Links 15.2024
On a Personal Note
If this newsletter reaches you, this means that we have avoided WW3…for now!
And other than that, I’ve not much to say about the state of the world right now. Maybe in the upcoming weeks. But who knows? Until then, memes must do:
The Great Struggle for Liberalism
So many of you have forwarded this article to me that I better link to it here. The reason why y’all seemed to have thought of me is obvious: Because it (in an almost uncanny way) sums up the “future of liberalism” section of this newsletter. Tbh, I even had a hard time not highlighting every single line. Just take the last paragraphs:
This election year, in the United States and around the globe, will be about whether liberalism can thrive again. [W]e liberals can’t just offer economic benefits; we also have to make the spiritual and civic case for our way of life.
There’s glory in striving to add another chapter to the great liberal story — building a society that is technologically innovative, commercially daring, with expanding opportunities for all; building a society in which culture is celebrated, families thrive, a society in which the great diversity of individuals can experience a sense of common purpose and have the space and energy to pursue their own adventures in living.
I mean, this just reads like something I should have written. Unfortunately, I’m not eloquent enough. But, luckily, David Brooks is. Read the whole thing, save it, preach it!
In 1978, the Russian dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn gave a commencement address at Harvard, warning us about the loss of American self-confidence and will. “A decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West today,” he declared.
Today, those words ring with disturbing force. The enemies of liberal democracy seem to be full of passionate intensity — Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Donald Trump, campus radicals. Meanwhile, those who try to defend liberal norms can sometimes seem like some of those Republicans who ran against Trump in the 2016 primaries — decent and good, but kind of feckless and about to be run over.
Into this climate emerges Fareed Zakaria’s important new book, “Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash From 1600 to the Present.” One of the powerful features of this book is that Zakaria doesn’t treat liberal democratic capitalism as some set of abstract ideas. He shows how it was created by real people in real communities who wanted richer, fuller and more dynamic lives.
[…]
[Y]et for all its benefits, liberalism is ailing and in retreat in places like Turkey, India, Brazil and, if Trump wins in 2024, America itself. Zakaria’s book helped me develop a more powerful appreciation for the glories of liberalism, and also a better understanding of what’s gone wrong.
I’m one of those people who subscribes to the Austrian psychiatrist Viktor Frankl’s doctrine: “Man’s search for meaning is the primary motivation in his life.” To feel at home in the world, people need to see themselves serving some good — doing important work, loving others well, living within coherent moral communities, striving on behalf of some set of ideals.
The great liberal societies that Zakaria describes expanded and celebrated individual choice and individual freedom. But when liberalism thrived, that personal freedom lay upon a foundation of commitments and moral obligations that precede choice: our obligations to our families, to our communities and nations, to our ancestors and descendants, to God or some set of transcendent truths.
Over the past few generations, the celebration of individual freedom has overspilled its banks and begun to erode the underlying set of civic obligations. Especially after World War II and then into the 1960s, we saw the privatization of morality — the rise of what came to be known as the ethos of moral freedom. Americans were less likely to assume that people learn values by living in coherent moral communities. They were more likely to adopt the belief that each person has to come up with his or her own personal sense of right and wrong. As far back as 1955, the columnist Walter Lippmann saw that this was going to lead to trouble: “If what is good, what is right, what is true, is only what the individual ‘chooses’ to ‘invent,’ then we are outside the traditions of civility,” he wrote.
Trust is the faith that other people will do what they ought to do. When there are no shared moral values and norms, then social trust plummets. People feel alienated and under siege, and, as Hannah Arendt observed, lonely societies turn to authoritarianism. People eagerly follow the great leader and protector, the one who will lead the us/them struggle that seems to give life meaning.
During our current moment of global populism, the liberal tradition is under threat. Many people have gone economically nationalist and culturally traditionalist. Around the world, authoritarian moralists promise to restore the old ways, the old religion, national greatness. “There are certain things which are more important than ‘me,’ than my ego — family, nation, God,” Viktor Orban declared. Such men promise to restore the anchors of cultural, moral and civic stability, but they use brutal and bigoted strongman methods to get there.
President Biden tried to win over the disaffected by showering them with jobs and economic benefits. It doesn’t seem to have worked politically because the real absence people are feeling is an absence of meaning, belonging and recognition.
This election year, in the United States and around the globe, will be about whether liberalism can thrive again. Zakaria’s book will help readers feel honored and grateful that we get to be part of this glorious and ongoing liberal journey. He understands that we liberals can’t just offer economic benefits; we also have to make the spiritual and civic case for our way of life. He writes: “The greatest challenge remains to infuse that journey with moral meaning, to imbue it with the sense of pride and purpose that religion once did — to fill that hole in the heart.”
There’s glory in striving to add another chapter to the great liberal story — building a society that is technologically innovative, commercially daring, with expanding opportunities for all; building a society in which culture is celebrated, families thrive, a society in which the great diversity of individuals can experience a sense of common purpose and have the space and energy to pursue their own adventures in living.
Germany’s robotic stores must rest on Sundays, too
Apologies for yet another article about Jermany (sic!); but since I am spending more time here, I’m just astonished at how far gone this country already is. So, here is another beautiful story of how a complacent and notoriously anxious (#GermanAngst) population that is still full of itself runs down a country.
By the way, this isn’t about convenience. If you read the article, you will see an unholy (!) alliance of German churches and trade unions maintaining a system that essentially kills innovation. But I wouldn’t focus all blame on those three players (despite their track record of harming Germany and Christianity (!)); the German populace was lured into this sense of comfort that it has become too apathetic to demand progress. Sad!
When it launched its fully automated stores four years ago, Germany’s regional supermarket chain Tegut billed the experiment as a window into the future of shopping.
But the Fulda-based retailer has since been embroiled in a legal fight over a centuries-old principle enshrined in the German constitution: Sunday rest.
Be they robotic or staffed by humans, most shops in Germany are not allowed to open on the last day of the week — and courts have upheld that ban.
“This is entirely grotesque,” Tegut management board member Thomas Stäb told the Financial Times. He said that the small robo-shops were “basically walk-in vending machines” that should not be affected by the ban.
The Fulda-based retailer owns about 300 traditional supermarkets and 40 fully automated mini-shops. It was forced to comply with a December ruling by the highest administrative court in the state of Hesse that said Sonntagsruhe must be observed even if no workers were involved.
The judges said the small self-service store qualified as a “shop” under German law, and therefore must abide by legislation on opening hours. [SG: This sounds like the most German ruling ever]
[…]
The legal battle was triggered by Germany’s service sector union Verdi after the first automated store opened in Fulda four years ago. The union fundamentally opposes Sunday shopping, arguing that retail staff, who already have to contend with highly flexible working hours during the rest of the week, need Sunday as a guaranteed day off to spend time with family and friends.
The union was also concerned about potential “knock-on effects” for workers in traditional stores. Tegut’s rivals could soon start lobbying for further liberalisation of Sunday shopping rules, a Verdi official said. [SG: Please note that Verdi is one of the most toxic unions we have in Germany]
[…]
But as the three judges made clear in their ruling, Germany’s work-free Sundays are about more than just work. They pointed to the Christian origin of the principle which was first decreed more than 1,700 years ago by Roman emperor Constantine the Great.
Sunday rest has been enshrined in Germany’s constitution since 1919 and was upheld by the constitutional court in a 2009 verdict.
“Our society needs a special day per week that has its own characteristics to celebrate Christian spirituality and to have shared experiences with friends and family,” said Philip Büttner, an official at KWA, a body of Germany’s Protestant Church that lobbies for the work-free Sunday. [SG: Note that the German churches are amongst the fastest-declining religious communities in the world]
Both the Protestant and Catholic Churches have formed an unusual alliance with Germany’s powerful unions to defend the status quo for years, and spearheaded the campaign against the Sunday opening of automated stores. In March, the alliance encouraged pastors to criticise the shops in their weekly sermons.
[…]
“Tegut’s teo is one of the most innovative new formats in German retail,” said Stephan Rüschen, a retail professor at Baden-Württemberg Cooperative State University in Heilbronn, stressing how important these stores were for rural communities where grocery stores had long disappeared and large shops were often miles away.
New teos were often celebrated with a village party, and “we are getting more requests to open now ones from municipalities than we can satisfy,” Stäb said.
Tegut does not disclose financial details about its automated stores, but Stäb said that “we are more than happy with the sales performance as well as the feedback from local residents”. He also stressed that the shop’s productivity per square metre was superior to traditional supermarkets.
To prevent theft, the shops collects customer IDs from their payment card before entering and rely on CCTV. Once inside, shoppers can walk around and pick products from shelves, which they then scan and pay for at a self-checkout. Stäb acknowledged that shoplifting was a slightly bigger issue than at normal supermarkets but stressed that it did not make them unviable.
For Tegut, losing Sunday sales was economically painful as that day accounted for about 25 to 30 per cent of teos’ weekly commerce, said Stäb.
Since the ruling, Tegut has paused the capital-heavy expansion of teo supermarkets in its home state.
Construction and validation of a scale for assessing critical social justice attitudes
“Wokeness” (as measured by the researchers, see below) and mental well-being seem to be negatively correlated. I’ll let you draw your own conclusions…
Also, note the gender divide.
(For context, these were some of the statements that they used to measure critical social justice attitudes (CSJA):
“If white people have on average a higher level of income than black people, it is because of racism.”
“University reading lists should include fewer white or European authors.”
“Microaggressions should be challenged often and actively.”
“Trans* women who compete with women in sports are not helping women’s rights.”
“We don’t need to talk more about the color of people’s skin.”
“A white person cannot understand how a black person feels equally well as another black person.”
“A member of a privileged group can adopt features or cultural elements of a less privileged group.”)
Abstract
Two large studies (combined n = 5,878) set out to construct and validate a scale for assessing critical social justice attitudes. Studies assessed the reliability, factor structure, model fit, and both convergent and divergent validity of the scale. Studies also examined the prevalence of critical social justice attitudes in different populations and the scale's correlations with other variables of interest, including well-being variables: anxiety, depression, and happiness. […] Participants responded to a survey about critical social justice attitudes. […] Overall, the study sample rejected critical social justice propositions, with strong rejection from men. Women expressed more than twice as much support for the propositions (d = 1.20). In both studies, critical social justice attitude scales (CSJAS) was correlated with depression, anxiety, and (lack of) happiness, but not more so than being on the political left was. [SG: That whole sentence is just slay tbh] The critical social justice attitude scale was successfully constructed and validated. It had good reliability and model fit.
The Case for Marrying an Older Man
Okay, before you start canceling me, please keep in mind that this isn’t an endorsement. Rather, I’m linking to this because it represents the cultural moment that I somewhat (and against much opposition) predicted already several years ago. As we all know, I have a very structured and deliberate approach to dating…and I’ve essentially ruled out same-sage dating (for various reasons!). I mean, to find examples of my very own experience with same-age relationships, we would have to turn back the clock to my first relationship during high school.
Again, I’m presenting this value-free. Everybody should experiment as much on the dating market as possible. But if you want to come along to our camp, this might be a good place to start. Although the arguments in the article slightly differ from mine, it is a great read and makes for a good cultural critique. Don’t take her pragmatism as tradwife-ing; she actually offers interesting reflections on feminism and time-sensitive gender-dynamics in relationships. Recommended!
When I was 20 and a junior at Harvard College, a series of great ironies began to mock me. I could study all I wanted, prove myself as exceptional as I liked, and still my fiercest advantage remained so universal it deflated my other plans. My youth. The newness of my face and body. Compellingly effortless; cruelly fleeting. I shared it with the average, idle young woman shrugging down the street. The thought, when it descended on me, jolted my perspective, the way a falling leaf can make you look up: I could diligently craft an ideal existence, over years and years of sleepless nights and industry. Or I could just marry it early.
So naturally I began to lug a heavy suitcase of books each Saturday to the Harvard Business School to work on my Nabokov paper. In one cavernous, well-appointed room sat approximately 50 of the planet’s most suitable bachelors. I had high breasts, most of my eggs, plausible deniability when it came to purity, a flush ponytail, a pep in my step that had yet to run out. Apologies to Progress, but older men still desired those things.
I could not understand why my female classmates did not join me, given their intelligence. Each time I reconsidered the project, it struck me as more reasonable. Why ignore our youth when it amounted to a superpower? Why assume the burdens of womanhood, its too-quick-to-vanish upper hand, but not its brief benefits at least? Perhaps it came easier to avoid the topic wholesale than to accept that women really do have a tragically short window of power, and reason enough to take advantage of that fact while they can. As for me, I liked history, Victorian novels, knew of imminent female pitfalls from all the books I’d read: vampiric boyfriends; labor, at the office and in the hospital, expected simultaneously; a decline in status as we aged, like a looming eclipse. I’d have disliked being called calculating, but I had, like all women, a calculator in my head. I thought it silly to ignore its answers when they pointed to an unfairness for which we really ought to have been preparing.
I was competitive by nature, an English-literature student with all the corresponding major ambitions and minor prospects (Great American novel; email job). A little Bovarist, frantic for new places and ideas; to travel here, to travel there, to be in the room where things happened. I resented the callow boys in my class, who lusted after a particular, socially sanctioned type on campus: thin and sexless, emotionally detached and socially connected, the opposite of me.
[…]
Of course I just fell in love. Romances have a setting; I had only intervened to place myself well. Mainly, I spotted the precise trouble of being a woman ahead of time, tried to surf it instead of letting it drown me on principle. I had grown bored of discussions of fair and unfair, equal or unequal, and preferred instead to consider a thing called ease.
The reception of a particular age-gap relationship depends on its obviousness. The greater and more visible the difference in years and status between a man and a woman, the more it strikes others as transactional. Transactional thinking in relationships is both as American as it gets and the least kosher subject in the American romantic lexicon. When a 50-year-old man and a 25-year-old woman walk down the street, the questions form themselves inside of you; they make you feel cynical and obscene: How good of a deal is that? Which party is getting the better one? Would I take it? He is older. Income rises with age, so we assume he has money, at least relative to her; at minimum, more connections and experience. She has supple skin. Energy. Sex. Maybe she gets a Birkin. Maybe he gets a baby long after his prime. The sight of their entwined hands throws a lucid light on the calculations each of us makes, in love, to varying degrees of denial. […] Most offended were the single older women, my husband’s classmates. They discussed me in the bathroom at parties when I was in the stall. What does he see in her? What do they talk about? They were concerned about me. They wielded their concern like a bludgeon. They paraphrased without meaning to my favorite line from Nabokov’s Lolita: “You took advantage of my disadvantage,” suspecting me of some weakness he in turn mined. It did not disturb them, so much, to consider that all relationships were trades. The trouble was the trade I’d made struck them as a bad one.
[…]
When I think of same-age, same-stage relationships, what I tend to picture is a woman who is doing too much for too little.
I’m 27 now, and most women my age have “partners.” These days, girls become partners quite young. A partner is supposed to be a modern answer to the oppression of marriage, the terrible feeling of someone looming over you, head of a household to which you can only ever be the neck. Necks are vulnerable. The problem with a partner, however, is if you’re equal in all things, you compromise in all things. And men are too skilled at taking.
[…]
At 20, I had felt daunted by the project of becoming my ideal self, couldn’t imagine doing it in tandem with someone, two raw lumps of clay trying to mold one another and only sullying things worse. I’d go on dates with boys my age and leave with the impression they were telling me not about themselves but some person who didn’t exist yet and on whom I was meant to bet regardless. My husband struck me instead as so finished, formed. Analyzable for compatibility. He bore the traces of other women who’d improved him, small but crucial basics like use a coaster; listen, don’t give advice. Young egos mellow into patience and generosity.
[…]
When we decided we wanted to be equal to men, we got on men’s time. We worked when they worked, retired when they retired, had to squeeze pregnancy, children, menopause somewhere impossibly in the margins. I have a friend, in her late 20s, who wears a mood ring; these days it is often red, flickering in the air like a siren when she explains her predicament to me. She has raised her fair share of same-age boyfriends. She has put her head down, worked laboriously alongside them, too. At last she is beginning to reap the dividends, earning the income to finally enjoy herself. But it is now, exactly at this precipice of freedom and pleasure, that a time problem comes closing in. If she would like to have children before 35, she must begin her next profession, motherhood, rather soon, compromising inevitably her original one. The same-age partner, equally unsettled in his career, will take only the minimum time off, she guesses, or else pay some cost which will come back to bite her. Everything unfailingly does. If she freezes her eggs to buy time, the decision and its logistics will burden her singly — and perhaps it will not work. Overlay the years a woman is supposed to establish herself in her career and her fertility window and it’s a perfect, miserable circle. By midlife women report feeling invisible, undervalued; it is a telling cliché, that after all this, some husbands leave for a younger girl. So when is her time, exactly? For leisure, ease, liberty? There is no brand of feminism which achieved female rest. If women’s problem in the ’50s was a paralyzing malaise, now it is that they are too active, too capable, never permitted a vacation they didn’t plan. It’s not that our efforts to have it all were fated for failure. They simply weren’t imaginative enough.
Peace,
SG