Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 517

American Academics Have Moved to the Left

Heterodox Academy, a new organization aimed at promoting viewpoint diversity in the social sciences, has produced a striking chart illustrating the leftward shift of American academics over the last generation:

This is a dramatic graph. The political leanings of US academics, over time. https://t.co/5g8AO48WOz pic.twitter.com/atBVLmsxUw

— Paul Kirby (@paul1kirby) January 3, 2016

What might account for the pronounced rise in the number of self-identified liberals at the expense of moderates and conservatives, starting in the mid-1990s? The Heterodox Academy post speculates that “things began changing in the 1990s as the Greatest Generation (which had a fair number of Republicans) retired and were replaced by the Baby Boom generation (which did not).”This probably tells part of the story, but we suspect there is more going on here than organic generational replacement. One possibility is that the story told in the graph represents the legacy of the “canon wars“—the intense battles over humanities curricula between traditionalists and multiculturalists that took place during the 1980s and 1990s. Despite some consequential traditionalist protestations, like Allan Bloom’s blockbuster 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind, “its generally agreed,” as Rachel Donadio has written, “that the multiculturalists won the canon wars.” The multiculturalist victory had at least three consequences: a reduced emphasis on what was traditionally called “the Western canon” in general education classes, the expansion of the “studies” departments (African American studies, gender studies, Jewish studies, Chicano studies), and the implementation of “harassment” codes that, in practice, were more often used against people who opposed the multiculturalist project. Whether or not you approve of these developments, it’s easy to see how they could have made scholarly minded students with traditionalist leanings less inclined to get a PhD and enter an academic humanities or social science department (the Heterodox Academy posts notes that most of the conservatives in the chart come from STEM departments and professional schools).Progressives sometimes argue that the dearth of conservatives in academia can mostly be explained by self-selection, rather than discrimination, and is therefore not a cause for concern. But this argument fails to take into account the way that changes in academic culture affect self-selection. If certain academic departments are seen as overwhelmingly catering to liberal interests, then conservatives will be less likely to join them. If the multiculturalist victories in the 1980s and 1990s account for some of the leftward shift among the professoriate in the last generation, then the current leftwing agitation on college campuses (and resulting administrative acquiescence) seems likely to have a similar effect.

Russia’s Shadowboxing with NATO

Russia has a new National Security Strategy, signed by President Putin on the last day of 2015, an uncanny New Year’s message that Russia’s relations with the West have entered an even more volatile phase. The new Russian NSS accuses the United States and its NATO allies of “seeking to preserve their global domination in world affairs” and of pursuing a policy of “containment against Russia through political, economic, military and informational pressure” (Article 12). It identifies NATO as a threat whose “growing power capabilities (and…) global functions are a clear violation of international law, shown by the growing military activities of its member-states,” and warns of the alliance’s “continued expansion” (Moscow’s standard term for NATO enlargement), “bringing its military infrastructure up to the Russian border, which constitutes a threat to national security” (Article 15). It declares the Euro-Atlantic “regional system” built around NATO and the European Union to be a failure (Article 16) and accuses the West of actively opposing the “integrative processes” in Eurasia, and “creating hotbeds of tension,” including the conflict in Ukraine, which it blames on Western interference (Article 17). The document deems “unacceptable” what it describes as NATO’s efforts to “increase military activity and to bring its military infrastructure closer to Russia’s borders”—a veiled reference to the post-Wales summit reassurance measures along NATO’s northeastern flank—and likewise deems “unacceptable” any efforts to build a NATO missile defense system and to attempt to give the “bloc global functions” (Article 106).

At one level, the document largely augments Russia’s 2014 military doctrine and constitutes a further evolution of Russian thinking on national security in the wake of the war in Ukraine and the continued crises in the Middle East. But it also offers an important glimpse into how Putin thinks about Russia’s power and place in the world. Beyond its stern declarations and ominous warnings, the document is an unambiguous expression of Russia’s determination to define itself in opposition to the West. It clearly singles out the United States and NATO as threats to Russia’s security, in language increasingly reminiscent of a bygone era. Yet it is more than nostalgia for an era of imperial greatness, for Putin’s strategy has two concrete and immediate audiences, at home and abroad.The first is the Russian public, for whom the latest statement reiterates a number of themes from Putin’s speeches and media statements this past year, including his 2015 end-of-the-year mega-press conference. Putin is readying his people for more tough times to come, squarely assigning blame for the country’s deepening malaise and incipient confrontation with the West to scheming forces outside Russia. At the most basic level, the new document appeals to a sense of Russian national pride and patriotic grievance, as it implies to the public that it is Putin who has lifted Russia from its Yeltsin-era “time of troubles.” The extent to which Russian policy today is identified with the will of a single man owes much to the myth of Putin as a strong leader in the long tradition of top-down modernizers who have historically shaped the power of the Russian state.The second audience for Putin’s new strategy are the Europeans, whose EU project has been stumbling, amidst a deepening sense of self-doubt and confusion as to where the boundaries between the national and the supra-national ought to lie. As the EU continues to stumble, unable to cope with the flow of refugees and migrants into Europe and the deepening divisions between elites and the public (the Russian NSS singles out migration flows into Europe as further proof that the transatlantic security regime is broken), Putin’s vision of the world may find a receptive audience, or at the very least stoke enough anxiety among the already weary and fearful post-Paris publics to transform the difficult task of NATO’s strategic adaptation into a mission impossible. Russia’s new strategy is a message to the Europeans to think twice about moving from reassurance to reinforcement along the northeastern flank of NATO, and instead to seek an accommodation with Russia, beginning with an acceptance of Moscow’s “legitimate national interests.”Though replete with references to international norms and standards, Russia’s new national security strategy is a projection of how Putin construes the Russian state—as a victim of foreign duplicity and aggression. In “Putin’s world” there is ample space for the lofty narrative of a resurgent Russia, alongside language better suited to a Pravda editorial from the early 1980s, as when the document flatly states that the U.S. has been expanding a network of military biological laboratories in countries bordering Russia (Article 19). Though much of what the new Russian strategy says about NATO’s power and its alleged hostile intentions belies the reality of the capabilities-strapped alliance, it is nonetheless important that we take what it says seriously. Given Russia’s continued military modernization, its annexation of Crimea, its war in Ukraine, and its military moves in Syria, NATO would be ill advised to dismiss Putin’s world as merely a shadowboxing ring.

In Putin’s Russia, Art Looks at You

The only thing more disconcerting than coming face-to-face with a nine-foot-tall fighter-jet helmet is the moment when it comes alive. Suddenly, the goggles revealed a pair of eyes. They looked up, down, side to side, sweeping the room in panic. I was no longer looking at art—art was looking at me.

It was Russian art, to be exact. This wild-eyed apparition was the centerpiece of Russia’s pavilion at the Venice Biennale, the art world-equivalent of the Olympics, where over thirty countries have built national pavilions to display the work of their most prominent contemporary artists. This year’s Biennale, entitled “All the World’s Futures,” invited artists to tackle the geopolitical and social issues facing their countries. And tackle they did—by broad consensus, this was one of the most glum Biennales on record. Artists chronicled human suffering in its many forms and causes: climate change, industrial growth, working conditions, and consumerism.In portraying this litany of modern ills, many of the national pavilions featured symbolically subtle fare that favored abstraction over figuration. The Swiss Pavilion presented a vast pool of pink liquid spanning the length of the gallery, a slurry of chemicals used in name-brand pharmaceuticals. The French Pavilion had motorized live trees that crawled among visitors. The Austrian Pavilion featured a black ceiling that hovered over empty galleries, a foreboding display. The other pavilions encouraged, but did not demand, a specific interpretation of their art. None equaled Russia’s national pavilion for sheer power—and pointed relevance to geopolitical events.Irena Nakhova’s fighter jet helmet blended satire and state-sanctioned messaging to an indecipherable degree. Was it a monument to Vladimir Putin’s ambitions, or a mockery? A larger-than-life symbol of military strength, the helmet was both ridiculous and menacing, much like Russia’s Supreme Commander-In-Chief himself. Vladimir Putin has carefully cultivated his image as a tough and tactical leader, and the internet is replete with proof that borders on parody: photos of the leader riding his horse shirtless; hunting shirtless; fishing shirtless; swimming butterfly strokes in a Siberian lake, you guessed it, shirtless. That a man of such unsubtle self-promotion outmaneuvers Western leaders on a regular basis no doubt confuses them—just as he intends it to.For a moment, let’s ignore the Sukhois over Syria and explore the cultural power play that took place along the canals of Venice. Russia’s giant jet helmet at the Biennale is itself part of Putin’s offensive against the U.S.-led global order, in which he offers Russia as a culturally, morally, and politically superior alternative to a decadent and uncertain West. In the eyes of this oddity, born of an avant-garde Soviet art moment, we can see the ambitions and insecurities of the post-Soviet state.When “Top Gun” was released in the golden days of the Reagan Administration and America’s Cold War military supremacy, it made the fighter jet a pop culture icon. The jet’s sleek lines, tactical flexibility and lethal effectiveness gave it an undeniable appeal matched by few other aircraft. Historical accuracies aside, there is a reason why the film featured F-14s and not A-10 Warthogs.Putin is apparently now seeking to project a similar “Top Gun” moment for Russia, using fighter jets as a compelling symbol of power and military adventurism. Nakhova’s jet helmet naturally evokes Russia’s increasingly assertive military efforts, from its invasions of Georgia and Ukraine to its repeated incursions into NATO airspace to its recent foray into Syria.So how does Russia’s military strategy end up on display at a Venetian art show? During the Biennale, Venice resembles an international cocktail party of the global elite, with galleries attended by cultural icons, political leaders, and media influencers. And through the Russian Pavilion, the Kremlin is debuting its rebranded Russia; a powerful, disciplined nation with a cosmopolitan culture that lacks the underlying decadence and weakness of Western liberalism.But Putin isn’t just showing off for the benefit of Western audiences. At a time when many former Soviet satellites are being drawn to the economic promises of the European Union and China, he is trying to stem the tide. Former Soviet neighbors from Belarus to Kazakhstan with large diaspora populations are presented with a familiar, Eurasian alternative. The Kremlin seeks to demonstrate that Russia is not only a strong power but also a great power, and a viable counterpoint to the West.Putin’s vision of a culturally confident Russia is intended for domestic audiences as well. The country’s artistic legacy has suffered over the last century, and interest in contemporary Russian art is exceedingly low. According to last year’s global auction sales, Russian artwork represented less than 2.5 percent of the global $16.1 billion sales total. Russia’s cultural identity has not yet recovered from the hardships of Soviet rule. With the Biennale, and domestic initiatives like the Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art and the Kandinsky Prize, the Kremlin is trying to establish Moscow as a cultural hub and to elevate state-sanctioned culture. As a form of soft power exerted on an international scale, these art initiatives set out to build Russia’s prestige abroad and at home.Irina Nakhova and Margarita Tupitsyn, the Russian Pavilion’s artist and curator respectively, were prominent figures in the 1970’s Soviet avant-garde art movement, the Moscow Conceptualists. Like Darwin’s finches, this group of artists developed in isolation from the commercial markets that sustained Western contemporaries like Frank Stella and Sol LeWitt. No galleries, no museums. No critics, no collectors.During those formative years, the “specter of the capitalist economy was exorcised from Russian soil,” writes Tupitsyn in the exhibit catalogue. The greatest sin of the capitalist art market was the pressure to commoditize: to produce physical works of art that could be bought and sold by unknown customers for the purpose of turning a profit, completely disassociated from the artwork’s origins. In contrast, the collective’s artistic medium was the concept, pure and simple, manifested in physical movement, color, and spoken words performed by artists for their peers in carefully curated apartments.When the Soviet Union fell, the Conceptualists found themselves at odds with an increasingly Westernized world. In the works of both Nakhova and Tupitsyn, we see a recurring theme of Soviet purity posed against the backdrop of corrupting Western influences. While these artists do criticize the authoritarian state, they express nostalgia for the pristineness of Soviet life that was lost with the introduction of Perestroika—and a yearning to return.Nakhova’s monumental fighter-jet helmet reflects the tension between the Conceptualists and the Western art world. As the disembodied pilot pins visitors to the spot with its terrified gaze, it recalls the uneasy interaction between Conceptualist artwork and the visitor/potential buyer. Not unlike an industry trade show, the Biennale is above all a commercial affair, with artists being judged by their sales and new inventions. The Moscow Conceptualists faced a similar dynamic under Perestroika. The golden days of Soviet living-room performance art were over, and the Conceptualists were now unwilling participants in the “culture industry.” The movement was subsumed by new galleries, commercial representation, and commoditized art.In a sense, the panic in the pilot’s eyes isn’t misplaced, because Vladimir Putin insists that Russia is more sinned against than sinning, the victim of the West’s outrageous propaganda efforts to portray it as the aggressor in Ukraine. As he put it conspiratorially in a 2015 speech to the Valdai Club, a Russian intellectual forum, “We are all used to labeling and the creation of an enemy image.” The pilot’s eyes express that defensiveness, but also betray the defensiveness of another—the innocent Soviet artist suddenly and brutally (in her opinion) confronted by Western avarice.The creators of this exhibition hardly endorse Putin’s militaristic response to Western dominance. Both artist and curator have worked in the West, taught at American universities, and spent their careers elevating Moscow Conceptualism among international audiences. They have spoken out against the crimes of the Soviets—Nahkova has recounted the story of her grandfather, killed in Stalin’s purges—but remain silent on the current regime. With their criticism of capitalism’s corrupting influence on the Moscow Conceptualists, Nakhova and Tupitsyn’s artistic outputs fall in line with Putin’s narrative that the triumphant West has done violence to Russian culture, forcing it into rearguard action.  It is a criticism they confine to the artistic sphere, but meanwhile, Putin is playing them in a larger geopolitical chess game, and effectively at that.The Kremlin maintains curatorial and financial control over the Russian Pavilion. In the months leading up the exhibit, Nakhova expressed concern with the increasingly hands-on approach of the Kremlin, remarking, “This year, there appeared the rule to approve the project at the Ministry for Culture. I hope everything will be fine but, in essence, it is censorship.” Just as the Russian government aggressively asserts its ambitions in Syria and Ukraine, so does the Russian Ministry of Culture at the Venice Biennale.Another driving force behind the pavilion is the Stella Art Foundation, a Moscow-based organization that seeks to popularize Russian contemporary art abroad. For the last six years, they have been responsible for selecting the curator of the Russian pavilion. The Moscow-based organization receives funding from “state, cultural, and private institutions,” and is led by Stella Kesaeva, the wife of a Russian billionaire, who was chosen to lead the Biennale effort by Culture Minister Alexander Avdeev.The Stella Foundation is a powerful weapon in Putin’s cultural arsenal. The organization hosts development programs for young artists in former Soviet satellite countries, including Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Ukraine. It has also participated in major exhibitions at the Louvre in Paris and the Kunsthistoriches Museum in Vienna. Kesaeva does her part in other ways as well, introducing young Russian artists to the Biennale crowd through lavish parties. In her own words, “You have to make a noise that draws attention.” It is a strategy well played in the Russian Pavillion.By comparison, the American system for selecting the U.S. Pavilion’s artist involves an open competition and meritocratic decision-making process. Curators from across the country submit proposals to a committee of museum directors, who present a selection to the State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. This year’s chosen artist was Joan Jonas, an avant-garde artist known for pioneering video art installations. The curator was Paul Ha, director of the MIT List Visual Arts Center. As the organizer and curator of the exhibit, Ha fundraised to cover the exhibit’s costs and organized logistics with the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, which helps manage the collaboration. While the Russian Pavilion was funded by the Stella Foundation, the U.S. Pavilion was supported by over 80 donors, primarily private citizens, but also galleries, organizations, and businesses.From beginning to end, the selection and artistic process is characterized by transparency, collaboration, and broad participation. And the diffused power structure shows: Jonas transformed the five rooms of the U.S. Pavilion into a meandering, fanciful, and fractured meditation on nature and childhood. During my visit, the Pavilion’s darkened rooms buzzed with layers of quietly spoken words, ghost folktales collected in Nova Scotia by the artist and played in each room. A flock of brilliantly colored kites hung above a screen displaying footage of children playing and desolate winter landscapes. In a room full of mirrors, a video was projected off a glass chandelier, dissolving the projection into hundreds of glittering drops that rippled across every surface.Taken as a whole, Jonas’ ethereal installation invites viewers to recall the magic of childhood, a time when the physical and imaginative worlds seemed more closely joined. The exhibit encouraged introspection, nostalgia, daydreaming, and a return to a pre-political stage of life. If the U.S. Pavilion qualifies as American propaganda, then we’re in deep trouble.By contrast, it would be an oversimplification to view the Russian Pavilion as a little Kremlin on the canals, but not a stretch to see it as state-sanctioned propaganda. Nakhova and Tupitsyn have offered a critique of the West and a glorification of Russia, but in a carefully ironic, almost self-parodying manner that appeals to the international art crowd as much as to Russia’s ruling classes. In the context of the other pavilions, the highly literal recreation of a fighter jet helmet is an undeniable manifestation of Putin’s grander ambitions. Western audiences, who naturally assume that all artists share the freedom to engage in political and social critique, may view the excessiveness and grandiosity as political parody. After all, it’s easier to laugh at Putin’s shirtless célébrité than to deal with him seriously. However, for domestic audiences in Russia and the former USSR who lived through decades of Soviet messaging, the helmet may be a nostalgic return to the outsized propaganda figures of a greater Russia—the worker heroes, noble peasants, and heroic cosmonauts. At the Russian Pavilion, both audiences are presented with a message that fits their preferred reality. By the standards of Russian propaganda, as long as both interpretations served their purpose, both are correct.Earlier this summer, a group of Ukrainian protesters symbolically “occupied” the gallery rooms in protest of Russia’s invasion and occupation of Crimea. Organized by a group of Ukrainian artists, the “mockupation” brought home an uncomfortable truth to the Biennale’s visitors: Art is inseparable from the context of its creation. The Russian Pavilion became a proxy for Russia itself.The group called itself “On Vacation,” a reference to Russian separatist leader Alexander Zakharchenko, who was quoted as saying the deployed Russian soldiers were on “vacation…among brothers who are fighting for their freedom.” The camouflaged protestors laid out in the galleries, “conscripting” visitors into service by handing out military uniforms. They encouraged guests to post selfies to Instagram using the hashtag #OnVacation, a mocking reminder of how the Russian soldiers’ social media presence in Crimea provided proof of Russian army movements in the region.Putin bemoans the “labeling and the creation of an enemy image” by an international media that dares to report on his troops’ movements, yet it’s hard to ignore the symbolism of a state-sanctioned nine-foot-tall fighter-jet helmet. Indeed, Putin might be the true performance artist of the Russian Pavilion. His regime signed off on a grandiose symbol of militant ambition, pushing the envelope further than any other national pavilion, yet with enough plausible deniability to make Biennale visitors question their own interpretation. It isn’t “really” a symbol of Russian military adventurism, just like Russian soldiers weren’t “really” invading Ukraine.Yet as the #OnVacation protests demonstrate, art never exists in isolation from the political motivations of those who create, fund, or view it. All the world’s a gallery, and all the men and women merely occupiers.

America’s Smallest Oil Producers Aren’t Backing Down

It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog, and it looks like there’s plenty of fight in America’s smallest oil producers. Low-output stripper wells can’t pump much more than a dozen barrels of oil per day, and they’re often run as family operations. Conventional wisdom would dictate that such lack of scale would make these small-time producers more vulnerable to sub-$40 oil prices, but in an encouraging sign for America’s immediate energy future, they’re proving surprisingly resilient in today’s bearish crude market. Reuters reports:

[I]nterviews with executives and experts show those smallest, often family-owned, businesses are also among the most resourceful, keeping the oil flowing even as prices near 11-year lows and a growing number of their wells lose money.

While hopes for a rebound are fading, “strippers” are doing everything they can to keep their “nodding donkey” pumps working so they can hold on to land leases that give them access to oil reserves […]Stripper wells pump no more than 15 barrels of oil per day but together over 400,000 wells scattered across the nation’s oilfields produce over a tenth of U.S. oil output, enough to affect the market supply-demand balance and prices.

It’s hard not to see some of what makes America great in the resilience of these “mom-and-pop” oil producers. In some ways, this is what Saudi Arabia and the rest of OPEC’s petrostates are up against today. Riyadh pushed the cartel not to react to falling prices by cutting production, instead advocating that members fight for market share and endure the fiscal fallout. No longer content with acting as the global swing producer, the Saudis hoped to pass that mantle to U.S. oil producers—especially shale firms whose operations can be started and stopped relatively quickly. And to some extent, that strategy has borne fruit: U.S. production tapered off in the second half of 2015, and the shale industry has had to go to extraordinary lengths to try to stay afloat.

But while stripper well producers tighten their belts and oil majors cut capital expenditures, petrostates are running up massive budget deficits. It’s a game of chicken with sky-high stakes, and so far neither OPEC nor U.S. producers seem willing to back down. It looks like 2016 will be another year of cheap oil.

China Lands Plane on Reclaimed Reef

Beijing landed a civilian aircraft on its recently finished airfield on the reclaimed Fiery Cross Reef in the contested Spratly archipelago in the South China Sea, China’s Foreign Ministry announced over the weekend. Vietnam was particularly angry, according to the WSJ:

The flight drew a quick protest from Vietnam, which said China had “seriously violated” its sovereignty. A Philippines foreign ministry spokesman said Manila, another claimant in the Spratlys, also planned to lodge a protest with the Chinese […]

Vietnam said it lodged an official protest with the Chinese Embassy in Hanoi over the action. The Spratly Islands are the subject of overlapping claims by several neighbors, including the Philippines, a U.S. ally.

The U.S. State Department’s response was more measured: “We are concerned that these test flights have exacerbated tensions and are inconsistent with the region’s commitments to exercise restraint from actions that could complicate or escalate disputes.”

Last week, China confirmed it is building a second aircraft carrier—this time from scratch. Building the aircraft carrier will take years, so this doesn’t immediately change anything. Still, tensions over contested Chinese moves in the South China Sea were a big story in 2015 and 2016 looks likely to bring more of the same. We’ll be watching closely to see if the White House will follow up on last fall’s freedom of navigation exercises in a consistent manner or whether it will send more of its trademark mixed signals.

Following China’s Lead, Markets Slide to Begin 2016

A major rout of Chinese stocks sparked an automatic “circuit breaker” shutdown in trading at 1:34PM today (local time), casting a pall across the world’s economy as traders pondered the uncertain new year in Europe and the United States. The CSI-300 index, which monitors the 300 biggest companies traded on the Shanghai and Shenzhen markets, was off 7 percent. Shenzhen suffered its biggest loss in nine years. Most observers blamed weak manufacturing figures out of China, but others also noted that a ban preventing large shareholders from selling their stocks, implemented in August as a measure to stabilize markets, was to be removed this upcoming Friday. And the circuit breaker itself may have played a role. Reuters:

“The slump apparently triggered intensified selling, while the trigger of the circuit breaker seems to have heightened panic, as liquidity was suddenly gone and this is something no one has experienced before. It was a stampede.” […]

“Without the circuit breaker mechanism, the market wouldn’t have dropped so much,” said David Dai, Shanghai-based investor director at Nanhai Fund Management Co

The latest numbers coming out of China bolstered the “two-track” characterization of the country’s economy, with services doing well even as industrials weakened. In the long term, that transition from manufacturing to a service-and-information economy could be good for China and the environment. But in the short term, at least, it’s likely to cause pain in China and in the world economy.

Today’s events are a reminder that nearly the entire global economy is exposed to China—weakness in Shanghai hurts bottom lines everywhere. Germany’s DAX was off 4.4 percent and the UK’s FTSE-100 was down 2.4 percent, and the S&P-500 was down 2.5 percent. Oil, which had rallied by more than 3 percent on hopes of higher prices due to instability in Saudi Arabia and Iran, saw its gains curbed on the economic news.

A Deal Worth Considering

Warsaw would be willing to trade a key concession in the British-EU negotiations in return for a “allied military presence” in its territory, according to Polish Foreign Minister Witold Waszczykowski. Reuters reports:

With hundreds of thousands of Poles living in Britain, Warsaw is one of the EU’s staunchest critics of Prime Minister David Cameron’s proposal to cut benefits for migrants as part of his planned overhaul of Britain’s EU membership terms.[..]

Asked whether Britain could offer Poland something to soften its opposition to Cameron’s proposal, Waszczykowski said: “Of course. Britain could offer something to Poland in terms of international security.“We still consider ourselves a second-class NATO member-state, because in central Europe … there aren’t, aside from a token presence, any significant allied forces or defense installations, which gives the Russians an excuse to play this region,” he said.

The new Polish government has been getting a lot of bad press, but this is an interesting option—one that Prime Minister David Cameron (and President Barack Obama) should look at closely. It is more important for both Warsaw and for Europe generally that the Eastern border be secure than that a migration policy, which is causing social tension in England and international tension within the EU, continue.

Furthermore, progress on the migrant issue would dramatically increase the odds that the “stay in” side would beat the “let’s quit” side in a British referendum on the EU. That’s very much in the American interest; responding to the Polish suggestion therefore offers the United States the ability to play a helpful role in European politics at a critical time. We hope the U.S. and U.K. take a good, hard look at this offer.

The Mother of All Meaning

Connections between the adult Jesus, his childhood, and the family in which he was raised aren’t easy to make. At first glance, the gospels don’t seem to sympathize with our natural human curiosity; whatever the gospel writers had in mind, producing complete biographies of Jesus wasn’t it. Mark omits Christmas altogether, and starts with Jesus getting baptized and launching his career. John has a short prelude and then does the same thing. Matthew and Luke give us the infancy narratives with a couple of sketchy references to childhood (flight into Egypt for Matthew, visit to the Temple in Luke) and that is pretty much it.

To get any insight at all into what Jesus’ childhood and upbringing were like, you have to do something that sometimes makes Protestants uncomfortable: study Mary. This late in the Christmas season, I haven’t yet written much about Mary, other than to write about her virginity. That is a characteristically Protestant and American failing. Throughout the Islamic, Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic worlds, the Virgin Mary isn’t just a figure in a storybook. She’s the object of widespread popular devotion.Much of this makes Protestants slightly queasy for both cultural and theological reasons. Culturally, the folk piety of the Middle Ages combined Christian concepts with pre-Christian rituals and ideas. Christmas trees and Easter eggs had their origins in pagan customs and ceremonies; in many cases the old gods and spirits lived on, thinly veiled, as saints. We can see something like this today in Brazil and the Caribbean where African religious figures and ideas have been conflated with Catholic saints in various ways. The Virgin Mary, a powerful female figure associated with fertility, was a comfortable fit for many of the pre-Christian cults.The traditional European missionary strategy for Christianity was to assimilate as many features of traditional piety and culture as possible to the new religion. In addition, much of Europe was converted to Christianity from the top down. Kings and the nobility adopted the new faith, and it only slowly ‘trickled down’ to the illiterate commoners. By the time of the Reformation, a wide gap had opened up between the folk piety in the countryside and way that educated people understood their faith.The Reformers stood for what they saw as an intellectually consistent Christian position and they wanted to bring all of cultural life under Biblical norms. They associated popular rites, shrines, and customs with the ‘high places’ and ‘groves’ that reforming kings like Josiah sought to abolish in ancient Judea. At the same time, they argued that the Catholic belief that saints (and especially the Virgin Mary) could and would intercede on behalf of sinners was doctrinally wrong and a source of corruption in the church. It demeaned God, they believed, to suggest that intercession from Mary would change his mind.  Is God’s compassion so limited, his wrath so blind, that he won’t show mercy unless the Virgin intercedes?Surely not, said the Reformers and they promoted an individualistic faith in which each person stood alone before Christ. There was only one intercessor, only one mediator sinners required, and it was the son, not the mother who was the route to the Father. There was little room in this for the traditional veneration of the Virgin and to this day, Mary plays a very small part in the piety or the culture of the Protestant world.Another aspect of the traditional Marian cult made Protestants nervous. The attention traditionally paid to Mary’s role not only detracted, Protestants thought, from the unique stature and work of Jesus; it also undercut the Protestant idea that salvation came through faith alone, with good works (deeds) having nothing to do with it. When Catholics celebrated Mary as the Second Eve whose obedience restored the relationship with God that the first Eve lost, Protestants heard this as a claim that human beings by their own will could overcome the effects of sin.This is all very well, and I’m writing this blog to celebrate Christmas rather than to meddle in centuries-old theological quarrels, but I think the Protestant reaction against the excesses of medieval Mariolatry has gone too far. It’s possible that some of the Reformers threw out the mother along with the bathwater, and the Christmas season seems like a good time to reflect on the theology, rather than the cult, of Mary.The key to the classic understanding of who Mary is lies in ideas that the overwhelming majority of American Protestant churches share with the Catholics and the Orthodox. Specifically, these have to do with who Jesus was.Jesus is nothing if not paradoxical. On the one hand, Christians believe, he is the Second Person of the Trinity. But, say Christians, Jesus is also a human being. How does this work? Like the Trinity itself, the nature of the relationship between the divine and human in Christ is a complicated idea, and over the centuries has been described in very technical ways by theologians much better educated than me. With some notable exceptions,  most Christians have held that Jesus has two natures combined in one person. He is fully divine, fully human— and still somehow just one person, one self. This idea was not formalized until the Council of Chalcedon in 451 AD, but the implications for Mary were already clear enough that twenty years earlier she was proclaimed Theotokos at the Council of Ephesus.Theotokos can be translated into English several ways: the most common is “Mother of God” and a very large majority of Christians around the world considers Mary to be, literally, the Mother of God. Since Jesus’ two natures are combined in one person, she must be considered not only the mother of his ‘human side’; she is the mother of the whole person. God’s love knows no bounds; his decision to enter history was so unlimited, so unconditional and so total that God became the son of a human woman.I want to stress that this is not a point of theology that divides Protestants and Catholics. Martin Luther, John Calvin and Charles Wesley all subscribed to the concepts laid down at Ephesus and Chalcedon; contemporary Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Episcopalians and many others adhere to churches and traditions that consider these ideas to be basic parts of the Christian faith. (Mormons and Unitarians do not; most mainline Protestants, evangelicals and Pentecostals do.)The question I’d like to suggest for readers here towards the end of the Christmas season is this: what respect and honor is due to the Mother of God? To sharpen it a bit, remember that Christians believe that Jesus perfectly fulfilled the law of Moses, not just ritualistically or to external appearances but sincerely and from the heart. The ten commandments sum up that law; the fifth commandment tells us to “Honor your mother and father.” Christians believe that Jesus honored his Father by a life of perfect obedience all the way to the cross. What honor do we think he paid to his mother? How exalted is she in heaven? What good thing would he withhold from her? What honor should we, his brothers and sisters by adoption, pay to the mother of our savior and lord, a woman who, if we take these things seriously, must be considered in some very important sense the mother of all believers?I am not suggesting that Southern Baptists start chartering planes for pilgrimages to Lourdes or holding Wednesday-night rosary sessions. And it’s clear to me (as indeed it is to most Catholics and Orthodox) that the most important way of honoring the Virgin Mary is to do your best to follow her son. Yet sometime during the Christmas season, it might be worthwhile for Protestants to ask themselves how they propose to honor the Mother of God this year.If Marian doctrine originates in our attempts to come to grips with the nature of Jesus, our understanding of Jesus will deepen if we study her. Christians of all stripes can usefully spend some time thinking about the woman who became the Mother of God, and looking at some of the ways she seems to have left her mark on Jesus.The passionate concern for the poor that shaped much of his ministry can already be seen in her response to the angel Gabriel as reported by Luke. Giving thanks to God, she says of him that

He hath showed strength with his arm; he hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.

He hath put down the mighty from their seat, and hath exalted the humble and meek.

He hath filled the hungry with good things; and the rich he hath sent empty away.

This is not a bad description of what Jesus did as an adult. The empathy for social outsiders, the refusal to be fooled or intimidated by wealth and social position, the radical intolerance for the abuse of privilege—they all seem prefigured in the words of his mother.

Another way in which Jesus was unusual for his time was his willingness to engage in serious intellectual and moral conversation with independent and unconventional women. The ‘woman of Samaria’ who interrogated him about the water of life, Mary Magdalene, Martha, and Mary who were clearly his close friends, the woman ‘taken in adultery’ whose stoning he prevented: Jesus is comfortable and relaxed with many of the women he meets, jokes with them, and takes them utterly seriously as free human beings. There is not one single verse in the Gospels in which Jesus says or does anything to suggest that women are anything less than men. Do we really have to ask ourselves who might have taught him to look at women this way?Down through the ages, Christian civilization has often treated women badly, yet visitors from other great world civilizations have often remarked on the (relative) freedom and equality that women enjoyed in the Christian world. The cult of the Virgin played some part in this; the medieval concept of the courteous and chivalrous knight was often associated with Marian piety (and sometimes with ideals of courtly love which had very little to do with Christian ethics).I like to think that there is something more: from what the Bible tells us about Mary, we know that Jesus was the son of a strong and independent woman. Steeped in the ethical traditions of Judaism, she was passionate about justice and willing to stake everything on her sense of God’s call. She had a soft spot for social outcasts—after all she was once in the position of being an unmarried, pregnant woman in a censorious and traditional society. She was thoughtful and meditative, but capable of swift and decisive action when the time came.She was unflinching and courageous. She followed God, not social convention. She was ready to be snickered at and pitied by the gossips of Nazareth and to risk her relationship with Joseph to respond to God’s call. She followed Jesus to the cross and watched her son die; her loving presence would have been one of the few comforts he had during that final ordeal.  She was ready to respond to the unexpected, to have her life wrenched out of a comfortable and traditional groove when God showed her that he had something else in mind.This is the kind of woman to whom God came looking for a mother for Jesus. No other human being in the history of monotheism (other than Jesus) was called to this kind of intimacy with God. And if Christians take their own theology seriously, our Lord and Savior was shaped by her genes and her character. Mothering is serious business, something I’ve think about often as Christmas follows Christmas without my own dear mother at the holiday feast. Jesus would not have been who he was if he had had another mother or no mother at all. She put a lot of herself in her son, leaving an imprint on his character that is visible from a distance of 2000 years. And she didn’t just mark him. She marked, marks us. Our civilization for better or worse has been shaped through its complicated, many-sided encounter with the man she raised and the faith that grew up around him.  We are all sons and daughters of Mary today, whether we acknowledge it or not.I grew up in the Episcopal Church where one of the favorite hymns was “Ye Watchers and Ye Holy Ones,” often sung on All Saints’ Day (November 1). I was an adult before I realized that one of the stanzas invokes the Virgin Mary:

O higher than the cherubim,

More glorious than the seraphim,

Lead their praises, Alleluia!

Thou Bearer of the eternal Word,

Most gracious, magnify the Lord,

Alleluia! Alleluia

“All generations,” she marveled to the angel while accepting God’s request to bear his son, “shall call me blessed.” For two thousand years they have; God blessed her and through her, he continues to bless us all. By saying ‘yes’ to God’s plan, she became the mother of meaning; without her, Christmas just doesn’t add up.

Iranians Storm Saudi Embassy in Tehran

A crowd of Iranian protesters has stormed the Saudi embassy in Tehran, ransacked it, and lit it on fire. The protest came in response to the Saudi execution this morning of a Shi’a cleric, Nimr al-Nimr. Pictures via Twitter:

RIGHT NOW: Saudi embassy in Tehran on fire after stormed by protesters over execution of Shiite leader al-Nimr pic.twitter.com/k92bTkh5hb

— Sobhan Hassanvand (@Hassanvand) January 2, 2016

Video shows protesters inside Saudi embassy in Tehran pic.twitter.com/DEmsNLI6ZG

— Sobhan Hassanvand (@Hassanvand) January 2, 2016

VIDEO: 12:08 AM, seems molotov cocktail thrown at Saudi embassy building in Tehran, protest over al-Nimr execution pic.twitter.com/d6vFKPcD6R

— Sobhan Hassanvand (@Hassanvand) January 2, 2016

Nimr al-Nimr was executed along with 47 others, including the man Saudi authorities describe as al-Qaeda’s top spiritual leader in Saudi Arabia. These executions were a sign of just how worried Saudi Arabia has become about its security situation, threatened by Shi’a Iran on the one hand and a radical Sunni movement it can no longer fully control on the other. (The recent recapture of Ramadi by the Iranian-backed government in Iraq is also seen as a win for the Shi’a in this regional square-off.)

But the execution of Nimr in particular was also much more than the product of anxiety: it represents a conscious decision on Riyadh’s part to raise the stakes in its regional showdown with Iran. (In a possibly related development, the Saudi-led coalition announced the end of a ceasefire against the Iranian-backed Houthis in Yemen on Saturday as well.) The Iranian storming of the Saudi embassy is a see-you-and-raise-you response. 

The sack of the Saudi embassy carries echoes of the 1979 Iranian attacks on the U.S. Embassy. That led to the hostage crisis, which Iranian hardliners used to break the moderates, who, after the fall of the Shah, still had a fighting chance. Likewise, the current crisis in Saudi-Iranian relations also undercuts Iranian moderates and strengthens exactly the hardline elements in Iran—exactly the types that Obama hoped to disempower with the nuclear deal. If the radical wing of the Iranian establishment can now turn the Saudi crisis to full account, this will create not just a struggle between two religious extremes but a crisis for U.S. regional strategy, such as it is. 

Those who think that what we’ve seen in Syria is as bad as things in the Middle East can get don’t understand much about sectarian hate and the dynamics of war.

Ed.: This post has been updated.

Brazilian Deficit Balloons

Things aren’t looking pretty in Brazil. BBC reports:

Brazil’s deficit jumped in November to one of the highest levels on record as state finances came under increasing strain amid a deep recession.

The public sector deficit – the difference between what the government spends and what it receives in revenues – rose to 19.6bn reais ($5.1bn).This was worse than expected and much higher than October’s 11.5bn reais.

The big worry is that President Dilma Rousseff, facing impeachment proceedings and some of the lowest poll ratings in Brazilian political history, may lack the strength or the will to rein in the leftwing of her party. A spurt of populist economic measures in the present circumstances could inflict heavier economic damage than expected. Smart Brazilians and foreigners have already been tiptoeing away from a troubled economy and weak leadership. Things could get even worse.