Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 496

Assad Attacks as Talks Falter

The U.N. has suspended peace talks in the Syrian Civil War until later this month, citing lack of progress. The New York Times reports:

The recess comes as Russian airstrikes have helped Syrian forces make major advances in the conflict and made them far less likely, diplomats say, to enter into serious negotiations. At the same time, the rebels and their backers in Saudi Arabia and Turkey are hard-pressed to negotiate a political deal, or even a truce, without a guarantee that their chief nemesis, President Bashar al-Assad, will be ousted.[..]

The talks in Geneva had barely begun, with Mr. de Mistura meeting a government delegation last Friday and continuing meetings with the main opposition delegation on Monday and Wednesday. The gulf between the two sides remains so wide that they were never meant to meet face to face.

There was discord over who would represent the opposition and what would be discussed, and by the time both parties arrived in Geneva, the goals were ratcheted down. The opposition delegation insisted that no political negotiations could begin until sieges had been lifted on rebel-held towns, airstrikes halted and political prisoners released.

Yet the suspension of the talks made it clear that even those modest goals were not to be met anytime soon.

The U.S. put a tremendous amount of effort into getting these talks started, and has already come under fire for pushing Syrian rebel groups to make concessions to the Russia-Syria-Iran position. And now here we are.

In spring, we’re likely to see a huge new refugee wave setting off massive crises in Europe, adding to the pressure on European governments to yield some ground to Russia and Assad. That will put the U.S. in an ugly position: European allies will be pushing us to make more concessions to Russia and Iran while our Sunni Arab allies and Turkey will be enraged at the spectacle of a further weakening of what they already consider is a disastrous appeasement policy. And these acrimonious politics will play out with the backdrop of a truly horrific humanitarian catastrophe steadily growing worse.All this works pretty well from Moscow’s point of view: Russia’s global prestige is going up as its client-making military makes progress, even as America’s alliances are undermined by ugly controversies and the U.S. administration looks weak and ineffective. Not bad for an operation that analysts say is only sapping 2 to 4 percent of Russia’s annual defense budget—a budget still off-limits to any cutting.Very few issues this consequential have been this poorly handled by an American government.

Will Gazprom Start a New Price War?

Russia’s state-owned natural gas company Gazprom for some time enjoyed the benefits of having a reliable market to its west. For years, Europe has depended heavily on overland imports from Gazprom, and Moscow has used that dependence as geopolitical and economic leverage, forcing its European customers to sign long-term take-or-pay contracts tied to the price of oil, and threatening (and in some occasions following through on such threats) to cut off supplies when its contract demands weren’t met.

What a difference a couple of years can make. The global gas market now seems as flooded as the oversupplied oil market, and with U.S. LNG exports now in play, Gazprom may have to start discounting its European supplies if it wants to keep its share of its most important market. The FT reports:

[Cutting prices] may be economically rational for Gazprom: already-low prices in the European gas market mean it could relatively easily push prices to a level at which it would be unprofitable to ship LNG from the US — and in doing so defend its market share in a region which accounts for the bulk of its profits.

The FT goes on to note that cutting prices could spark a “fully-fledged price war” that could hurt U.S. LNG.

But for its part, the timing of this couldn’t be worse for Moscow. Like the rest of the world’s petrostates, Russia derives a large chunk of its budget revenues from the sales of oil and gas. With oil prices down below $35 per barrel, the Kremlin is having to slash the national budget. And remember those long-term contracts Gazprom signed with its European customers, the ones linked to oil prices? That linkage is now proving a double-edged sword, thanks to the crude collapse.Gazprom’s grip on Europe has been loosened considerably in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Crimea, in large part because that aggression incentivized a number of the Continent’s leaders to look actively for ways to reduce their reliance on Russian energy supplies. Now, with U.S. LNG making its debut and Australia and Qatar both continuing to keep the global LNG market well-supplied, it seems Gazprom might have start cutting prices to keep its customers happy. How the tables have turned. . .

Australia Posts One of Its Worst Trade Deficits Ever

Australia’s trade deficit widened to $3.5 billion in December, the country’s fourth worst ever recorded. The ABC:

Seasonally adjusted deficits have ballooned in the past year, with the worst result on record of $4.1 billion being notched up in April, while June’s $3.6 billion result was the third largest on record.

In total, trade deficits increased by $9.5 billion in the three months to December, an increase of 27 per cent on the $7.5 billion worth of deficits chalked up in the three months to September.The result was driven by a weaker export performance in December – down 5 per cent in value for the month – eclipsing the 1 per cent decline in imports.

The global commodities collapse hasn’t been kind to Australia, and it only looks likely to get worse over the next year as demand for raw materials continues to plummet. It’s true that, unlike emerging markets, Australia’s economy is already pretty well diversified and services make up close to 70 percent of GDP. Still, a lot of the recent growth in the Australian economy has come from mining and agriculture. In recent years, Australia has looked to Asia for business, but those countries’ economies, starting with China’s, are slowing.

Around the world, we’re seeing governments and businesses that spent recent decades building up huge capacity to support heavy industry—from the raw materials to shipping to manufacturing—cope with the reality that the world simply isn’t as ravenous as everyone thought it would be. It’s a sobering development for lots of countries, from Rio to Frankfurt to Sydney.

Rearranging the Deck Chairs on the Titanic

After months of rumors and conflicting reports, the draft of a compromise between British PM David Cameron and the EU’s Powers That Be has been released—and the race to an In/Out Referendum in June is on. Open Europe has a point-by-point breakdown of what Britain got from Brussels. But from the Times of London comes the (unsurprising) news that some parts of the deal may be weaker than advertised—which is sure to tick off Brits who feel they’ve been jumping to Brussels’s tune for too long. Right now, polls are even and the race is anyone’s to win.

But while this recent round of negotiations will be politically important, focusing on just the particulars of this list of concessions misses the bigger point. Gideon Rachman, writing in the Financial Times, highlights some of the grand strategic implications of the coming vote. Noting a litany of crises splitting Europe north and south (the euro) and east and west (immigration and law and order questions in Poland and Hungary), Rachman writes:

Amid all this, Mr Cameron’s demands for minor changes in Britain’s relationship with the EU seem almost bizarrely besides the point. As one German policymaker fumed to me: “The European house is burning down and Britain wants to waste time rearranging the furniture.”

Rachman is right: The British terms are bizarrely parochial, for a time of crisis and from a nation that’s supposedly one of Europe’s big players. But the quote from the German he spoke to also leaves out something big: If the Brits are rearranging the furniture while the building is on fire (and the building is on fire), the Continental Europeans have been insisting that leaving the space heater under the curtains would have worked just fine as long as the curtains had been of a different color. France, Germany, and the rest have yet to come to grips with how deep and cutting EU reform will have to be, if the Continent hopes to pull itself out of the mess. Simply stumbling from crisis to crisis while kicking the can further down the road will not magically result in a working, problem-free “United States of Europe” one day.

However, Britain, due to its unique intellectual, legal, and diplomatic inheritance, has a genuinely different perspective on many problems in Europe—one which could help Europe, if Britain can bring its weight to bear. And therein lies the rub. As Walter Russell Mead wrote last year:

[Americans] look at the EU today and see an incoherent assemblage of nations with wildly different interests and ambitions. We see that Club Med wants reform of the euro, that France fears German power and that tensions are growing between east and west and north and south.

We see potential reform coalitions everywhere we look; what we don’t see is the kind of brilliant British initiative that so often in Europe’s past brought order out of chaos and built alliances that checked those who sought to smother the continent’s diversity and subject it to a single, crushing system.[..]The staunchly Protestant Britain of William III was able to bring the Pope himself into its grand alliance against Louis XIV; today Britain has a cause just as good and as important, but it appears to lack the wisdom to lead the reform movement that Europe urgently needs.

This needs to change—because the problems of Europe aren’t going away, and both America and the UK (whether it stays in the EU or leaves it) will continue to be invested in Europe’s health.

In his piece, Rachman offers an argument you’ll be hearing a lot of, on both sides of the Atlantic, between now and the referendum time: The UK should stay in the EU because to leave it would cripple the EU just at a time when Europe is facing threats both within (the rise of nationalist parties) and without (Russia). This is true—but only if “staying in” means pushing hard for needed reforms. It’s widely acknowledged that if the U.K. votes “Out,” it will be the beginning of a series of wrenching changes. People need to start understanding that the same applies if it votes “In”—for the UK, and for all of Europe.

One Step Toward Fixing Student Loans

The major cause of America’s student debt bubble is structural: College costs too much, due to excessive subsidies, an anti-competitive accreditation system, guild protections, and crony regulations. But it doesn’t help that, in addition, students taking out loans are totally ignorant about the process of repaying them. Bloomberg reports on new research by LendEDU, “a company that provides information about loan refinancing options”:

When Lendedu talked to 477 undergraduate and graduate students at three Bay Area campuses, it found that just 6 percent of them knew how long they would be repaying the debt. Only 8 percent knew the interest rate on their loan.

. . . More than 90 percent of the students did not know which type of loans accumulate interest during school and which do not. Seventy three percent thought that Sallie Mae, which for years collected federal student debt, was a person rather than a company.

This alarming data points to one badly needed reform for student loan programs: We should require any college that wants to qualify for federal loans to mandate that all first-year students take—and pass—a course in personal finance that includes information about the process of borrowing money, repayment costs, the institutions involved, and so on. It should also include information about post-college financial management, like taxes, retirement saving, and personal investment. Alternatively, colleges participating in the federal loan program could require incoming students to demonstrate mastery of basic financial topics in high school. Indeed, this kind of information should really be taught to every 17-year-old before that 18th birthday.

The government has a clear interest in making sure college students understand these topics, and in a world where job-hopping is the norm and defined benefit pensions are on the way out, it’s increasingly important that workers be better equipped to take charge of their own financial fate. Implementing such a program wouldn’t fix the student loan disaster, but it could make some meaningful progress on the margins.

Urbanity as a Vortex of Pluralism

I have spent the last few years working toward a theory of pluralism, to replace the secularization theory which, I believe, has been empirically falsified. I have sketched the outline of such a theory in my book The Many Altars of Modernity (2014); a German translation has just been published (I will take the liberty of again quoting my favorite Zulu proverb: “If I don’t beat my drum, who will?”).

Actually, I like to speak of two pluralisms: The first is religious pluralism in the usual sense—a plurality of religions, worldviews and moral systems co-existing in the same society; the other refers to the co-existence of religion with a powerful secular discourse without which a modern society could not exist. That discourse is what Charles Taylor has ably described as the “secular frame” in his book A Secular Age (2007); but he exaggerated the degree of hegemony achieved by this discourse under modern conditions. This is indeed the basic error of all forms of secularization theory, made by both those who still adhere to that theory, and those who instead propose a re-sacralization of the world—nicely encapsulated in the assertion of “the return of the gods”. Except for a small portion of the world’s population (especially in Western Europe and in an international intelligentsia) the relation between religion and modernity is not a matter of either/or, but rather of “both/and”. To help you start thinking in these terms, which for many of you are probably implausible, I invite you to come with me to central Texas, where I have periodically taught as a visiting professor at a conservative Baptist university. There, in one of the most religious and economically dynamic regions of the United States you can meet successful petroleum engineers, brain surgeons and computer specialists who believe that prayer can perform miracles of healing and some of whom believe that it can divert the course of a hurricane. If you want to follow up with two recent empirical studies of the Evangelical mind, I refer you to Tanya Luhrmann (anthropologist, Stanford) and Robert Wuthnow (sociologist, Princeton). It is not interesting to ask whether this co-existence is possible; we know that it is (it only takes about four hours to fly from Boston to Dallas). The interesting question is how this feat is achieved, and achieved by very intelligent people with graduate degrees in the natural sciences.I now propose to look at how the two pluralisms occupy urban spaces today. They do so today in just about every country in the world beyond the level of modernity of, say, Amazonia. I start with America, because it is in the vanguard of both pluralisms—the most religious and religiously diverse country in the developed world (the comparison with Europe is most helpful here), and also the location of the most advanced science and technology (more Nobel prizes and international patents than anywhere else). Start in Washington: Go north on 16th Street, NW, from the White House toward Maryland. I have never found out why (probably zoning regulations), but this stretch of urban landscape is a veritable museum of comparative religion: different Protestant churches (including an African-American one, a big Catholic church, different denominations of American Judaism, a Greek Orthodox church, a Buddhist temple, a Baha’i center, and a building dedicated to one of the many syncretistic sects that sprouted in Vietnam. There is no mosque on 16th Street, when I last looked, but one of the biggest ones is one block away. I don’t know whether any formal interreligious dialogue is going on between these establishments (I would love to eavesdrop on a dialogue between Orthodox Jews and Buddhists). However, occasionally some of those who work in these places or who attend services there must be getting into informal conversation with each other (for instance, at big events they might negotiate over parking spaces). If these occasions occur repeatedly, even if theological topics are avoided, what is likely to occur is what I call “cognitive contamination”—when the beliefs and practices of these “others” begin to affect one’s own.If you want to get out of Washington (an understandable urge these days), I can suggest a more relaxing excursion: Go to Honolulu and take the Pali Highway across the island of Oahu. Even before you leave the city limits, you can experience another orgy of religious pluralism. As one would expect, there is a stronger Asia presence—more Buddhists than Orthodox Jews  (though you might come across a guitar strumming rabbi in an aloha shirt who practices Tantric meditation). Granted, few other countries can match the exuberant religious pluralism of America, but others are catching up. Some years ago I saw devotees of Krishna chanting and dancing in front of St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna, one of the monuments of European Christendom. And also some time ago I was at a party in Stuttgart, where I expressed the opinion that a media-savvy Hindu holy-man was probably a fraud. One of the other individuals there, who had been introduced as an engineer, took strong exception to my characterization. He said that he was a disciple of the guru; he spoke in a broad Swabian dialect.For the other pluralism we might as well take Boston. Someone has once  described it, as not so much a city as a federation of campuses and medical centers. Its top universities, notably Harvard and MIT, calmly assume that they constitute the navel, the mythical omphalos, of the intellectual universe (I’m sure that this is an exaggeration, but myths often have long lives—to paraphrase W. I. Thomas, the co-author of The Polish Peasant, definitions of reality, if held by elites, have a way of becoming reality.) As to medical centers, if you intend to become seriously ill and have the required insurance, it is a good idea to do so in Boston.At the research center I used to direct at Boston University I recently organized a conference on the hospital as an interface between modernity and religion. Every hospital is a temple to the spirit of modernity: The therapy dispensed there is to be based exclusively on scientific knowledge and the most advanced technology is applied in its service. However, the organization of a hospital resembles that of a religious hierarchy. All doctors wear long white robes, and the top doctors, surrounded by acolytes, occasionally descend from the heights and pronounce judgments. Lesser medical personnel, nurses and technicians wear less sacred uniforms. The patients, upon whom this entire hierarchy is imposed, go around in demeaning clothing (like the so-called “johnnies” favored in American hospitals, the buttocks exposed to public view and every part of the body easily accessible to the clerisy in charge). They must wait until sentence is pronounced from on high; they hope a merciful one.Of course such temples of modernity do not exist in less developed situations—say, in a rather primitive African hinterland. But even there one will encounter agents or consumers of modernity, such as scouts for multinational corporations looking for untapped natural resources, or eco-tourists looking for communion with unspoiled nature; these two cordially dislike each other. But, minimally, there will be three modern outposts sent into this remote territory by the national government—a police station, a primary school, and a clinic. But here too religion will interact with these modern intrusions. There will be traditional actors, such as tribal chiefs trying to preserve the old family virtues (there will probably be no television yet, but other immoral communications will have reached, possibly by way of sexually liberated eco-tourists); the tribal chiefs will also resent the authority of the police station, as indigenous healers (aka witch-doctors) will compete with the clinic. But there will very likely be religious impinging from the outside, some from very modern origins—such as the powerful Pentecostal movement which has been sweeping throughout sub-Saharan Africa. And here too there will be both conflict and collusion between modernity and religion.But back to Boston: The hospital, flying the banners of modernity, is ongoingly invaded by religion. Some of it is on the formal level. Large hospitals in Boston employ a multireligious group of chaplains. Some are sent in by outside religious bodies, some are actually on the hospital’s own payroll. Both groups very commonly go through a program that began many years ago under the heading “clinical training”, intended to teach aspiring chaplains basic techniques of “counseling” (a kind of psychotherapy 101). Wendy Cadge (sociologist, Brandeis) has written a very impressive study of hospital chaplains, Paging God (2012). One of her findings is that these chaplains prefer to describe their message as “spirituality”, rather than “religion”. This allows them to fit more easily into the discourse of the medical hierarchy, including doing entries into patients’ charts—a “spirituality” index being potentially added to all the other data: blood pressure, sugar levels, X-ray pictures, and so on. Cadge does not use this term, but what she describes is a process of secularization; she also found that Catholic hospital chaplains are most resistant to this process, because their ministry is largely sacramental (including the sacrament that used to be called “extreme unction”, though it is now named in such a way as not to suggest to anxious patients that they are about to die).Let me put the change starkly: Ministry to the dying, once called ars moriendi/”the art of dying”, was intended to reconcile the patient with God while there is still time; the secularized ministry is intended to reconcile patients with unresolved feelings toward parents, spouses and other “significant others”. But even on the formal level there is a two-way traffic going on. I recently met the Buddhist chaplain of an originally Jewish hospital in Boston. We had an interesting conversation. I asked him whether there were many Buddhist patients. No, hardly any, he replied. Does he then teach Buddhism? No, he wouldn’t be allowed to do this, he said. Then what does he talk with patients about? Well, he will talk about anything they want to talk about; but also he talks about some Buddhist concepts without identifying them as such. Which ones? He mentioned three: “attentiveness”, “non-self” and “patience”. These are traditional precepts, helpful in the quest for enlightenment, but it is open to question whether this secularization does indeed, as he seems to intend, smuggle in Buddhist contents under cover of a secular discourse, or whether it is an abandonment of the Noble Eight-Fold Path that was originally meant to release from the horror of endless reincarnations. Be this as it may, while hospital chaplains (at least non-Catholic ones) translate ministry into psychotherapy, medical faculties develop an interest in exploring “traditional ways of healing”, including forms of Asian meditation (a conspiracy of neuroscientists and witch-doctors?). In other words, while the discourse of modern medicine, exemplified in the institution of the hospital, is very powerful indeed (and, let me hasten to say, does indeed heal and prolong life) there seems to be “mutual cognitive contamination” at work here.In addition to these formal interactions, there are numerous informal religious incursions, by visiting family and friends of the patient, by home clergy and pastoral visitors, and even by medical staff. Three episodes from my own experience (all in Boston):1. About eight years ago I was seriously ill and had to spend three weeks in the hospital (I subsequently recovered very well—no extreme unction required, not even a Lutheran one!) During one of the worst periods a young intern came to my room; I had never seen him before, I think he came about some medication. Out of the blue, just before leaving, he said: “I want you to know that some of us have been praying for you. I think this is important.”2. A little later a middle-aged cleaning women came into the room. She was a Latina, and I knew that she was Pentecostal (a faith that I, as incurably Lutheran, have never found appealing). She was sobbing, told me that her mother had died yesterday. I spontaneously took her hands in mine and said “somos todos en los manos del Senor”/”we are all in the hands of the Lord”. For a moment we had sacralized this space.3. Much more recently, after an accident, I was in physical therapy. A woman I didn’t know phoned me. She had heard from a colleague about this, she is an occupational therapist, and she wonders whether I could use her services. I thanked her, but no—I only needed my head for my occupation, and it was fine. She said something friendly, then added before hanging up: “and have a blessed Ash Wednesday”. I was a bit startled; not being very attentive to the church calendar, I had not remembered that it was Ash Wednesday. But then I wondered: Did she think that I am Catholic? If so, why? But then more interesting: Does she wish everybody, whether thought to be Catholic or not, a blessed Ash Wednesday? If so, she had switched from a conversation of medical relevance to a religious one (be it with pastoral or missionary intent).The contemporary American or European city has clearly designated religious and secular spaces: think St. Patrick’s Cathedral and Coney Island amusement park; or Notre Dame and what used to be the red-light district of Montmartre. And then, in both countries with a separation of church and state, secular political spaces with religious undertones: the Arc de Triomphe and the Statue of Liberty. They tend to overlap, which is generally accepted by most citizens, except for ideological zealots (latter-day Jacobins who want to ban religion from all public spaces such as ACLU lawyers in America offended by Christmas creches in public parks). Airport and military chapels in America have learned how to change symbols to convert these places from one denominational space to another:remove the crucifix and substitute a menorah, and the Catholic sanctuary has become a synagogue pro tem. Scholars of religion use the concept of landnama rituals, a Viking term meaning the ceremonial appropriation of space under a new sovereignty, as when the Spanish conquerors placed a cross and a royal banner on top of an Aztec temple to signify to whom this land now belongs. Call what happens now “pluralist landnama”. (Sort of like another contemporary institution: “serial monogamy”!)A concept coined by Alfred Schutz (1900-1959) is useful in describing the religious and secular spaces in a modern city: the concept of relevance structure. Some spaces are clearly marked as religious or secular spaces—prayer is in the relevance structure of a church, aesthetic experience in that of a museum. This becomes very clear when either relevance structure is deliberately violated (“transgressed”).Two examples from post-Soviet Russia: In 2012 a feminist punk rock band called Pussy Riot invaded the liturgy in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow. They staged an obscene dance, with a libretto denouncing the Putin regime and its close alliance with the Russian Orthodox Church. The desecration was especially transgressive; there had been an earlier church in that location, razed under Stalin to be replaced by a swimming pool. After the collapse of the Soviet Union the Cathedral was splendidly rebuilt, to celebrate the survival and renewed public status of the Church.The counter-example of reconsecration was told to me by an American scholar of Russia with a special interest in religion. The Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg was founded by Catherine the Great in 1764 and opened to the public in mid-19th century. Among other treasures it holds the largest collection of icons in the world. Ever since its opening it has been visited by many thousands of tourists, right through the Soviet period (even atheistic Marxists could visit the collection for purely aesthetic pleasure, also for scholarly or historical reasons). Around the time of Pussy Riot a group of Orthodox believers visited the exhibit. They stood before it with lit candles and incense, sang hymns, kissed the icons and prayed to them. The administrators of the Museum threw them out, not because of old-time atheism, but because the behavior of the believers was inappropriate—it transgressed the relevance structure of an urban museum. The administrators of the Metropolitan Museum or the Louvre would also have been annoyed (though hardly as shocked as the worshippers in the Cathedral in Moscow). The Hermitage was the scene of a dramatic instance of landnama: For a short time this secular space had become a sanctuary for Orthodox worship.Alfred Schutz was not much interested in religion, but his idea of relevance structures is very well suited to help us understand how secularity and religion can co-exist, both in society and in the minds of individuals. It has always been possible to switch relevance structures. Some individuals whom Max Weber would have categorized as “religious virtuosi” can do this, and so can ordinary believers. St. Teresa of Avila, one of the greatest Catholic mystics, fell into ecstasies that filled her with the presence of God; along with her friend St. John of the Cross she also reformed the Carmelite Order in 16th-century Spain. In the latter capacity she had to inspect many convents of Carmelite nuns. I think you have to switch off the relevance structure of monastic administration while in a state of ecstasty, and vice versa. And a good Catholic layman devotedly attending Mass, may occasionally engage in a bit of flirtation with a charming senorita in an adjoining pew. Nothing new here. But a modern society (not least because of the two pluralisms) is enormously complex, forcing its members to learn how to switch relevance structures from early on.In conclusion, I want to make a more personal observation: I have long thought of the big city as a place of mystery. Vienna, the city of my childhood, was reasonably big (already then with about two million inhabitants), but my movements through the city were obviously rather limited. My first really big city was Paris, where I lived for a few months as a very young man, and through which I roamed on the Metro and on foot. All these many buildings, their interiors hidden from sight: what secrets could they hide?Years later I took a course at the New School of Social Research under Albert Salomon entitled “Balzac as a Sociologist”. I sensed that Balzac’s novels conveyed the same experience of Paris, all its secrets hidden behind closed doors. What could be going on behind this particular door: a religious cult (Balzac was curious about esoteric cults), a great crime, an orgy, or a political conspiracy?  During my student days I roamed endlessly through New York; since I was already obsessed with religion (as a friend of mine once put it, rather pejoratively, “once a godder, always a godder”), I visited every sort of religious space—not only regular Christian churches and different synagogues, but any manner of what for me were esoterica: a brand-new Zen center, the Anthroposophical Society and its cultic offspring, the so-called Christian Community (where one could attend a quasi-Gnostic ceremony in 20th-century America), a Mormon church, Pentecostal storefronts in Puerto Rican East Harlem (about which I wrote my M.A. thesis, my hands “dirty with research”), and the Baha’i (about which faith I wrote my doctoral dissertation). I could go on. But enough. I will observe that mystery is always, minimally, akin to the core of religious experience which Rudolf Otto (in my opinion the greatest 20th-century scholar of religion) called the mysterium tremendum. Thus it should not be a surprise that cities have typically been places of religious innovation (Pentecostalism, the biggest religious explosion of our time, mainly flourishes in the intensely pluralistic mega-cities of the Global South).

A Period of Conflict and Clash

Uber is under political fire from Kenyan taxi drivers, even as reports emerge that Uber drivers have been victims of attacks. The AP:

Taxi operators in Kenya Wednesday asked the government to stop operations of Uber, the ride sharing app which has risen in popularity because of its cheaper fares [. . . .}

Chairman of the Taxi Cab Association of Kenya Josphat Olila said Wednesday that the organization will hold protests in a week. Mwangi Mubia, the association’s spokesman said 4,000 taxis are being driven out of business because of Uber’s cheaper fares. On Tuesday, Interior Ministry Spokesman Mwenda Njoka issued a statement saying that there have been reports of attacks on Uber drivers this week.

Resistance to Uber is a global phenomenon. Taxi drivers in first world cities like London, Paris, and New York, as well as in poor countries, have fought—and in some places, fought violently—against the introduction of Uber. It’s easy to denounce these anti-Uber drivers as luddites and criticize these cab companies as crony capitalists—which they usually are.

But it’s also important to understand what Uber and related companies are doing in broader context, for in that context, these companies are much more unsettling and disruptive than they may at first appear. In fact, the dispute over Uber and similar businesses opens a window into some of the world’s most important problems.In a country like Kenya, life for those at the bottom is scary and grim. They live in large slums without safe drinking water or good health services, where people pay high rents to criminal syndicates for the right to build and inhabit shacks—a.k.a “informal housing.” Kids in these slums play soccer with plastic garbage bags wound into a ball and held together by string. Open sewers flow down steeply eroded gullies.People in these places don’t get much protection from the state. There’s no food and water safety bureau, no police, little health care, no recognition of their property rights, and no courts that settle their disputes. They have minimal education. As for protections against sex discrimination or means of obtaining disability payments or unemployment insurance: fuggedaboutit.You get a kind of tiered society in places like this. Below the level of political leaders and the rich, there is a bubble of “formal sector” workers. They include people employed by foreign interests (NGOs, foreign investors, and so on) and “on the books” employees of both state enterprises and well-established private companies. These jobs usually come with good wages and all kinds of perks. Employment laws for the formal sector are often modeled on European labor legislation and in many poor countries, it can be as hard to get fired from one of these jobs as it is to get fired from the U.S. Postal Service—or the New York City public schools.But the bubble is small, and in many countries most people are in the informal sector. Dump pickers, street vendors, causal laborers, most domestic workers, and lots of other people essentially fall outside the range of government concern: no minimum wage, no health and safety regulations on the job, and no social insurance.The imbalance between these formal and informal sectors can be incredibly dysfunctional. In South Africa, government employees and employees of international companies like the great mines that play such an important role in the economy, have worked long and hard to solidify their position and to create ever stronger protections around formal sector jobs. One result: The government can’t afford to extend quality services to all of its people because the civil service is so expensive. Moreover, foreign investment is deterred because the labor laws in the formal sector are so strict that South Africa, despite huge unemployment and high rates of poverty, is uncompetitive internationally as a manufacturing platform.In a situation like this, people first attempt to get a job in the formal sector. But when they lack the education, political connections, or whatever it may be to get inside the bubble, the next strategy is to band together with other people in a similar job or situation to get a kind of informal protection. The vendors on a given street will organize to prevent other vendors from setting out their stalls or undercutting their prices. The informal van services that many people use, because the government’s mass transit doesn’t serve the places where poor people live, are organized and not just anybody can set up a rival van service along the routes.For people who have or who acquire a stake in these informal networks, the strength of their organizations can be a matter of life and death.There’s a lot wrong with this kind of society. The crony capitalists and the formal sector workers enjoy inflated standards of living that deny opportunities to many others. The informal networks, organized outside the state with no recourse to formal legal protections, often depend on hired muscle and are easily infiltrated by or turned into criminal gangs. You just have to look around one of these huge slums—found around cities from Cape Town to Cairo in Africa and in much of Asia and Latin America as well—to see millions of people work very hard, with most of them not getting anywhere. As a system of social organization, this falls well short of the optimum.Economists like Hernando de Soto have done some interesting thinking about how to bring the informal sector inside the bubble and how the property rights and hard work of urban slum dwellers could, if given the right kinds of institutional support and recognition, serve as the basis for better lives for hundreds of millions around the world.But all that is long-term, and for people on the edge of survival, time horizons are short. Ultimately, innovations like Uber and the dismantling of cozy crony systems will make life better for most of the residents in an urban area. Passengers will get cheaper, faster rides, drivers will be able to set their own hours, and more people will have access to a growing market. But the disruption that hits organized taxi drivers in a city like Nairobi will too often destroy one way of making a living without opening new options. And when drivers who fear displacement band together in gangs and try to defend their economic position with, if necessary, violence, they are reacting pretty much as everybody does in the society in which they live.The new technologies and the new business formats that the Information Revolution is creating, then, have very different impacts in different places around the world—and global disruption is happening faster than ever. The Industrial Revolution began in Great Britain in the late 1700s, and it took hundreds of years for the factory system to spread around the world. Ride-sharing technology, on the other hand, is just a few years old, and is already being adopted in countries at all levels of development. But the problem isn’t really Uber, either. The problem is the lack of opportunities that makes taxi drivers so willing to fight for what little they have. For creative destruction to work and to be sustainable, those whose jobs or industries perish must, on the whole, be able to find other jobs and other opportunities.These problems aren’t going away anytime soon, and we should all brace for a period in world history in which the clash between new technology and new ways of doing things, on the one hand, and entrenched interests, on the other, is rising, sometimes explosively. We aren’t looking at a period of social calm and rest, not in Kenya, not in Europe, not in the Middle East, and not in the Americas.

Rand Paul: A Jeffersonian in a Jacksonian Moment

Senator Rand Paul, who was once considered a top-tier GOP candidate—the slicker, more mainstream version of his father, who might be able to appeal to a wider GOP constituency—has dropped out of the race after failing to get even a quarter of his father’s support in the Iowa caucuses. Paul’s poor performance is partly due to his own doing and his own political challenges: As many commentators have pointed out, his uneasy efforts to broaden his base beyond hardcore Ron Paul fans lost him some support among that group, even as his continued association with his father’s brand made more traditional Republicans wary. And despite a strong performance in the last debate, Paul often came across as joyless and didactic throughout the campaign.

Ultimately, however, Paul’s collapse is more about the mood of the party and the country than it is about any strategic missteps by him. 2016 is looking more like the year of the angry, middle- or working-class nationalist—in other words, of Andrew Jackson—than the year of the principled Jeffersonian libertarian. Sen. Paul was Edward Snowden’s most high-profile booster in a year when anxieties about terrorism are pushing leading candidates to denounce the NSA leaks in harsher and harsher terms. He was a strong advocate for criminal justice reform in a year when the GOP race seems increasingly defined by Nixon-style law-and-order toughness. And, of course, Rand Paul was a champion of a less active foreign policy and a smaller military at a time when support for a more hawkish foreign policy is surging among Republicans.In other words, it was probably impossible for a candidate like Paul to take the helm of the GOP in a year like this one. Jeffersonianism has a long history in America, but it has historically run into trouble in the face of global chaos and internal discontent. For now, and for the foreseeable future, Jeffersonians will need to be content with influencing the party from the sidelines.

How the West Misjudged Russia, Part 4: Mad about Medvedev

Editor’s Note: How do Russia and the West see one another? What are the experts’ views on the confrontation between Russia and the West? How do the pundits explain the Russo-Ukrainian war and Russia’s Syrian gambit? What are the roots of the mythology about Russia in the West, and why has the West failed to predict and understand Russia’s trajectory? This is the fourth essay in a series that seeks to answer these questions. Read part three here.

When one looks at what experts were saying a couple of years before they were doused by the cold shower of Putin’s war on Ukraine in 2014, one has to wonder whether they were analyzing a different Russia, perhaps from a parallel universe. The standard Western perception of Medvedev’s presidency reveals a political culture that is founded on the hope that the rest of the world accepts the Western understanding of reason and normalcy, and that politicians mean what they say. Naivety and wishful thinking were instrumental in provoking the Kremlin to test the West after Medvedev’s interregnum. The Kremlin gang, observing the West’s euphoria over Medvedev, whom they considered a mere chair warmer, saw proof that Western leaders could be easily duped. As for the experts’ predictions, history not been kindThe Medvedev presidency (2008–12) presented a real challenge for the Western pragmatists. Most of them saw Medvedev as a liberal leader ready for partnership with the West. I remember Henry Kissinger saying in 2008: “My impression is that a new phase of Russian politics is underway…. The [Medvedev election] marks a transition from a phase of consolidation to a period of modernization…. The government’s operation—at least initially—with two centers of power may, in retrospect, appear to be the beginning of an evolution toward a form of checks and balances…. We are witnessing one of the most promising periods in Russian history.” It wasn’t long before we saw just how accurate the realist guru’s pronouncements were. (Indeed, this quote explains why I stopped using the term “realists.”)Even the usually shrewd Zbigniew Brzezinski, who has always kept the normative dimension in mind, viewed Medvedev as “the most prominent spokesman for the modernization-democratization school of thought” and his position as “ a milestone in Russia’s political evolution.”1I won’t mention a whole host of similar comments in both Russian and foreign media—there were a lot of them! I will just pose a rhetorical question: How could one believe in Medvedev’s liberalism or independence when Putin still held all the reins of power? And if the analysts didn’t know that Putin remained in control, maybe they should be in a different line of work. Even today I can’t understand how even the most astute of my Russian and Western colleagues could sound so hopeful about Medvedev’s rule. I remember talking to them, trying to dispel their illusions, only to receive a condescending smirk or a shrug of shoulders in reply. It’s quite possible Western analysts were in large part influenced by their Russian colleagues, who parachuted into Western capitals with talk of Medvedev’s liberalism—but this is no excuse either.On the whole, the illusions related to Medvedev’s presidency can be explained by: the hopes that the Kremlin’s personalized regime was capable of reform; the belief that the Russian leader thinks what he says (incidentally, when has that ever been true?); the condescending attitude toward Russians that sees them as a nation than can only be ruled or modernized by a leader; and the acceptance of the Kremlin’s imitations as genuine processes. In any event, here we have confirmation of a lack of understanding of how the Russian System really works.The hopes for Medvedev’s liberalism found expression in the two models of Western policy: the U.S. reset and the EU Partnership for Modernization. While the reset did pay the United States some tactical dividends, what did the EU Partnership do for Brussels, other than to help the Kremlin play its “Let’s Pretend!” game?In 2012 the Kremlin openly declared that the West’s dominance has come to an end. (To be sure, already in 2007, in his speech at the Munich Security conference, Putin had warned us about the direction Russian would be turning.) This conclusion would become one of the key theses of the updated official Russian foreign policy concept, which said, “ the possibilities of the historical West to dominate…are shrinking.” Meanwhile, pragmatists continued to work within the cooperation-partnership model, apparently hoping that the Kremlin was just pretending at its growing assertiveness for some domestic purpose. Calling for “strategic dialogue” with Russia, Thomas Graham and Dmitri Trenin, director of the Moscow Carnegie Center, wrote in the New York Times that “the two countries’ strategic interests do not necessarily collide…and there is probably a significant overlap.” They were talking about “common concerns” on the issues of “China, Islamic extremists, and competition for Arctic resources by non-Arctic powers,” as well as Russia’s goal to modernize its economy (!). The authors even believed that the United States and Russia still “could be partners.”One can certainly understand the experts’ desire to find common ground between the two countries at a time when the reset had clearly run out of steam. But how realistic was their belief that the strategic interests of the two states wouldn’t collide, given that Putin had already begun to demonstrate hostility toward the West and especially toward America? One could not escape the impression that we were dealing with the modification of the old mantra of “common interests:” really, if the interests “do not collide”, they must share something in common. Meanwhile, the common concerns mentioned by the experts clearly fell short of becoming the basis for “strategic dialogue.” Besides, economic modernization totally fell by the wayside in the Kremlin. How could Washington have convinced Moscow to engage in strategic dialogue under those circumstances? What price should it have paid to persuade Moscow to participate in the project when, according to the authors of the NYT op-ed, there were no more easy tradeoffs.Andrew Wood rightly noted that the word “strategic” in this context looked like “a slippery term.” It seems that the authors of this idea were themselves not sure that it could be implemented. Thus, Graham called for “creating the atmosphere and shaping expectations to persuade Russia to act in ways that advance [U.S.] goals.” I then wrote in my response: “What’s good for the goose is also good for the gander; Moscow will also seek to ‘shape expectations.’ And the Kremlin is a much smoother operator.” Besides, “empty strategic dialogue” could only “legitimize Putin and the Kremlin,” as David Kramer put it.Of course, Moscow and Washington had to talk, but why call this conversation a “strategic dialogue,” which implied an agenda that had little to do with reality? And why call pretending and “shaping expectations” a strategy? Was it a deliberate attempt to cater to the Kremlin’s vanity? Looking back, I begin to regret the time spent on proving the obvious. We, the normativists, and the pragmatists could have focused on discussing a far more important question: What will be the likely results of the Kremlin’s turn to containing the West, and how can we prevent both sides from entering a dangerous confrontation without creating new ungrounded hopes? We all fell into the trap that Lipset had warned us about: Instead of analyzing the important issues, we wasted time debating small stuff.2Return to Russia-Fortress, and the “Humiliation” SongWhile pragmatists were trying to accommodate the Kremlin, the Russian ruling team had strapped on a military helmet. By the end of 2013, before the war with Ukraine, the Kremlin had endorsed a new existential Doctrine that may be summarized as follows:

First, Russia is a special “state-civilization” based on a return to “traditional values.” One need not have a particularly active imagination to see that Putin has been evoking an order based on personalized power and the individual’s total submission to the state.3
Second, Russia has become the chief defender of Christianity and faith in God. The Soviet Union was keen on spreading its ideology around the globe. The Kremlin intends to do more: It seeks to offer the world its vision of moral values.
Third, the Kremlin declared its intention to build its own galaxy by unifying the post-Soviet space and making it an “independent center of global development”—the Eurasian Union.
Finally, Russia has a duty to defend the “Russian World,” meaning Russian-speaking minorities in other countries. This provided a ready-made pretext to meddle in those countries’ internal affairs.

The “Putin Doctrine” legitimated a harsher rule at home and a more assertive stance abroad.4 Former UK Ambassador to Russia and current Chatham House fellow associate Roderic Lyne wrote, “ Todays’ Putinist model departs from the integrationist and modernizing aspirations of 1990–2004, but is not genuinely ‘new.’ It is reactionary rather than innovatory; not geared to the future but inspired by the past—by Russia’s history in the 18th and 19th centuries with elements of the Soviet legacy added in.” The irony is that the Kremlin, in looking for a way to keep going, returned to a model that by the end of the 1990s had already caused the System’s previous incarnation to fall apart. In another ironic twist, liberal civilization once again became the stimulus for the Kremlin’s new breath; this time its normative ambiguity, double standards and acquiescence offered the Kremlin a pretext for looking where the red line is.

By annexing Crimea and backing pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine, the Kremlin was able to justify its military-patriotic mobilization of society. “Unwilling to undertake vital institutional reforms. And with his popularity sliding inexorably downward in 2012–13, Mr. Putin shifted the foundation of his regime’s legitimacy from steady economic progress and the growth of personal incomes to patriotic mobilization,” wrote Leon Aron, resident scholar and the director of Russian studies at the American Enterprise Institute. Militarist rhetoric rose to a fever pitch, aided by the lack of cultural or moral regulators capable of shielding an atomized society of disoriented, demoralized individuals from the schemes of an overweening state.How have the Russian pragmatists interpreted the Kremlin’s change of existential pattern? They have returned to “humiliation” mantra, which had been popular among the Russian left and nationalist circles after the collapse of the USSR and has now become the main justification for the Kremlin’s revisionist stand. (I wrote an essay about Russia’s alleged “Weimar complex” and here will deal only with its main arguments.) The “humiliation” narrative has some key lines: The West has always undervalued Russia; the West refuses to grant Russia its “proper” role in the international arena; finally, the West is deliberately trying to constrain Russia by encircling it with every kind of “fence”, from NATO to the Eurozone.Sergei Karaganov, dean at the High School of Economics, has made it his mission to alert the West to the “Weimar syndrome” that its policies have created inside Russia. The West refused to “acknowledge that Russia occupies a place in European and global politics that it considers natural and legitimate,” asserts Karaganov. But what does “occupying natural and legitimate place” entail? Does it entitle Russia to its own interpretation of the global rules of the game? Just as other pragmatists, Karaganov interprets NATO expansion as the West’s refusal to end the Cold War. But if NATO expansion is in fact a manifestation of the Cold War, what was Russia doing in the NATO-Russia Council?Academician Alexei Arbatov typically levels the following accusation against the West: “Russia was treated as a power on the losing side, although it was Russia which actually dealt the final blow to the Soviet empire and the Cold War.” Instead of compensating Russia and thanking it for ending the Cold War, the West has been driving the country into a corner and forcing it to lash out. I have a question for Arbatov: What level of compensation, what degree of thanks, would be sufficient to satisfy the Russian ego?Putin has long been trying to accommodate the West, but “Western leaders have shown no real interest in integrating Russia.” That is how Dmitri Trenin explains Moscow’s resentment. This conclusion could be relevant, if one neglects to mention how long and with how much effort liberal democracies have been trying to help Russia to transform itself in order make its integration into the West possible, or how the Russian elite has stubbornly refused to build a rule of law state.Pragmatists have been repeating another key verse from the Kremlin Bible: “The Russian foreign policy tack has been, and remains, winning full sovereignty for Russia.” This is the conclusion towards which pragmatists’ whole argument builds. But hold on a minute: Who on earth is threatening Russia’s sovereignty? Facts and names, please!Among the many variations of the “humiliation” narrative, one in particular strikes a chord in the West, especially among intellectuals on the left: the Russian demand for political equality on the international scene. One can only imagine what “equality” means in this context. Russia enjoys the same rights in international institutions as other States. What else is needed for equality? To grant Russia “special rights” or permit it not to observe certain accepted international norms would be to place it above other States. How, exactly, would that correlate with equality? Are some States “more equal” than others?Why, one wonders, are the advocates of the “humiliation” theory not themselves humiliated, for instance, by Russia’s corruption, its pathetic heath care system, and its declining educational and living standards? Why did Russia’s “Weimar syndrome” not prevent its elite from integrating into Western society at a personal level over the past twenty years? Lastly, we must ask how Russia’s supposed “Weimar syndrome” correlates with the “Decline of the West,” a subject on which the Kremlin and nearly all Russia’s experts are constantly harping. Such a Spenglerian Twilight of the West has become one of the key premises of Russia’s approach to foreign policy. (“The potential of the historical West is shrinking”—this is the official assessment.) So how can a declining West humiliate Russia?You can find traces of the “humiliation” concept nearly everywhere in Russian political thought. It is used to beef up anti-Western and anti-American feelings at home. When targeted at an audience outside Russia, “humiliation” has to serve as an argumentation in favor of satisfactory response to the Kremlin’s grievances. Demands by Russia’s pundits for Western accommodation are instantly echoed by their soul mates in the West (indeed, it is as if they were in collaboration).It’s worth mentioning that “humiliation” in Russia has always been the other side of the superiority complex of the Russian political elite. Constant whining and alleged or real grievances reflect vanity and nostalgia over past glory and wounded pride, and they serve as justification of a new swagger and disdain for the rest of the world (including the states and nations that allegedly “humiliate” Russia). Such a political sado-masochistic complex!A variation of the “humiliation” concept is currently making the rounds. Russians can’t live, we are told, in a rule of law state. Indeed this notion truly humiliates Russian society. Its adherents don’t see the contradiction: If Russians aren’t ready to live in the rule of law state and need to be subjugated, why on earth would the “humiliation” fans demand from the West equal treatment and “proper place” for Russia in the Western league? The West has every right to ignore or reject hostile civilizations!“Stop thinking that Russia can be turned into a country that will live by Western rules and notions,” warns Fyodor Lukyanov. Well, maybe Lukyanov can’t live “by Western rules”—but does that give him the right to speak on my behalf, or for all of Russia’s other citizens?Regrettably, quite a few respected Western experts agree that Russians have no liberal future. In an FT essay Thomas Graham argues, “The Russian President stands within a long tradition of Russia thinking. His departure would fix nothing.” Thus, the West is dealing with a “Russia Problem” that looks like Russian Destiny. “Russians…are unlikely to abandon Mr. Putin in his struggle against the West,” insist Rumer and Graham. This means that Russians are incorrigible, doomed to be manipulated, and ready to tolerate repressive rule. I don’t know what information the authors are privy to that makes them so sure that the Russians will continue clinging to Putin. Why are the experts so sure of that? Do they know something about us Russians that we are unaware of? This approach can be interpreted in only one way: Russians carry a special gene that precludes them from living in a rule of law state that respects international conventions. In other words, we Russians are a predatory nation that can live only by being subjugated by our rulers and by subjugating other nations, and we cannot rid ourselves of the serf’s mindset. This is not merely a condescending way of looking at Russians, it is racist as well.To be continued…

1Brzezinski, Strategic Vision: America and the Crisis of Global Power (Basic Books, 2012), p. 147.

2In the fall of 2014, Graham no longer called for “accommodation,” or “strategic dialogue.” He wrote, “Washington will continue to seek a way to punish, constrain, and weaken Russia, now seen as an adversary.” Thomas Graham, “The Dangers of a New Containment,” Costs and a New Cold War: The U.S. Russia Confrontation over Ukraine, Paul. J. Saunders, ed., Center for the National Interest (September 2014). True, soon Graham returned to the idea of accommodation.3On the new Kremlin survival doctrine see: Lilia Shevtsova, “Russia’s Political System: Imperialism and Decay,” Journal of Democracy (January 2015); Lilia Shevtsova, “Forward to the Past in Russia,” Journal of Democracy (April 2015).4On the Putin Doctrine, see Lilia Shevtsova, “The Maidan and Beyond: The Russia Factor,” Journal of Democracy (July 2014). See also Sergei Lavrov, “Russia’s Foreign Policy Philosophy,” International Affairs (March 2013), and the speeches by Putin that can be found here (September 19, 2013); here (March 18, 2014); and here (December 4, 2014).

US to More Than Quadruple Defense Spending in Europe

The Obama Administration has announced major increases in defense spending to deter Vladimir Putin in Europe and to fight ISIS in the Middle East. The New York Times reports:

President Obama plans to substantially increase the deployment of heavy weapons, armored vehicles and other equipment to NATO countries in Central and Eastern Europe, a move that administration officials said was aimed at deterring Russia from further aggression in the region.

The White House plans to pay for the additional weapons and equipment with a budget request of more than $3.4 billion for military spending in Europe in 2017, several officials said Monday, more than quadrupling the current budget of $789 million [. . . . ]

Mr. Obama, according to a defense official, is also going to ask Congress for a 35 percent increase — $7 billion — to fight Islamic State militants.

This kind of budget request takes careful planning, and is the result of a considered decision by the President and his Administration, not of impulse or quick political expediency. So, two cheers: Even if he is not going to pursue an activist foreign policy in his last year, President Obama is at least setting up his successor to do so, if she or he wishes.

The next President is going to inherit multiple foreign policy crises on day one, and he or she will almost certainly take a more traditional, activist line than President Obama has, no matter who wins. (On this point: Rand Paul has now dropped out of the GOP race.) This budget maneuver gives that next Administration, whoever will lead it, more tools in more places. How the next POTUS plans on using them should be part of the election’s foreign policy debates going forward.