Less-than-Splendid Isolation
The world is vanishing from Americans’ awareness.

If you get your news from the sources most Americans do, you will not know that India recently test-fired the Agni II, an intermediate-range, nuclear-capable ballistic missile. Nor will you know the test’s results, which were reported all over the subcontinent but not in America. You will probably be unaware of Sergei Magnitsky’s death in a Moscow prison, or of who he was; the news was barely reported in the United States. You will not know that former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic’s trial for war crimes and genocide was suspended, since that doesn’t appear to have been reported in the U.S. at all. Stories from Iraq and Afghanistan combined have accounted for less than 5 percent of the news hole this year, according to Pew Research. Aside from China and Iran, which make occasional cameos, the rest of the world is disappearing from American consciousness, as the New York Times’s list of the ten most e-mailed articles routinely confirms. Top stories at last glimpse: “Catching Tuna and Hanging On for the Ride”; “Payback Time: Wave of Debt Payments Facing U.S. Government”; “Why Exercise Makes You Less Anxious”; and seven other domestic items.

The explanation for the decline of professional journalism is by now so familiar that it hardly needs rehearsing. (Internet, recession.) Harder to explain is the decline in the ratio of foreign to domestic news. The phenomenon is particularly striking if you live, as I do, in a country that has largely dropped off the media’s radar screen. It’s still more obvious if you’re a journalist: no one wants stories from Turkey these days. The spokesman for the Turkish Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee recently addressed a group of journalists here. His topic—“Is Turkey drifting away from the West?”—should fascinate anyone troubled, for example, by the prospect of a nuclear Iran. No one from a major U.S. daily or news station attended, though journalists from Britain, Belgium, Spain, and Greece did. “The Americans never come,” the organizer said. I cannot give this story away to Americans. “Sorry, Claire,” wrote the editor of one news magazine, “but we’re not interested in Turkey stuff.”

(…)

“Utopia Matters”

This conversation between Susan Cross and Vivien Greene explores the genesis of the exhibition “Utopia Matters: From Brotherhoods to Bauhaus” and the legacy of utopian ideas today. Susan Cross is Curator at MASS MoCA, North Adams, Massachusetts, and Vivien Greene is Curator of 19th- and Early-20th-Century Art at the Guggenheim Museum and has organized “Utopia Matters.”

SUSAN CROSS: My first question is about the show’s inspiration. Was it motivated by recent political events in the United States, either frustration with the George W. Bush era or the promise of transformation embodied by Barack Obama?<

VIVIEN GREENE: I began thinking about the exhibition in 2003, so it precedes this political moment and was probably prompted more by a desire for an antidote to the dystopian Bush administration. The idea first came to me while I was a Fellow at the American Academy in Rome. There I started thinking about artists’ colonies and how they were mini-utopias. I then considered them in the context of larger utopian communities, or places that began as such—including the Soviet Union—and how these smaller models seemed to succeed or continue to reoccur and be reformed, whereas those defined by Socialism didn’t ultimately seem to function. I pursued the idea, in part, to counter a number of contemporary political thinkers who feel that the fall of Communism proved that the utopian model had always been untenable.

And now we are left without an alternative model to capitalism.

Yes, though while utopia might not work when a large government is involved, certainly, it is not a failed model if you look at smaller and creative communities, even if they don’t last very long. Nineteenth-century brotherhoods, the Bauhaus, or projects today, like those of Rirkrit Tiravanija, demonstrate the viability of utopian models.

By necessity your exhibition investigates communities that have ended, but we don’t have to say they have “failed,” as you stated. This is a really productive way of reconceptualizing failure versus success. These laboratories for utopia, which are short lived or involve a small community, inspire new ways of living and thinking.

The word “laboratory” is a very good one. Utopias don’t have to exist in perpetuity in order to be loci for invention. While individual artists do and have pursued utopian precepts in their work, the exhibition deals with groups working in these sorts of “laboratory” situations. I start after the American and French revolutions, once these events and Enlightenment thought together made it possible for artists to be autonomous and free from patrons, such as the church or the state. Before that, they just don’t have that kind of agency, in the visual arts at least.

(…)

US left behind in technological race to fight climate change
A speech by the US energy secretary, Steven Chu, shows how America’s unquestioning belief in the free market has held back technological innovation

I have just been watching the tragic sight of a fallen giant flailing around on its back like a beetle, desperately trying to turn itself over.

The occasion was a speech by the US secretary of energy, Steven Chu. He is, of course, a Nobel physicist, brilliant, modest, likeable, a delightful contrast to the thugs employed by the previous administration. But his speech was, in the true sense of the word, pathetic: it moved me to pity.

Yesterday afternoon in Copenhagen – where the UN climate talks are entering their second week – Professor Chu unveiled what would have been a series of inspiring innovations, had he made this speech 15 years ago. Barely suppressing his excitement, he told us the US has discovered there is great potential for making fridges more efficient, and that the same principle could even be extended to lighting, heating and whole buildings. The Department of Energy is so thrilled by this discovery that it has launched a programme to retrofit homes in the US, on which it will spend $400m a year.

To put this in perspective, four years ago the German government announced it would spend the equivalent of $1.6bn a year on the same job: as a result every house in Germany should be airtight and well insulated by 2025. The US has about 110m households; Germany has roughly 37m, and German homes were more energy-efficient in the first place. This $400m is a drop in the ocean.

Professor Chu went on to explain two amazing new discoveries: a camera which can see how much heat is leaking from your home and a meter which allows you to audit your own energy use. Perhaps thermal imaging cameras and energy monitors seem new and exciting in the US, but on this side of the Atlantic, though their full potential is still a long way from being realised, they’ve been familiar for more than a decade.

He thrilled us with another US innovation, a technology called pumped storage: water can be pumped up a hill when electricity is cheap and released when it’s expensive. The UK started building its first pumped storage plant, Dinorwig, in 1974. Then he told us about a radical system for heating buildings by extracting heat from water: this must have been the one that the Royal Festival Hall used in 1951.

I’m sure these technologies have in fact been deployed for years in parts of the US. My point is that Chu appeared to believe that they represent the cutting edge of both technology and public policy.

The energy secretary explained that the US is now making “a very big investment” in developing and testing new components for wind turbines. The “very big investment” is $70m, which is what the US spends on subsidies and forgoes in tax breaks for fossil fuels every two days.

As if to hammer home the point that the Department of Energy seems to be stuck in a time-warp, and as if to highlight the sad decline of technological innovation in the US, Chu finished his talk with a disquisition on the beauty of the earth as seen by the Apollo astronauts.

What has happened to the great pioneering nation, the economic superpower which once drove innovation everywhere? How did it end up so far behind much smaller economies in boring old Europe? How come, when the rest of the developed world has moved on, it suddenly looks like a relic of the Soviet Union, with filthy, inefficient industries, vast opencast coal mines and cars and appliances which belong in the 1950s?

It can’t all be blamed on George Bush: this technological backwardness pre-dates him. The real problem is the terror of all modern US governments of being seen to interfere in the free market. It’s ironic that the lack of effective regulation in the US has not ensured – as the free market fundamentalists prophesied – that the US came out in front, but that it has been left far behind. Just ask the car manufacturers. The truth, too uncomfortable to be discussed by US officials, is that government regulations are among the main drivers of technological innovation.

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US left behind in technological race to fight climate change

A speech by the US energy secretary, Steven Chu, shows how America’s unquestioning belief in the free market has held back technological innovation

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Steven Chu, US secretary for energy. Photograph: Ben Margot/AP

I have just been watching the tragic sight of a fallen giant flailing around on its back like a beetle, desperately trying to turn itself over.

The occasion was a speech by the US secretary of energy, Steven Chu. He is, of course, a Nobel physicist, brilliant, modest, likeable, a delightful contrast to the thugs employed by the previous administration. But his speech was, in the true sense of the word, pathetic: it moved me to pity.

Yesterday afternoon in Copenhagen – where the UN climate talks are entering their second week – Professor Chu unveiled what would have been a series of inspiring innovations, had he made this speech 15 years ago. Barely suppressing his excitement, he told us the US has discovered there is great potential for making fridges more efficient, and that the same principle could even be extended to lighting, heating and whole buildings. The Department of Energy is so thrilled by this discovery that it has launched a programme to retrofit homes in the US, on which it will spend $400m a year.

To put this in perspective, four years ago the German government announced it would spend the equivalent of $1.6bn a year on the same job: as a result every house in Germany should be airtight and well insulated by 2025. The US has about 110m households; Germany has roughly 37m, and German homes were more energy-efficient in the first place. This $400m is a drop in the ocean.

Professor Chu went on to explain two amazing new discoveries: a camera which can see how much heat is leaking from your home and a meter which allows you to audit your own energy use. Perhaps thermal imaging cameras and energy monitors seem new and exciting in the US, but on this side of the Atlantic, though their full potential is still a long way from being realised, they’ve been familiar for more than a decade.

He thrilled us with another US innovation, a technology called pumped storage: water can be pumped up a hill when electricity is cheap and released when it’s expensive. The UK started building its first pumped storage plant, Dinorwig, in 1974. Then he told us about a radical system for heating buildings by extracting heat from water: this must have been the one that the Royal Festival Hall used in 1951.

I’m sure these technologies have in fact been deployed for years in parts of the US. My point is that Chu appeared to believe that they represent the cutting edge of both technology and public policy.

The energy secretary explained that the US is now making “a very big investment” in developing and testing new components for wind turbines. The “very big investment” is $70m, which is what the US spends on subsidies and forgoes in tax breaks for fossil fuels every two days.

As if to hammer home the point that the Department of Energy seems to be stuck in a time-warp, and as if to highlight the sad decline of technological innovation in the US, Chu finished his talk with a disquisition on the beauty of the earth as seen by the Apollo astronauts.

What has happened to the great pioneering nation, the economic superpower which once drove innovation everywhere? How did it end up so far behind much smaller economies in boring old Europe? How come, when the rest of the developed world has moved on, it suddenly looks like a relic of the Soviet Union, with filthy, inefficient industries, vast opencast coal mines and cars and appliances which belong in the 1950s?

It can’t all be blamed on George Bush: this technological backwardness pre-dates him. The real problem is the terror of all modern US governments of being seen to interfere in the free market. It’s ironic that the lack of effective regulation in the US has not ensured – as the free market fundamentalists prophesied – that the US came out in front, but that it has been left far behind. Just ask the car manufacturers. The truth, too uncomfortable to be discussed by US officials, is that government regulations are among the main drivers of technological innovation.

US climate agency declares CO2 public danger
Environmental Protection Agency declaration allows it to impose emissions cuts without agreement of reluctant Senate

The Obama administration adopted its climate change plan B today, formally declaring carbon dioxide a public danger so that it can cut greenhouse gas emissions even without the agreement of a reluctant Senate.

The timing of the announcement – in the opening hours of the UN’s Copenhagen climate change summit – prevents Barack Obama from arriving at the talks without concrete evidence that America will do its bit to cut the emissions that cause global warming.

“Climate change has now become a household issue,” said Lisa Jackson, head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), adding that the evidence of climate change was real and increasingly alarming. “This administration will not ignore science or the law any longer, nor will we ignore the responsibility we owe to our children and our grandchildren.”

The announcement gives the EPA a legal basis for capping emissions from major sources such as coal power plants, as well as cars. Jackson said she hoped it would help to spur a deal in Copenhagen.

The EPA action had been seen as a backstop should Congress fail to pass climate change law. Obama and other officials had repeatedly said they would prefer to pass legislation, but that prospect has grown increasingly remote. The House of Representatives narrowly passed a climate change bill in June, but the proposals have stalled in the Senate.

Jackson said the EPA’s regulations, which would come into effect from next spring, would not be too onerous, applying only to facilities emitting more than 25,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year.

The oil and manufacturing industries, which have opposed climate change action, said the move was overly politicised, and warned that the new regulations would be tied up in lawsuits.

The US Chamber of Commerce, also sceptical on global warming, said the move would hurt the economy. “An endangerment finding from the EPA could result in a top-down, command-and-control regime that will choke off growth by adding new mandates to virtually every major construction and renovation project,” said Thomas Donohue, the chamber’s president.

Jackson is to address the Copenhagen meeting on Wednesday, while Obama will join more than 100 other world leaders in the Danish capital on the final day of the conference, on 18 December.

The endangerment declaration dates from a supreme court decision in 2007 ordering the EPA to make a ruling on whether carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions were a pollutant subject to the Clean Air Act of the 1970s.

Rastak Group from Gilan

Rastak Group from Gilan, Iran

MIT team wins Darpa’s treasure hunt in less than one day

A $40,000 online challenge proposed by the US government has been won by a team of researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology – just hours after it was launched.

The Darpa Network Challenge, which took place on Saturday, offered a cash prize for the first group to successfully locate 10 large red weather balloons hidden at a string of secret locations across the US.

Competitors were asked to use the internet and social networking sites to discover the whereabouts of the balloons, in what Darpa – the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency – said was an experiment to discover how the internet could help with rapid problem solving.

More than 4,000 groups eventually registered to take part, but although the organisers had given players up to nine days to track the balloons down, the team from MIT scooped victory within nine hours of the launch.

“Darpa salutes the MIT team for successfully completing this complex task less than nine hours after the balloon launch,” said Regina Dugan, the director of the agency.

The winning team has not explained precisely how they came to discover the location of all 10 balloons, but the process detailed on the team website explains that they created a viral campaign to encourage people to put forward information they gleaned about the locations.

The team offered the first person to spot a balloon a $2,000 share of the prize money, but smaller awards would also be given to those who referred that player to MIT’s website – a scheme of incentives aimed at getting people to urge their friends to take part.

Whatever happened in the end, it appeared to work – and quickly.

“The challenge has captured the imagination of people around the world, is rich with scientific intrigue and, we hope, is part of a growing ‘renaissance of wonder’ throughout the nation,” said Dr Dugan.

In the end the eight-foot balloons were hidden in locations across nine states: Arizona, California, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Oregon, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia.

Boycott locked-down academic journals

(…)

Danah Boyd on Open Access Publishing:

The traditional model of journal publishing makes sense in an era where the only mechanism of distribution was paper. Paper publishing and distribution is expensive, and I’m not trying to dismiss this. Yet, in a digital era, the structures of publishing and distribution have changed; the costs have changed too. Open-access, online-only journals have four key costs: bandwidth, copyediting, marketing, and staffing costs. The latter is often irrelevant in fields where editors volunteer. It’s not clear that marketing is necessary or cannot be done for free. There are all sorts of possible funding models for bandwidth. This leaves copyediting.

I’d be sad to see some of the academic publishers go, but if they can’t evolve to figure out new market options, I have no interest in supporting their silencing practices. I think that scholars have a responsibility to make their work available as a public good. I believe that scholars should be valued for publishing influential material that can be consumed by anyone who might find it relevant to their interests. I believe that the product of our labor should be a public good. I do not believe that scholars should be encouraged to follow stupid rules for the sake of maintaining norms. Given that we do the bulk of the labor behind journals, I think that we can do it without academic publishers (provided that we can find hosting and copyediting).

Here’s what I’d like to propose:

• Tenured Faculty and Industry Scholars: Publish only in open-access journals. Unlike younger scholars, you don’t need the status markers because you’re tenured or in industry. Use that privilege to help build new journals that are not strapped to broken business models. Help build the reputations of new endeavors so that they can be viable publishing venues for future scholars. Publish in open-access journals, build a personal webpage and add your article there. You will get much more visibility, especially from younger scholars who turn to Google before they go to the library. I understand that a lot of you prefer to flout the rules of these journals and publish your articles on your website anyhow, even when you’re not allowed. The problem is that you’re not helping change the system for future generations.
• Disciplinary associations: Help open-access journals gain traction. Encourage your members to publish in them. Run competitions for best open-access publications and have senior scholars write committee letters for younger scholars whose articles are stupendous but published in non-traditional venues.
• Tenure committees: Recognize alternate venues and help the universities follow. Younger scholars can’t afford to publish in alternate venues until you begin recognizing the value of these publications. Help that process along and encourage your schools to do the same.
• Young punk scholars: Publish only in open-access journals in protest, especially if you’re in a new field. This may cost you advancement or tenure, but you know it’s the right thing to do. If you’re an interdisciplinary scholar or in a new field, there aren’t “respected” journals in your space and so you’re going to have to defend yourself anyhow. You might as well use this opportunity to make the valued journals the open-access ones.
• More conservative young scholars: publish what you need to get tenure and then stop publishing in closed venues immediately upon acquiring tenure. I understand why you feel the need to follow the rules. This is fine, but make a point by stopping this practice the moment you don’t need it.
• All scholars: Go out of your way to cite articles from open-access journals. One of the best ways for a journal to build its reputation is for its articles to be cited broadly. Read open-access journals and cite them. Oh, and while you’re at it, if you have a choice between citing a living author and a dead one, support the living one. The young scholar at Santa Cruz who’s extending Durkheim’s argument needs the cite more than Durkheim. Don’t forget that citations have politics and you can vote for the future with your choice of citations.
• All scholars: Start reviewing for open-access journals. Help make them respected. Guest edit to increase the quality. Build their reputations through your involvement. Make these your priority so that the closed journals are the ones struggling to get quality reviewers.
• Libraries: Begin subscribing to open-access journals and adding them to your catalogue. Many of you do this, but not all. Open-access journals are free. Adding them to databases does costs money but it helps scholarship and will help you ween off of expensive journals in the long run.
• Universities: Support your faculty in creating open-access journals on your domains. You are respected institutions. The bandwidth cost of hosting a journal would be much less than allowing your undergrads access YouTube. Support your faculty in creating university-branded journals and work with them to run conferences and do other activities to help build the reputation of such nascent publications. If it goes well, your brand will gain status too.
• Academic publishers: Wake up or get out. Silencing the voices of academics is unacceptable. You’re not helping scholarship or scholars. Find a new business model or leave the journal publishing world. You may be making money now, but your profits will not continue to grow using this current approach. Furthermore, I’d bank on academics shunning you within two generations. If you think more than a quarter ahead, you know that it’s the right thing to do for business as well as for the future of knowledge.
• Funding agencies: Require your grantees to publish in open-access journals or make a pre-print version available at a centralized source specific to their field. Many academic journals have exceptions for when funding agencies demand transparency. You can help your grantees and the academic world at large by backing their need to publish in an accessible manner. Furthermore, you could fund the publishing of special issues in return for them being open-access or help offset a publisher’s costs for a journal so that they can try to go open-access. (Tx Alex)

Making systemic change like this is hard and it will require every invested party to stand up for what they know is right and chip away at the old system. I don’t have tenure (and at this rate, no one will ever let me). I am a young punk scholar and I strongly believe that we have a responsibility to stand up for what’s right. Open-access is right. Heavy metal gates and expensive gatekeepers isn’t. It’s time for change to happen! To all of the academics out there, I beg you to help me make this change reality. Let’s stop being silenced by academic publishers.

Do You See a Pattern?

If Alexander often irritates his critics, it is in part because he is so obviously gifted. Born in Vienna in 1936, he was raised in England; won a prestigious scholarship to Cambridge, where he studied architecture and mathematics; and went on to receive Harvard’s first architecture Ph.D. Not yet 30, he published his doctoral thesis as book, on the strength of which he received the American Institute of Architects Gold Medal, the first ever awarded for research.

Most people discover Alexander through his classic, A Pattern Language, which appeared in 1977. Small and fat (more than 1,000 pages), printed on fine paper, and bound in a plain maroon cover embossed with a gold escutcheon, it resembles a Latin breviary. Its author’s ambitious goal was nothing less than to catalog the entire built environment—from towns to bedrooms—as a collection of discrete “patterns,” 253 of them. Each pattern was explained, supported by research, and illustrated by sketches and photographs. The patterns were linked to one another, showing which ones worked well together, and arranged hierarchically from large to small. “Neighborhood Boundaries,” for example, suggests that strong neighborhoods require clear edges and restricted access. At the other end of the scale, “Ceiling Height Variety” observes that buildings with uniform ceilings are uncomfortable and recommends varying ceiling heights between large and small rooms to create different degrees of intimacy. In other words, the breviary is a designer’s handbook.

A Pattern Language proved invaluable to nonarchitects building their own homes, and by 1980 Alexander, who was based in Berkeley, Calif., and leavened a mathematician’s precision with Zen-like pronouncements, had become something of a guru in the youthful Whole Earth Catalog-influenced counterculture. His fellow architects, on the other hand, who didn’t like seeing their art reduced to a formula, were ambivalent. There was also the question of style. The pattern language calls for architectural features such as sheltering roofs and small window panes, while Modernist design favors flat roofs and large sheets of glass. This anti-Modernist bias was confirmed by Alexander’s next book, The Timeless Way of Building (1979), which was an overt and often devastating attack on modern construction techniques in general and on contemporary architecture in particular.

(…)

The Mary Rose Museum, Portsmouth, England, section
(Source: Patternlanguage.com)

Think tank: The serious gap in Wikipedia’s knowledge

In its almost nine years of existence, Wikipedia has achieved unequivocal success: as the fifth most visited website in the world, it features more than 14.3m articles in 270 languages contributed by more than 100,000 volunteers.

Given that this has been done on a shoestring budget, Wikipedia easily puts to shame all other efforts to create and disseminate digital knowledge.

The debates about the truthfulness of entries have also subsided — perhaps a sign that most of us have discovered there are plenty of other lies on the internet. Wikipedia has become the lazy man’s Google: why bother sifting through 100 search results if chances are that someone has already done this job for you in a Wikipedia entry?

Most projects would be comfortable with gaining so much power in so little time, but Wikipedians are an ambitious bunch. Their commitment, as codified in the vision statement of the Wikimedia foundation, the legal entity behind the project, is to create a world where “every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge”.

The very phrasing suggests that Wikipedians are painfully aware of their project’s most burning problem: unevenness. There are two gaps on Wikipedia. First is the language gap: local editions of Wikipedia have considerably fewer articles than those in popular languages such as English or German; the Swahili edition of Wikipedia has 14,756 entries, compared with more than 3m articles in English (hence the commitment to extend Wikipedia’s benefits to “every single human being”). Second is the vast expertise gap on the site — Wikipedia has an excellent compendium of articles about popular culture but an uneven coverage of topics in science and humanities (hence the commitment to embrace “the sum of all knowledge” rather than just the easier-to-find popular bits).

Only new talent, contributors with specialised skills, can fill these two gaps. The tricky part is persuading them to stay after their first edit or two: some leave in disgust because their contributions get deleted, others because arguing with other editors takes too much time and effort. This aversion to new content stems from Wikipedia’s early success: many of the project’s old guard have marked their Wiki-territory and don’t want to cede power — or even accept changes made by them (Wikipedians’ resistance to new edits is well documented in a recent study by PARC, a Californian research group).

(…)

Thucydides—The Oration of Pericles

Our public men have, besides politics, their private affairs to attend to, and our ordinary citizens, though occupied with the pursuits of industry, are still fair judges of public matters; for, unlike any other nation, regarding him who takes no part in these duties not as unambitious but as useless, we Athenians are able to judge at all events if we cannot originate, and instead of looking on discussion as a stumbling-block in the way of action, we think it an indispensable preliminary to any wise action at all. Again, in our enterprises we present the singular spectacle of daring and deliberation, each carried to its highest point, and both united in the same persons; although usually decision is the fruit of ignorance, hesitation of reflection. But the palm of courage will surely be adjudged most justly to those, who best know the difference between hardship and pleasure and yet are never tempted to shrink from danger. In generosity we are equally singular, acquiring our friends by conferring not by receiving favors. Yet, of course, the doer of the favor is the firmer friend of the two, in order by continued kindness to keep the recipient in his debt; while the debtor feels less keenly from the very consciousness that the return he makes will be a payment, not a free gift. And it is only the Athenians who, fearless of consequences, confer their benefits not from calculations of expediency, but in the confidence of liberality.

–Thucydides (Θουκυδίδης), History of the Peloponnesian War bk 2, ch 40 (Pericles’ Funeral Oration)(ca. 405 BCE)

The funeral oration can be seen as the answer to a simple and perpetually recurring question, namely “Why do we fight?” In the Homeric age the answer might have been for glory and booty, and in the more poetic notion of the hero. The less literary and more historically realistic reason may have been simpler: soldiers fought because their masters required it of them. The novelty of this oration is that it provides an answer from the perspective of a democratic state, and it does this 2400 years ago.

It’s easy to be critical of the Pericles that Thucydides presents us. He was a cunning political leader, a general, intent on peddling a bill of goods to the Athenian people—war against Sparta and its allies. In fact we now know that much of the oration consists of a response to criticisms that the Spartan king had leveled at the Athenians—they were lawless and lack discipline, their government was inefficient and bordered on chaotic, they wasted too much time on pointless talking and theorizing, and perhaps the sharpest blow—that they arrogantly disrespected the laws and customs of the larger Hellenic community, which is to say, international law.

In fact, for all their brilliance and promise, the Athenians were remarkably short-sighted. They conducted their war effort with a heavy hand, as Thucydides best chronicles in the famous Melian dialogue (bk v, ch 17), probably the single most aggressively misinterpreted section of his history. In Pericles’s last speech (bk ii, 63) he candidly acknowledges the attitude other Greeks had towards Athens: “your empire has become a tyranny.” That had severe consequences for Athens in the war. City-states and islands flocked to the Spartan alliance, outraged by the arrogance and lawlessness of the Athenians, as demonstrated by their wanton destruction of neutral Melos. The tide of the war turned decisively. Things did not work out well for Athens. Yet throughout this period, Athens was the envy of the Hellenic world—looked to almost despairingly for leadership. In the end the foolish military exploits of the Athenians led not simply to their own doom, but to the eclipsed role of the Hellenic world as a whole. A factious Greece, riven by conflict, never realized its potential as a political actor in the Mediterranean world.

Still, the speech is filed with wonderful lines about the value of democratic life—the importance of education, arts and literature, or the notion of debate and argument as parts of an essential path to good decisions, for instance. For Homer, there was a fundamental divide between the “doers of deeds” and the “speakers of words.” Only the former could be heroic. For Thucydides a process of democratic debate was an accepted part of civic life, and deliberation and debate were the essential forerunners to war-making. And Thucydides presents a complex and balanced notion of democratic equality—there is equality before the law, but advancement is achieved by those with the skills best suited to the needs of the state.

…

…the fourth movement of Anton Bruckner’s Symphony No. 8 in C Minor (1887) in a performance by the World Philharmonic Orchestra under the baton of Carlo Maria Giulini. This work is an exploration of the heroic and tragic, menacing and celebratory in turn, with a development so complex that it seems almost a symphony within a symphony. It needs to be experienced in a concert hall to appreciate its full effect—and particularly the walls of sound that Bruckner brings down on the listener. There is no denying the influence of Wagner in this music, and also the strangely military-heroic elements that sound throughout it, sometimes darkly and sometimes gloriously. While Bruckner dedicated the work to Emperor Franz Joseph and provided contemporary program notes, there is much to suggest that Bruckner’s inspiration for the work is drawn heavily on Greek notions of the heroic, especially the works of Pericles’s contemporary, Aeschylus.