... and I saw my devil. And I saw my deep blue sea ...
Hi. Siva Vaidhyanathan here. It's been a while
since I served as guest host of Altercation. I have been pretty busy and the
various other hosts have been doing so well I figured I could not break into the
lineup. But hey, even Melky Cabrera can earn a
starting gig on a team of All Stars once he gets his break.
Mostly, I have been monumentally busy. My daughter is 20 months old, and every minute spent blogging is a minute I am not reading or singing to her. So I had to cut down on most of the writing that does not pay the bills. Speaking of writing that does pay the bills, I am working on three books right now. I know, it sounds Altermanesque. I am doing a little book that will serve as a general introduction to intellectual property. I am co-editing a big reference book on intellectual property. And I am writing a major (I hope) book about Google and all the ways it's shaking up our cultures, markets, politics, and lives.
Toward that end, I am doing much of the Google writing out in the open thanks to the Institute for the Future of the Book, which is hosting both my regular blog, Sivacracy.net, and my new "open book" blog, which will be up soon. If any of y'all have thoughts on the future of text, books, education, etc. and Google's influence on any of them, please do not hesitate to drop me a line or leave a comment on my blog.
I just moved from Greenwich Village, USA, to Charlottesville, VA. I love this place. I can't say I ever thought I would leave New York City. But it became clear over the past two years that the city is increasingly designed for millionaires and tourists. I will never be a millionaire. So I might as well be a tourist.
Life in the Village became pretty annoying in the last few years I spent there. Folks, do everyone a favor. When you visit Manhattan, walk. Or take the subway. Or take an MTA bus. DO NOT take those horrifying double-decker tourist buses. The guides make stuff up. The buses block traffic and run red lights. They are noisy and smelly and drive down Bleecker Street so frequently that they choke all the life out of the Village like algae in a golf-course pond.
Anyway, I am now happily employed by one of the finest public universities in the land, the University of Virginia. Later this week (I am writing Altercation every day this week except Wednesday, when Col. Bateman does his thing), I will discuss the greatest higher education fraud perpetrated on the American people: the U.S. News & World Report rankings. But until then, just take my word for it. Virginia is for scholars, and I could not be more happy to be here.
One of the reasons I moved to the University of Virginia was to embark on building what promises to be the premier media studies department in the country within 10 years. To do that, we shall capitalize on our connections and proximity to our nation's capitol. In a few years, if anyone asks you where a student should go to study the relationship between media and policy, tell her about UVa.
That relationship among media actors, policy makers, technological change, and scholarly analysis is pretty interesting and getting more so. The best yearly conversation on those matters is coming up in a few weeks in Washington. It's called The Future of
Music Policy Summit. And it's a must-go for anyone interested in music.
There are several ways to look at the involvement of scholars in policy. Scholarship tends to be more relevant and resonant when it engages with matters of public importance. And it's safe to say that policy debates could be richer and more civically engaged if scholars without a conflict of interest played a more significant role in them. (For an excellent example of civically engaged scholarship that SHOULD influence policy but rarely does, see this article by law professor Susan Crawford advocating a better way for the FCC to dole out radio spectrum).
But there is also the danger of scholars and intellectuals who are far too sure of themselves putting their theoretical notions to work in the world. Witness the stunning failures of two professors who just should have remained professors: Paul Wolfowitz and Condoleezza Rice. Or perhaps the worst of all intellectuals gone political: Woodrow Wilson. Of course, there are plenty of examples of folks who have moved from the academy to the government and left distinguished records both places. Donna Shalala and Ken Galbraith come to mind. Maybe Ben Bernanke will distinguish himself in government the way he has in the academy. But it remains to be seen. These past few weeks have not shown him at his best.
Several excellent books have examined this phenomenon -- what intellectual historian Mark Lilla has called "the lure of Syracuse." One book that is too often overlooked is Tevi Troy's Intellectuals and the American Presidency. Of course Lilla's The Reckless Mind, a collection of essays on the perils of intellectuals who flew too close to the hot suns of political power, is a must-read.
I am a big fan of Lilla's work over the years. That's why I am a bit worried about his forthcoming book, The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West. I have only read the excerpt that ran in The New York Times Magazine on Sunday. But I see already that the book builds on one of the gravest misunderstandings about global cultural history.
Lilla believes that there is something called "the West." Worse, he thinks that within this alleged "West" there is a "We" that conforms to the core tenets of textbook history: "We" were once burdened by superstitions and irrationalities until somehow "we" became enlightened.
Now, I think the enlightenment is a great thing. And I keep waiting for it to show up and triumph here in the United States. I just don't see how one can claim that what Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad derides as "liberalism and Western-style democracy" has dominated anywhere for any significant period of time. Heck, this country had a functional democracy (with almost all adult citizens enfranchised and the state generally reflecting the will of the electorate) for a very brief period of time: either from 1965 through 2000 (Voting Rights Act through Bush's unelected takeover) or 1971 through 2000 (starting with the adoption of the 26th Amendment).
Any construction of an intelligible and enlightened "West" must elide all of those messy contradictions within it: Nazism, Francoism (Catholic royalism), Stalinism, radical Serbian nationalism, Jerry Falwell, etc. But mostly, it must ignore the diversity of thought and practice among real people who inhabit "the West." And it must ignore the omnipresence of materialism, secularism, consumerism, rationalism, and even atheism as major traditions in places that could not easily be described as "Western" such as India, Iran, and China.
Basically, East is West. Yet England ain't Ireland ain't Scotland ain't Finland ain't Haiti. There is too much diversity among neighbors for there to be binarity among hemispheres. We willfully misunderstand the world by bifurcating it, as if the entire population of humanity were the subject of some hastily written David Brooks column.
The biggest problem with Lilla's argument is that he assumes that what he calls "political theology" somehow ceased to be a political force in "the West" some time after World War II.
I, for one, am not "puzzled" by cries of theological radicalism from Iran or Saudi Arabia. I have heard them in this country for years. Spend some time in any conservative Baptist church in Texas and you will here the code words, if not the outright proclamations, of political theology. This is not just theologically infused politics like one hears from Barack Obama or Jimmy Carter. This is hard-core millenarianism. And like it or not, it is perhaps the most powerful strain of political thought in the United States today. Catholic versions of it play a role in "Western" places like Spain, Portugal, Brazil, and Mexico. As recently as the multiple campaigns of William Jennings Bryan, political theology dominated the rhetoric of the Democratic Party. And, of course, it is the chosen lens through which George W. Bush views the world. That's why Ahmadinejad reached out to him with a letter. He knew that Bush would "get it."
I don't mean to undermine the claims of political liberalism and liberal theology, both of which have had profound effects from Vienna to Vancouver. But I cringe at claims that immersion in such ideologies somehow blinded us to the limits and weaknesses of their historical influences.
Now, to be fair, Lilla acknowledges the revival of political theology in the West. But he links it most strongly to the growing presence of Islam in Europe.
Look, Islam is not some strange and different thing. To those of us raised outside the three major monotheistic religions of the world, all three pretty much demand the same things from their adherents and predict the same things for pagans, kafir, or whatever you want to call us.
The best way to examine the influence of political theology is to acknowledge its common power within radical Islam, radical Christianity, and radical Judaism. It's there. It killed 3,000 New Yorkers in 2001. But it also blew up a bunch of abortion clinics in the 1990s and assassinated Yitzak Rabin. (Update: There was an attempted bombing in April of an abortion clinic in Austin, Texas. So it's not just the 1990s.)
Enlightenment, or the ability to raise one's political consciousness beyond the provincialism of whatever religious text drives your decisions, is a recent and fragile thing, as Lilla explains very well in his article. But it ain't just a French, German, English, and American thing. A fuller examination of this global struggle would acknowledge that Iran is just as thrown by the recent (1979) emergence of political theology as we are. Persian culture has deep traditions of tolerance and rationalism -- what we would recognize as liberalism. And India was once ruled by enlightened despots like Ashoka and Akbar. India practically invented religious tolerance (although you would not know that to look at it today).
The conflict between political theology and political liberalism is, as Lilla claims, the central conflict of our time. I would add that it is the central conflict of all time. And it ain't just Americans and Europeans who have to deal with it. The front lines of this struggle run through Jakarta, Bombay, Karachi, Cairo, and Lagos. That's where the real story is.
Although I was able to visit a number of facilities on the island -- including a conference center with space age furnishings and a variety of indoor and outdoor classrooms -- and could stop by a virtual kiosk for the 
