1.
Glosses on Adolescence and Punching the World.

Firstly, Maite Aurrekoetxea Casaus considers the worrying link between two dangerous trends. The rise of the extreme right, particularly among young voters (who we tend to associate with progressive ideas), reflects a structural crisis in our societies. So it's not just disaffected older people who are moving right. It's also young people who see their future as blocked, and look for immediate explanations and simple solutions.

Often these movements ally themselves with antifeminism. The radical right presents feminism as an unnecessary and harmful ideology, and these ideas play well among those young people who are experiencing vulnerability and uncertainty. Gender emerges as key. Surveys in Spain in 2023, for example, showed that 51 per cent of young men aged 15-29 think that "feminism has gone too far"...

A raft of social and economic factors has led to the erosion of the "masculine provider" role, and masculinist discourse offers an easy answer, with nostalgia and resentment proving to be more effective drivers than justice. Such sentiments are easily exploited by the right, with its seductively simple message. Faced with an uncertain world, it proposes returning to a known hierarchy, part of which involves men dominating, and women adapting. The right is also great at emotive language. "The solution," says the author, "lies in reconstructing discourses that revalidate equality as a collective good, defuse hatred as a form of identification, and propose open, diverse, and democratic models of masculinity." Shouldn't be too difficult, then...


Lisbon

Secondly, Agnese Sampietro has this to say about deciphering the kinds of emojis that scared us all in Adolescence:

A. There's a difference between denotation (the literal meaning of a word) and connotation (the associated meaning, which varies according to the context). A purple heart in Adolescence, for example, means sexual desire; in other parts of the world it indicates support for "8M", 8 March, aka International Women's Day...

B. Emojis are a kind of jargon, delimiting the frontiers of a given group, but "far from being a novelty of the digital age, this use of emojis is reminiscent of criminal slang or the secret languages ​​that develop among members of a group in order to deliberately exclude the rest of society".

Policing the emojis used by adolescents, or anyone else for that matter, is unlikely to prove a useful solution: "Emojis are an example of the enormous creativity we display when it comes to communicating. If Adolescence has achieved anything, it's that many of us now take them more seriously."


Bengkulu. Non-verbal communication sometimes ends up being mysterious

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2. What actually is the "white working class"?

Recent forays into "working class literature" meant I pricked up my ears when this 2018 article by Andrew J. Perrin came up again in the Public Books newsletter.

Perrin reviews a number of books that attempt to analyse the so-called "white working class" (WWC) that was so valorized as the underdog at Trump rallies (he's talking about Trump I, of course, but the observation still applies). The problem, he argues, is there's just NOT "a single WWC culture and character, monolithic and unchanging". Discourses that say there is tend to "miss the diversity within the WWC and reinforce the myth that the WWC is more authentically American than the rest of the country". And, of course, such discourses are politically motivated, and exploitatively mobilized: "The WWC was made, not found; deployed, not discovered."

It's the old essentialist-versus-constructivist argument. And I always come down on the side of the constructivists, because what they say grasps what happens in life so much more convincingly. As Perrin points out, most people, of whatever class, hold contradictory interpretations of the world around them, composed of "fragments of experience, knowledge, and understanding", which they then draw on to assess and respond to whatever life throws at them: "Which of these fragments they piece together into an expression, an idea, a vote is not about static authenticity. It’s about context, politics, threat, emotion, opportunity, connection, education. Grasping the WWC’s role in American politics doesn’t mean fetishizing their inner character; it means understanding what fragments are available to them and how new contexts, new campaigns, new environments lead them to piece them together into new, varied, and different stories." If we buy into the prevailing WWC narrative, then all the rest of us have to do is compromise. If we understand the WWC as "dynamic, flexible, and responsive", then at least there's room for engagement.


Taroko Gorge. Only workers allowed here...

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3.
Writers condemn Israeli action in Gaza.

"Three hundred and eighty writers and organisations ... have signed a letter stating that the Israeli government’s war in Gaza is genocidal and calling for an immediate ceasefire... It opens with a poem, titled A Star Said Yesterday, by the Palestinian poet Hiba Abu Nada, who was killed by an Israeli airstrike in October 2023... The letter goes on to say that Palestinians 'are not the abstract victims of an abstract war. Too often, words have been used to justify the unjustifiable, deny the undeniable, defend the indefensible. Too often, too, the right words -- the ones that mattered -- have been eradicated, along with those who might have written them... Just as it is true to call the atrocities committed by Hamas against innocent civilians on 7 October 2023 crimes of war and crimes against humanity, so today it is true to name the attack on the people of Gaza an atrocity of genocide.'"

The definition of genocide is notoriously slippery, but it's hard to judge what's happening in Gaza any differently.

Signatories to the letter include many writers who have featured on The Velvet Cushion in recent years: Zadie Smith, Ian McEwan, William Dalrymple, Jeanette Winterson, Elif Shafak, Kapka Kassabova, and Andrew O'Hagan.

Cynics will say such initiatives are pointless. And yes, nobody's words, on their own, are enough, as Crisis Group points out, to confront the facts on the ground: "Some 600 days into Israel’s military campaign, launched after the 7 October 2023 attack by Hamas, at least 54,000 Palestinians and 1,600 Israelis are dead, and the Palestinian enclave is in ruins. Since March, when its latest offensive began, Israel has pushed Gaza’s 2.2 million people to the brink of starvation and now started compacting them at gunpoint into barely a fifth of the strip’s already crowded area... Since Israel broke the ceasefire in March, its relentless offensive has killed 4,000 Palestinians and displaced 600,000."

But if you have made any kind of name for yourself, I can understand that you want to SPEAK OUT. Words are always a good beginning.


Bologna
"I am what they tell me not to say, not to dream, not to think, not to dare, not to take. I am what they tell me not to be"

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4.
More about Hannah Arendt.

This woman is everywhere... She died almost 50 years ago, and yet her work seems to clang around our current era like a fire alarm.

As a rider to my recent reading of We Are Free To Change the World, by Lyndsey Stonebridge, I read an essay by John Plotz, which came out last month. The subtitle is Hannah Arendt's Antidote to Anticipatory Despair, and he focuses on her reaction to The Pentagon Papers. Published in The New York Revew of Books in 1971, her essay is entitled Lying in Politics (that's "lying" as in telling lies, not "lying" as in lounging, a la Jacob Rees-Mogg).

Plotz's concern is contemporary, not historical. He begins: "Arendt’s account of what went wrong with US foreign policy in the Vietnam era is germane today for what it reveals about the ultimately brittle nature of autocratic power structures. By her telling, those who want to lead a democratic country over the brink into authoritarian tactics begin by intending to deceive others, succumb to self-deception, and fall eventually into the atmosphere of 'defactualization.' Trump’s 'power lie' [Masha Gessen's expression] is only a single item in the Trumpian food pyramid of lies, bluster, bullshit, and bluff. If we are ready to start disassembling it, Gessen is not enough: Arendt is the guide we need..."

Arendt observes a process of "deception, self-deception, image-making, ideologizing, and defactualization". And Plotz argues: "Four months in, the new Trump administration is already moving from self-deception and deception on to 'image making' and 'ideologizing'; it is fast approaching complete 'defactualization.'"

The game is not over yet, though. At the moment, says Plotz, it's still attempted rather than completed defactualization. And completion is always hard to pull off in a world of contingencies: "The move to declare that we are already deeply enmired in an autocracy is much less useful than what Arendt provides: a diagnosis of how defactualization can rise and an account of its innate instability that points out the virtues of keeping a firm eye on reality and steadily working to deny the lie."

Plotz warns against "anticipatory despair", which assumes "we have already fallen into a far deeper pit than has yet been dug". Rather, we need to "laugh and resist". Arendt's analysis of the fundamental weakness of a government that's detached from reality "offers the road map that will let us skirt the crumbling edge of the pit they have dug for themselves and whomever else they can drag in".


Kyoto

Spurred on by this, I read Lying in Politics. for myself. It's a great addendum to the material I used to teach on the Viet Nam war (or American war, as the Vietnamese style it). And reading, by the way, the full context of the title of Stonebridge's book -- "we are FREE to change the world and to start something new in it" -- made me see it differently (although I still don't feel equipped to engineer such change). Lying, Arendt argues, becomes possible through imagination. That is, we can imagine something different from what we see. The capacity to say that the sun is shining, when actually it's raining, shows that "while we are well equipped for the world, sensually as well as mentally, we are not fitted to it as one of its inalienable parts". And so, "we are FREE to change the world and start something new in it..."

What follows is a ruthless summary of the web of deceit that went into the bloody prolongation of the Viet Nam war ("an unbelievable example of using excessive means to achieve minor aims in a region of marginal interest [to the US]"...; a case where "we are confronted, in addition to falsehoods and confusion, with a truly amazing and entirely honest ignorance of the historically pertinent background"...; "the willful, deliberate disregard of all facts historical, political, geographical, for more than twenty-five years"...).

And she takes some more general swipes at the "problem-solvers", who were "eager to discover laws by which to explain and predict political and historical facts as though they were as necessary, and thus as reliable, as the physicists once believed natural phenomena to be". In my domain of IR we knew these folks as the positivists, and those in my camp always distrusted them. For Arendt, they are people "who lost their minds because they trusted the calculating powers of their brains at the expense of the mind's capacity for experience and its ability to learn from it".

The essay also has some quotable quotes:

-- "Oddly enough, the only person likely to be an ideal victim of complete manipulation is the President of the United States."
-- "Image making as global policy -- not world conquest but victory in the battle 'to win the people's minds' -- is indeed something new in the huge arsenal of human follies recorded in history."
-- "Even great power is LIMTED power. Behind the constantly repeated cliche of the 'mightiest power on earth,' there lurked the dangerous myth of omnipotence."
-- "So long as the press is free and not corrupt, it has an enormously important function to fulfill and can rightly be called the fourth branch of government."


Bau. Some prefer darkness

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5.
Three cheers for empathy...

What Arendt's work says about empathy is quite subtle. She is driven by the need to understand, and understanding means figuring out what's going on inside other people. But this isn't a mushy kind of thing... Stonebridge says in an interview: "I don’t want you to empathize, [Arendt] says because she’s quite hard-nosed. All she actually means is, I want you to think what the world looks like from the perspective of another. So that you’re not necessarily gathering them into your world. You’re actually imagining what the world looks like from their perspective. It’s an endeavor which sometimes she’s very successful at, and sometimes she fails." In her book, Stonebridge puts it like this: "[Arendt] wanted [her students] to see what separates human experience as well as what we have in common, what is different as well as what is the same... It was Kant's 'enlarged mentality' that Hannah Arendt was bringing with her... The ability to represent the experience of others in one's mind -- even though we have not actually perceived that experience for ourselves."

That leaves us reaching out imaginatively, without any of the potentially soppy overtones of the word empathy.


Newark. Not so empathetic...

The reason I bring this up is twofold. First, there's Katharine Viner's very interesting interview with former New Zealand Prime Minister, which is entitled: "Empathy is a Kind of Strength": Jacinda Ardern on Kind Leadership, Public Rage and Life in Trump's America. It was partly the way Ardern demonstrated empathy, I think, that made her such a heroine to many of my students.

From the article:

"The 'politics of empathy' might not be in vogue, but Ardern remains committed to it. Is it a strong enough weapon against authoritarianism? Elon Musk recently said that 'the fundamental weakness of western civilisation is empathy'. She snorts. 'What does that even mean?'

"Attacking empathy is all the rage with the right, I point out, especially in the US. There are popular books called Against Empathy and The Sin of Empathy. 'Well, in that environment, saying loudly and proudly that you believe in empathy and that you'll govern in that way is an act of strength.'"

Which sounds good. Is good. But the Viner interview reveals just how vitriolically some in her own country reacted against Ardern, and it's still true that she's more highly regarded overseas than she is in New Zealand. The interview was occasioned by the publication of Ardern's memoir, A Different Kind of Power, and this review by Grant Duncan does a good job of explaining the diverging judgments.


Miyajima. Politics is a bit like this...

She may have got things wrong (I was outside NZ all through her tenure, so I have no personal experience of it), but I'd still prefer her kind of politics to most of what's on offer today. There's another bit of the interview that's worth quoting at length. Ardern opens:

"'Political leaders in those moments of deep economic insecurity have two options. One is to acknowledge the environment that they’re in. We’re in a globalised world. We’re in an interconnected world. And we’re in a world of technological disruption. We need a policy prescription that acknowledges all of that. And those are often hard solutions. Hard, difficult to communicate, difficult to implement. But that’s what you’ve got to do. Or...'

"She pauses. 'You choose blame. Blame the other, blame the migrant, blame other countries, blame multilateral institutions, blame. But it does not fundamentally solve it. In fact, all that happens at the end is you have an othered group, and people who feel dissatisfied and angry and more entrenched.'

"Would she call Trump’s America fascism yet?

"There is a very long pause -- when I listen back to the tape I time it to 11 seconds. 'I’m just trying to think about where that takes us,' says Ardern, eventually. 'I think probably in my mind, certainly what we’re seeing isn’t anything I’ve ever experienced in my lifetime.'"

Me, I'm for empathy. Not sloppy empathy, but the attempt to get your head around how other people feel (including other people you violently disagree with -- although it's tough because often the people I violently disagree with violently disagree with empathy...).

And what's a really good way to put ourselves in others' shoes? Reading, says Lorena González Ruiz... Books help us step outside what is familiar, and understand complex emotions -- so long as we take care to open ourselves up to different voices.


Calvi