Tag Archives: Politics

Learning To School: Federalism and Public Schooling in Canada – Jennifer Walker

“The evidence therefore indicates that the provinces have defied the odds and found a way to develop and maintain similar policy activities and fashion a de facto pan-Canadian policy framework for elementary and secondary education without the direct intervention of the federal government.”

Canada is the only OECD country without a national department of education. It might be reasonable, therefore, to expect it to have a highly fragmented system, with each province pursuing a unique educational strategy. In reality, however, there is a large amount of standardization between provinces, in terms of financing, curriculum, and assessment.

Whether left or right, all of us find silver bullets appealing: we confront problems or challenges in the world, and we look for the one thing that can solve it all. Of course, most silver bullets seem to corrode when exposed to sunlight, but one that has mostly kept its appeal is education: teach people to be good citizens, to act morally, to be responsible, and a whole lot of problems disappear.

I’m not convinced it’s that easy, but it still means understanding education has a certain appeal. Unfortunately, though I think Learning to School might appeal to specialists, it’s heavy for a general reader: it can read like a phd thesis at times. Her central finding is that the subnational governments do cooperate often without federal intervention, and that learning and cooperate can lead to significant policy similarity – an important finding, but honestly exactly what I would have expected. I had hoped to have an analysis of the effectiveness of those policies, but the book instead focuses on how they evolved. If you want to understand how policies, particularly those about education, can evolve in a federal state, the book is comprehensive: if you want to learn about education, I think there are better choices.

Moral Clarity: a guide for grown-up idealists – Susan Neiman

“If you’re committed to the Enlightenment, you’re committed to understanding the world in order to improve it.” – Neiman

“Two things fill the mind with awe and wonder the more often and more steadily we look upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.” – Kant

Consider a man who cannot resist temptation: every time he passes a brothel, for example, he succumbs, risking his marriage, his dignity, and his health. What if that man knew he would be hanged if he entered? We all conclude he would resist: the desire for life is a preeminent human motivation, and all else pales before it, no matter how tempting.

What if, however, an unjust ruler seeks to kill someone, and orders the man to give false testimony to condemn the other to death? If the man refuses, he will himself be put to death. Now we hesitate: we aren’t sure what the man would do, or indeed what we would do in those circumstances. Kant (from whom the thought experiment is taken), says this shows there are limits to knowledge; it is difficult to know in advance what we would do. Many would agree we should refuse to testify, and we all agree we could: we are simply not sure if we will. There, Kant argues, lies freedom: it is not pleasure but justice that can move humans to overcome the love of life itself.

Moral Clarity is an attempt to understand the foundations of reason and idealism in the Enlightenment, and to use those ideas to clarify our own often muddy conceptions of politics and morality. The 18th century left, she points out, believed in universal ideals to which reality should be compared (Kant, Rousseau): the right believed that such ideals were dangerous and deceptive, and gained value only from their similarity to reality (Hume, Burke). From modern terrorism to traditional religion, she uses Enlightenment ideas to help understand the modern world, and argues that the Enlightenment belief in the power of ideas is an essential tool for progressive movements everywhere.

Neiman is an expert on Kant, and her philosophy is excellent; clear and insightful, she quotes widely and deeply and is extremely impressive. Unfortunately, at least for me her applications to policy are far weaker: it reads as a series of jabs at Republicans with no particularly new insights or understandings to provide. If you can get to the meat of the book, however, it provides a clear and compelling argument for morality and ideals in the public sphere, concepts that we are today too often uncomfortable or even unfamiliar with.

Fire and Ashes – Michael Ignatieff

“I want to explain how it becomes possible for an otherwise sensible person to turn his life upside down for the sake of a dream, or to put it less charitably, why a person like me succumbed, so helplessly, to hubris.”

Michael Ignatieff is an extremely distinguished academic internationally, having held positions at Cambridge, Oxford, Harvard and Toronto. He’s won a variety of prizes for his books, including short listing for the Booker prize as well as a variety of non-fiction and academic texts, and also worked as a television and radio broadcaster in the UK. He is also a rather dismal politician.

Fire and Ashes is the story of how Ignatieff took over the leadership of the Canadian Liberal party, traditionally the most powerful party in Canadian politics, and led it to its worst result in history, even losing his own seat. Of course, the vagaries of party politics are hardly attributable to the leader alone, but it suffers in comparison to his professional success elsewhere. Ignatieff attempts to use that experience to draw lessons for those who might come after him, with mixed results.

The book does capture why he struggled as a politician, though perhaps not how he meant it to. Comparing it to Bill Clinton’s autobiography, for example, you can see the difference between someone who thinks deeply about politics, and someone who actually lives as a politician. Ignatieff comes across as wise about politics as an observer, not as a participant.

Ironically, though that may have made him a worse politician, it makes it a better book: one can appreciate his observations without attempting to disentangle political motivations. Perhaps that’s why much good political commentary is written by unsuccessful politicians. A book length reflection on a personal failure is no easy task, however: Ignatieff’s is a mix of astute observations about politics, somewhat bitter discussions of why he didn’t do well that are not as incisive as they needed to be, and some revealing confessions, as when he argues power matters above conscience because without power you can’t do anything (a section I found rather depressing, since if you sacrifice conscience to win power, I’d rather you didn’t). Ignatieff is a smart, analytical man who isn’t meant to be a politician, and his book captures that, both in what he recognizes and what he doesn’t about his performance.

The Lays of Ancient Rome – Thomas Babington Macaulay

“All human beings, not utterly savage, long for some information about past times, and are delighted by narratives which present pictures to the eye of the mind. But it is only in very enlightened communities that books are readily accessible…A man who can invent or embellish an interesting story, and put it into a form which others may easily retain in their recollection, will always be highly esteemed by a people eager for amusement and information, but destitute of libraries.”

The Lays of Ancient Rome are a collection of narrative poems, written as if they date from early Roman history. Macaulay’s intention was to recreate the feel of ballads the Romans might themselves have listened to, but are now lost. More recently, Winston Churchill memorized them in their entirety while at school to show that, despite his weak academic performance, he at least had an excellent memory.

The poems are a mix of martial, tragic, and spiritual themes, and are each prefaced with a discussion of the legend that inspired them. As with more modern folk tales, however, he also tries to capture themes of inequality and justice that would colour the telling of history in Roman times. For that reason, they still feel clever, as a poem written for the inventors of satire deserves.

On War

“Then out spake brave Horatius,
The Captain of the Gate:
‘To every man upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late.
And how can a man die better
Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers,
and the temples of his gods.’”

On increasing inequality

“Then none was for a party;
Then all were for the state;
Then the great man helped the poor,
And the poor man loved the great:
Then lands were fairly portioned;
Then spoils were fairly sold:
The Romans were like brothers
In the brave days of old.
Now Roman is to Roman
More hateful than a foe,
And the Tribunes beard the High,
and the Fathers grind the low.”

On Poverty

“Lest, when our latest hope is fled, ye taste of our despair,
And learn by proof, in some wild hour, how much the wretched dare.”

Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift

“Whoever could make two ears of corn, or two blades of grass, to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind, and do more essential service to his country, than the whole race of politicians put together.”

To many of us, Lilliput is the children’s story of small people tying down a bigger person, with some mumbling about horses or political philosophy in the background. In truth, however, it is that and more: a mockery of traditional travel literature, a satirical view of government and religion, a study of human nature and corruption, even a questioning of the ethos of scientific progress and development.

Lilliput is wracked with civil strife between two parties, those who wear high heels and those who wear low heels. Neither side trusts the crown prince, of course; he wears one of each. They are also at war with another country, because one likes to break its eggs from the big end, and the other from the small: the dispute stems from a religious text which says people should break their eggs from the appropriate end, only neither side agrees which end is appropriate. A conflict reminiscent of religious feuds in his time, or political ones in ours, perhaps.

Though Lilliput, the land of little people, is the best known, the book actually covers four broad journeys: first Gulliver is relatively big, then small, then wise, then ignorant. Each country he visits has different forms of government, perceives humanity in a different light, and is flawed in their own way; in Laputa Gulliver finds a society fixated on science but unable to use it for practical ends, while with the Houyhnhnms he finds a society of horses ruled by reason and ruling the human equivalents, called Yahoos. All of them are entertaining, and readers will likely find their own favourites. For myself, I think I enjoyed most the acute observations by other societies about our own: nothing like an external perspective, whether six inches or sixty feet high, to lend objectivity.

Oh, and the egg breaking wars. “It is computed that eleven thousand persons have at several times suffered death rather than submit to break their eggs at the smaller end.”

The Black Jacobins – CLR James

“They enslaved the Negro, they said, because he was not a man, and when he behaved like a man they called him a monster.”

The most successful slave revolt in history is also one of the least well known. San Domingue (modern Haiti) was the wealthiest colony of France, supplying two thirds of France’s total overseas trade and serving as the largest single market for the European slave trade. In 1791 the slaves rose up, defeating in succession their French masters, British and Spanish armies, and then a 60,000 soldier French force. They would declare full independence in 1804, and remain the only slave revolt to found a state.

The story is best known from CLR James’ 1938 The Black Jacobins, one of the first books to portray slaves not as things to whom atrocities were done, but rather men and women who had agency over their own lives: masters of their fates and captains of their souls, as it were. Their leader, Toussaint L’Ouverture, would eventually be arrested on Napoleon’s orders and die in prison, but not before beginning a revolution, inspired by the French ideals of Liberté, Egalité, and Fraternité, that would end with the declaration by his lieutenant of full independence.

The book can at times be hard to follow, covering as it does eight independent sides with constantly shifting alliances; the slaves, wealthy whites, poor whites, French royalists, French counter-revolutionaries, Spanish, English, and Mulattoes. Each would make and break treaties with the others while attempting to dominate the island. I also tend to object to Marxist historians: all historians have biases, of course, but I prefer mine to at least try to minimize their biases, instead of reveling in them. If all you want is to know the history, you should read the Wikipedia article. If you want to understand the history, however, and even more understand how slaves and slavery have been seen and portrayed through history, CLR James is the place to start. From how scorched earth tactics and crippling reparations impoverished Haiti, to the end of the British Trans-Atlantic slave trade three years later, to framing 12 Years a Slave’s portrayal of slaves with agency, there is much of modern interest.

“The difficulty was that though one could trap them like animals, transport them in pens, work them alongside an ass or a horse and beat both with the same stick, stable them and starve them, they remained, despite their black skins and curly hair, quite invincibly human beings; with the intelligence and resentments of human beings.”

The Tyranny of Experts – William Easterly

“Development seems to be almost exclusively about the fate of nations rather than the fate of individuals. We seem to care more about Zambia than about Zambians.”

In the 4th century BC, Plato sailed to Sicily in order to help educate the tyrant Dionysius the Younger, the leader of the city of Syracuse. He believed he could turn him into a philosopher-king, the perfect leader of a country, despite his tyrannical tendencies. It did not turn out well. Plato would end up banished (though it could have been worse: the tyrant’s father had sold Plato into slavery when they disagreed) and the tyrant was bad as ever until he was overthrown in a coup.

Though he doesn’t mention Plato, Easterly worries about a similar modern problem. He points to the World Bank-supported theft of land from farmers in Uganda for a British company’s forestry project, about which the World Bank refused to conduct an investigation, or their support for development policies which resulted in the forced displacement at gunpoint of around 1.5 million farmers in Ethiopia so land could be leased to foreign investors, for which UK aid is now being sued. The development industry, he argues, has a nasty habit of accepting or supporting dictators and human rights abuses in its quest for development, accepting a false bargain of material development in exchange for overlooking human rights.

Development experts get all excited about their favourite policies, and then find that the democratic process to enact those policies is messy and slow. With the best of intentions, some turn to autocracies and let the end justify the means. This, Easterly argues, is not only immoral but also ineffective. In the short run, supporting an autocrat who rewards loyalists and punishes everyone else eliminates incentives for growth: in the long run, it leaves a legacy of poverty and poor human rights for generations (see Why Nations Fail for more on this).

As befits a book that emphasizes local context, each chapter begins with the specifics of an individual or region developing, from the Mouride Brotherhood, an Islamic order based in Senegal that produces wildly successful international traders, to Hyundai in South Korea. I was disappointed that, as Easterly himself admits, the data to decide whether autocracies are bad for growth just doesn’t exist, and the book is not really convincing in either direction, though there are certainly reasons for skepticism. Readers hoping to be convinced that China is bad or good for growth will be disappointed. Well taken, however, are his moral and long run criticisms: he rightly points out that in the absence of statistical fact about whether autocracies boost growth, the burden of proof surely lies with the side that violates human rights.

Disclosure: I read The Tyranny of Experts as a free advance reader copy – it is released on March 4th. You can get it here (or in the UK or Canada). I’ve also had the opportunity to see Easterly speak in person about one of his previous books; he’s an excellent speaker, for what it’s worth.

Strange Fruits: Why Both Sides are Wrong in the Race Debate – Kenan Malik

“As the rise of the politics of difference has turned the assertion of group identity into a progressive demand, so racialisation is no longer viewed as a purely negative phenomenon. The consequence has been the resurrection of racial ideas and the imprisonment of people within their cultural identities…The concept of race is irrational. The practice of antiracism has become so. We need to challenge both, in the name of humanism and of reason.”

The idea of race has what I find a surprisingly short history. For much of humanity’s past, it was group membership of things like socioeconomic status, citizenship, or faith which mattered. As late as 1881, the King of Hawaii was given precedence over the Crown Prince of Germany; social rank mattered more than race.

Race then had its heyday, but post WW2 it for good reasons became unacceptable. Malik worries in “Strange Fruits” that it is returning in popularity in the guise of culture and under the auspices of antiracism. The right, he argues, uses human diversity as an argument to exclude the different; the modern left uses human diversity as a reason that people must be treated differently. Both, he suggests, rely on race and emphasize differences between people. Often it is culture that the left argues must be preserved: but that he suggests is too often used as a proxy for race, and one’s membership in a culture is defined by who one’s ancestors were. When museums restrict access to certain exhibits for cultural reasons, as they do in Australia and elsewhere, genetics and descent is the gatekeeper to knowledge.

In the end, race explains an insignificant 3-5% of human variation. Its categories are almost entirely arbitrary, and impossible to define over a constantly changing humanity. If science wishes to use it as a pragmatic way of grouping people, Malik argues, as when the FDA approved a drug targeting African-Americans, then fine; but it is the use of a social construct for convenience without the specificity to be anything more, and should be treated as such, not as a fixed dividing line between groups. Antiracists on the left who argue that cultures/races must be treated differently because they are different, he suggests, should remember the same: celebrating racial differences requires the same assumptions about race as those held by racists, an unscientific and unfounded philosophy.

To find out more, you can pick up a copy here (or just read the reviews) – or in the UK or Canada.

The Restoration of Rome (Charlemagne) – Peter Heather

The last history post for a while, honest! We’ll be back to doing books next week. But can’t you just feel all the character you’ve built learning all this history?

Charles the Great. Karolus Magnus. Charlemagne. Around 800 AD, he would be the last of our three wannabe reunifiers to attempt to recreate the Western Roman Empire. He had the right pedigree for it; his grandfather, Charles “The Hammer” Martel, is often credited with stopping the Islamic invasion of Christendom through Spain in a major battle.

Charlemagne was the leader of the Franks in Northern Europe, and was called to Italy to help defend the Papal state from the Lombards in the North of Italy. He did so, incidentally conquering the Lombards and most of Western Europe.

Having conquered the territory, however, he still needed a way to show he was emperor. The Catholic Church was respected, but it was reluctant to pronounce anyone emperor, since emperors were seen as the chosen of God and in some sense even outranked Popes. For some reason Popes weren’t wild about that. In 799 AD, however, an opportunity arose. The pope at the time, Leo III, was accused of various crimes, imprisoned, and barely escaped. After a meeting with Charlemagne, however, he was sent back with troops enough to protect him and ensure his authority. A year later, Charlemagne was crowned emperor by Leo III. Interpretation is left to the reader.

Even Charlemagne’s empire, however, would last only a century. Why? Heather argues that without Roman bureaucracy, a new Empire was impossible. The Roman Empire worked because local nobility wanted to become part of the imperial bureaucracy; that’s where power and influence was, but revenues still flowed to the Emperor. The Carolingian Empire, on the other hand, used gifts to buy the loyalty of nobles, often of land and the associated tax revenues. With the loss of the tax base, combined with the decreased agriculture productivity across Western Europe, emperors weren’t much wealthier than their nobles, and so nobles would rebel or support rival claimants to the throne, carving the empire up. This problem was only exacerbated as the Vikings attacked from the North, since the presence of a highly mobile attacking force meant even more resources had to be devolved to local areas, which would in turn feel less loyalty to the central power. The result was many smaller kingdoms, not one large empire.

It’s a difficulty all Empires face; devolving enough power to make regions able to solve their own problems, without giving them enough to be independent. In a time when it could take a month for a message to cross Europe, the problem was even worse, but its remnants remain in debates of decentralization and state power in the UK and the US.

And so ends our week and a half of history: back to book reviews!

The Restoration of Rome (Justinian) – Peter Heather

“By Roman or indeed any standards, Justinian was an autocratic bastard of the worst kind…He was certainly, however, the last ruler of Constantinople to use the resources of his Eastern heartlands to attempt to recreate a Roman Empire in the western Mediterranean and beyond.”

We’re still on a history kick, I’m afraid; we’ll be back to book reviews soon, honest!

Almost immediately after Theoderic died in the West, Justinian would take over as emperor of Eastern Rome. Historians are divided as to his abilities and motivations: some see him as a visionary who would attempt to rebuild the empire and Roman law, but it’s hard to know how true that is. Regardless, immediately after succession he faced the challenge any new leader faces: how to build legitimacy and popular support.

To do so, he embarked on two projects, picking a fight with the neighbouring Persians and attempting to codify the last 1400 years of Roman law. We’ll discuss the law later, but in brief the Persians defeated him, leading to huge riots in Constantinople, which he would put down by killing approximately 5% of the total population.

This, perhaps understandably, did not endear him to his subjects, so he looked for another way to build popular support: he would turn to Western Europe, conquering first North Africa, then Sicily and Italy. As he did so, however, the Persians invaded and utterly destroyed the second largest city in the Eastern Roman empire, Antioch. It would take him 27 years to stop the Persians and pacify Italy.

Within two generations, however, most of what he conquered would be lost, and most of the Eastern Roman Empire as well; historians are divided as to whether he is to blame for overextending, or if the new Islamic state that would take so much of its territory was inevitable.

It is for his reform of law, however, that Justinian is perhaps best known. Assembling all legal documents from the last 1400 years of Roman rulings, he would build a single legal system, suppressing entire law schools when they disagreed with him. That system would shape most of Western Europe’s legal system, and courses in it were mandatory at Oxford, for example, until the 1990s.

In any case, reuniting the West having failed from both West and East, attempts at reunification would falter for several centuries, until we get to perhaps the best known of our three wannabe unifiers: Charlemagne.