I have a new @WCrowdsLive essay on the idea of the "arc of history." Martin Luther King was discussing racism and civil rights at home. Obama repurposed it more broadly to include America's global role. But did the arc exist beyond our own borders? 1/x
As an aside, there is an interesting question of how the notion of progress is eschatologically problematic for Islam and to some extent Christianity. For many Muslims, progress exists, it just runs counter to historical time. 2/x
MLK spoke of the "arc of the moral universe." Obama adapted this and came up with the "arc of history." Meanwhile, "the right side of history" wasn't new. Clinton used it 20 times. What was new was Obama's emphasis on the *wrong side* of history. 3/x
What was interesting about these "sides" of history is that they were supposedly self-evident. When Russia intervened in Syria in 2015, Obama seemed almost nonplussed. Russia, after all, was on the wrong side of history, and it would soon come to see the error of its ways. 4/x
Evil, then, was something outside of history, a violation of the arc that was meant to be bending toward justice. If you had this view, to be in real politics, where evil seemed to be everywhere, must have been frustrating. And not just frustrating but incomprehensible. 5/x
The English philosopher John Gray had a brilliant essay on the incomprehensibility of evil to those who believed in a certain kind of liberal progress. 6/x theguardian.com/news/2014/oct/…
Where God once existed, there was now something called History. But to insist on history as an engine was to anthropomorphize something that could only be told after the fact. As @GrahamDavidA notes, history doesn't have agency. People do. 7/x
Doing Foucault and critical theory in college was helpful. You realized power relations were vital to understanding policy outcomes; no institutional arrangements were "neutral"; everything was basically a social construction; and objectivity was an illusion
If you missed it, our two-part conversation with @DouthatNYT on @WCrowdsLive is out. A deep dive into decadence, wokeness, interplanetary colonialism, anti-supernaturalism, and the perils of meritocracy
In Part 2, I ask @douthatnyt whether Christianity, in contrast to Islam, struggles with "rationalist" elites because it doesn't present itself as an explicitly rationalistic faith.
The question of why educated elites don't seem to find Christianity compelling despite an obvious and often intense desire for meaning and structure is something of a puzzle. @douthatnyt has been excellent on this: nytimes.com/2021/04/10/opi…
This is brilliant essay from @dmarusic on how the arc of history doesn't necessarily bend toward justice, and to assume that it does creates major blindspots in foreign policy. It's a tour de force of argument. But I disagree on some key points. wisdomofcrowds.live/how-liberal-tr… 1/x
This is exactly right. There was a naiveté in Obama and Kerry's notion that historic's arc was bending. *Someone* needs to do the bending, and Obama wasn't willing to back his own premise with hard power. And without power, the moralism was both empty and presumptuous. 2/x
In pointing to this false premise of the "liberal world order," @dmarusic argues that questions of order must be separated from questions of morality, but it's not clear to me that this is the right conclusion to draw. And I think this is where we diverge. 3/x
Last week, my Friday Essay provided a counterpoint to @dmarusic's pessimism. In betraying our own ideals, we remind ourselves that we have them in the first place.
The tragic reality is that the minority of Islamist groups that use violence can often claim more success than nonviolent ones, whether the Taliban, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham in Syria, Libyan militants, or even Hamas
In areas where chaos and conflict are the norm, militants like the Taliban can come in and dispense rough often brutal justice, particularly when it comes to legal disputes and corruption. This gains them support, however grudging, as @SuneEngel reports.
In this week's @WCrowdsLive essay, I make the case for hypocrisy in foreign policy, not because hypocrisy is good but because it is better than the alternative. I wish it were otherwise but apparently it's not. 1/x
As I finish a book about rethinking democracy promotion for the post-Trump era, I've been struggling with the question of hypocrisy. It's unavoidable now that the gap between words and deeds has returned with Biden, which is both bad and good. 2/x
The hypocrite has always been a subject of fascination, not merely because he is bad. Mere badness is pedestrian. The hypocrite is different (and worse) because of his ostentatious morality. But should a hatred of hypocrisy be applied to countries and not just individuals? 3/x