Small and Simple Things – The Scholar's Stage

Christmas Day as Judgement Day

01 January, 2024Community, Political Theory, Possessions For All Time, Small and Simple Things, Things I Do Other Than Blogging

To write of Christmas after December 25th is neither a sin nor a crime, but there is something untoward in my tardiness. We meet the overdue Christmas missive with the same misgiving we reserve for the rooftop that twinkles through February. Even small children know—however much they may deny it—that the Christmas season cheers because it only lasts a season. The magical must be momentary. Thus we treat Christmas lights that last too long and Christmas tales that come too late with the same ill humor we greet a joke repeated one time too often. We do not smile on those who try to prolong a mood past its moment.

This essay risks pushing the holiday past its healthful limits. My excuse is only that it began as a series of tweets published on Christmas itself. My tweets auto-delete: if their message is to be preserved, they must be published here after Christmas Day.

The thesis I preserve is simple: the Christmas season is a sort of measuring stick. What is good in bourgeois civilization is concentrated in this season of beauty and merriment. Against this bar all creeds, all claimed paths to excellence, all cults of eudaimonia, may be measured. Against this bar most are found wanting.

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Soviets, Cybernetics, and China: A Reading Program

01 July, 2023Books and Literature, Complex Systems, Futuristics, History, Russia, Small and Simple Things, Things I Do Other Than Blogging

Two years ago I ran a small reading group that met over zoom. Our reading topic: Leninism. Curious about the claims that modern Chinese politics are an outgrowth of Marxist ideas and practice yet feeling insufficiently familiar with the Leninist political tradition to properly judge its influence on contemporary Chinese politics, I organized a group of China-watching politicos to read both classic Marxist texts and historical studies of the Soviet Union and Maoist China.

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Why Chinese Culture Has Not Conquered Us All

26 April, 2022Culture, Small and Simple Things, The Middle Kingdom

Xi Jinping regularly exhorts China’s diplomats, propagandists, journalists, writers, filmmakers, and cultural figures to “tell China’s story well.”The slogan flows naturally from the operating assumptions of Party state strategists: in their telling, a central pillar of any nation’s “comprehensive national power” (综合国力) is what these Chinese have labeled “discourse power” (话语权).

Discourse power is the ability to mold the assumptions, conceptions, and values of foreign princes and peoples. The concept sits midway between Beltway talk of “soft power” and the sort of influence leftists describe with the phrase “cultural hegemony.” Discourse mirrors the instrumentalism of the first term—discourse power is not just a set of static social relationships or societal norms, but a tool to be wielded—but is far less associated with happy-go-lucky rhetoric about admiration, emulation, and attraction so closely bound up in American conceptions of soft power.

Triumphant victors of the Cold War would conceptualize the issue in such terms: the victors of any given cultural conflict always believe they have won through the wide appeal of their vision and the free choice of those attracted to it.

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The Rise and Fall of Civilizations: A Reader Course

13 January, 2022Arabia, Bactria, Bharat, Books and Literature, Complex Systems, Culture, Diplomacy, Dogs of War, Europa Regina, History, Narrative, Near East, On Humanity, Political Theory, Romans and Grecians, Small and Simple Things, Southeast Asia, Steppe and Sown, The Middle Kingdom, Wealth

A Scholar’s Stage forum member reports that he and a friend recently finished reading John Darwin’s After Tamerlane. Enraptured by Darwin’s account of flourish and fall, they ask what else they might read to understand the rise and decline of peoples and powers over the course of human history.

In my mind there are four central parts to this tale:

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Learning From Our Defeat: The Skill of the Vulcans

26 October, 2021Bargaining and Balancing, Dogs of War, Narrative, Small and Simple Things, The Presidency

The national security teams of Bush 41 and Bush 43, America’s most accomplished and most reviled set of statesmen officials… were the exact same set of people. The authors of America’s Cold War victory were the architects of America’s 21st century defeats. There lies the mystery! With more collective experience under their belts than any foreign policy team since the Founding Era, with a greater list of accomplishments than any group of national security elites since the creation of the modern national security state, the statesmen-officials of the second Bush administration should have accomplished glorious deeds. They should have lived up to their track records. Instead, they delivered failure and catastrophe. How could this have happened?

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As the Generations Churn: The Strategic Consequences of Cultural Change in Communist Russia… and China?

26 August, 2021Culture, Demographics, Diplomacy, History, Narrative, Oligarchy, Russia, Small and Simple Things, The Middle Kingdom

Vladislav M. Zubok’s A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War From Stalin to Gorbachev is a surprising counterpart to my essay, “Culture Wars are Long Wars.” That essay proposed a general theory of cultural change. Key to its thesis was the observation that most cultural change does not occur because people change their ideas, but because people with new ideas replace people with old ones. As most people form their essential political worldview by the time they are 30 and only adapt it on the edges to new circumstances, only the most earth shaking events have the power to fundamentally shift the frameworks and values that the majority filter their politics through. Large scale cultural shift is largely a story of generational churn.

While the focus of that piece was on American domestic politics, this is a general phenomena that applies across cultures and time periods. Vladislav Zubok understands this. The generational nature of political change is a recurring theme of Failed Empire, which chronicles the ups and downs of Soviet diplomacy from the end of World War II to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. While we often describe Soviet history in terms of the leader reigning at the top of the system, Zubok argues that shifts in Soviet strategic behavior reflected not only the differing leadership styles of the various CPSU General Secretaries, but broader transitions from one generation of leaders to another.

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In Favor of Bad Takes

13 July, 2021Community, Narrative, Small and Simple Things

Over at the Duck of Minerva Daniel Nexon has posted a reflective essay on the way the political science blogosphere has changed over the last two decades. Nexon’s IR-themed group blog was one of the first “political science blogs” of the aughts; at the old blogosphere’s height it was the largest academic-IR themed blog on the internet. I first encountered it around that time, when debates from the “strategy sphere” were spilling into the larger online conversation. America was debating the wisdom of the surge and our path forward in the Middle East, and blogs like Duck of Minerva dove into the controversy.

Though he couches his disappointment in diplomatic language, Nexon is bummed about the state of online poli-sci…

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Public Intellectuals Have Short Shelf Lives—But Why?

29 January, 2020Cognition, Community, Small and Simple Things

Image Source Several months ago someone on twitter asked the following question: which public thinker did you idolize ten or fifteen years ago but have little intellectual respect for today? [1] A surprising number of people responded with “all of them.” These tweeters maintained that no one who was a prominent writer and thinker in […]

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On the American Football Game

04 February, 2019Community, Small and Simple Things

I die—but first I have possess’d, And come what may, I have been blest. —Lord Byron This clip has been played 87 million times on Facebook and another seven million times on Youtube. It’s inspirational. It’s powerful. I get why it has as many hits as it does. But there is something more to it, […]

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Tradition is Smarter Than You Are

27 August, 2018Culture, Ecology, Small and Simple Things

The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to [a fence] and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. […]

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