our
expanding universe and its neighbors. (Mehau Kulyk / Photo Researchers,
Inc.)
The big-bang theory was born. During the decades that followed, the theory
would receive overwhelming observational support. Yet scientists were aware that
the big-bang theory suffered from a significant shortcoming. Of all things, it
leaves out the bang. Einstein’s equations do a wonderful job of describing how
the universe evolved from a split second after the bang, but the equations break
down (similar to the error message returned by a calculator when you try to
divide 1 by 0?) when applied to the extreme environment of the universe’s
earliest moment. The big bang thus provides no insight into what might have
powered the bang itself.
Fuel for the Fire
In the 1980s, physicist Alan Guth offered an enhanced version of the big-bang
theory, called inflationary cosmology, which promised to fill this critical gap.
The centerpiece of the proposal is a hypothetical cosmic fuel that, if
concentrated in a tiny region, would drive a brief but stupendous outward rush
of space—a bang, and a big one at that. In fact, mathematical calculations
showed that the burst would have been so intense that tiny jitters from the
quantum realm would have been stretched enormously and smeared clear across
space. Like overextended spandex showing the pattern of its weave, this would
yield a precise pattern of miniscule temperature variations, slightly hotter
spots and slightly colder spots dotting the night sky. In the early 1990s,
NASA’s Cosmic Microwave Background Explorer satellite first detected these
temperature variations, garnering Nobel Prizes for team leaders John Mather and
George Smoot.
Remarkably,
mathematical analysis also revealed—and here’s where the multiverse enters—that
as space expands the cosmic fuel replenishes itself, and so efficiently that it
is virtually impossible to use it all up. Which means that the big bang would
likely not be a unique event. Instead, the fuel would not only power the bang
giving rise to our expanding realm, but it would power countless other bangs,
too, each yielding its own separate, expanding universe. Our universe would then
be a single expanding bubble inhabiting a grand cosmic bubble bath of
universes—a multiverse.
It’s a striking prospect. If correct, it would provide the capstone on a long
series of cosmic reappraisals. We once thought our planet was the center of it
all, only to realize that we’re one of many planets orbiting the sun, only then
to learn that the sun, parked in a suburb of the Milky Way, is one of hundreds
of billions of stars in our galaxy, only then to find that the Milky Way is one
of hundreds of billions of galaxies inhabiting the universe. Now, inflationary
cosmology was suggesting that our universe, filled with those billions of
galaxies, stars, and planets, might merely be one of many occupying a vast
multiverse.
Yet, when the multiverse was proposed back in the 1980s by pioneers Andrei
Linde and Alexander Vilenkin, the community of physicists shrugged. The other
universes, even if they existed, would stand outside what we can observe—we only
have access to this universe. Apparently, then, they wouldn’t affect us and we
wouldn’t affect them. So what role could other universes possibly play in
science, a discipline devoted to explaining what we do see?
And that’s where things stood for about a decade, until an astounding
astronomical observation suggested an answer.
The Mystery of Dark Energy
Although the discovery that space is expanding was revolutionary, there was
one aspect of the expansion that most everyone took for granted. Just as the
pull of earth’s gravity slows the ascent of a ball tossed upward, the
gravitational pull of each galaxy on every other must be slowing the expansion
of space.
In the 1990s, two teams of astronomers set out to measure the rate of this
cosmic slowdown. Through years of painstaking observations of distant galaxies,
the teams collected data on how the expansion rate of space has changed over
time. And when they completed the analysis, they all nearly fell out of their
chairs. Both teams found that, far from slowing down, the expansion of space
went into overdrive about 7 billion years ago and has been speeding up ever
since. That’s like gently tossing a ball upward, having it slow down initially,
but then rocket upward ever more quickly.
The result sent scientists across the globe scurrying to explain the cosmic
speedup. What force could be driving every galaxy to rush away from every other
faster and faster? The most promising answer comes to us from an old idea of
Einstein’s. We’re all used to gravity being a force that does only one thing:
pull objects toward each other. But in Einstein’s general theory of relativity,
gravity can also do something else: it can push things apart. How? Well, the
gravity exerted by familiar objects like the moon, the earth, and the sun is
surely attractive. But Einstein’s equations show that if space contains
something else—not clumps of matter but an invisible energy, sort of like an
invisible mist that’s uniformly spread through space—then the gravity exerted by
the energy mist would be repulsive.
Which is just what we need to explain the observations. The repulsive gravity
of an invisible energy mist filling space—we now call it dark energy—would push
every galaxy away from every other, driving the expansion to speed up, not slow
down.
But there’s a hitch. When the astronomers deduced how much dark energy would
have to permeate every nook and cranny of space to account for the observed
cosmic speedup, they found a number that no one has been able to explain. Not
even close. Expressed in the relevant units, the dark-energy density is
extraordinarily small:
At the same time, attempts by researchers to calculate the amount of dark
energy from the laws of physics have yielded results that are typically a
hundred orders of magnitude larger, perhaps the greatest mismatch between
observation and theory in the history of science.
And that has led to some soul searching.
Physicists have long believed that with sufficient hard work,
experimentation, and industrious calculation, no detail about the fundamental
makeup of reality would lie beyond scientific explanation. Certainly, many
details still lack an explanation, such as the masses of particles like
electrons and quarks. Yet the expectation has been that in due course physicists
will find explanations.
The spectacular failure of attempts to explain the amount of dark energy has
raised questions about this confidence, driving some physicists to pursue a
radically different explanatory approach, one that suggests (once again) the
possible existence of a multiverse.
The Multiverse Solution
The new approach has scientific roots that stretch back to the early 1600s,
when the great astronomer Johannes Kepler was obsessed with understanding a
different number: the 93 million miles between the sun and the earth. Kepler
struggled for years to explain this distance but never succeeded, and from our
modern perch the reason is clear. We now know that there are a great many
planets, orbiting their host stars at a great many different distances,
demonstrating the fallacy in Kepler’s quest—the laws of physics do not single
out any particular distances as special. Instead, what distinguishes the
earth-sun distance is simply that it yields conditions hospitable to life: were
we much closer or farther from the sun, the extreme temperatures would prevent
our form of life from taking hold. So, although Kepler was on a wild goose chase
in seeking a fundamental explanation for the earth-sun distance, there is an
explanation for why we humans find ourselves at such a distance.
In seeking an explanation for the value of dark energy, maybe we’ve been
making a mistake analogous to Kepler’s. Our best cosmological theory—the
inflationary theory—naturally gives rise to other universes. Perhaps, then, just
as there are many planets orbiting stars at many different distances, maybe
there are many universes containing many different amounts of dark energy. If
so, asking the laws of physics to explain one particular value of dark energy
would be just as misguided as trying to explain one particular planetary
distance. Instead, the right question to ask would be: why do we humans find
ourselves in a universe with the particular amount of dark energy we’ve
measured, instead of any of the other possibilities?
This is a question we can address. In universes with larger amounts of dark
energy, whenever matter tries to clump into galaxies, the repulsive push of the
dark energy is so strong that the clump gets blown apart, thwarting galactic
formation. In universes whose dark-energy value is much smaller, the repulsive
push changes to an attractive pull, causing those universes to collapse back on
themselves so quickly that again galaxies wouldn’t form. And without galaxies,
there are no stars, no planets, and so in those universes there’s no chance for
our form of life to exist.
And so we find ourselves in this universe and not another for much the same
reason we find ourselves on earth and not on Neptune—we find ourselves where
conditions are ripe for our form of life. Even without being able to observe the
other universes, their existence would thus play a scientific role: the
multiverse offers a solution to the mystery of dark energy, rendering the
quantity we observe understandable.
Or so that’s what multiverse proponents contend.
Many others find this explanation unsatisfying, silly, even offensive,
asserting that science is meant to give definitive, precise, and quantitative
explanations, not “just so” stories.
But the essential counterpoint is that if the feature you’re trying to
explain can and does take on a wide variety of different mathematical values
across the landscape of reality, then seeking a definitive explanation for one
value is wrongheaded. Just as it makes no sense to ask for a definitive
prediction of the distance at which planets orbit their host stars, since there
are many possible distances, if we’re part of a multiverse it would make no
sense to ask for a definitive prediction of the value of dark energy, since
there would be many possible values.
The multiverse doesn’t change the scientific method or lower explanatory
standards. But it does ask us to reevaluate whether we’ve mistakenly posed the
wrong questions.
Hanging by Strings
Of course, for this approach to succeed, we must be sure that among the
multiverse’s many different dark-energy values is the very one we’ve measured.
And that’s where a third line of investigation, string theory, comes to the
fore.
String theory is an attempt to realize Einstein’s dream of a “unified theory”
capable of stitching all matter and forces into a single mathematical tapestry.
Initially formulated in the late 1960s, the theory envisions that deep inside
every fundamental particle is a tiny, vibrating, stringlike filament of energy.
And much as the different vibrational patterns of a violin string yield
different musical notes, so the different vibrational patterns of these tiny
strings would yield different kinds of particles.
Pioneers of the subject anticipated that string theory’s rigid mathematical
architecture would soon yield a single set of definitive, testable predictions.
But as the years passed, detailed analysis of the theory’s equations revealed
numerous solutions, each representing a different possible universe. And
numerous means numerous. Today, the tally of possible universes stands at
the almost incomprehensible 10500, a number so large it defies
analogy.
For some string-theory advocates, this stupendous failure to yield a unique
universe—ours—was a devastating blow. But to those advancing the multiverse,
string theory’s enormous diversity of possible universes has proven
vital.
Just as it takes a well-stocked shoe store to guarantee you’ll find your
size, only a well-stocked multiverse can guarantee that our universe, with its
peculiar amount of dark energy, will be represented. On its own, inflationary
cosmology falls short of the mark. While its never-ending series of big bangs
would yield an immense collection of universes, many would have similar
features, like a shoe store with stacks and stacks of sizes 5 and 13, but
nothing in the size you seek.
By combining inflationary cosmology and string theory, however, the stock
room of universes overflows: in the hands of inflation, string theory’s
enormously diverse collection of possible universes become actual universes,
brought to life by one big bang after another. Our universe is then virtually
guaranteed to be among them. And because of the special features necessary for
our form of life, that’s the universe we inhabit.
High-Risk Science
Years ago, Carl Sagan emphasized that extraordinary claims require
extraordinary evidence. So, can we gather evidence supporting a proposal that
invokes other universes?
Because the other universes would lie beyond what we can observe, it might
seem that the answer is no, placing the multiverse outside the bounds of
science. But that’s too quick. Evidence for a proposal can be amassed even when
some of its important features are inaccessible.
Take black holes. Scientists routinely use general relativity to speak with
confidence about what happens inside a black hole, even though nothing, not even
light, can escape a black hole’s interior, rendering such regions unobservable.
The justification is that once a theory makes a slew of accurate predictions
about things we can observe, as general relativity has, we justifiably gain
confidence in the theory’s predictions about things we can’t
observe.
Similarly, if a proposal that invokes the multiverse gains our confidence by
making correct predictions about things we do have access to, things in our
universe, then our confidence in its prediction of other universes, realms we
don’t have access to, would rightly grow too.
As of today, we are far from crossing this threshold. Inflationary cosmology
makes accurate predictions about microwave background radiation; dark energy
accurately explains accelerated expansion. But string theory remains
hypothetical, largely because its primary distinguishing features become
manifest at scales billions of times smaller than we can probe even with today’s
most powerful accelerators.
More direct evidence for the multiverse might come from potential collisions
between our expanding universe and its neighbors. Such a cosmic fender bender
would generate an additional pattern of temperature variations in the microwave
background radiation that sophisticated telescopes might one day detect. Many
consider this the most promising possibility for finding evidence in support of
the multiverse.
That there are ways, long shots to be sure, to test the multiverse proposal
reflects its origin in careful mathematical analysis. Nevertheless, because the
proposal is unquestionably tentative, we must approach it with healthy
skepticism and invoke its explanatory framework judiciously.
Imagine that when the apple fell on Newton’s head, he wasn’t inspired to
develop the law of gravity, but instead reasoned that some apples fall down,
others fall up, and we observe the downward variety simply because the upward
ones have long since departed for outer space. The example is facetious but the
point serious: used indiscriminately, the multiverse can be a cop-out that
diverts scientists from seeking deeper explanations. On the other hand, failure
to consider the multiverse can place scientists on a Keplerian treadmill in
which they furiously chase answers to unanswerable questions.
Which is all just to say that the multiverse falls squarely in the domain of
high-risk science. There are numerous developments that could weaken the
motivation for considering it, from scientists finally calculating the correct
dark-energy value, or confirming a version of inflationary cosmology that only
yields a single universe, or discovering that string theory no longer supports a
cornucopia of possible universes. And so on.
But as with all rational bets, high risk comes with the potential for high
reward. During the past five centuries we’ve used the power of observation and
mathematical calculation to shatter misconceptions. From a quaint, small,
earth-centered universe to one filled with billions of galaxies, the journey has
been both thrilling and humbling. We’ve been compelled to relinquish sacred
belief in our own centrality, but with such cosmic demotion we’ve demonstrated
the capacity of the human intellect to reach far beyond the confines of ordinary
experience to reveal extraordinary truth. The multiverse proposal might be
wrong. But it might also be the next step in this journey, unveiling a
breathtaking panorama of universes populating a vast cosmic landscape. For some
scientists, including me, that possibility makes the risk well worth
taking.
Brian Greene is a professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia
University, and co-founder of The World Science Festival. His most recent book,
The Hidden Reality, explores the multiverse.
Ronald Reagan, Strom Thurmond, and other civil rights
heroes. Not pictured: black people.
The civil rights movement, once a controversial
left-wing fringe, has grown deeply embedded into the fabric of our national
story. This is a salutary development, but a problematic one for conservatives,
who are the direct political descendants of (and, in the case of some of the
older members of the movement, the exact same people as) the strident opponents
of the civil rights movement. It has thus become necessary for conservatives to
craft an alternative story, one that absolves their own ideology of any guilt.
The right has dutifully set itself to its task, circulating its convoluted
version of history, honing it to the point where it can be repeated by any
defensive College Republican in his dorm room. Kevin Williamson’s cover
story in National Review is the latest version of what is rapidly
congealing into conservatism’s revisionist dogma.
The mainstream, and correct, history of the politics of civil rights is as
follows. Southern white supremacy operated out of the Democratic Party beginning
in the nineteenth century, but the party began attracting northern liberals,
including African-Americans, into an ideologically cumbersome coalition. Over
time the liberals prevailed, forcing the Democratic Party to support civil
rights, and driving conservative (and especially southern) whites out, where
they realigned with the Republican Party.
Williamson crafts a tale in which the Republican Party is and always has been
the greatest friend the civil rights cause ever had. The Republican takeover of
the white South had absolutely nothing to do with civil rights, the revisionist
case proclaims, except insofar as white Southerners supported Republicans
because they were more pro-civil rights.
One factoid undergirding this bizarre interpretation is that the partisan
realignment obviously took a long time to complete — Southerners still
frequently voted Democratic into the seventies and eighties. This proves,
according to Williamson, that a backlash against civil rights could not have
driven southern whites out of the Democratic Party. “They say things move slower
in the South — but not that slow,” he insists.
His story completely ignores the explicit
revolt by conservative Southerners against the northern liberal civil rights
wing, beginning with Strom Thurmond, who formed a third-party campaign in 1948
in protest against Harry Truman’s support for civil rights. Thurmond received 49
percent of the vote in Louisiana, 72 percent in South Carolina, 80 percent in
Alabama, and 87 percent in Mississippi. He later, of course, switched to the
Republican Party.
Thurmond’s candidacy is instructive. Democratic voting was deeply
acculturated among southern whites as a result of the Civil War. When southern
whites began to shake loose of it, they began at the presidential level, in
protest against the civil rights leanings of the national wing. It took decades
for the transformation to filter down, first to Congressional-level
representation (Thurmond, who Williamson mentions only in his capacity as a
loyal Democrat, finally switched to the GOP in 1964), and ultimately to
local-level government. The most fervently white supremacist portions of the
South were also the slowest to shed their Confederate-rooted one-party
traditions. None of this slowness actually proves Williamson’s contention that
the decline of the Democratic Party in the South was unrelated to
race.
Williamson concedes, with inadvertently hilarious
understatement, that the party “went through a long dry spell on civil-rights
progress” — that would be the century that passed between Reconstruction and
President Eisenhower’s minimalist response to massive resistance in 1957. But
after this wee dry spell, the party resumed and maintained its natural place as
civil rights champion. To the extent that Republicans replaced Democrats in the
South, Williamson sees their support for civil rights as the cause.
(“Republicans did begin to win some southern House seats, and in many cases
segregationist Democrats were thrown out by southern voters in favor of
civil-rights Republicans.”) As his one data point, Williamson cites the victory
of George Bush in Texas over a Democrat who opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
He correctly cites Bush’s previous record of moderation on civil rights but
neglects to mention that Bush also
opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
Williamson does feel obliged to mention Barry Goldwater’s opposition to the
1964 Civil Rights Act, but defends it as a “principled” opposition to the
“extension of federal power.” At the same time, he savages southern Democrats
for their opposition to the 14th and 15th Amendments, Reconstruction,
anti-lynching laws, and so on. It does not seem to occur to him that many of
these opponents also presented their case in exactly the same pro-states'
rights, anti-federal power terms that Goldwater employed. Williamson is willing
to concede that opponents of civil rights laws have philosophical principles
behind them, but only if they are Republican. (Perhaps is the process by which
figures like Thurmond and Jesse Helms were cleansed of their racism and became
mere ideological opponents of federal intrusion.)
To the extent that the spirit of the all-white, pro-states' rights, rigidly
“Constitutionalist” southern Democrats exists at all today, Williamson locates
it not in the nearly all-white, pro-states' rights, rigidly “Constitutionalist”
southern Republicans, but rather in the current Democratic Party. This is
possibly the most mind-boggling claim in Williamson’s essay:
Democrats who argue that the best policies for black Americans are those that
are soft on crime and generous with welfare are engaged in much the same sort of
cynical racial calculation President Johnson was practicing when he informed
skeptical southern governors that his plan for the Great Society was “to have
them niggers voting Democratic for the next two hundred years.” Johnson’s crude
racism is, happily, largely a relic of the past, but his strategy
endures.
The strategy of crude Democratic racism endures! That this strategy has
sucked in more than 90 percent of the black electorate, and is currently being
executed at the highest level by Barack Obama (who — at this point, it may be
necessary to inform Williamson — is black) suggests a mind-blowing level
of false consciousness at work among the African-American community.
Williamson does stumble on to one interesting vein
of history, but completely misses its import. In the course of dismissing
Goldwater’s 1964 opposition to the Civil Rights Act, he notes that the
Republican Party declined to fully follow his lead. The party platform, he
notes, called for “full implementation and faithful execution of the Civil
Rights Act of 1964.” He does not mention that this language came after party
conservatives rejected amendments with stronger language endorsing “enforcement”
of the civil rights law and describing the protection of the right to vote as a
“constitutional responsibility.” (A bit of this story can be found in Ben
Wallace-Wells’s fantastic piece on
George Romney in the current print issue, and more in Geoffrey Kabaservice’s
“Rule
and Ruin.”)
It is true that most Republicans in 1964 held vastly more liberal positions
on civil rights than Goldwater. This strikes Williamson as proof of the
idiosyncratic and isolated quality of Goldwater’s civil rights stance. What it
actually shows is that conservatives had not yet gained control of the
Republican Party.
But conservative Republicans — those represented
politically by Goldwater, and intellectually by William F. Buckley and
National Review — did oppose the civil rights movement. Buckley wrote
frankly about his endorsement of white supremacy: “the White community in
the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail,
politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate
numerically.” More often conservatives argued on grounds of states’ rights, or
freedom of property, or that civil rights leaders were annoying hypocrites, or
that they had undermined respect for the law.
Rick
Perlstein surveyed the consistent hostility of contemporary conservatives to
the civil rights movement. Ronald Reagan, like many conservatives, attributed
urban riots to the breakdown in respect for authority instigated by the civil
rights movement’s embrace of civil disobedience (a “great tragedy that began
when we began compromising with law and order, and people started choosing which
laws they'd break, thundered Reagan”). Buckley sneered at the double standard of
liberal Democrats — in 1965, he complained, Vice-President Hubert Humphrey
attended the funeral of a white woman shot by the Klan for riding in a car with
a black man, but did not attend the funeral of a white cop shot by a black man.
The right seethed with indignation at white northern liberals, decrying the fate
of their black allies while ignoring the assaults mounted by blacks against
whites.
And of course this sentiment — exactly this
sentiment — right now constitutes the major way in which conservatives talk
about race. McKay
Coppins has a fine story about how conservative media has been reporting
since 2009 on an imagined race war, a state of affairs in which blacks routinely
assault whites, which is allegedly being covered up by authorities in the
government and media. “In Obama's America, the white kids now get beat up with
the black kids cheering,” said Rush Limbaugh in 2009.
We should not equate this particular line of
hysteria with Buckley-esque defenses of white supremacy, or even with
Goldwater-esque concern for states’ rights. The situation is obviously far more
different than it is similar. Conservatives are not attacking measures to stop
lynching or defending formal legal segregation. The racial paranoia of a Rush
Limbaugh or an Andrew Breitbart – Williamson defendsboth
– is far less violent or dangerous than the white racial paranoia of previous
generations. That undeniable progress seems to be more tenable ground for
Williamson to mount his defense of conservatism and race. Conservatives ought to
just try arguing that, while conservatives were wrong to perceive themselves as
victims of overweening government and racial double-standards before the civil
rights movement triumphed, they are right to do so now.
They need to try something different, anyway.
The pseudo-historical
attempt to attach conservatism to the civil rights movement is just silly.
Here's another idea: Why not get behind the next civil rights idea (gay
marriage) now? It would save future generations of conservative apparatchiks
from writing tendentious essays insisting the Republican Party was always for
it.
I continue reading the book between innings at the Auburn-Florida game. These memory competitors are like idiot savants. There is no way I would ever want to get into that kind of competition. These people have too much time on their hands. What freaks.
This is my kind of book: a popular treatment of the subject of memory written by a journalist citing both research and talking about his personal experience. As a perpetual undergraduate with broad intellectual interests, this is right up my alley.
The trouble with liberals, Robert Kennedy complained
in 1964, was that they were “in love with death” — they romanticized failure,
finding greater nobility in losing the whole loaf than in winning half of it. In
the years since then, liberals have not only lost a lot of loaves but have
acquired a mess of other troubles, among them the difficulty of getting anyone
to admit to being a liberal. To wear the label today seems an act of defiance,
much as members of the gay rights community have appropriated, from their
antagonists, the epithet “queer.” Liberalism — for decades (centuries, even) the
prevailing philosophy in American political life — has become the creed that
dare not speak its name, except late at night on MSNBC.
Illustration by Oliver Munday
THE CAUSE
The Fight for American Liberalism From Franklin Roosevelt to
Barack Obama
By Eric Alterman and Kevin Mattson
561 pp. Viking.
$32.95.
Enter Eric Alterman, defiant to the last. In 2008,
this columnist and media critic published a handbook called “Why We’re
Liberals,” a crisply written and emphatically argued retort to the Coulters,
Hannitys and others for whom liberalism is a strain of fascism, totalitarianism,
socialism and overmothering (why choose?). Alterman’s new book, “The Cause,”
written with an assist from the historian Kevin Mattson, is something of a
companion volume: a history of liberalism from Franklin Roosevelt to the
present. (Mattson’s role is a bit ambiguous; in the book’s acknowledgments,
Alterman credits him with providing “raw material.”)
Much of this unfolds, in “The Cause,” by inference, or
as interstitial material between character sketches. This is less a book about
liberalism than it is a book about liberals — stretch limousines full of them,
fleet after fleet. Liberalism, Alterman suggests, is a movement of “many
different faces,” and his book, at times, appears intent on showing them all:
faces of intellectuals, faces of politicians, faces of protesters and
filmmakers, philosophers and diplomats.
There is an indiscriminate quality to Alterman’s
attentions, which too often seem to reflect his personal passions rather than a
careful weighing of a figure’s historical significance. Thus Oliver Stone gets
just as much ink as Walter Reuther, a towering figure in the history of
organized labor; Bruce Springsteen, about whom Alterman has written a previous
book, receives more airtime than Hubert Humphrey and Thurgood Marshall combined.
(Bob Dylan, meanwhile, merits only passing mentions.) Alterman’s choices can be
interesting and even brave; one has to admire his willingness to include
intellectuals like Lionel Trilling and Richard Rorty in a work of popular
history. But in such a crowded field, their relative influence — and anyone
else’s — becomes impossible to assess.
The net effect is that of a Pointillist painting,
though when you step back from the canvas and squint a little, the dots fail to
cohere into a discernible image. As “The Cause” smash-cuts from Henry Wallace to
Richard Hofstadter and from Gloria Steinem to Gary Hart, Alterman pauses all too
infrequently to reflect on the “cause” — or causes, or ideals — that connects
them. This, to be fair, is a challenge, one compounded by liberal schisms and by
the nebulousness of much liberal thought; Trilling, as Alterman notes, described
liberalism as “a large tendency rather than a concise body of doctrine.”
Liberals, quite unlike leftist radicals or conservative ideologues, tend to
reject dogma and theory in favor of “bold, persistent experimentation,” as
Roosevelt called it, or, put another way, pragmatism grounded in enduring, yet
evolving, values. It is hard to dissect a gestalt.
Still, that is the historian’s role, and other books —
most notably, in recent years, by Alan Brinkley and Paul Starr — have brought
sharpness to the picture that “The Cause” renders blurry. Despite its author’s
best intentions, “The Cause” makes it harder, not easier, to understand how
liberals ever mustered the intellectual clarity or collective resolve not only
to govern but to achieve what they manifestly did during their long reign at the
vital center of our national life — or even, in a more qualified way, during the
two decades since Bill Clinton promised to “put people first.”
As “The Cause” proceeds toward the present day,
Alterman reveals a revanchist streak. Urging liberals to “recapture” Roosevelt’s
“militant and optimistic spirit,” he casts a cold eye on virtually every effort,
over the past 30 years, to do just that. The intimation of “The Cause” — of both
its title and its tone — is that there really is a true faith against which
subsequent vintages of liberalism must be judged (and found wanting).
“Neoliberals” like Gary Hart are dismissed as callow and cold; “New Democrats”
of the late 1980s are overly in thrall to their corporate donors; and Michael
Dukakis, poor Michael Dukakis, is not merely a loser but “no liberal at all —
just a sign of the desperate times into which American liberalism had fallen in
its apparently endless quest for solid political ground.” As for Clinton, Jimmy
Carter and Barack Obama, the Democrats who have been elected president since
Johnson, “The Cause” flays all three for yielding to “political pressures” and
becoming “far more conservative” as president than as presidential candidates.
Each of these points is arguable in its own right. But
taken together, they reflect a contempt for compromise. Without proposing an
alternative path, Alterman leaves liberals in a familiar dead end. This,
regrettably, is the sort of peremptory judgment that holds liberalism back (just
as the conservative equivalent, with its fixation on Reagan-era doctrines and
its incantation of old pieties, binds the Republican Party in a kind of
intellectual aspic).
“The work goes on, the cause endures,” said Robert
Kennedy’s brother Edward — one of the heroes of this book — in his stirring
speech at the 1980 Democratic National Convention. But if it really is to
endure, then the means of advancing it will surely have to evolve, taking full
account of unpleasant realities: the scale of the debt; the depth of public
suspicion not just of government but of most institutions; courts that have
grown hostile to claims of civil rights and assertions of governmental power;
and the tenuousness of our commitment to the common good. The work, indeed, goes
on.
Jeff Shesol, the author of “Supreme Power: Franklin Roosevelt vs. the
Supreme Court,” was a speechwriter for President Bill Clinton.
