In an infamous profile several years back, Obama national security advisor Ben Rhodes sardonically dubbed the think tank community in Washington, D.C. “the Blob.” The name stuck, and it is now common usage to describe an institutional form of one-dimensional thinking. In this issue we feature Hans Kundnani, one of the sharpest analysts of the European scene and an erstwhile Germanist, who observes similar Blob-like tendencies in Berlin. Kundnani makes clear the regrettable implications of such same-song groupthink.
Pankaj Mishra’s writing has shaped a generation of people around the world on issues of empire, power, and the protean commitments of the so-called non-aligned nations. In this magisterial essay, Mishra turns his attention to the instrumentalization of the Holocaust, or Shoah, the Hebrew word for catastrophe. What are the moral dimensions to interpret when a country founded as a safe haven for those suffering brutalization stands accused of prosecuting brutality itself?
Aeon, the digital magazine, is very much a fellow traveler with The Ideas Letter, encouraging writing that is uneasily pigeonholed. Their recently published piece by Mihir Dalal on the Marathi ideologue, Vinayak Savarkar, an early 20th Century intellectual guru to India’s right-wing RSS and BJP, is eye-opening.
From ideology we move to conceptual history and the ways in which “fatalism” as a concept has been deployed, both productively and promiscuously.
The Ideas Letter has been a venue in which critical imagination about the “neoliberal” world and its possible successors is hotly debated. Two podcasts here make high-octane listening on the theme: Alison Gopnik on the pressing issue of care, and Katharina Pistor on the surprisingly under-developed area of the law’s symbiotic relation to capital. Finally, and in the spirit of changing one’s mind, esteemed economist Angus Deaton explains the reasons why he has changed his.
Our musical selection (and we are readying a playlist for those interested in our suggested music to date) is arguably the greatest quintet in the history of Western music. The level of artistry and the communication amongst the musicians in Miles Davis’s famed second quintet are off the charts. Here they are live (and in color) in Milan, autumn 1964.
—Leonard Benardo, senior vice president at the Open Society Foundations
The Berlin Blob
Hans Kundnani
The Ideas Letter
Essay
The foreign policy establishment in many capitals tends to share a set of assumptions and reflexes, a form of groupthink dubbed “the Blob” (coined by Obama foreign policy advisor Ben Rhodes). These elites are, all too often, disconnected from public opinion in their countries, and in fact have more in common with the opinions of their counterpart Blobs elsewhere than their compatriots, a situation that is particularly acute in Berlin, argues Kundnani.
“Whatever the reasons for it, German foreign policy think tankers apparently do not see it as their role to openly debate anything, let alone to challenge each other, contradict each other, and push each other. Rather, they seem to see it as their role to collectively defend the conventional wisdom of the moment, to criticise or even simply ridicule others who do not share it, and to reassure and support each other. This would make more sense if foreign-policy experts had a strong track record of success in the last few decades. But in Germany as much as the United States, they have made terrible errors of judgement that have had disastrous consequences.”
Further Reading
The False Religion of Unipolarity
Mark Episkopos, Compact
The Cold War’s absolutist rhetoric contrasts with the prudent, strategic policies of containment carried out by the U.S. and the Soviet Union to avoid upsetting the international balance of power. The post-Cold War unipolarity, Atlanticism, ushered in a new kind of foreign policy thinking, “premised not on acknowledgment of limits and the necessity of strategic prudence, but on an ideology of perpetual global primacy. So narrowed the gap between action and rhetoric that had helped the United States win the Cold War and allowed the two sides to avoid a catastrophic trajectory of direct military confrontation. A new generation of foreign-policy elites, reared in what they believed was the beginning of a new Pax Americana, sought to materialize the values to which their predecessors only paid lip service. The resulting ideology of Atlanticism—also sometimes referred to as neoconservatism, liberal internationalism, and American primacy—makes no attempt to reconcile means and ends in foreign policy.”
The Shoah after Gaza
Pankaj Mishra
London Review of Books
Essay
The narrative of an Israeli identity predicated on an intense preoccupation with the Holocaust, “a very particular version of the Shoah that could be used to legitimise a militant and expansionist Zionism,” dates to the Six Day War and Yom Kippur War in the late 60s and 70s The Shoah came to be broadly conceived as a symbol of Jewish vulnerability in an eternally hostile world, and the narrative of imminent danger to Jews “began to serve as a basis for collective self-definition for many Jewish Americans in the 1970s,” writes Mishra. This was viewed with intense concern by Auschwitz survivors Jean Améry and Primo Levi, among others, who argued that the utilization of the Shoah undermined the broader relevance of its legacy—critiques that today would be denounced as antisemitism, notes Mishra. Israeli violations of the rights of Palestinians feeds antisemitism, they argued, a view echoed by many diaspora Jews in the current context of war in Gaza.
“In the absence of anything more effective, the Shoah remains indispensable as a standard for gauging the political and moral health of societies; its memory, though prone to abuse, can still be used to uncover more insidious iniquities. … All these universalist reference points—the Shoah as the measure of all crimes, antisemitism as the most lethal form of bigotry—are in danger of disappearing as the Israeli military massacres and starves Palestinians, razes their homes, schools, hospitals, mosques, churches, bombs them into smaller and smaller encampments, while denouncing as antisemitic or champions of Hamas all those who plead with it to desist, from the United Nations, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch to the Spanish, Irish, Brazilian and South African governments and the Vatican. Israel today is dynamiting the edifice of global norms built after 1945, which has been tottering since the catastrophic and still unpunished war on terror and Vladimir Putin’s revanchist war in Ukraine. The profound rupture we feel today between the past and the present is a rupture in the moral history of the world since the ground zero of 1945—the history in which the Shoah has been for many years the central event and universal reference.”
Further Reading
The Great Rupture in American Jewish Life
Peter Beinart, New York Times
Oct. 7 exacerbated a growing rift within liberalism and Zionism, which had, for decades, defined American Jewish identity. The “emerging rupture,” as liberals increasingly identify with the Palestinian cause and Zionism allies with the right, “will redefine American Jewish life for decades to come.”
“For many decades, American Jews have built our political identity on a contradiction: Pursue equal citizenship here; defend group supremacy there. Now here and there are converging. In the years to come, we will have to choose.”
Inventing Hindu supremacy
Mihir Dalal
Aeon
Essay
India’s Hindu Right, led by current Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has placed Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, a previously little-known turn-of-the-century ideologue at the center of their efforts to rewrite Indian history from a Hindu supremacist perspective. Savarkar, who called for hopelessly caste-divided Hindus to unite to violently reclaim their homeland from outsiders, both Muslims and the British colonizers, is positioned by India’s ruling BJP “as a nationalist icon on a par” with Nehru and Gandhi. Hindutva has significant legitimacy among Hindu voters, and rival parties do not dare challenge it.
“The significance of their success in appropriating Indian history cannot be overstated. The appropriation allows for the exclusionary politics of the BJP-RSS to subsume, even replace, religious belief. For example, the inauguration of the Rama temple by Modi this January, one of the biggest events in modern Indian history, incited a national frenzy among Hindus. But the spectacle wasn’t mainly a celebration of Rama bhakti (religious devotion). It was about a politically united Hindu community declaring its pre-eminence in its homeland.”
Further Reading
Political fatalism and the (im)possibility of social transformation
Lukas Slothuus, Contemporary Political Theory
Political fatalism, the belief that human agency cannot effectuate social transformation, is a significant barrier to social change. Slothuus focuses on the fatalism of impossibility; the belief that humans cannot do anything to prevent negative social changes, like a climate catastrophe, is an important barrier to social transformation. “Fatalism of impossibility can lead to paralysis because no action can salvage redemption. If positive change is foreclosed by definition, action might not make much sense,” he writes, focusing on the cognitive components of fatalism in order to propose various solutions.
“…The problem with fatalism of impossibility is not simply that it stands in the way of radical social transformation but also that it discourages or even prohibits small-scale political organisation and progress. The track-record of defeat and success affects the behavioural patterns of actors, such that even intellectuals committed to emancipation find it difficult to escape a fatalistic attitude of action paralysis. This is a particularly germane issue in relation to climate change, which may seem so overwhelming that it is not just difficult to locate where to intervene but can lead to action paralysis. For example, even people who are deeply committed to living within planetary boundaries may find the scientific evidence so overwhelming that even minor behavioural changes become blocked. Hence, if fatalism reigns supreme, this places severe restrictions on the kind of emancipatory action that is possible.”
Care
Alison Gopnik
Social Science Bites
Interview
Caring is “one of the things that’s most characteristically human” and a critical component of human thriving. And yet care is profoundly neglected in economics, philosophy, and social science. While the evolution of care can be explained broadly by Darwinism and mammalian biology, these mechanisms have been leveraged far beyond immediate offspring, and, in humans, encompass care of people we can never meet, such as ancestors and future generations. We often think that we care for others because we love them, but Gopnik’s research has found that we love people we care for.
“…We humans have a much wider range of carers than any other species. So one of the things that we really know about people is that not just biological mothers, but fathers and grandparents and siblings and other members of the community, everyone can potentially be involved in caring for somebody else. … And I think one of the practical challenges is that we don’t have very good ways of institutionalizing that care beyond, say, just the care of parents, for children, or children for elderly parents.”
The Code of Capital
How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality
Katharina Pistor
New Books Network
Interview
Katharina Pistor’s book, The Code of Capital, examines how law, originally a social good, has become a private commodity that fosters wealth inequality. Lawyers play a pivotal role in this transformation for Pistor, who argues that understanding legal systems is crucial for grasping the dynamics of wealth creation and disparity in modern economies. These economies are structured using what she terms a “feudal calculus” within the legal framework: an adaptation of legal tools developed in England to protect the rights of landlords hundreds of years ago, which have now expanded to vast numbers of assets, and undergird our entire economic system. Capital is made from two ingredients: an asset, and the legal code which endows that asset with durability, fungibility and universality.
“Realizing the centrality and power of law for coding capital has important implications for understanding the political economy of capitalism. It shifts attention from class identity and class struggle to the question of who has access to and control over the legal code and its masters… The craftsmanship of their lawyers, the code’s masters, explains the adaptability of the code to the ever-changing roster of assets; and the wealth-creating benefits of capital help explain why states have been only too willing to vindicate and enforce innovative coding strategies. … Capitalism, it turns out, is more than just the exchange of good in a market economy; it is a market economy in which some assets are placed on legal steroids.”
Rethinking my Economics
Angus Deaton
International Monetary Fund
Essay
Economist Angus Deaton challenges his profession for its overenthusiastic belief in market efficacy, lack of focus on power dynamics, neglect of ethics and human well-being, and overreliance on specific empirical methods. Economists should be more open to changing their views in response to evolving circumstances, Deaton argues, revaluing unions and challenging the benefits of free trade. Perhaps most controversially, he concludes that immigration comes at a cost for domestic inequality.
“…When efficiency comes with upward redistribution—frequently though not inevitably—our recommendations become little more than a license for plunder. Keynes wrote that the problem of economics is to reconcile economic efficiency, social justice, and individual liberty. We are good at the first, and the libertarian streak in economics constantly pushes the last, but social justice can be an afterthought.”
Further Reading
Saving Economics from the Economists
Clara Mattei and Aditya Singh, Project Syndicate
Active efforts to depoliticize economics—led by early 20th Century economists enamored by Mussolini’s fascism—rebranded economics as a neutral science, sidelining class dynamics and justifying economic coercion through apolitical assumptions.
“Contrary to the prevailing economic narrative, our socioeconomic system is not inevitable, nor do we need to grudgingly accept it as the only way forward. The depoliticization of economic discourse is a political project aimed at preserving the capitalist structure of class dominance and foreclosing any alternatives to capitalism. Fortunately, just as this status quo was established through collective action, it can also be subverted through collective resistance.”