Lifestyles
Yesterday evening, I went to a large party at the phenomenally opulent
Rainbow Room at Rockefeller Center, where I ate well, drank well, laughed, and enjoyed a truly splendid view of the city from on high. No pictures were taken (nor were they allowed to be taken), sad to say, so you'll just have to imagine milling around, very fine (complimentary) cocktail in hand, looking out over the city as the sun sank into... well, into New Jersey, to be fair. But still. It was great.
We had butlered service, splendid food, aged whiskey, genuine celebrity entertainment, the works. There are
members of this place, and people who make a habit of their $200-per-person dinner-and-dancing nights (which must be absolutely lovely, but would you go every
week at that price?). I left thinking (and still have this sense about me even now) that New York is such a place of opulence, a place where jackets are required and New Year's party reservations can easily top $1000.
But descend the 57 floors from the Rainbow Room back to street level, and you are suddenly surrounded by normal people. All of New York is not opulent.
There is a flip side to the normalcy below, however. The Rainbow Room is no jewel in the heart of abject poverty, no Jakartan high-rise amid the slums; it is, instead, a jewel just above and among millions of unremarkable middle-class folk, window-shopping on Fifth Avenue (and occasionally buying things), watching their kids skate at Rockefeller Center (and paying an obscene amount for the privilege), taking pictures, and chatting about the Iraq war. One is supposed to leave the Rainbow Room with my sense that this was a unique glamour, one that is unattainable by the masses. The decor says it; the dress code says it; the rhetoric certainly says it. (Just consider what is going on with this language: From the beginning, "the Rainbow Room has epitomized New York style, glamour and sophistication." It began as "an intimate establishment where the elite and influential of New York could gather to socialize over cocktails, dine on fine cuisine, dance to the strains of legendary big bands on a revolving floor bathed in color lights from the organ," and it has "flourished in quiet opulence throughout the past century by cultivating members who appreciate the nature of private clubs....") But the truth is, the vast majority of the window-shoppers and picture-takers below could easily afford a night out at the Rainbow Room if that's how they chose to spend their money. $200 is not pocket-change; but it is not crazy, either. Someone who chose to forego Time Warner Cable's triple-play package could attend one of these dinner-and-dancing events once every six weeks--but she couldn't watch the Sopranoes or the Simpsons or Dawson's Creek reruns. One could go to one of these dinners for less than
the cost of a Playstation Portable--but you couldn't look hip playing that ridiculousness on the subway. You could have brunch at the Rainbow Room for less than a new pair of shoes, less than a nice shirt, less than you'd spend on admission for yourself and one child at Disney World.
America has class differentiation, to be sure--but it seems to me that this differentiation is in large part due to self-identification rather than true economic differences. I don't mean to write off the problematic, and probably undemocratic, attitudes that allow our average large-company CEO to make
500 times the salary of the average employee at their company, but I do mean to point out that we often seem to make cultural distinctions much more strongly than economic ones. I mean, a ticket to hear the Rolling Stones and one to see the New York City opera are pretty much interchangeable price-wise. You can buy a grand Texan ranch and wear flannel and a cowboy hat with your oil money, or you can buy a grand yacht and wear suits (and both are culturally acceptable, and situate you squarely within a community of like-minded millionaires). You can see arthouse films or blockbusters, and you'll be spending the exact same amount of leisure time and the exact same number of dollars.
The Rainbow Room likes to cultivate the idea that it isn't just for anybody, that it is rather for the rich, the cultured, and the important. They write as if you're supposed to mill around and smoke your thousand-dollar cigar in your waistcoat and tie, taking the spectacular view for granted and downing champaigne like water. The truth is, of course, that some people can do that, and others nonetheless have a perfectly lovely time having made the conscious decision to spend that money tonight, and still others are very pleased to spend the evening eating burgers, fries, and ice cream ($20), drinking beer ($10), watching pay-per-view wrestling ($25), grabbing a bag of chips and some dip ($7), cheering, listening to stadium music downloaded from itunes ($15), and watching their favorite stars getting bashed over the head with an unending supply of folding chairs. This is not, I note, a $200 evening--but it is a $77 evening, and it does represent a choice of cultural activities as much as brunch at the Rainbow Room or an evening in very good seats at the Lincoln Center (both of which, I note, could be had for very nearly the exact same price).
the new and the old
Are universities (and other institutions of learning - Medieval monasteries, yeshivot, perhaps even prep schools) necessarily conservative in nature?
This is a conversation I've had several times in the past few weeks. It all began architecturally: I suggested to H that the new residential buildings at Cornell are monstrosities that look unfinished. They have a kind of fake-brick siding that doesn't meet up at the edges, which I hate; I may have said, "Forget the siding--they should just make them of real brick." But perhaps I actually suggested that they should be made of stone. Certainly, I made it clear that anything with even minor pretensions to permanence should be built from a medium that could age well.
H averred. There might be other benefits to Cornell's building choices, benefits that have little or nothing to do with their looks but everything to do with aging well. For example, he said, it might be convenient and intelligent to think about moving or modifying these buildings in the medium- or even near-term. Maybe a university does itself a disservice if it isn't adaptable (here we're still talking architecturally). Universities are always on the cutting edge of research; they grow and change quickly as they discover new things; and they're the home of the stereotyped ivory-towered liberal who is the vanguard of a new morality, a new set of ideals, a new way of life (and here we are suddenly talking politics). The modular dorm may be both an artistic reflection of this fact and a practical way of letting the university change its space to better serve new ideas, new experiments, new students.
Let us put aside the virtues of Cornell's new west campus dorms (if any virtues there be) in favor of a different question: When did it happen that the university became a stronghold of the liberal crowd? I mean, the first modern universities were theological in nature, a natural outward expansion of the monastery-as-repository-of-knowledge way of doing things. Such institutions were necessarily conservative, by virtue of expounding an eternal and unchanging worldview (even if the details were as-yet-unknown). If God made the earth to be the center of the galaxy, it's a good bit harder to make the jump-shift to heliocentricism than it is if previous (merely human) scientists made some incorrect assumptions.
But there are other reasons that universities, even secular universities, might be generally presumed to be conservative. First, they are places where the old teach and have power over the young. Unrestrained twenty-year-olds might be young and idealistic and likely to (try to) change the world, but we may be forgiven for thinking that twenty-year-olds who are awestruck by their brilliant (septuagenarian) history instructors, who worry (at least a bit) about their grades from said instructors, and who must attend class most days and buckle down to work on serious term papers and theses, might be somewhat more restrained in their radicalist tendencies.
Second, the university is an established institution with a very respectable place in modern society. When one tries to get into a good university and to get out of it again with a good degree in order to get a well-paying, respectable job, one is doing exactly the sort of thing that the government wants and has always wanted from its people. This does not represent a radical break from society or even a minor threat to established social mores; indeed, it is a pure case of working within the system. Most people who go to universities are still planning to travel an old and well-trodden path.
And finally, the nature of imparting knowledge as such--even merely man-made, man-discovered knowledge--seems inherently conservative. Whether I'm telling you God made it this way or nature evolved this way, whether X is Absolutely True or merely taken to be true because it's the best explanation we have, the university is a place where students sit down and are lectured on the wisdom of their forebears. Some young people may not respect their elders--or their elders' values--but you'd think that students at top universities would be some of the first to recognize the worth of older wisdom.
Despite all of this, though, for some time now universities have been hotbeds of liberalism, of reform, of novelty, and occasionally of radicalism, both in this country and abroad. In America, this is evidenced by an intriguing split: universities and churches, once bosom-buddies, now find themselves reliably on opposite sides of nearly every social issue to rise to public importance.
P & P (boyfriend and girlfriend) suggest that the new liberalism makes a kind of sense given the post-Enlightenment (and particularly 20th-century) focus on academic research. The main goal of academics, after all
isn't to impart knowledge anymore. Rather, it's to make new knowledge. Academia, they say, is all about the new these days.
P & P have a good point. But perhaps we'd do well also to consider an argument put forth by J, a correspondent of mine from Florida. She suggests that greater educational opportunities for people from all backgrounds--a thing H, P & P, J and I all agree to be an unequivocally good thing--has helped to do away with a rhetoric both of social superiority and of leadership, character, and moral formation in the academy. Back when the members of the student population were being groomed by their rich, Senatorial, businessmen fathers to be rich Senators and businessmen themselves, college was largely about instilling a certain character into young men and providing them with a successful and aristocratic social network. Students like this are still very much in evidence in our most elite universities--but there are lots of other types, too. Now, students are as likely to aspire to professordom as to public service in the established government; the professor is no longer "merely" educating next year's leaders, but is rather a leader in a field him- or herself. In the meantime, students are taught the excitement of academia as much as (or probably more than) the duty of public service. Getting back to P & P's point, students are not merely made aware of new discoveries, but are encouraged to take part in them as well--and not as hobbies or interesting pastimes, as in the old tradition of the recreational scientist or the war-fighting poet, but as a full-fledged professional with the possibility of major awards and popular recognition (apparently called "the Einstein effect" these days). In other words, it's not just the professors who privilege their research more highly than their teaching--the students do it, too.
For J, the movement away from grooming university students for public service and worldly success is a good one. Divorcing the academy from the church, first, and from the government, later, has given it a new independence and has led to many great scientific and technological advancements. J only wishes this whole grooming-for-power thing was done away with once and for all.
From my end, I am left with a question:
But where would those kids go? It is true that research and teaching are two very different functions. It is also true that many of our greatest research institutions in America appear to milk their undergrads for money in order to support their deservedly-renowned research functions, without giving a fair return of knowledge for dollars; Cornell, for example, puts 400 students into introductory physics classes--and uses the tuition payments to fund Mars Rovers. (Don't get me wrong--the Mars Rovers are awesome, and
somebody ought to be paying Steve Squyres an amazing sum for his efforts--but it probably oughtn't be, in part, students who think they're paying him to teach their astronomy classes when he's just earned the right not to teach for a long while.) But if the academy should rightfully become the home of research and discovery exclusively, leaving all that conservative good-grooming, old-style education stuff for somebody else, then we need to ask who is prepared to take on that function in today's world. As it is, we could do worse than letting our future world leaders putz around for a few formative years in the presence of some of the most profound, interesting, and intelligent new discoveries, and discoverers, that there are.
guitar; bed; bear; mirror
I've got a new digital camera. Alas, my antiquated computer can't run the software to let me upload the images. What to do?
Enter
Zq with
his digital camera (and his photo-friendly computer). The photo credits on this one go to him.
I enjoy my camera very much. I like taking photos. I love the ability to see my results right away and to reshoot if they're sub-par. I'm creating albums upon albums. And they all live within the camera, since I can't export them to the computer on my desk.
I have discovered that I'm a luddite. I think I've been in denial about this. But I realize now that not only don't I have an internet connection at home (which I have previously defended on "I don't want to waste my life surfing the net" grounds); I don't even have a computer that can run today's most universal programs and software. Perhaps, and I say this with skepticism, but perhaps, it is time for an upgrade.
(The photo's of me.)
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: just a few of the several States of our Union
I've been out of commission for a while--there was an interesting scare at the surprisingly empty, surprisingly responsive, and surprisingly concerned St. Luke's/Roosevelt Medical Center Emergency Room--but that shan't keep me from commenting on the now week-old State of the Union address. A quick highlights reel:
1. Bush's best rhetorical move: linking economic strength and economic leadership in the world at large to democracy, anti-terrorist activities, and the war in Iraq.By railing against isolationism generally, the President crafted a non-obvious yet very clever and fairly compelling link between the two seemingly-disparate goals of a strong economy at home and a strong (read: forceful) foreign policy abroad. We need to keep our markets open, he said; we need to welcome foreign workers; we need to adapt to the new global marketplace in order to maintain our position as an economic leader in the world. In short, we need to take an active part in the global economy and cannot descend into economic isolationism or high-tarriff protectionism if we want to maintain our competitive edge. And while workers in threatened industries might want to see their jobs saved, nearly all of us know that what Bush said on these counts is
true. It
is in our best interest to take an active interest in world markets.
The clever move that followed was the suggestion that an active interest in foreign governance is
also in our best interest, for the exact same reasons. Moreover, it is allowed--nay,
responsible--for the same reasons that active participation in the global economy is allowed and, indeed, responsible. We can't accept isolationism economically: our economy will flail and fail. We can't accept isolationism politically, either: our government and our institutions will also flail and fail. Just as we have seen the dollar threatened when we try to protect jobs and divorce certain industries from worldwide economic trends, we have seen that unstable governments abroad and foreign terrorism can come back to bite us at home. We can't just live in a bubble of democratic goodness here in America; we must reach out, by force if necessary, and engage in an active foreign policy--for the good of polities in the world at large, to be sure, but also for the domestic good.
2. Bush's worst rhetorical move (and I quote):Ultimately, the only way to defeat the terrorists is to defeat their dark vision of hatred and fear by offering the hopeful alternative of political freedom and peaceful change. So the United States of America supports democratic reform across the broader Middle East. [One short paragraph about Egypt here.] The Palestinian people have voted in elections, and now the leaders of Hamas...
Okay, come on now. Like the two measly sentences of the intervening paragraph are going to keep us from noticing that the Palestinian election brought a
terrorist government into power. Whichever of Bush's speechwriters brilliantly placed the two news items "democracy brings peaceful change" and "the Palestinians just democratically voted for terrorists" next to one another should be shot. (Well, no, okay, that's rather a harsh overstatement. But the move
is rhetorically terrible. It highlights the
problems with Bush's doctrine of democratic superiority, not the success thereof.)
The speech may have been the worse for this move, but it's worth pointing out that the juxtaposition presented here did get me thinking (specifically, about the problems of democracy and the Bush democratic doctrine, unsurprisingly). I tend to privilege democracy highly. After all, it ideally gives a people self-determination, which is a very great good indeed; I may even be prepared to state that this is an inherently moral good.
But there are some difficulties in Bush's firm belief that democracy is the political ideal that brings peace and justice to wayward states. First and most obviously, we should point out that the masses in any given state are not necessarily nice, just, or fair. The majority of people in a state may favor the destruction of Israel; or warfare in Iraq; or harsh measures against some political, ethnic, or religious minority; or even just theft from the rich; but majority support doesn't make any of those things
right. In such circumstances, it's hard to tell whether justice, fairness, and decency on the one hand, or democracy on the other, is the greater good. (Indeed, it's not clear to me that there's even a general rule; perhaps we need to take things on a more pragmatic, case-by-case basis: democracy may be the greater good when the question is one of property rights and popular repossession without compensation to the owner, but it may be the lesser good when the question instead concerns killing or radical destruction of human life. But such pragmatism has, I think, dire consequences for coherent and determinative moral systems (the kind which are useful by virtue of offering us instructions by which to live our lives).)
Of course governments must always balance basic morality and indivual rights against popular desires--we Americans try to do that with our Bill of Rights; the Brits do it with their unwritten Constitution and an explicit, legally-binding dependence upon decency and common sense in daily actions--but the problem of fair and moral governance nonetheless seems particularly acute in a democratic system. It is a system that breeds ideologues and encourages strong speakers who can arouse passions in a crowd,
not, I note, a system that easily allows independent thinkers to rise to the top while practicing careful deliberation on any given issue. There are many things to be said for democracy; but there is, perhaps, something also to be said for a Platonic aristocracy of the best-educated, most thoughtful, most moderate voices, led at the top by a philosopher-king who has been raised to consider problems of good governance. (There is much to be said against such a system, too, to be fair: democracy comes with the possibility of mob rule and shameless demogogues, but monarchy is closely allied to tyranny.)
The second big problem with the democratic doctrine as practiced by Bush is the percieved right--perhaps even obligation?--to impose democracy abroad. Even if Bush is right about the stability and moderating effects of democracy, I can't help but think that our "encouragement" has done anything in Iraq (for example) but
destabalize the government and foment anti-American, anti-European radicalism. In almost all circumstances, I tend to think that stability is a far greater good than any particular governmental system; life is better if it is predictable, even if not ideal (or even harshly oppressive). This is contraversial, I know, but
I just don't think we've shown that democracy trumps other governmental forms when it comes to producing happy people. If we're worried about unhappy people coming to blow us up, I'm just not sure forced democracy is the way to go
regardless of whether the system brings greater domestic stability. If it's not making us appreciably safer, though, I have a hard time with the idea that we are justified in overthrowing someone else's government. We would do well to remember that that's a way to scuttle self-determination, too.
After all, it's problematic to assume that, because democracy works for us and we're a powerful country, monarchy or oligarchy don't work for others. It's just not clear to me that a rich, relatively permissive, and practically undemocratic U.A.E., for example, yields people who are yearning for political change. (Actually, judging from my friends from Dubai, it is rather more clear that they would be horrified by the prospect.) Yet we as a nation persist in the belief that democracy is the only government worth having.
Of course, none of this means that Bush is necessarily wrong about the desirability of the recent Palestinian vote. It may well be that democracy
is moderating and that the vote represents real promise in the Middle East. After all, Hamas is suddenly going to have to deal with domestic issues: with clean government (given that Fatah was largely overthrown because of its pervasive corruption), with education, with hospitals. They're going to have to negotiate with the rest of the world on everything from disarmament (where they may hold their own) to environmental issues (where they'll want to appear respectable in the world). Even if their ideals don't change, the end of Israel is hardly going to top Hamas's to-do list. And, anyhow, their ideals
might change, merely for pragmatic reasons of maintaining their power and avoiding domestic violence on their watch. Perhaps Bush is right that, in the long term, democracy breeds peace.
The thing is, that's not clear yet. And he was stupid to put it in his speech. And he was stupider still to use the Palestinian election as an example of a newly spreading, peaceable democracy.
