When Chomsky wept

When Chomsky wept

Not the 'death of god' but 'too many gods' (religious plurality)

http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/berger/2012/05/09/if-its-december-im-presbyterian/

Secularization theory should be replaced by a theory of plurality—a situation in which many religions co-exist and interact with each other ...  to simply state its two principal components, one on the level of religious institutions, the other on the level of individual consciousness. 

On the level of institutions:  In the pluralistic situation every religious institution, which it likes this or not, becomes a voluntary association. Max Weber, one of the fathers of the sociology of religion, distinguished between two institutional forms of religion—the “church”, into which one is born, and the “sect”, which one joins as an adult. The historian Richard Niebuhr suggested that American history has created (presumably inadvertently) a third form of religious institution—the “denomination”, which in many ways looks like a “church”, but which one nevertheless freely joins and belongs to, and which is in competition with other religious bodies. 

On the level of consciousness, religion loses its taken-for-granted quality, instead becomes a matter of individual decision. The peculiarly American term “religious preference” nicely catches both levels. Put differently, the challenge of secularity, where it exists (it does in some places, notably in Europe), is that there is an absence of gods; the challenge of plurality is that there are too many gods.

When there is a combination of religious plurality with a political system which guarantees freedom of religion, what comes about is, precisely, Niebuhr’s denominationalism. For well-known historical reasons, America has been in the vanguard of such a development. Its emergence in many parts of the world today has usually little to do with American influences, but is the result of the above-mentioned combination of a social and a political fact.

In the pluralistic situation every religion becomes a denomination—even Judaism, which is both a religion and a people, into which, by definition, one is born. In America Judaism has been born again (I choose the phrase deliberately) in at least three denominations.

Last year I happened to come on a Hindu temple in central Texas. It is a large, unmistakably Indian building, plucked down in the heart of the Bible Belt. In India most temples are dedicated to one or two gods, depending on the location. This is not practical in America, where immigrants come from different parts of India. The Texas temple has a large space where everyone can join in common worship (on important holidays hundreds of people come from all over the Southwest). But then there are eight or nine small chapels, where people can connect with the god or goddess of their preference—denominationalism objectified in architecture. A colleague of mine has been teaching a college course titled “Introduction to Hinduism”. She thought that the students would be Americans of any background interested in Indian religion. To her surprise most of the students were of Indian ethnic background, mostly very ignorant of Hinduism. When asked why they had registered for the course, several of them said that they wanted to find out who they are. Logically, this sentence does not make sense: If one is something, one need not find out what the something is; if one has to engage in a project of finding out, then, almost by definition, one is not that something. But sociologically, the sentence is remarkably descriptive: These young Americans want to have information that will help them to decide whether and how they want to be Hindus.

Schama interviews Hobsbawm on BBC Radio 4

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01g4f87/Archive_on_4_Hobsbawm_A_Life_in_History/

Accompanied by a rich archive of interviews with Hobsbawm from the BBC archives, Schama discusses Hobsbawm's activism and career from his involvement as a teen with the KPD resistance to Nazism in 1930's Germany, through his life at the heights of British academia. The programme also focuses on Hobsbawm's often controversial political affiliation with the Communist Party of Great Britain, remaining a member until its dissolution in 1991, long after many comrades had left following the suppression of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution.

Talking about his early political development, he highlights the moment when we was first turned on to Marxism, at the height of a vicious, street-and-ballot struggle between the Communist Party of Germany and a nascent Nazi threat:

That period in Berlin shaped my life. Without this I simply wouldn't be what I am now. It was one of the masters at school who, in fact, turned me into a Marxist. I explained to him that I was a communist and we needed a revolution, and he asked me a few questions and said “You clearly have no idea what you're talking about. Kindly go to the school library and see what you can find.” And then I discoveredThe Communist Manifesto, and that was it... Can you imagine at the age of fifteen, reading The Communist Manifesto, the first few pages, and I said “This is it”.

This astonishing and often very touching profile gives a remarkable insight into the influence Hobsbawm had; as Schama admits, even those who weren't members of the Communist Party Historian's Group, or supporters of the democratic centralist communist ideology, were “intoxicated” by the opening up of historical study engendered by what Hobsbawm calls “social-cum-intellectual-cum-structural history”. Hobsbawm, alongside other great social historians such as Christopher Hill and E.P. Thompson, changed the way history was approached: not through a knowledge of Kings and Queens, or an understanding of the causes of Great Wars, but in the everyday struggles and entertainments of the vast majority of normal, working people whose lives produce and reflect the great social changes of world history.

Norman Birnbaum on Christopher Lasch

Gratitude and Forbearance: On Christopher Lasch | The Nation


" ... The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy (1994) was the last book Lasch would complete before dying of cancer. (He refused chemotherapy because he had concluded that it would not save his life and would destroy his capacity to write.) It was a work with two messages. The most obvious was his denunciation of the moral isolation of the nation’s elites, their sense of superiority and justified privilege, their claim that they represented a triumphant modernity, the universal acceptance of which was delayed by the philistine shortsightedness of the less educated and less fortunate. The second message was that hope for a different life had to begin with an affirmation of ordinary life—the business of living, the rhythms of the life cycle—and not from the endorsement of a metahistorical project dispensed from on high. In his last years, Lasch, notwithstanding his lack of religious belief, traded intellectually with theologians. He decided that they were using concepts like being, suffering and redemption to describe the permanent structures of human existence that he had approached empirically. He was drawn to the Protestant existentialists, whose hero was the anti-Nazi martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer, rather than to the Catholic visionaries, with their exalted notions of community. Perhaps that was an oblique tribute to his familial origins, and to the American past."

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v09/n03/benedict-anderson/old-corruption

Vol. 9 No. 3 · 5 February 1987

Old Corruption

Benedict Anderson writes about the Philippines

She is today, as the widowed ‘Cory’ Aquino, Time’s widely admired Woman of the Year. But she started life as Corazon Cojuangco, daughter of the wealthy sugar magnate Don Jose Cojuangco, and cousin of that Eduardo Cojuangco who in the Marcos era became one of the most notorious plunderers of the Filipino economy. She owes her present eminence to both names, but it is the earlier one that is the more significant for assessing the situation in which the Philippines finds itself.

Like almost all Christian Filipinos, she bears a Spanish Christian name, although Spanish colonial rule ended ninety years ago, and today almost no Filipinos understand the Spanish language. The suffix ‘-co’ to her maiden name, a suffix common to the family names of some of the Philippines’ more powerful dynasties (Cuenco, Chioco, Tiangco), derives from the Hokkien Chinese suffix-of-politeness for males: it shows that she belongs to that Chinese-mestizo class, blooming between the 1760s and 1850s, which has largely monopolised political power in the islands in modern times.[1]Important as American influence has been since 1900, it has served primarily to reinforce a social system and cultural order which is profoundly rooted in over three hundred and thirty years of Spanish rule. Not for nothing is it sometimes said that the Philippines is as much a part of Latin America as it is of South-East Asia.

Yet it was Latin America with a difference. By the time the Spanish arrived in the 1560s, Felipe II’s empire was already in decline, and the Philippines, named after him, was the last major imperial conquest. Most of Madrid’s energies were spent on her vast American possessions; the few Spaniards who came to the Philippines found neither gold nor silver to plunder; the only source of rapid wealth lay in the fabled ‘galleon trade’ by which Chinese porcelains and silks were exchanged in Manila for Mexican silver and sold at vast profit in Spanish America and Madrid. Outside the Manila entrepot – where Chinese merchants and artisans rapidly increased in number – few Spaniards, except for soldiers and clerics, resided. It was through the latter, above all, that the islands were to be ruled.

The timing turned out to be crucial. In the Americas Christian missionary zeal confronted local, state religions which it crushed with ruthless ease. In the Philippines, however, it found itself in a neck-and-neck race with an energetic Islam sweeping rapidly northeastward across island South-East Asia. (Had the Spanish arrived forty years later, much of the archipelago would probably have become religiously impenetrable, as predominantly Islamic as Indonesia and Malaysia are today.) Thus the late 15th-century politico-religious struggle in Andalusia was renewed, not many decades later, on the other side of the world – and in the same vocabulary. To this day, the Muslim populations of the southwestern Philippines, most of whom the Spaniards never subdued, are known, even to themselves, as ‘Moros’ (‘Moors’), and their armed resistance to Manila as the Moro National Liberation Front. Yet anti-Muslim (and Counter-Reformation) zealotry would not have been enough to ensure a programme of conversion so successful, ultimately, that 90 per cent of today’s Filipinos are at least nominally Christians. What proved critical, and not merely in this religious respect, was the absence anywhere in the Philippines (except where Islam had recently moved in) of indigenous states. Nothing remotely like the Burmese Buddhist monarchy, the Vietnamese Mandarinate, or the Javanese and Malay Hindu-Muslim dynastic realms. Christianisation of scattered pagan communities could proceed largely by peaceful means, a fact nicely underlined by the complete absence in the Philippines of the Inquisition. It was also carried out in the many local vernaculars – to the acquisition of which immense clerical energy was committed – and not in Spanish. Thanks to this policy, as well as the remoteness of the archipelago, and the pervasive, reactionary power of the clerisy, even after three hundred and thirty years of Spanish rule no more than 5 per cent of the population had command of Spanish. Spanish culture, in the most general sense, had a deep, continuing impact: but it was mediated not so much by the Spanish language as by Iberian Christian clerics – a vast, if largely ‘accidental’ difference from the experience of the southern Americas (except perhaps of the Jesuits’ Paraguay).

Ecclesiastical power had one other decisive influence on the development of the 20th-century Philippines’ social structure. While the Church in general, and the Orders in particular, gradually acquired vast wealth, especially in land, and while many clerics fathered children on local women, a formally celibate Spanish clergy could not, by its very nature, create a class capable, through the legal inheritance of family property, of creating vast private latifundia. What it did do, however, was to set a landowning example, create the social space for a mestizo latifundism in due course, and prepare a huge treasure for looting under early 20th-century American colonial rule.

The beneficiaries turned out to be the likes of Corazon Cojuangco’s late 18th-century forebears (the ‘patriarch’ immigrated from Fukien). From the early days the priesthood, dreaming of a Christian Middle Kingdom, had put much effort into conversion of those whom they called sangleys (‘traders’ in Hokkien), and whom we think of today as ‘Chinese’. If they had little success with the sangleys themselves, they did very well with the children born to such men by Christianised native women. Spanish law helped by assigning the formal legal status of mestizo to such children: i.e. preventing them from assuming their fathers’ sangley status. Assigned their own distinctive hybrid costumes and gremios (guild organisations), they emerged quickly as a distinct community – above all, in the environs of Manila.

Historical luck was with them. During the two-year English occupation of Manila in 1762-64, the often-victimised sangleys supplied and fought alongside the invaders; in revenge, the returning Spaniards expelled the bulk of the sangley community, and barred substantial further entry by mainland Chinese for close on a century. They could afford to do so because by then the galleon trade was in steep decline (the last galleon sailed in 1811), and the enlightened Bourbon despot Carlos III was expanding Spanish power into the countryside and promoting a quite new commercial export agriculture (including a royal monopoly in tobacco). With the sangleys out of the way, and the few resident Spaniards mainly occupied with administrative and ecclesiastical tasks, the ‘Chinese-mestizos’ took over most significant local commercial activity, and began moving out into the countryside of Luzon and the Visayas in Carlos III’s wake.

It is striking that when Spain’s American empire was disintegrating between 1810 and 1825, all was calm in the distant Philippines. The creole magnates, lawyers and petty officials who led nationalist revolutions against the Bourbons’ ‘second conquest of the Americas’ found no counterpart in the archipelago – even though the islands were administratively subordinated to the Viceroyalty of Mexico. The Church used its monopoly on education and control of printing to guard against any intrusion of liberal ideas; and the mestizos had good reason to be grateful for the new policies of Madrid. They might have no role in the Orders, and little in the decrepit administrative system, but they were entrenched in the expanding urban and rural economy. When in 1834 Madrid decided fully to open Manila (and a bit later Cebu City) to international trade, the mestizos were poised to take optimal advantage of the new opportunities. By then there were almost two hundred and fifty thousand of them in a total population of not much more than four million.

In the 19th century it was with British capital that the mestizos happily joined hands, as in the 20th century they would do with American and Japanese. For example, the island of Negros was almost uninhabited when British interests set up the first sugar mill there in 1857. Forty years later the population had increased tenfold, mainly by mestizo-organised immigration, and 274 steam mills were in operation.[2] Two great Chinese-mestizo ‘sugar’ families with British connections, the Osmeñas and the Cuencos, came so to dominate Cebu’s ‘party’ politics that by the 1950s it was said that in that island ‘there are no Nacionalistas and Liberals – there are only Osmeñistas and Cuenquistas.’[3]

---------------------------------------

[1] On this group the locus classicus is Edgar Wickberg’s The Chinese in Philippine Life, 1850-1898 (Yale, 1965).

[2] David Steinberg, ‘Tradition and Response’, in Crisis in the Philippines: The Marcos Era and Beyond, edited by John Bresnan (Princeton University Press, 1986). Along with essays on ‘The Social Situation’ by Wilfredo Arce and Ricardo Abad, and on ‘The Economic Crisis’ by Bernardo Villegas, Steinberg’s text is a valuable contribution to an otherwise conventional ‘How did things go so wrong?’ volume.

[3] Cited in Onofre Corpuz, The Philippines (Prentice-Hall, 1965).

Paine:

Peter Linebaugh's  Introduction to Thomas Paine's Common Sense, Rights of Man and Agrarian Justice:  http://hydrarchy.blogspot.com/2009/09/introduction-to-thomas-paines-common.html

Tom Paine was a worker and commoner. He spoke and wrote from a particular experience, that of an English artisan at the onset of industrialization. He was, too, a planetary revolutionary—indeed, he helped give meaning to the term—and as such his writing is hugely significant for the twenty-first century. If we were to compare him to any contemporary figure, it would be Che Guevara. He asserted aspiration, possibility, the unheard of. He breathed the warmth of human agency to frigid hierarchies of power. The phrase “world revolutionary” might have several meanings—a sailor of the seven seas, a scientist of the universal mind, a philosophe in the republic of letters, a journeyman on the move.  

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/10/16/061016crbo_books?currentPage=all 

... his uncompromising condemnation of all the world’s religions. In “The Age of Reason,” published in 1794 and 1795, Paine wrote, “All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.” Theodore Roosevelt once called Paine a “filthy little atheist,” but Paine did believe in God; he just didn’t believe in the Bible or the Koran or the Torah; these he considered hearsay, lies, fables, and frauds that served to wreak havoc with humanity while hiding the beauty of God’s creation, the evidence for which was everywhere obvious in “the universe we behold.” 

In “The Age of Reason,” Paine offered his own creed:

I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life. 

I believe in the equality of man; and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavouring to make our fellow-creatures happy. 

But . . . I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish Church, by the Roman Church, by the Greek Church, by the Turkish Church, by the Protestant Church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church. 

“Paine’s religious opinions were those of three-fourths of the men of letters of the last age,” Joel Barlow observed, probably overstating the case only slightly. Paine’s views were hardly original; what was new was his audience. While other Enlightenment writers wrote for one another, Paine wrote, as always, for everyone. His contemporaries believed that radical philosophical speculation—especially critiques of religion—was to be shared only with men of education (and, it was assumed, judgment). The poor could not be trusted with such notions; freed of church-based morality, they would run amok. Paine disagreed, profoundly. To say that he was vilified for doing this is to miss the point. He was destroyed.

Mark Twain once said, “It took a brave man before the Civil War to confess he had read ‘The Age of Reason.’ ” But that didn’t mean it wasn’t read. In 1797 alone, a single Philadelphia printer sold a hundred thousand copies. In Britain, sales of “The Age of Reason” outpaced even those of “Rights of Man,” though, since it was banned as blasphemous, it’s impossible to know how many copies were sold. The London printer Richard Carlile, who called his bookstore the Temple of Reason, was fined a thousand pounds for publishing it, and sentenced to two years in jail. (During an earlier trial on similar charges, Carlile had read aloud from “Rights of Man,” a ploy that allowed him to publish it again, as a courtroom transcript.) 

After Carlile’s wife fell into the trap of selling “The Age of Reason” to a government agent posing as a bookstore browser, she—and her newborn baby—followed her husband to prison. Eventually, in order to avoid exposing anyone inside the bookstore to further prosecution, there appeared in the Temple of Reason an “invisible shopman,” a machine into which customers could drop coins and take out a book, about which Collins writes, “It is sobering to think that the freedom of the press once depended upon a mechanism now used to vend Mars bars.”

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/10/16/061016crbo_books#ixzz1qAbMGaVv 

Barrington Moore, Jr, ca. 1985:

http://www.tannerlectures.utah.edu/lectures/documents/moore86.pdf 



Authority and Inequality under Capitalism
and  Socialism


THE   TA N N E R   LECTURES  O N  HU M A N   VALUES 


Delivered  at 
Brasenose College, Oxford University 
May  16, 17, 2 3 ,  and 24,  1985

'No bourgeoisie, no heterogeneity'

The other Moore's law | http://www.economist.com/node/13063306


'What is it about the middle class that influences politics? To oversimplify, its crucial feature is heterogeneity. Compared with the poor and the rich, the middle class contains a greater range of interests. It covers a wide range of occupations: software engineers, shopkeepers, teachers and all the manifestations of economic complexity. 


'Because of this variety, the middle class is driven by a wider range of concerns than either the poor—whose main worry is the need for more money—or the elite, who concentrate on defending their political or economic position. The middle class is not a narrow special-interest group in the same way. 


'Other things being equal, any group in the middle should act as a moderating influence on social conflicts. By definition, a growing middle class will reduce income inequality because it will moderate the stark divide between rich elite and rural poor that is often a source of conflict in emerging markets.  


'In sum, the middle class acts as a buffer. Sometimes it allies itself with the poor, sometimes with the rich. That does not guarantee the emergence of democracy, but the presence of a large, varied middle class does make democracy more attractive than if a country is dominated by just two classes. 


'Such a large, varied middle class encourages new policies, often (though not always) more liberal ones. To oversimplify again: the characteristic political demand of the poor is for transfers. They want a new well in the village or electricity for the slums. This encourages a politics of patronage. The characteristic political demand of the middle class is for things like property rights and a stable economic policy. This tends to give rise to a politics of accountability, if not necessarily democracy. 


'Because the middle class contains so many competing interests, patronage politics—handing out goodies to a favoured few—can end up hurting as many members of the group as it helps, so it becomes less tempting.'

Chomsky: A rare pic, smoking pipe

ca. 1969 

Universal Man

Noam Chomsky: Meet the universal man - opinion - 19 March 2012 - New Scientist

Why can everyone learn Portuguese? Are some aspects of our nature unknowable? Can you imagine Richard Nixon as a radical? Is Twitter a trivialiser? New Scientist takes a whistle-stop tour of our modern intellectual landscape in the company of Noam Chomsky

See gallery: "Chomsky's life in pictures"

Let's start with the idea that everyone connects you with from the 1950s and 60s - a "universal grammar" underlying all languages. How is that idea holding up in 2012?
It's virtually a truism. There are people who misunderstand the term but I can't deal with that. It's perfectly obvious that there is some genetic factor that distinguishes humans from other animals and that it is language-specific. The theory of that genetic component, whatever it turns out to be, is what is called universal grammar.

But there are critics such as Daniel Everett, who says the language of the Amazonian people he worked with seems to challenge important aspects of universal grammar.
It can't be true. These people are genetically identical to all other humans with regard to language. They can learn Portuguese perfectly easily, just as Portuguese children do. So they have the same universal grammar the rest of us have. What Everett claims is that the resources of the language do not permit the use of the principles of universal grammar.

That's conceivable. You could imagine a language exactly like English except it doesn't have connectives like "and" that allow you to make longer expressions. An infant learning truncated English would have no idea about this: they would just pick it up as they would standard English. At some point, the child would discover the resources are so limited you can't say very much, but that doesn't say anything about universal grammar, or about language acquisition. Actually, I doubt very much that a language like that could exist.

Ideas about human nature naturally crop up in your work. It's a fuzzy term, so what do you mean by it?
To me it's just like bee nature. Humans have certain properties and characteristics which are intrinsic to them, just as every other organism does. That's human nature. We don't know very much about it except in a few domains. We know a lot about how the digestive system develops, that's part of human nature. We know some things about the visual system. With regard to cognitive systems, the systems are more complex and difficult to investigate, so less is known. But something is. Language is one component of the human cognitive capacity which happens to be fairly amenable to enquiry. So we know a good deal about that.

In your new book, you suggest that many components of human nature are just too complicated to be really researchable.
That's a pretty normal phenomenon. Take, say, physics, which restricts itself to extremely simple questions. If a molecule becomes too complex, they hand it over to the chemists. If it becomes too complex for them, they hand it to biologists. And if the system is too complex for them, they hand it to psychologists... and so on until it ends up in the hands of historians or novelists. As you deal with more and more complex systems, it becomes harder and harder to find deep and interesting properties.

If human nature is relatively fixed, as you argue, how do we achieve social and political change?
Human nature is not totally fixed, but on any realistic scale evolutionary processes are much too slow to affect it. With language, for example, we have very good evidence that for the last 50,000 years there has been no evolution. That is a reflection of the fact that our basic capacities have not evolved.

So within a realistic time frame there is not going to be any change in human nature. But human nature allows many different options and the choice among those options can change, and it has. So there are striking changes, even in our own lifetime, of what we accept as tolerable. Take something like women's rights: if you go back not so many years women were basically regarded as property. That's a sign of the expansion of our moral spheres. So sure, human nature remains the same but a lot of things can change.

Sticking with social and political change, what is going on with climate-change denial in the US?
The Republican party now has its catechism of things you have to repeat in lockstep, kind of like the old Communist party. One of them is denying climate change.

Why is it happening?
It happens that there's a huge propaganda offensive carried out by the major business lobbies, the energy associations and so on. It's no secret, they're trying to convince people that the science is unreliable, that it's a liberal hoax. Those who want to be funded by business and energy associations and so on might be led into repeating this catechism. Or maybe they actually believe it.

The Republican-dominated House of Representatives is now dismantling measures of control over environmental destruction that were instituted by Richard Nixon. That shows you how far to the right they have gone. Today Nixon would be a flaming radical and Dwight D. Eisenhower would be off the spectrum. Even Ronald Reagan would be on the left somewhere. These are interesting, important things happening in the richest and most powerful country in the world that we should be very much concerned about.

The media has been one of your big interests over the years. Are new and social media really changing the way we do things?
I'm probably the wrong person to ask. I'm kind of out of the Stone Age, I don't use any of these things and don't know a lot about them, but they are doubtless effective. For example, Occupy Wall Street could not have developed like it did without social media.

Are they affecting other things very much?
I think that is open to question. For one thing, by their very nature they have to be fairly superficial, there isn't a lot you can say in a tweet or even an internet post. Almost by necessity, I think it is going to lead, or has led, to some superficiality. So like most technology, there is an upside and a downside.

You argue that the US is in political and economic decline. Is that also true of the intellectual and scientific worlds?
Well, there are some who do claim that, but I'm not convinced. For example, if you look at the journal Science, the editor-in-chief Bruce Alberts has a series of editorials in which he is deploring the way science is taught in the US. In the federally funded schools and the universities people are being taught factoids; they are taught the periodic table to memorise when they do not understand what it is about. Alberts says this totally misleads people about the nature of science and that it is driving kids away from science. If what he is describing does overwhelm the education system it will presumably lead to a decline in scientific competence and capacity as well.

Looking back on your long career, if you were to start all over again would you still choose to study language?
When I was a college student and I got interested in linguistics the concern among students was, this is a lot of fun, but after we have done a structural analysis of every language in the world what's left? It was assumed there were basically no puzzles.

In the 1950s, there was a serious attempt to address the core problems of language and it was immediately discovered that everything was a problem and we did not understand a thing. Now a great deal has been learned and we understand a lot more about the nature of language. The contemporary field is still very exciting. It is a living field. If you're teaching today what you were teaching five years ago, either the field is dead or you are.

Profile

For over 50 years, Noam Chomsky has studied linguistics and philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has global reputations as a linguist (key book, Syntactic Structures) and for political analysis/activism (key book, Manufacturing Consent). His new book, The Science of Language: Interviews with James McGilvray, will be published in April (Cambridge University Press)

The US national-security state: Why it grows and grows

'In the realm of foreign policy, Barack Obama has learned what every modern president eventually does: despite the dangers, the emergencies, the intractable disagreements, and the life-and-death risks, international affairs naturally claim an ever-growing share of a president’s attention and enthusiasm. On the world stage, he represents an entire mighty country, not one perhaps-embattled party. International figures may be frustrating to deal with—Karzai, Ahmadinejad, Netanyahu in their different ways—but usually they can’t totally thwart or undermine him the way a Mitch McConnell or a Roger Ailes can. He can think big thoughts and announce big plans without seeing them immediately picked apart or ridiculed. And he can dare to devise a long-term strategy, like Obama’s with China, knowing that the tools for carrying it out—in the military, the diplomatic corps, the intelligence agencies, and the rest of the national-security apparatus—are within his line of command.

'It is no wonder that the “national-security state” in all its aspects has continued to grow throughout the decades since the beginning of World War II. Defense budgets, intelligence and surveillance networks, private military contractors, irregular forms of war: these and other executive-branch tools of international power work like a ratchet. Some presidents rapidly increase them in times of emergency, as George W. Bush did after the 9/11 attacks. No president scales them back. Thus the imbalance continues to grow between international efforts, where a president has an ever greater array of tools and weapons, and the frustrating domestic arena. Despite having run on his opposition to the Iraq War and overseen the formal U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, Barack Obama has, if anything, expanded the range of executive military power, from his unilateral (and mainly successful) decision to intervene in Libya to his expansion of drone attacks.

'Think of the contrast with domestic affairs, especially economic management ...'

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/03/obama-explained/8874/3/

The Protestant Revolution

http://www.bbc.co.uk/print/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2007/08_august/21/protestant_episode.shtml

Episode one – The Politics Of Belief

In the series opener, historian Tristram Hunt uncovers how a debate about religion in 16th-century Germany sparked a political revolution. From the bloody battlefields of medieval Germany, to the civil wars of the 1640s in Britain, Protestantism unleashed a series of revolutions and wars that rippled across Europe.

And the reverberations of the Reformation continue to this day. The programme explores how the role of Protestantism has influenced the current conflict in the Middle East and the foreign policy of George W Bush.

Protestantism inspired a new way of thinking; a challenge to authority that has crossed centuries and continents. Martin Luther's challenge to the Pope in the 16th century inspired conservatives and radicals alike, and its history is one of conflict, challenge and rebellion – from the early religious radicals in Germany, to the founding of the British Labour Party and the Civil Rights movement in Fifties America.

The Protestant Revolution unravels how a breakaway form of Christianity has come to shape the political landscape of the modern world.

Episode two – The Godly Family

The Protestant Revolution transformed people's experiences of sex, love, family life and the relationship between men and women.

In the second episode, Tristram uncovers how Protestantism replaced the Catholic veneration of celibacy with a devotion to family life. The programme shows how Luther became the loving husband and father, and how the first Protestant Archbishop of Canterbury gave us our modern idea of marriage.

The programme traces the contradictory legacy of Protestantism – on the one hand sexual equality, while, on the other, virulent patriarchy. Viewers meet the austere Puritan preacher who met his soul mate, and the programme also investigates radical, free-loving 17th-century sects as well as discovering how straight-laced Victorian mothers became the sexually liberated women of today.

In gay and lesbian churches, and in conservative Christian communities today, we can see the continuing impact of Protestantism. Gay bishops, gay marriages and abortions dominate debate, and now, ironically, threaten the world's largest Protestant communion, the Anglican Church.

Episode three – A Reformation Of The Mind

Tristram explores how Protestantism has come to shape modern western art, literature and science, in the penultimate episode of Protestant Revolution.

In 16th-century Britain, radical Protestants triggered one of the greatest acts of vandalism in British history, wiping out Catholic monasteries, churches and artwork. But the cultural revolution inspired by this religious movement went far further than the shattered statues of 16th-century Britain.

The legacy of the Protestant Revolution lies unseen around us. Tristram follows a trail that leads from the monasteries of Catholic England to modern art galleries and explores how Protestantism lay at the heart of one of our greatest art forms – the novel.

Tristram also uncovers how a Protestant culture of inquiry and discovery drove on a new scientific age that spanned from the discovery of gravity to the Industrial Revolution.

And now, as new scientific frontiers are broken, Tristram reveals how religion lies at the heart of some of our most significant scientific discoveries. In the process, he discovers how Protestantism has helped to create the modern secular world.

Episode four – No Rest For The Wicked

Capitalism and an increasingly active anti-global movement are two of the most powerful forces on the planet, and Tristram reveals how both phenomena developed out of Protestantism, in the final episode of The Protestant Revolution.

The journey begins with Jean Calvin who, desperate for a sign of God's favour, found it in the world of work and money. Tristram explores how Puritans, anxious to worship God at every opportunity, introduced the world of the ticking clock and shaped the architecture of the working week.

Puritans on both sides of the Atlantic developed modern work and business practices, and provided the intellectual and financial impetus to launch the Industrial Revolution.

The push for profit could go too far, however. The sugar plantations of the Caribbean divided the Protestant church, giving rise to an anti-capitalist voice that campaigned first against slavery and then against the excesses of factory labour.

Today, capitalism is triumphant, but the anti-capitalist movement is also gathering force, and the two great opposing legacies of Protestantism continue to battle it out.