Rory Stewart at full stride across Asia

One young Scotsman’s dauntless walk across Afghanistan — at peril from bandits, wolves, dysentery, snow-blindness and Taliban thugs with Kalashnikovs — makes a crackling fine and best-selling adventure. But that can’t be the only reason Rory Stewart’s account of The Places In Between is the gift book and assigned reading for all incoming students at Brown University (also at Brandeis University and doubtless other campuses) in this war-rattled presidential campaign season of 2008.

Some wise spirit of the moment in America seems to have designated Rory Stewart as the poster hero for something we long for, or something we’re trying to learn. And it became the up-front business of my conversation with the author to nail that something: not simply why the book enthralls, but why the committees of deans want us to search its meanings.

Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with Rory Stewart (24 minutes, 11 mb mp3)

Stewart’s own message these days, seemingly at odds with the book, dwells on disengagement and abject failure:

Rory Stewart at rest

My message is not actually a very attractive one. It’s not one that resonates a great deal. Essentially what I’m trying to say is that we need to focus on what we can do rather than on what we want to do, and that’s psychologically quite difficult.

The situation in Afghanistan, the situation in Iraq — these are intolerable situations. These are situations where people want to say: surely we can’t just stand by with civil war imminent — 93 percent of the world’s heroin being produced in Afghanistan, terrorists on the Pakistani border. Surely we ought to do something. And my response is: ought implies can. We don’t have a moral obligation to do what we can’t do.

And that sense that you could be faced with an intolerable situation, whether it’s in your personal life, an illness maybe, or whether in public policy, which you can’t do anything about is something people really don’t want to take on. People prefer to pretend they can do something, or just do anything rather than admit that there’s nothing they can do.

Rory Stewart in conversation with Chris Lydon, August 27, 2008.

So what of the lure and excitement of this book, The Places In Between?

Is it about the sheer bravery of a wiry but slight, unarmed, no-tech civilian extending his curiosity and goodwill across real mountains to The Other?

Is it the example of the old-fashioned visitor who shows up, as Kipling’s Kim or the real T. E. Lawrence once did, with a gift for languages and a respectful store of cultural lore?

Is it in fact about nostalgia for paleo-colonialism — for the 19th Century civil servants of the British Empire, even in Afghanistan and Iraq. In what may be a giveaway footnote on page 247, Rory Stewart pines for the old days. “Colonial administrations may have been racist and exploitative, but they did at least work seriously at the business of understanding the people they were governing…”

In the blind pit of unending Western wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, can Rory Stewart be taken to demonstrate a radically different way to engage, and still to prevail?

To my reading the most wonderfully ambiguous moment comes late in the trek toward Kabul. Government soldiers who are in fact village boys (”new uniforms from America and salaries from Iran”) waylaid Rory Stewart and, when he tried to ignore them, came after him:

I had gone twenty yards when I heard running behind me; my sleeve was grabbed; I turned to shake the man off and he punched me in the face, his knuckles striking my cheekbone just below the eye. I stumbled and then turned around with my fists ready. He stepped back and we circled each other, me feeling clumsy under my pack…

“Stop,” I said. “This is wrong. I’m a Briton. I am a guest of your Governor Khalili. You have just punched me in the face. I’m a very important man; you can’t do this to me. What is your name? … What are you all laughing at? You are evil men… thugs.”

I saw three more check posts over the next twenty kilometers… The commander announced he was driving me to the headquarters in Bamiyan — fifteen kilometers back down the road I had been walking on for three hours — for further questioning. Despite having resolved only three hours earlier never to defy a policeman again, I lost my patience.

“No, I refuse,” I replied. “I am a guest. I am a close friend of the governor. I stayed in his guesthouse. He has given me permission.” None of this was true. I walked on ignoring the angry shouts behind me, and to my relief no footsteps followed and the shouts faded. I turned up a narrow gorge toward the snow peaks, and saw no one for four hours.

Rory Stewart, The Places In Between, pages 267 - 269.

The knockout winners in these pages are Stewart’s Eton- and Oxford-accented air of authority, the power of his narrative and the primeval power, perhaps, of pale skin. Orientalism, in a word. But there is in fact nothing so simple about Rory Stewart or his views, which have kept unfolding since The Places In Between. And still I wasn’t prepared for his renunciation of “the project.”

I think at the time I wrote the book, I imagined that if you planned better, if you knew more, if you cared more, it would be possible to do better — that the failures in Bosnia and Kosovo and Afghanistan and Indonesia that I’d seen were due to amateurism; they were due to lack of planning, lack of structure, lack of strategy, lack of commitment. But I then moved from Afghanistan to Iraq. And in Iraq I saw failure on such a monumental scale that I changed my view. I no longer believe that the problem is lack of professionalism. I believe these projects are intrinsically impossible.

The problem is not simply that we don’t have imperial officers anymore, or that that we don’t create the culture wherein they could flourish. But that even if we had the context and the individuals, they too would fail. Because the growth of nationalism, of Islam, the potential for resistance, the voices of people in Iraq and Afghanistan, their capacity to disrupt these kinds of projects, are now such that even were you to transplant some Macedonian general of Alexander the Great and try to put him in charge with sway over Afghanistan — with all the charm, dynamism, charisma and savagery that that would entail– he would still fail… I changed my mind because of Iraq.

Rory Stewart in conversation with Chris Lydon, August 27, 2008.

I asked him too directly perhaps: You’ve become a poster hero, Rory Stewart, but for what? For a recovered humility, he said. For an American self-examination, I think, that runs against the grain of The Places In Between and of the presidential campaign conversation that will be at a climax when we meet Rory Stewart again at Brown. To commenters, please: what is it we’ll really want to ask him, and ourselves, in October?

Which words and ideas in the definition of exceptional America do you underline?

Is is a bit odd for any nation to be deeply divided, witlessly vulgar, religiously orthodox, militarily aggressive, economically savage, and ungenerous to those in need, while maintaining a political stability, a standard of living, and a love of country that are the envy of the world — all at the same time. To do all these things at once, America must indeed be unusual. Or even, as Alexis de Tocqueville said a century and a half ago, exceptional.

Peter H. Schuck and James Q. Wilson, in their Preface to Understanding America: The Anatomy of an Exceptional Nation.

Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with James Q. Wilson (31 minutes, 14 mb mp3)

James Q. Wilson: Exceptionalist

Understanding America: The Anatomy of an Exceptional Nation is the book that the Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson said all the presidential candidates had to read. “What is unique about America?” Patterson asked in the New York Times Book Review this summer. “What drives its vitality in economic, cultural and social affairs? Why is it so envied and reviled in the rest of the world? Why are its politics so peculiar? Why is it so culturally fraught?”

There are giant gaps in this big book, it turns out, starting with the Iraq War as an expression of how Americans think and act outside the neighborhood. Editors James Q. Wilson and Peter H. Schuck decided to duck foreign policy altogether. It’s an odd omission especially because the unilateralism inside George Bush’s “coalition of the willing” is so clearly an extension of an “exceptionalist” premise — that old alliances, United Nations rules, even Geneva Conventions do not restrain the United States of America.

The mood of the book tends toward the celebratory. Most of the score of contributing scholars seem to agree we’re more unlike the rest of the world than like it, and better off for the difference. But counter-indications are also spelled out — on the matter of inequality and upward mobility, for example — and some gravely worrisome trends. A rising tide lifts all yachts in our economy today. “The evidence for increased inequality since the 1970s is overwhelming,” write Gary Burtless and Ron Haskins of the Brookings Institution. “The top of the distribution is pulling away from average and below-average earners, and until the early 1990s there was evidence that the bottom was falling further behind the middle of the distribution.” The gift of upward mobility in the U.S. is bestowed mainly on immigrants, the day they get here. “People born in the U.S. do not enjoy exceptional opportunities for upward mobility compared with people born in other rich countries.”

In our conversation, panjandrum James Q. Wilson voices the dismay of his generation at the corruption and commercialization of American culture for export — which in another day meant gems like Walt Whitman, Jerome Kern and Gene Kelly. In our own era it’s a long way from Louis Armstrong to the knock-offs, far and wide, of “American Idol.” This is a subject we take up next with the insatiably curious and critical Martha Bayles, a contributor to Understanding America.

Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with Godfrey Hodgson (39 minutes, 18 mb mp3)

Godfrey Hodgson: now

When you’ve had enough of the dugout chatter from Denver on the cable networks, try Godfrey Hodgson from Oxford, 5000 miles from the convention scene. I wonder if anybody sees American politics more essentially than the co-author of a reporters’ masterpiece (up there with Norman Mailer’s) on the 1968 campaign, An American Melodrama, and many other rapt studies of us. (Forthcoming: The Myth of American Exceptionalism.) Hodgson volunteers in conversation that what he missed forty years ago was the length and depth of the conservative cycle the US was entering with Richard Nixon’s election. Today, forty years later, Hodgson’s keynote is that the conservative ascendancy, having fomented the Iraq War and a Gilded Age of inequality, sounds far from broken. The “change” chord rings to Hodgson more of therapy than political reconstruction. The tune from America these days, he says, still sounds something like the Russophobic ditty sung in England in the 1870s — the song that gave “Jingo” to the lexicon of chip-on-the-shoulder patriotism.

We don’t want to fight,
But by Jingo if we do,
We’ve got the ships,
We’ve got the men,
And we’ve got the money, too.

From a popular music-hall song by G. W. Hunt, around 1877.

Godfrey Hodgson: then

The grandest thematic links between ‘68 and ‘08 — race and the American imperium — are oddly same and different, constant and transformed. Race in the Sixties meant riotous rebellion and a rights revolution; the race “issue” today refers to the apparently unpollable question whether Americans will vote a black family into their iconic White House. The debacle in Iraq would seem to cry out for some open straight talk about the limits of American power in the world, but this campaign shies from the general question. In 1968, Robert Kennedy, running against Lyndon Johnson’s war in Vietnam, wanted us to lay claim nonetheless to “the moral leadership of this planet.” Eugene McCarthy mocked “the idea that somehow we had a great moral mission to control the entire world.” He was bolder and steadier than any of the major candidates for 2008 in opposing permanent counterinsurgency as our fighting posture in the world — this American assumption for itself of “the role of the world’s judge and the world’s policeman.” It is the relatively shy silence on that point that tells Godfrey Hodgson that the 2008 campaign is veiled in the premises of the conservative ascendancy.

Meantime Geoffrey Hodgson wonders who could answer the question that drove John Gunther’s “Inside USA” books:

John Gunther would send a researcher ahead, book a suite in the big hotel in town, invite all the movers and shakers, give them a cocktail or two and then say, “Who runs this place?”

We can tick off the established powers of 40 years ago that aren’t there anymore. Sure, the city machines have gone. In 1972, I made film about the Democratic Convention and there, there were still residual smoke-filled rooms, residual bosses, I remember doing an interview with Pete Camille of Philadelphia, for example –a city boss, but that’s gone. Detroit is gone. The big three auto makers have just gone cap-in-hand to the administration asking them for, I think it’s, 25 billion bucks, because they’re broke. The banks are sliding around on the floor. Wall Street; the old foreign policy establishment. I wrote a biography of Colonel Henry L. Stimson; he and his friends, the Bundy brothers, have disappeared… If I may say so, the New York Times and the Washington Post are not the powers in the world that they were in 1968 …

To my mind, Franklin Roosevelt… really was the person who figured out how to make the presidency work and I learned from a political scientist called Aaron Wildavsky one thing about how he did it. He had basically four levers or connections that he used. One of which was the Congress, one of which was the Democratic Party, one of which was the bureaucracy or the permanent government, and one of which was the media. I don’t think any of those connections are still in good working order… The political party has really been utterly transformed by the process that began with the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in which the old traditional Democratic party was destroyed and the Republican party became a conservative party. For the first time really you have a European style politics where you have a party of the left and a party of the right. The French say the party of movement and the party of order. It may be that the old political parties just can’t work that way.

It certainly seems that the media cannot be managed in that way if only because of the internet, and the bloggers, and the multiplicity of people who have access to the bullhorn, as it were… Max Weber, who invented the concept of the charismatic leader, always assumed that the destined fate of the charismatic leader was to create a bureaucratic leadership, that there was an almost inevitable progression that you go from the charismatic leader to the organization. This was his example: you go from Jesus Christ to the Apostle Paul, the man who organized the church as a powerful, enduring and efficient institution.

I think the Democratic Party is an intensely interesting organization, and if Barack Obama can really reshape, retool the Democratic Party as an instrument of benign political change, in the way that Franklin Roosevelt created the Roosevelt Coalition, which is now completely crumbled, then I think he will be a very great political leader, but it’s going to be tough. I don’t know whether it’s possible to imagine a President Obama recreating a presidency that is as effective as the Roosevelt presidency was.

Godfrey Hodgson in conversation with Chris Lydon, August 27, 2008

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Cass Sunstein (30 minutes, 14 mb mp3)

Cass Sunstein of the gentle Nudge

Cass Sunstein gives us the half-hour short course here on “the most exciting intellectual movement of the last thirty years” — behavioral economics, that is, of which we had a taste recently with George Lakoff and Dan Ariely.

Behavioral economics is the demonstration (by clinical psychology, affirmed by neuroscience) that the “rational man” of neo-classical economics is in fact, in Dan Ariely’s book title, Predictably Irrational — that we are eternally kidding ourselves in our choice of credit cards, or of diets and desserts; that we tend to lurch without much reflection from over-optimism to over-anxiety about terrorist threats, war risks, and environmental melt-downs. Cass Sunstein is himself a demonstration of the spread of the new thinking from psychology and economics to law and politics. From the University of Chicago Law School, where he taught alongside Barack Obama for a dozen years, he has just moved permanently to Harvard, where he and Obama seem still to be channeling each other. Sunstein’s new book Nudge, with the economist Richard Thaler, is an introduction to a variety of not-quite-coercive strategies for helping people get what they really want: 401k savings plans, for example, that would be automatic for all workers who didn’t choose to set some of their wages aside. The general trick, Sunstein says, is recognizing that there’s less Immanuel Kant, more Homer Simpson, in each and all us than we’ve been taught.

This started with psychology. Two Israelis Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky did a bunch of amazing experiments in the 1970’s where they said people use some mental shortcuts in trying to think about risk. If a recent event, for example, is in your head, say it involves a crime or a misfortune or something wonderful happening, then you will think it’s really probable that the crime or the misfortune or the wonderful thing will happen. This way of thinking migrated first into economics. There has really been a revolution in economic thinking because economists are trying to do their work with a realistic rather than artificial sense of what human beings are like. The idea is that we can do economics with Homer Simpson as our types rather than doing economics with computers as our types. People just aren’t computers. When Homer, in one episode, went to buy a gun, the gun owner told him that him that there is a three day waiting period. And Homer responded: “What? Three Days? I’m angry now!” So that captures people’s passion and focus on the short term, and it also captures how law and policy can help a lot.

Harvard Law Professor Cass Sunstein in conversation with Chris Lydon, August 21, 2008.

Tanglewood beats working… for anybody who gets to listen, and perhaps specially for the young performers who are pouring their talented hearts into the opportunity of a lifetime.

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Doug Fitch, Christin-Marie Hill and Erik Nielsen here (27 minutes, 12 MB MP3)

Erik Nielsen, conductor; Christin-Marie Hill, mezzo; and Doug Fitch, stage director at the Tanglewood Music Center.

In the theater shed on the western edge of the Tanglewood lawn I am sitting in on the rehearsal of the Kurt Weill-Bertholt Brecht masterpiece — not The Threepenny Opera but the cult classic of decadence and the new German music theater between the world wars, The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. Because the Boston Symphony Orchestra maestro James Levine is out sick this summer, the anything-might-happen atmosphere around the Tanglewood preparations feels a tiny bit like the no-net air of risk and revolution that hovered over the riotous, contentious first performances (with Lotte Lenya starring) in Leipzig and Frankfurt in 1930. The prophetic power of the show — its bite into our world — is one amazement. The spectacle of young professionals finding their way is another. Three of them talked with me after the first rehearsal in costume: the stand-in conductor Eric Nielson, the mezzo singing the villainous Widow Begbick, Christin-Marie Hill; and the stage director Doug Fitch.

Bertholt Brecht and Kurt Weill

Opera is a funny world. One of the reasons “Mahagonny” is such a great thing to do is that it’s an opera at war with opera. It comes out of this Cabaret - dark, dark, dark side of burlesque… and what is opera? Opera is the polo of the culture world. It’s elite, it’s extremely expensive, you never make money on it, it’s really fun to do. And people get hurt!

Stage Director Doug Fitch in conversation with Chris Lydon, at the Tanglewood Music Center, August 1, 2008

For every age and part of the world, there is a place about which fantasies are written. In Mozart’s time it was Turkey. For Shakespeare, it was Italy. For us in Germany, it was always America. You have no idea how little we knew about America. We had read Jack London and we knew absolutely all about your Chicago gangsters, and that was the end. So of course when we did a fantasy, it was about America.

Kurt Weill, in The New Yorker: June 10, 1944

[In "Mahagonny" and our own world] …the word that comes to my mind is insatiability. It’s a constant need… For me, this opera is about the insatiable feeding of desire. It is never going to go away. And the way it’s set up… there’s no way you ever can find satisfaction or be pleased… You know, it’s called “The Rise and Fall of Mahagonny.” It doesn’t sound like it’s going to end well from the very get-go. What seems so powerful about this piece is that nobody inside the
opera knows what’s going on with them; they’re all trying to do their best. Jack, who eats himself to death, is doing this not even because he wants to eat. He’s feeling: “Have I done well enough yet?” and his friend says, “Don’t do things by half. Go all the way. Just do it,” like the Nike commercial, a major motto of our time. “Just do it.” Weill and Brecht imagined this.

Stage Director Doug Fitch in conversation with Chris Lydon, at the Tanglewood Music Center, August 1, 2008

Barack Obama at the Victory Column in Berlin just now marks another stage of “rejoining the world” and “rebranding” the American voice out there on the globe. It’s an astonishingly rapid transition in these dog days of July, 2008. Obama on tour is becoming “the cause of all mankind,” as Thomas Paine once said of our country. What would it mean, or require, for Americans to see ourselves this way again? This is the puzzle Ted Widmer sets himself in Ark of the Liberties, whose title comes with express irony from lines that Herman Melville wrote with irony as well, in White Jacket: “And we Americans are the peculiar, chosen people — the Israel of our time; we bear the ark of the liberties of the world… We are the pioneers of untried things, to break a new path in the New World that is ours.”

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Ted Widmer (38 minutes, 17 mb p3)

Ted Widmer

Ted Widmer, curator of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown, is a connoisseur of political rhetoric — an American historian and, among other things, editor of the Library of America’s compendium of great speeches. I put it to him in conversation: who thinks we’re “the last best hope of earth” after the war in Iraq? Who looks at our pretty lowly rank in international measures of equality and life expectancy, and says: “lead on, America!” What is it that is still exceptional about this world nation of ours? Do we even want to be exceptional anymore? And would a President Obama make us feel more comfortable with the neighbors, more like them, or yet rarer, more blessedly peculiar?

The world has become a lot more like us. We are more like the world and the world is more like us. Democracy is successful on every continent, immigration exists everywhere, most countries have constitutions and very few monarchies are left on earth. One hundred years ago, it was still a relatively rare thing to have a self-sustaining democracy with its own constitution. So our model has won. We won in a million ways in the 20th century and other countries are like us. I’m hopeful that if [Obama] is elected, it will lead to the latest American renaissance and that it will inspire people again in our capacity to lead. I think that was badly damaged, but I now object to a lot of books by liberals, even though I am a democrat. There’s this huge wave of pessimism crashing over the marketplace and you can’t walk into a bookstore without seeing 20 books about how we
blew it…

Ted Widmer in conversation with Chris Lydon at Brown University, July, 2008.

I reminded Ted Widmer, and myself, that the great William James thought we’d blown it, and exposed the fraud of “exceptionalism,” in the occupation of the Philippines a century ago. “God dam the U.S. for its vile conduct,” James fulminated (anticipating Reverend Jeremiah Wright in the taking of prophetic liberties with his language). James went to the heart of the “exceptional” question:

We used to believe… that we were of a different clay from other nations, that there was something deep in the American heart that answered to our happy birth, free from that hereditary burden which the nations of Europe bear, and which obliges them to grow by preying on their neighbors. Idle dream! pure Fourth of July fancy, scattered in five minutes by the first temptation. In every national soul there lie potentialities of the most barefaced piracy, and our own American soul is no exception to the rule. Angelic impulses and predatory lusts divide our heart exactly as they divide the hearts of other countries. It is good to rid ourselves of cant and humbug, and to know the truth about ourselves. Political virtue does not follow geographical divisions. It follows the eternal division inside of each country between the tory and the liberal tendencies, the jingoism and animal instinct that would run things by main force and brute possession, and the critical conscience that believes in educational methods and in rational rules of right.

William James, “Address on the Philippine Question” in William James: Writings 1902 - 1910, Library of America.

Ted Widmer remembered that Mark Twain, too, went volcanic about the Philippines and the imperial transformation of the American eagle. Twain’s revision of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” began, “Mine eyes have seen the orgy of the launching of the Sword / He is searching out the hoardings where the stranger’s wealth is stored…”

Mark Twain was very angry about the Philippines. America’s most beloved writer in many ways, and yet he had a most acute political conscience… He might have had to explain to a judge in 2008 why he was writing the anti-governmental things that he was writing around the time of the Philippines insurrection, which was the ugly aftermath to the Spanish American War. Those guys are brilliant and, I think, with William James you get something closer to what the Puritans would have said, which I find a more honest message, and it’s what Lincoln was saying too, which is that if you believe that God is favoring you more highly, then you also have further to fall and you have a higher accountability. It seems to me that we’re lacking the accountability. We’re trying to take the good part of this and we’re rejecting the other part that comes with it. Lincoln, many of the Puritans and William James all felt that if we’re failing to live up to our incredible, special position in the world - we’re so lucky, we live far from all these other wars, we have so many natural resources, we have this great system of government - if we’re screwing it up, God’s going to be very angry at us. And that I just find a more honest way of looking at it. There’s a dark side of exceptionalism as well as a light side.

Ted Widmer in conversation with Chris Lydon at Brown University, July, 2008.

John Maeda, the new president of the Rhode Island School of Design, has said his wants his job to be “something delivered live as a kind of open conversation with the RISD community and the world.” At our own joint site lydonmaeda.com, we are embarking on our own digressive ramble around whatever topics pop up — a few of them referenced in the visuals here. You are cordially invited to join the conversation with a comment, or with suggestions as to where we go from here.

Click to listen to the conversation with
John Maeda and Chris Lydon (49 minutes, 22 mb mp3)

A “metaphorical body” helped build Barack Obama’s triumph so far, in George Lakoff’s scientific reading. That tall, supple, smiling Obama figure, standing tall, fires up good feelings through the “mirror neurons” in our brains. “Up and forward” is the effect we feel, as Lakoff puts it in conversation. So what is the effect on our political minds of what feels now like an uncertain Obama shuffle to the center or the right? “Bad things” are transmitted by the same mirror neurons to our embodied brains, Lakoff says, when the gifted candidate’s “metaphorical body” seems to waffle — on phone-company immunity for illegal wiretapping, for example, or even on the use of churches as public social agencies.

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with
George Lakoff (50 minutes, 23 mb mp3)

George Lakoff: this is your mind on politics

Far the toughest, most consequential test will be Barack Obama’s response to the AIPAC pressures in both branches of Congress to blockade, or swat, or whack Iran in the last days of the Bush-Cheney administration. Obama’s mission, Lakoff says, must be to set a unmistakably different direction and tone from the hawkish resolutions now gathering sponsors in the House and Senate — to reframe the conversation in his own terms of America’s interest not only in a just world but in recovering moral force misspent in Iraq. “He has to decide how the resolution is framed, and make sure that Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi carry it out — and that everybody in the party knows what’s at stake. This is where leadership starts, right now.”

George Lakoff is the most astutely political of the best-selling brain scientists — like the “predictably irrational” Dan Ariely — now sharing the fruits of 30 years of revolutionary research on how our minds actually work. On one rapt reading of Lakoff’s latest, The Political Mind: Why You Can’t Understand 21st Century American Politics with an 18th Century Brain, I had three main questions in this long conversation: how does cognitive science explain (1) the rise of Obama; (2) the mid-summer rattling of Obama and (3) the stakes for Obama and the rest of us in the multiple pressures to “get tough” with Iran.

You have to understand what Obama is up against. First, he’s up against a mode of thought that is very common, what’s called “optimism bias” in behavioral economics. That is, when you make a plan, you are more likely to think that it will work than that it won’t… There’s a set of biases that give hawks a better chance in debate, with lines like, “the surge is going to work.” Or “it will be a cakewalk,” you know, “they’ll be throwing roses in front of us,” and so on…

You also have a cultural narrative — basically on the hero-villain structure. The villain in this is Ahmadinejad who is inherently evil… It’s a dangerous world out there, so the conservatives will say. So the question is, ‘What do you do?’ and the answer, in the hero/villain plot structure, is the hero has to fight the villain… The assumption is that we’re moral and anything we do to fight this villain is going to be moral, and that could be utterly ridiculous. We could create utter catastrophe over there, but the story is what matters in the public mind… and if we stick to it, and we’re virtuous, and we’re strong, we’ll win.

That narrative shows up all the time on TV shows, in movies and in political campaigns, and it showed up in the first Gulf War and the Iraq War, and it is being played again. So you’ve got to undercut it. That is a very tricky thing to do. If you try to undercut it simply with military facts, you’ve got a problem. That is, you say, ‘We can’t fight wars on three fronts, we can’t even do it on two fronts. We’re losing in Afghanistan.’ That doesn’t make us look very heroic. That doesn’t fit with the U.S. as the strong super power, so you’ve got to fight that idea. What you need is a different idea, and what Obama has done has been very interesting so far… In discussing foreign policy — for example, in the American Prospect article called the “The Obama Doctrine” — Obama’s idea is not just based on the national interest and being the strongest super power, etc., but also on the idea that we want a just world, that the most difficult problems in the world are not at the level of the state, but at the level of the person: that poverty, hunger, disease, women’s rights and so on, are major issues in the world, as well as global warming, and that we have to take a different view of the world, we have to be the world’s greatest moral force. I think that’s the story that you’re going to get from Obama: We have to be the world’s greatest moral force again, and we’ve lost it. We’ve lost it because we’ve used our military badly and we’ve had bad judgment. That’s the story and the question is, ‘Will it go?’ ‘Will it fly?’

George Lakoff of Berkeley and The Political Mind in conversation with Chris Lydon, July 10, 2008.

Roger Williams

In celebration of the Fourth of July, despite everything… Martha Nussbaum revives a dreamy vision of religious freedom. Jeff Sharlet paints the real bathos of our adapted political piety. I join them both in the pleasure of rediscovering Roger Williams (1603 - 1683) as a neglected American model of real religion, real freedom, real tolerance. As Martha Nussbaum reminds us, Roger Williams was English-born, a friend and contemporary of John Milton. He came to America — and from Massachusetts to the colony he founded in Providence, Rhode Island — in flight from meddlesome Puritans. His affinity for the Narragansett Indians, and his sense of the injustice that the settlers were inflicting on Indian property and humanity, sharpened his educated understanding of the rights of the individual spirit.

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Martha Nussbaum and Jeff Sharlet (54 minutes, 25 mb mp3)

Martha Nussbaum

And so he developed a view of conscience – which I think is really attractive – which is that every human being has within themselves something very precious which he called conscience, which is a capacity to seek for the ultimate meaning of life in your own way. And the thought is that we all have this equally; whether we’re using it right or wrong, it ought to be respected. And respecting it means giving it lots of space to pursue its own way and not establishing an orthodoxy that squeezes it. He had two really neat images for religious intolerance. One of them was imprisonment, as consciences were imprisoned all over the world. And the other, even more striking one was rape. Consciences were being raped. He called it “soule rape” when somebody sets up a religious orthodoxy and denies a space to others to find their own way.

Philosopher Martha Nussbaum of Liberty of Conscience in conversation with Jeff Sharlet and Chris Lydon, July 1, 2008.

Jeff Sharlet

We’ve gone irreparably too far. I don’t like the word theocracy; I
don’t think we ever will be a theocracy, but we have severe establishment and we will have establishment of a religion that’s very comfortable with the status quo. It’s a religion of what is, and it’s a religion that shuts down dissent and it’s a religion that shuts down prophetic voices as well. Yes, I think we’ve gone irreparably too far in the United States, but that doesn’t mean that we stop speaking and living and dissenting - and for those of us who feel religious, speaking in prophetic terms, and for those of us who don’t, speaking in political terms. Hope is something that you have when you have a situation that reason doesn’t quite support, so we have to be hopeful. We have irreparably established a certain kind of religion in American life so there’s no going back. I think there’s only moving forward until we get to a country that Roger Williams would like to live in.

Journalist Jeff Sharlet of The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power and The Revealer in conversation with Martha Nussbaum and Chris Lydon, July 1, 2008.

Tony Schwartz in the Shrine of Sound

Tony Schwartz made his famous TV and radio commercials (like the “Daisy spot” for Lyndon Johnson, and Coca Cola’s “It’s the Real Thing” campaign) in what felt like a chapel in his apartment in the old “Hell’s Kitchen” neighborhood of West Side Manhattan. Hunched over his turntables, wrapped in earphones and cables in a room lined on every wall with Tony’s 40 years of sound recordings, he’d remind you of the Wizard of Oz with his bumbling air of magic, but also of Orson Welles with his grasp of theatrical effects, and also his friend Marshall McLuhan with his flair for multi-media theory and his experience with how message systems really work, in and out of your body. I’d first entered this little high church of sound covering George McGovern’s presidential campaign in 1972.

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with David Hoffman on Tony Schwartz (59 minutes, 27 mb mp3)

Barry Goldwater’s Undoing

I went back in 1974 to write this Times piece, Packaging Voters for Candidates, TV-Style on Tony, the “best in the business” of media consulting. And I went back and back for ever after to absorb Tony’s coaching. He was gently instructive when I took him my first television stand-ups after leaving the Times. “You’re trying to do what Times training impels you to do — push ‘facts’ through the camera lens at the viewer. But listen to me, Chris: television is not a medium of information; it’s a medium of effects…” I learned on my own, when I came back from vacation to the TV desk with a mustache, that television viewers are looking mainly at their presenters’ hair, and not hearing much of what they say. Tony observed that television is mainly an auditory medium, and would be more effective if your picture tube was out of commission. He beleived that for many evolutionary and anatomical reasons — not least because “people are born without ear-lids” — the ear and audio deliver more of the signals that form our thinking than the eye does. And many of the trademark Tony Schwartz spots on television were commercials that deliberately slowed down the eye input with still photos, for example, or neutralized the eye with a shot of just an office clock and a second hand, while an actor’s plummy voice was asking: “Would you give me sixty seconds to tell you why Bob Abrams should be Attorney General of New York?”

Tony and Mike

Tony adored the babble of babies and the outdoor sounds of his block of New York. Above all he loved what Studs Terkel calls “that fabulous instrument, vox humana.” The blossoming of Tony’s reputation in the Seventies and the soundness of his books — The Responsive Chord and Media: the Second God — ran nicely parallel with the rebirth of radio at NPR. I was late taking the cue to radio myself, but I knew from Tony that radio was God’s own medium, and by the time I got there I knew from Tony why it felt like home. It is wonderful to realize, in the responses on Tony’s death two weeks ago, that the pied pipers of the rising radio generation — people like Jay Allison and Ira Glass– are devoted practitioners of Tony Schwartz’s ideas.

David Hoffman

So maybe the next question is how many more of the podcasters and other newbies enabled by the inexpensive tools of Internet radio will get the blessing of Tony’s techniques and wise encouragement. I engage the brilliant and prolific TV documentarian David Hoffman — of “Sputnik Mania” in theaters this summer and the comprehensive film Guerrilla Media about Tony — in the conversation here not only to remember the master of sound and his signature pieces, but to introduce the wisdom of Tony Schwartz to the podcast generation. With your help, it might be just the start of our appreciation of Tony.