Habermas @ Leuven: the EU as enormous labor union?

None other than Jürgen Habermas has come to speak at Leuven, and about nothing less than the future of the European Union – to be precise, “Solidarity, Democracy, and the European Union”. God bless him, Habermas is nigh unintelligible when he speaks (fortunately, the university distributed copies of his lecture), but no one can question that his heart is in the right place. The question is whether his heart possesses the best possible argument; that seems doubtful to me.

Arguably, Habermas is famous among philosophers, social scientists, and activists for making a Golden Age out of the Enlightenment era, and drawing abstract models therefrom. The best example is his famous description of how the public sphere and liberal democracy came to emerge. Historically, a crucial institution was the coffeehouse, which philosophically becomes liberal democracy in ideal form: a common, agreed-upon space wherein interlocutors agree to rationally and coolheadedly debate an issue to a consensus. Elections, in their best form, resemble such a debate; so, too, legislative discussions.

With respect to the European Union’s present troubles and its future solution, the historical model for Habermas, at least as I understand him, appears to be the late-nineteenth century labor union, which philosophically becomes supranational democracy in ideal form. This time, the idea is of forging a cohesive fraternity with a democratic (i.e., rational, deliberative) but still collective decision-making process with a wealth-sharing agenda. I presume that because everyone is acting and thinking in solidarity, and because the European Union’s various institutions are driven to work for the best interests of this collective, the notorious “democracy deficit” that besets the Union today would evaporate. So too would disappear the clash of national self-interests that are threatening, says Habermas (and we all sort of feel it), to rend asunder the northern and southern economies.

The political-theological shadow of Maslow: “I have desired only what Thou didst desire”

Abaraham Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs, often portrayed as a pyramid with the more basic material needs at the bottom, haunts much of the contemporary discourse in both religion and political science (and, perhaps, long before Maslow articulated it, the pyramid has been in the backs of everyone’s minds since time immemorial). In simplest terms, for the political, democracy and liberty can easily be undermined by a careful calculation of keeping the majority of society on the brink of physiological and psychological starvation. The religious almost seem to tacitly agree, as they counter-act by either outright denying the importance of the pyramid’s bottom tier (asceticism), sharply separating the apex from the lower tiers (“Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s”), or asserting the apex’s dictatorship over the lower tiers (fundamentalism, theocracy). However, Maslow’s shadow is much more intricate and dark.

My friend Maarten, a student and aspiring activist in peace and conflict studies, and I share what could be called a Maslowian obsession, mine religious, his political: the relationship, and often conflict, between body and soul, this world and the next, or put another way, resources and rights, stability and liberty. At root, it is really about, both individually or collectively, the clash of desires, heteronomy’s limits upon self-actualization and self-determination, and the struggle with contingency. We’ve been thinking about these issues as they appear under the light of material crisis — such as the one going on right now in the Great Recession and the deepening of the neo-liberal order — when history very much casts entire swathes of human beings into the seeming positions of winner and loser, successful and failure, celebrated and forgotten, survival or extinction.

Wait for the wheel (II)

The wheel has turned once more; the fasting is done, the samovars are heated, the tea is served. Naw-Rúz has quietly returned. Today is a holiday older than memory, signifying the cosmic cycle of seasons; the eternal struggle of light and dark; the lesson that must always be re-learned at ever-subtler hermeneutical depths, as we sift through the alluvium of meaning upon the banks of an enigmatic river.

This was the first cycle since becoming a Bahá’í that I performed the full fast: that is, getting up before sunrise to eat, abstaining from food and drink, etc. In previous cycles, I ate bread and water at set times; insomnia made arising so early an impossible challenge; and solitude, wrought by a lack of like-minded colleagues, was disheartening company for the journey. Understandably, I dreaded the coming of the fast this year — but this cycle around proved different. This cycle, I had company, as well as a determination, spurred on by close friends, to step beyond doubt and foreboding to try.

I was always perplexed by my fellow Bahá’ís, who every February would anticipate the fast with excitement, and then seemed so happy to be starving themselves. Now I see why. The air has been thick with providence, and every other day the earth shook with unforeseen encounters and conversations. New insights seemed to creep around every corner. A few of the things I’ve learned, some quotidian, some esoteric, some harsh, some I needed to be reminded about, some that should not have been so surprising:

Red threads and corkscrews

As friends and readers know, 23 February is my “second birthday”, a perhaps-Calvinistic way of describing my decision to join the Baha’i Faith four years ago. The first two cycles, I commemorated the event by reviewing the events leading up to the big decision; the third cycle, I decided to do something bold and propose the beginnings of a “philosophy of journalism” (for which, according to no less a source than the Chronicle of Higher Education, there is a crying need). This cycle, I want to say something about “divine confirmations”. It’s a peculiar feature of, let’s call it Baha’i phenomenology: an intuitive feeling of providence, the perceived intimation of an invisible “yes”. However, I don’t want to theorize it; I just want to explore it as it seems to be appearing in my life as of late.

To others, sometimes it may appear as though my academic concerns have meandered, but in fact there is, as the Flemish say, a rode draad, a red thread: my journalistic experience, which has gradually re-directed my intellectual focus. When I think over my intellectual journey, it’s interesting to see the cycles within it, like a corkscrew slowly drilling into time:

Goodbye and good riddance, 2012

What a crappy year. I mean that primarily from two perspectives: professionally and privately. Academically and religiously, I’m inching closer to that personal Holy Grail of mine — getting into a doctoral program — and I’m much more involved in the Baha’i community now (including, much to my surprise, getting elected to the Leuven Local Spiritual Assembly!) And I’ve grown closer to some friends, born witness to more than a few weddings, things for which I can be grateful. But overall, 2012 (which roughly corresponds to my thirtieth year, so I can also say 30) was a kind of personal Mayan doomsday, laying waste to my savings, my organization, my love life, my travel opportunities, my blog, on and on.

By the grace of God — and the generosity of friends, family, and donor entities — I’ve managed to pull through, and so has NewEurasia. We’ve assembled a new team and a new vision for ourselves, while my savings have been somewhat rejuvenated. I’m still struggling with the issue of projected bachelorhood, constantly weighing the pros and cons of being, it seems, semi-permanently single for the foreseeable future, but okay. I’ve been reading a lot of Merleau-Ponty and Lefort, and if there’s one thing I’m (re-)learning from them, it’s both to embrace ambiguity and uncertainty, and to really embody one’s choices, even if sometimes one legitimately wonders whether there was ever much of a choice at all.

So, good riddance 2012. I’m more than inclined to condemn you as a waste of my time, but I’ll choose to hope you were a necessary purgation, instead. Certainly, you’ve taught me a lesson in making hard decisions, particularly when the surrounding ethical conditions are murky and the ethical consequences even murkier. Still, I hope 2013 is better, clearer, enjoyable.

* * *

WordPress compiles an annual statistics report for its bloggers. I’m pleased to say that, much to my surprise, Wikipedia is my highest source of readers, followed by various online social networks and then, of course, NewEurasia. I’m also really pleased that one of my biggest readerships comes out of Kyrgyzstan!

Here’s a fun excerpt:

4,329 films were submitted to the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. This blog had 33,000 views in 2012. If each view were a film, this blog would power 8 Film Festivals.

Yeah, sure, why not?

The view from bar-do’i srid-pa

When I woke up this morning, I wasn’t intending to write anything this year to commemorate your death. I had thought that I had finally said everything that needed to be said last year. But I find that perhaps I do have something else to say, or rather, to ask.

It was my thirty-first birthday last week. I spent the evening with friends loading myself up on sushi–I don’t know which tasted better, the company or the fish. The next day was Thanksgiving; it’s been five years since it last landed so close on my birthday.

Life here in Belgium hasn’t been terrible. Most of my friends are still around, and my MPhil thesis proceeds slowly but surely. I have decent living quarters, although almost all of my belongings are in storage at the moment. My finances may finally be stable again.

But Belgium isn’t Kyrgyzstan. I wanted to be in that beautiful country so much. To see Bishkek in autumn, to spend a year beneath the Tien Shan mountains, to happily suffer the freezing cold winters and trip over the cracked pavement–that’s what I wanted.

A symbolic vote / The symbolism of the vote

Of all the things that infuriate me about the United States, a nation that is as exceptionally mismanaged as it is exceptionally inventive, the one that has irritated me the most the past month has been the inability for American expatriates to vote at our embassies. The reason almost certainly lies in the Electoral College: expatriates cannot simply be registered as a bloc of their own, since the popular vote is filtered at the national level via the state-based “electoral” vote. Yet one more reason to strongly consider revising, if not getting rid of, the Electoral College.

Here’s another: if we understand democracy as the vox populi along majoritarian lines, then the very mathematics of the Electoral College system are undemocratic. Whoever can carry enough states to bring his (or her) overall Electoral College vote total to at least 270 shall win. Since most states in this election are supposedly already spoken for, this suggests that an extremely small percentage of voters — i.e., those in the mythical “swing states” — shall determine the race (back-of-napkin calculations suggest 5 million). The logical flipside of this is that the rest of us might as well not vote; the result, if it is indeed so pre-ordained, shall be the same.

But my purpose here is not to complain; rather, it is to go on the record as an Obama supporter. In the end, he really is the best candidate; indeed, in the words of one friend, he’s the best candidate we could ever hope to have. The New Yorker has an excellent summary of Obama, as well as why we should fret about Romney (I still can’t believe my countrymen might elect a president with offshore accounts! What are we, Kazakhstan?).

I suppose in the end it’s a kind of faith, or, yes, hope: give Obama four more years. And it’s not about partisanship; it’s about what I, and many of my countrymen — “countrymen” both in the particular American sense and in the global sense, in that the world is but one country and mankind her citizens — believe is the best for the United States and the world. What Romney represents isn’t that.

And it’s indeed about representation, symbolism. The characters of these two men are complex, and it’s uncertain what they completely signify. However, there’s an inkling that “Obama” at least signifies not descending into ideological fanaticism, and with it, the prevailing of reason. Of course, the triggers of signification rely a lot upon one’s framework, as I imagine Romney supporters would say that this is what “Romney” signifies for them. So, in a way, we’re all leaping into the dark with our vote.

Ah yes, my vote. Well, I missed the absolute latest postdate, which means my vote probably won’t be counted. Again, not that it would matter from a mathematical perspecitve (I’m a New Yorker, and my state has been pre-ordained for Obama); rather, it’s a statement. I’m saying: I’m still involved, and whatever the outcome, I still wish the best, for my society and the world.