Posts Tagged ‘Napoleon’
“Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought… Each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override.”*…
Stephen Colbert once observed that “reality has a well-known liberal bias.” And indeed, liberalism— the political/moral philosophy rooted in individual liberty, consent of the governed, and equality before the law– has been a major ideology through modern times… and, of course, the major ideology animating the founding of the United States.
But as Easten European states turn to authoritarians, Western European nations wrestle with the rise of nationalist far-right parties, and the U.S. is “steered” by MAGA using Project 2025‘s “map,” there’s a concern that liberalism’s days may be past.
Persuasion is running a series of essays on “Liberal Virtues and Values.”
The series, made possible with the generous support of the John Templeton Foundation, will make the case that liberalism has its own distinctive set of virtues and values that are capable not only of responding to the dissatisfaction that drives authoritarianism, but also of restoring faith in liberalism as an ideology worth believing in—and defending—on its own terms.
The latest installment is from Martin Gurri, who argues that Liberalism needs a new foundation (and that how we handle AI will matter fundamentally)…
That liberal democracy is in a state of terminal decline I take to be beyond dispute. Like Alice in the rabbit hole, those of us who dwell in democratic societies suffer from a nauseating sense of falling without ever landing on solid ground. The usual suspects blamed for this tumble—populism, inequality, the economy—are mere surface symptoms of an internal breakdown. We have arrived at the conclusion of a world-historical cycle. Liberal democracy is the procedural embodiment of Enlightenment ideology—and after two centuries of dominance, that ideology has lost all purchase and stands utterly exhausted.
Radical alternatives confront us. Either we reorient our system to post-Enlightenment principles or we risk staggering into the nihilist’s paradise I have called the Endarkenment.
Enlightenment philosophers placed their faith in reason and science. These are purely critical disciplines: liberal propagandists wielded criticism like a scalpel to dissect conservative laggards and utopian revolutionaries alike. Once triumphant at the “end of history,” liberal democracy turned the knife on itself—a process of self-criticism and self-doubt that has shredded its own ideals to ribbons.
The positive values inherited from the Enlightenment—equality, individualism, compassion—were always parasitic on Christianity. But Christianity, like all religions, has no place in a universe ruled by reason and science. Nietzsche long ago brought us the troubling news: the Christian God is dead. Oblivious to the implications of this calamity, liberal democracy kept marching like a cartoon character over the edge of the abyss, until the laws of moral gravity asserted themselves. So began the Great Fall.
Criticism is a force for progress so long as there are blatant irrationalities, like slavery or Jim Crow discrimination, to overcome. But under the hammer of Enlightenment ideals, modern society has been flattened, centralized, and rationalized. Deprived of obvious superstitions to debunk and totalitarian rivals to defeat, liberal democracy has been revealed in all its internal contradictions.
One such contradiction, I contend, pits the cherished principle of equality against the chosen few who actually practice reason and science: let’s call this the problem of the elites.
A second contradiction finds freedom of the press and of opinion arrayed against the need to protect objective truth: call it the problem of information.
Finally, freedom of worship and the life of the spirit collide head-on with the materialist criticism favored by Enlightenment ideology: the problem of meaning.
Each of these contradictions could prove fatal to the democratic project, but none is insoluble, and the search for solutions offers an opportunity for renewal. While there are no guarantees, we could emerge from the crisis with a better understanding of the reach and limits of equality, a more transparent information sphere, and even, it may be, a rich infusion of the transcendental into everyday life…
[Gurri unpacks each of those contradictions…]
… So what is to be done?
The first, obvious step is to move the question to the center of our shared conversations. The most capacious thinkers of the age should contemplate first principles and ultimate goals with at least as much intensity as they invest in Donald Trump or the latest economic report. There’s nothing artificial about this. Science and reason are necessary for modernity. Meaning and moral aspiration are necessary for humanity. A balance must be struck that preserves the one and gives full weight to the other.
Materialism, we must understand, is a valuable perspective for science but not a realistic appraisal of the human condition. Scientists work as if on a geometric point, abstracted from nature and indifferent to its dispositions. In reality, however, we come from nature, we are of nature, and we are far from indifferent to our place in it. Our intuitions are internal to the system: humanity’s spiritual quest is, in every sense, nature reflecting on itself. One such intuition is agency—the belief that, at the crossroads, I am free to go right or left, and I alone make the choice. Another is faith in causation. These stances are irrational, or rather pre-rational, but without them liberal democracy as well as science itself would be impossible.
In the end, materialism is self-defeating. To say, “I choose to be a materialist” is to fall into an absurd fallacy. Either our bodies, which consist of matter, obey unchanging laws, or the mind, transcending matter, is capable of choice. There can be no middle ground.
Politics, in a metaphysical age, will resume its traditional place as a secondary activity—a means to an end. This will leave liberal democracy vulnerable to false prophets who are willing to trample on individual rights in pursuit of some apocalyptic scheme. The interesting question is whether the post-truth condition will make the peril greater or lesser. On the one hand, the lack of universal firewalls might make it easier for a fanatic to flood the system. Yet post-truth itself, I believe, is the strongest kind of firewall. In our fractured, eternally contested environment, the progress of any totalizing doctrine will be painfully slow. The quest for meaning and the struggle over frames of reference are, in the end, really one and the same.
We have inherited a rich and evocative spiritual vocabulary, but it belongs to a worldview thousands of years old. “King of kings,” to cite just one example, should sound archaic in a democratic age. Can we awaken the scientific world to the spirit? Is it possible to sanctify our largely instrumental relations? This shouldn’t entail a belief in fairies and goblins, or even necessarily in religion. Any good empiricist will admit that the richest human lives are lived symbolically. Can we climb the symbolic ladder to the mountaintop, where meaning and modern humanity come harmoniously together—anchoring, it may be, a loftier understanding of equality and social life, and of the sanctity of truth?
We won’t know until we try. Pessimism, let me suggest, is unwarranted. History moves in mysterious ways. We may be due for a second coming of historian Karl Jaspers’ “Axial Age”: preachers and philosophers who conceived a drastically updated transcendental vision, with the rational and the sacred, truth and meaning, reconciled with political freedom.
For 200 years, we placed society under the sway of universal principles. That’s gone with the wind. We have entered an era of radical contingency, in which even truth is indeterminate. The natural tendency is to retreat to the certainties of the past—but there’s no going back. If we hope to preserve the gains from Enlightenment society, and resolve its many contradictions, we’ll have to do so within a new and wildly unstable conceptual framework.
With the spell of the Enlightenment broken, liberal democracy will have to redefine what “created equal” means. This process could end in a rigid caste system, with the institutions in the hands of self-selected mandarins who wield the power of the state to impose their “solutions.” Preferably, and more likely given the thrust of the new technology, we’ll see a flattening of the institutions and the continued trampling by the public into the sacred spaces of politics and communication.
Equality, however understood, will be forged in the will of the citizenry rather than granted by a benevolent God. That will make it contingent like everything else, and so liable to variation and in constant need of defense. And if perfect equality is an impossible dream, eternal inequality requires impossible discipline. The current elite class, already under enormous pressure, may lose its cohesion and melt into the impermanence of the age, divided among the various schools and sects and frames of reference.
The structure of information will follow the definition of equality. The commanding heights will be control over AI. If AI development and deployment is a closed game, the elites could set themselves up as intermediaries in the oracle of an omniscient divinity. If AI is a competitive product, the public will gain the upper hand. In that case, we can expect a flowering of eccentric applications, the individualization of commerce and industry, and the final overthrow of the expert class. The information sphere will remain the mirror to our passions, divisions, and metaphysical longings. Freedom of speech, no longer “endowed by our Creator,” will become the battleground on which the question of equality is ultimately settled.
Here I finally reveal myself in my true colors. I’m an analyst. My task is to describe reality, and that’s what this essay is about. But I also lead an active life inside the world that I’m describing—and I have preferences. I see equality as a factor of opportunity, law, and human dignity, not of perfect outcomes. I think truth emerges from examining a subject from a large number of perspectives, even those that may seem disturbing or false. I hope that my story—as a person, a father, a grandfather—connects to other stories in the past and will connect to more in the future, in a pattern that is not entirely devoid of meaning. And I believe fervently in liberal democracy, because—born in Cuba—I have tasted the alternative.
The breakdown of Enlightenment ideology is only the latest challenge liberal democracy has faced in my lifetime. I’m not entitled, as an analyst, to downplay the perils ahead, but I’m allowed, as an American, to have faith that they will once again be overcome…
Eminently worth reading in full: “The Search for a Post-Enlightenment Democracy”
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As we renew, we might send free-thinking birthday greetings to Henri-Benjamin Constant de Rebecque (or as he’s usually called, Benjamin Constant); he was born on this date in 1767. A French political thinker, activist, and writer on political theory and religion (whose work influenced, among many others, Sir Isaiah Berlin), Constant was a committed republican from 1795, backing the coup d’état of 18 Fructidor in1797, and the following one on 18 Brumaire, in 1799. He became the leader of the Liberal opposition in 1800, during the Consulate. Constant fell out with Napoleon, and had to flee (first to Switzerland, then to Saxony). Nonetheless, after his return to France, Constant sided with the Emperor during the Hundred Days, drafting the Charter of 1815. He became politically active again during the Bourbon Restoration and was elected to the Chamber of Deputies in 1818 (where he remained until his death in 1830). As the head of the Liberal opposition, known as Indépendants, Constant was one of the most notable orators in the Chamber, especially in his role as a proponent of the parliamentary system.
“The system, to a large extent, causes its own behavior”*…
Alan Jacobs quotes from Freeman Dyson‘s epic 1998 book, Imagined Worlds…
It often happens that a scientific revolution is accompanied by a change in style. I like to use the names of Napoleon and Tolstoy to symbolize two contrasting styles: rigid organization and discipline represented by Napoleon, creative chaos and freedom represented by Tolstoy. In the world of computers, Napoleon is the massive IBM main-frame; Tolstoy is the humble Macintosh. The computer revolution was an escape from the Napoleonic ambitions of von Neumann to the Tolstoyan anarchy of the Internet. Future revolutions will bring more such escapes.
Jacobs goes on to observe…
The big AI companies are the apotheosis — literally, in the view of many who work for them — of Napoleonic science. The open web and the world of hobbyist and small-scale devices (often built on the Raspberry Pi) are our remaining refuges of Tolstoyan computing.
See also: “Twenty Five Years After Imagined Worlds, What World Are We Living In? – Our surprisingly Napoleonic twenty-first century,” in which Erik Larson unpacks Dyson’s thinking and reconciles it to the world of 2022 (when Larson wrote the piece).
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As we contemplate culture, we might spare a thought for Jack Kilby; he died on this date in 2005. An electrical engineer, he made a– if not the— foundational advance that moved us into the age we’re now navigating: the integrated curcuit (or as we know it, the chip).
In mid-1958, as a newly employed engineer at Texas Instruments, Kilby didn’t yet have the right to a summer vacation. So he spent the summer working on the problem in circuit design known as the “tyranny of numbers” (how to add more and more components, all soldered to all of the others, to improve performance). He finally came to the conclusion that manufacturing the circuit components en masse in a single piece of semiconductor material could provide a solution. On September 12, he presented his findings to the management: a piece of germanium with an oscilloscope attached. Kilby pressed a switch, and the oscilloscope showed a continuous sine wave– proving that his integrated circuit worked and thus that he had solved the problem.
Kilby is generally credited as co-inventor of the integrated circuit, along with Robert Noyce (who independently made a similar circuit a few months later). Kilby has been honored in many ways for his breakthrough, probably most augustly with the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physics.
“The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious”*…
Eminent art critic and historian Hal Foster has started what will be a four-part series in The Paris Review on looking at– and seeing– art…
Many of us look at art in the company of others; I have done so with a close friend, off and on, for five decades. We meet at a museum, wander around, settle on a painting (or, rather, it settles on us), look, talk, look more, talk more. We attend to the work and to each other; we enter its world together. Only recently and rarely have we written up our reactions, which we do individually. A testament to our friendship, this writing is also a tribute to the art, to the discursivity that informs it and the sociability that it allows.
Paintings call out to us in myriad ways. My friend and I are most drawn to pictures that are reflexive about looking, that anticipate it, that sharpen it, that alter our habits of seeing. This may be a Modernist criterion, but it hardly disqualifies older art; we have ranged as far back as Early Netherlandish painting. In this selection, though, I focus on pictures that date from the past hundred and fifty years. (For better or worse, that’s also my academic field.)
My aim in this exercise isn’t to tease out context, which is almost too present in wall texts today. Immediacy may be a mirage, but I try to come to my chosen works as directly as possible. It’s not that I ignore the texts on the walls; I just don’t get stuck there. I don’t pretend to see with a “period eye,” as Michael Baxandall called the attempt to perceive as historical viewers may have. Contextual information may often be necessary, but I keep it at a useful minimum. And though I sometimes get speculative, that’s part of the fun. In fact, one purpose of these studies is to be loosened from my scholarly superego (which isn’t very strong, in any case). I want to demystify the viewing of art a little, not to deskill it exactly, but to suggest that anyone can do it. Ignorant Art History is a big tent.
Looking at a painting is a welcome respite from scanning a screen. In that sense, this exercise is reactive: I labor in the small cottage industry of attention that has sprouted up in the cracks of the massive complex of distraction all around us. A phenomenological turn often occurs at times of intensive mediation, but the point is not simply to have our perceptions mirrored back to us. T. J. Clark has put the aim nicely: “When I am in front of a picture the thing I most want is to enter the picture’s world: it is the possibility of doing so that makes pictures worth looking at for me.” To look at a painting is also to exit our world for a while, and then to return to it cast in a different—distant—light. The time travel is often wonderful, and almost free…
The first of his short essays, on the Matisse pictured above, just dropped…
… As we approach this painting, we have little idea of what it depicts, or whether it depicts anything at all. A washy blue covers the entire surface unevenly, and its space is traversed by several black vectors. A vertical line stretches the length of the canvas on the far right, where it intersects with two horizontal lines that cut across the center of the picture. In the lower half of the painting, three diagonal lines run roughly parallel to one another, also toward the right.
The main motif floats in the top third of the painting. Outlined heavily in black, its interior is made up of the same blue as elsewhere except for one white blotch and a few black planes, scratched to reveal the white underneath. Three thin, white planes also appear in the interior, each crossed with a horizontal black stripe; the central plane divides the space in two.
All this is hard to sort out, and two more pieces on the right—a green blob beside a black one—only add to the puzzle. It is a complicated painting, but its complication is borne of simplicity. Completed in 1914, at the beginning of World War I, it is an austere work in an austere time.
The title offers a kind of lifeline: View of Notre Dame. But what kind of view and from where? And what are all the black lines? Neither abstract nor representational, the painting requires a shift in our way of looking: its elements are less images of things than signs for them.
We know that the Notre-Dame sits on the western end of the Île de la Cité in Paris. So the three diagonals might signify the quai along the Left Bank, the low path alongside the Seine, and the great river. The two horizontal lines then read as a bridge over the Seine, and the slight curve underneath them as its arched support. Finally, the long vertical line serves as the near edge of the quai, or perhaps of the very building from which the view is taken. The angles suggest that we look down on the scene from a Left Bank apartment several floors up. The overall blue signifies air and water where that seems appropriate, and anything else (or nothing at all) where it does not.
How does the squarish motif convey the famous cathedral? If the bisected shape suggests the two great towers, the white plane between them might evoke the rose window. Since we view the cathedral from the Left Bank, it appears turned away from us slightly, its south side more exposed. If the black areas register the sides of the building in deep shadow, the white ones might signify the play of light across the facade. And the blobs in green and black? The green could be a plant, and the black its shadow.
The pieces don’t add up completely or neatly. But then signification is about signaling-just-enough rather than representing-in-full. Here, seeing is guesswork. It often is elsewhere, too; we just don’t acknowledge it. Sometimes a sign doesn’t signify and sometimes it suggests more than one thing. The diagonals evoke both the quai and the river; the black areas convey a material thing here and an immaterial shadow there.
Around this time, Matisse kept a studio above the quai Saint-Michel. Might View of Notre Dame double as a view of the interior from which it was painted? In that case, the Paris cathedral is also a French window, with blue sky and white clouds seen in or through the glass; the green shrub is also a plant on the sill; the lines of the bridge are also the molding in the room; and—who knows?—the diagonals of the bank are also the easel on which this very painting was produced…
The remaining three installments will drop weekly into May.
* “The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science.” – Albert Einstein
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As we appreciate art, we might recall that on this date in 1808, at the outbreak of the Peninsular War, the people of Madrid rose up in rebellion against French occupation.
In 1814, Francisco de Goya memorialized the event in his painting The Second of May 1808.
“You live and learn. At any rate, you live.”*…
… and to the extent that we care about our democracy, that’s an issue.
In an article based on his recent Sakurada-Kai Foundation Oxbridge Lecture at Keio University, Tokyo, John Dunn argues that our democracies depend on our picking up the pace of learning. The abstract:
There cannot be a coherent democratic theory because democracy is not a determinate topic. Representative democracy is a relatively modern regime form. It now needs rehabilitation because so many instances have performed poorly for so long. Representative democracy is now also an aging regime. As a type of state, it is subject to the territorial contentiousness and contested legitimacy of any state. It claims its legitimacy from iterative popular choice, but the plausibility of that claim is increasingly strained by the drastic disparities in life chances reproduced through the property systems it protects. The inherent difficulty for citizens to judge how to advance their collective interests is aggravated by the recent transformation of the information economy. In the cumulative damage inflicted by climate change it faces a deadlier peril than any previous regime and one which only a citizenry that can enlighten itself in time can reasonably hope to nerve itself to meet…
There follows a fascinating– and provocative– elaboration of this thesis in which Dunn considers the history of democracy and the alternatives with which it has, since its inception, vied. He concludes in a bracing fashion…
… The varieties of autocracy which will be on offer wherever the rest of the world has the opportunity to take them up will be without exception the reverse of enlightened – instrumentally and compulsively bound to the extremes of obscurantism, Darkness as a full-on fideist commitment, deliberate self-blinding as a navigational strategy. Move fast, break lots, and never pause to inspect the wreckage.
Representative democracy has recently proved itself a poor structure for collective enlightenment, but the case for it depends on its at least not precluding that, its being still open to making the attempt, and responding to what it can contrive to learn. The most optimistic vision of democracy in action has always seen it as an opportunity for collective self-education on the content of shared goods and the means to achieve them. If that is scarcely a realist picture of what it has ever been, at least it is an image of the right shape. It is too late to ask who will educate the educators. At this point we must educate ourselves together and heed the lessons of that education or we must and will die – not just each of us one by one, as we were always fated to do, but soon enough all of us and for ever…
Eminently worth reading in full: “Can Democracy be Rehabilitated?“
Apposite: “How American Democracy Fell So Far Behind,” from Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt (gift article– and source of the image above)
* Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless
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As we devote ourselves to democracy, we might spare a thought for Ludwig van Beethoven; he died on this date in 1827. A crucial figure in the transition between the Classical and Romantic eras in Western music, he remains one of the most famous and influential of all composers. His best-known compositions include 9 symphonies, 5 concertos for piano, 32 piano sonatas, and 16 string quartets. He also composed other chamber music, choral works (including the celebrated Missa Solemnis), a single opera (Fidelio), and numerous songs.
Relevantly to the piece above…
Beethoven admired the ideals of the French Revolution, so he dedicated his third symphony to Napoleon Bonaparte… until Napoleon declared himself emperor. Beethoven then sprung into a rage, ripped the front page from his manuscript and scrubbed out Napoleon’s name…
Beethoven’s temper and Symphony No. 3 ‘Eroica’
“Be careful what you wish for”*…
… And how you wish for it. Eric Athas, with an all-too-timely reminder…
Whenever I’m thinking about ideas to send to you all, I’m reminded of a principle called Goodhart’s Law, which says: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”
In other words, when you tell people they’re being evaluated by a target they must hit, you risk pushing them to produce the wrong results in the name of reaching the target. The incentives can drive them to fixate on achieving the target, not achieving the overall goal.
The concept is named after the economist Charles Goodhart, who introduced it in a 1975 paper about monetary management. But the theory has been connected to a range of situations.
One of the most famous examples is a story about colonial India, when the British government sought to subdue an overpopulation of cobras in Delhi by placing a bounty on the snakes. Turn in a snakeskin, get some money.
But the plan backfired. People started farming cobras to cash in on the bounties, only exacerbating the population problem. This tale, which you can hear more about in a 2012 Freakonomics episode, spawned a shorthand for this phenomenon—the cobra effect…
… Goodhart’s Law, or the cobra effect, isn’t limited to economic policy or invasive species. You can apply it to everyday situations:
- A fitness tracker rewards you for clocking 10,000 steps a day, so you spend your evenings pacing around your living room. [see here]
- A calorie-counting app pushes you to form an unhealthy diet to stay under the limit.
- You set a resolution to read book a week but soon begin selecting books purely based on length—not interest or relevance—to hit the target.
- A construction firm is given unrealistic milestones and must cut corners to fulfill a contract.
- A school becomes hyper-focused on its test scores and offers incentives for grades instead of providing a well-rounded educational experience.
That last one happened in a years-long cheating scandal in Atlanta that unraveled in the 2010s.
Workplace quotas can have this effect, too. When you’re evaluated based on a quota, you may do anything to meet that quota, even if the quality of the work diminishes.
On the flip side, a quota policy may demotivate workers. Here’s what Adam Cobb, a professor of management at Wharton, said in a Wharton write-up about quotas: “People might start withholding effort … If you can easily meet your monthly quota, why should you try as hard once the goal is reached? Doing so may encourage the company to raise the quota, making your life harder.”
You can find the cobra effect in academic research, too, with the push for publication fueling an increase in fake papers.
Today, we’re surrounded by measurements that can be tempting to use as targets in our behavior. What is inbox zero but a target that may distract us from completing more fulfilling work?
I think a lot about the cobra effect with social media, where your success is tied to your ability to accrue views, likes, comments, and shares. Those targets can create an expectation that you must always be creating something new. Social media managers, influencers, and YouTubers have talked about the pressure to churn out new content to please algorithms and feed their audiences…
… Which brings me back to the point I started with a few hundred words ago, and the title of this post. I send this newsletter every Sunday. The routine is helpful because it provides me with a structure to work within. Absent that framework, I could end up spending too little or too much time on it.
But I must remind myself that the weekly tempo isn’t the target. If it were, I’d be critiquing myself based on arbitrary timing, not on the quality of the information I’m sharing with you. I’d be more prone to “spin up” content, as opposed to finding interesting ideas to share with you. I try to keep Goodhart’s Law in mind each week.
As you go about your day, consider your own goals, personally and professionally. When you take an action, like posting a photo on social media or completing a work task, are you doing it to please a measurement? To hit a target?…
The cobra effect and the dangers of turning measures into targets: “I’m not writing this to hit a weekly target,” from @ericathas.
Apposite: “When workplace bonuses backfire” (Economist gift link)
(Image above: source)
* Aesop’s Fables
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As we interrogate our intentions, we might recall that it was on this date in 1793 that the Queen of France, Marie Antoinette, was beheaded. The French Revolution had begun in 1789…
… The Storming of the Bastille on 14 July led to a series of radical measures by the Assembly, among them the abolition of feudalism, state control over the Catholic Church in France, and a declaration of rights.
The next three years were dominated by the struggle for political control, exacerbated by economic depression. Military defeats following the outbreak of the French Revolutionary Wars in April 1792 resulted in the insurrection of 10 August 1792. The monarchy was replaced by the French First Republic in September, while Louis XVI was executed in January 1793.
After another revolt in June 1793, the constitution was suspended, and adequate political power passed from the National Convention to the Committee of Public Safety [which decreed Marie Antoinette’s fate]. About 16,000 people were executed in a Reign of Terror, which ended in July 1794. Weakened by external threats and internal opposition, the Republic was replaced in 1795 by the Directory. Four years later, in 1799, the Consulate seized power in a military coup led by Napoleon Bonaparte. This is generally seen as marking the end of the Revolutionary period…
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