“Technocracy in America: Rise of the Info-State” by Parag Khanna

Khanna hammers away at a few simple points in this short book. Democracy is not the finality of all political progress. It is only a means, not an end in itself. The American system has a lot to learn from best practices in governance abroad. It needs to rely less on democracy and more on technocracy. Technocracy needs to be founded on a system of meritocracy. I do not agree with all of his diagnoses of the problems with American governance, not to mention his solutions, but Khanna has written a thoughtful book whose primary attributes are his boldness and fearlessness in solutions. No one can accuse him of not thinking outside the box. Still, the best parts of the book are where he dissects the best practices of other countries, rather than drawing up systems for America ex novo.

Khanna's two main models are Switzerland and Singapore. They both combine what he finds most appealing in direct democracy and technocratic management. Since 1848 Switzerland has held over half of all the world’s plebiscites. “With only 100,000 signatures, Swiss citizens can…. instigate national initiatives to propose new laws and even constitutional amendments, or referenda to challenge them.” Singapore has “scenario planners embedded in every ministry covering both domestic and international issues. These “foresight officers” organize and impartially frame scenarios for leaders to consider on an ongoing basis…. Scenarios are neither predictions nor straight-line projections, but are composites of emergent patterns that could combine into an integrated picture…. [Government] sets reasonable key performance indicators (“KPIs”) that are tracked at regular intervals to assess progress.” Khanna approves of the fact that the executive duties in Switzerland, Singapore, and China are shared, to some degree, by a committee rather than a single president. This divides oversight, responsibilities, and spreads out the leadership agenda. He also praises the Singaporean system where “all cabinet ministers are matched to permanent secretaries from the civil service who know the beat inside out. Singapore’s civil service is a spiral staircase: With each rung you learn to manage a different portfolio, building a broad knowledge base and first-hand experience…. Along the way, generalists become specialists and vice-versa, and cross-pollination leads to innovative problem-solving.” Singapore’s civil servants are also compensated well, among the best paid and most revered of its citizens.

Khanna favors changing America to a parliamentary system with no fixed election cycle and an executive chosen from among these MPs. This would be an executive committee of seven people. He also favors abolishing the Senate for dual-governorships, rotating between the state capital and Washington. This is all pie in the sky stuff, but Khanna exhibits a continual emphasis on administration, accountability, big data, empirics, trial and error, all mixed with plebiscites. He views the city-state as the unit of governance of the future. “The virtue of devolution is not only that distributing authority is as powerful a check on tyranny as democracy, but that it allows for local experiments and rapid citizen feedback, resulting in models that the federal government can further study and scale to other states.” His vision of America is an urban one, where cities connect with other cities, be they American or foreign, and in many ways bypass the gridlock of Washington. Meanwhile the federal government combines an administrative executive with a permanent technocratic bureaucracy, all checked by public referenda. That his America of the future will never actually become a reality doesn’t mean the Khanna doesn’t have some fresh ideas to debate.

“The Brothers Karamazov” by Fyodor Dostoevsky (translated by Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky)

This is a novel that deals with life’s biggest themes- filial bonds, sibling relations, God and the Devil, the honor of gentlemen, duty, respect, the purpose of life, free will, sex, love, and passion. The tale is full of intrigue and suspense. The three brothers Karamazov are so different and yet they seem to have a mystical bond that unites them. Their father is a degenerate, yet true to himself. The novel is particularly Russian, yet its themes transcend time and place. The plot is almost incidental to each character’s development. Almost all the individuals are fully fleshed out, with flaws and beauty in each. Dostoevsky does a particularly wonderful job plumbing the depths of what makes each brother tick, their internal struggles, and their code of life. The psychology of what makes us all human, how we relate to each other, and how we find purpose and meaning in life, both in this earthly world and in relations to a higher heavenly power, all come through. There is a current of mysticism that runs alongside an intensely religious pulse. The lessons are not didactic and yet Dostoevsky is seeking to expound eternal truths as he writes.

“Aspiration- The Agency of Becoming” by Agnes Callard

Callard is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Chicago. Strictly, her book is narrowly focused on the subject of aspiration, but I often found as I read my mind wandering to larger themes of the human experience, in general. She stresses that aspiration is a process, taking place over a period of time, and which results in a complete transformation of the Self, with a new values, ethics, and beliefs. Callard uses aspiration as her lens to wrestle with philosophical issues such as decision theory, moral psychology, and moral responsibility.

Callard begins by making the point that aspiration is something you do, not something that is passively done to you. It is a change in values that is actively sought, if not yet gained. “Agency, as distinct from mere behavior, is marked by practical rationality. Insofar as becoming someone is something someone does, and not merely something that happens to her, she must have access to reasons to become the person she will be…. Gaining a value often means devoting to it some of the time and effort one was previously devoting elsewhere…. Aspiration, as I understand it, is the distinctive form of agency directed at the acquisition of values.” Importantly, aspiration is an ongoing process, not a single event. “More generally, if I cannot know in advance what a transformative experience will be like, I also cannot know how transformative it will be…. Our point of view on the matter changes little by little, and we transition slowly from someone who is relatively indifferent to the preferences, values, and interests of the new way of being to someone for whom they figure as the centerpiece of her life…. Sometimes one’s character and values change (“drift”) in incremental steps, so that one can see only in retrospect the magnitude of the change that those steps have added up to.” There is agency throughout this process, however. Aspiration is not an act of submission. The aspirant might not know exactly where she is going, but she is working hard to get there all the same. “Coming to acquire the value means learning to see the world in a new way…. [Aspiration] challenges the prevailing assumption that basic or fundamental preferences (desires, values, etc.) are the kinds of things you can only reason from, by exposing a way we have of reasoning towards them…. On an aspirational model, these decisions are best understood as climactic moments embedded in a longer transformative journey, marking neither its beginning nor its end…. The one making the decision is, therefore, not entirely an outsider to the life she may opt into.” The aspirant does not aspire alone. She is often helped by a mentor, a role model, her family, or a community. “Aspirational agency is distinctly dependent on such environmental support…. Original contact with the values that will eventually become objects of aspirational pursuit” is critical to the process.

Callard makes the case that it is possible to reason one’s way towards values that one does not at present fully hold. That is the process of aspiration and part of its ongoing nature. ““Bad” reasons are how she moves herself forward, all the while seeing them as bad, which is to say, as placeholders for the “real” reason…. She sees her own motivational condition as in some way imperfectly responsive to the reasons that are out there…. Something can be imperfect in virtue of being undeveloped or immature, as distinct from wrong or bad or erroneous…. The agent who can give an account of what is to be gotten out of what she is doing grasps the value of what she will (if successful) achieve through her action.” There is a hope in the aspirant’s mind that there is more still to come. “You can act rationally even if your antecedent conception of the good for the sake of which you act is not quite on target—and you know that…. Proleptic reasons are provisional in a way that reflects the provisionality of the agent’s own knowledge and development: her inchoate, anticipatory, and indirect grasp of some good she is trying to know better…. Proleptic reasons are double…. The reason on which she acts has two faces: a proximate face that reflects the kinds of things that appeal to the person she is now and a distal one that reflects the character and motivation of the person she is trying to be. Her reason is double because she herself is in transition.”

Aspiration deals with wholesale changes in someone’s life. Often, during the process, one loses values one held dear, while gaining new ones. It is a moral transformation. “Aspiration is the diachronic process by which an agent effects change on her own ethical point of view. Aspirants aim to direct their own ethical attention in such a way as to more fully appreciate one value or set of values and to become immune or insensitive to those values that intrinsically conflict with the first set. An aspirant is someone who works to improve her desires, her feelings, her ethical evaluations, and, more generally, her own capacity for responding to reasons.” Again, there is agency in this transition. “The aspirant has marked out one attitude as a kind of target toward which she orients herself, and another (or others) as a danger from which she must turn herself away…. Intrinsically conflicted agents interfere in their own thinking; intrinsically conflicted aspirants interfere for the sake of effecting long-term change…. Her goal is to handle these conflict situations in such a way as to eventually mitigate their occurrence…. Deciding to aspire doesn’t resolve anything. What resolves conflict is aspiration itself, the temporally extended work of changing ourselves, our values, our desires, our outlook…. Aspirants externalize the desire all the way into nonexistence.”

Callard next looks into akrasia: weakness of will or lack of self-restraint. There is a difference between “acting on a reason and acting on one’s best reason…. Akrasia is understood as acting on a reason that is worse or weaker than another reason one could have acted on.” Callard resolves the conflict found in akrasia by relying on the aspiring Self. “Because we can be intrinsically conflicted, we are not trapped in the evaluative condition we happen to be in. The fact that we can be akratically insensitive to our dominant evaluative perspective is the flip side of the fact that we can be sensitive to evaluative content that doesn’t fit into that perspective. We are not restricted to taking the reasons we currently have the framework for processing…. Human progress in value depends on our openness to feeling some goodness before we can make reflective sense to ourselves of that goodness. The possibility of akrasia is thus tethered to the possibility of aspiration…. The akratic and the enkratic have an important common ground in the experience of intrinsic conflict that precedes their bad (akratic) or good (enkratic) action. Both characters are distinct from the paragon, and thus neither fully inhabits the evaluative perspective from which they deliberate…. Enkratics know why they are doing what they are doing, and akratics know why they should have acted otherwise…. Aspirants try to resolve their intrinsic conflicts; akratics and enkratics try to act in spite of them. Aspirants try to get a better grasp of the target value, so as to approach the paragon; akratics and enkratics make do with whatever grasp they have, by deliberating as though they were the paragon…. Akratics act from a grasp of value, however partial. Aspirants act toward a grasp of value…. We cannot hold off from making use of our values until such time as they are securely in our possession; for what happens in the meanwhile is also life…. We reason, locally, from the very values we may, more globally, also be reasoning toward.”

Callard also looks into the moral responsibility of aspiration. “Our interest is in self-directed value-acquisition, which is, first and foremost, a change of a person in the ethical dimension.” She focuses on the idea of the transforming Self. Although, a single person is a continuous entity, the Self, nonetheless, is changing throughout the process of aspiration. She is creating her new Self. “The aspirant does not see herself as fashioning, controlling, sanctioning, making, or shaping the self she creates. Instead, she looks up to that self, tries to understand her, endeavors to find a way to her.” She is grasping for a value she admires, but does not quite know the true value of, yet. “In aspiration, it is the created self who, through the creator’s imperfect but gradually improving understanding of her, makes intelligible the path the person’s life takes.” Again, agency is intimately involved in this value acquisition process. It is purposeful and self-directed. “The fact that there is no vantage point one can simply adopt outside one’s character doesn’t entail that one couldn’t arrive at the vantage point that is outside one’s current character by working toward that condition…. This kind of work involves both moving toward and moving away from a perspective on value. When engaged in it, not only are we gaining something, we are also often losing something.” There is a relationship between the two Selves that continues through the process. “Instead of imagining my future self as beholden to my past self, I suggest we imagine my past self as looking forward, trying to live up to the person she hopes to become…. If you are trying to get better acquainted with some value, then you take your antecedent conception of that value to be inadequate. You act in order to grasp the value better, but your reason for wanting to grasp that value must be the very value you don’t yet fully grasp…. We work to appreciate them, and this work is rationalized and guided by the values we are coming to know…. It is the end that provides the normative standards for assessing what comes before it…. If practically rational guidance required an agent to know exactly what she wanted out of the outcome, aspiration could not qualify as rationally guided. The aspirant fails to grasp the full normative grounding of her project until it is completed.” The aspirant does not yet possess the normative value she seeks, and yet she is not flailing in the dark. She has an imperfect picture, which she is actively striving to gradually improve. “The aspirant…. is someone whose grasp both is, and is known by her to be, inadequate…. [She] is aware of the defectiveness of her grasp of some value. She is unable to engage in the relevant activity purely for its own sake, precisely because she does not yet value it in the way that she would have to in order to do so.”

Callard contrasts aspiration with ambition, which she calls “the kind of pursuit that is large in scale but is not directed at producing a change in the self.” Ambition is different from aspiration because it is not a process of learning. Ambition is directed towards some sort of success, but the value of which is already fully grasped by the agent at the start of the process. “While the ambitious person may receive assistance from others in achieving his goal, the aspirant needs others to help her with the project of grasping her goal.”

Callard ends by reemphasizing that aspiration is a process that takes place over time. It is not a single act, with a distinct before and after. “Large-scale transformative pursuits often involve a kind of rebirth even with respect to those values that straddle the transformative event.” Aspiration is the process of transforming the entire Self into something new. It is a becoming. “A proleptic reasoner will have trouble explaining exactly why she is doing what she is doing, though once she gets to her destination she will say, “This was why.”"

“The Iliad” by Homer (translated by Richmond Lattimore)

I had been meaning to read the Lattimore translations of Homer for a while now. He does not disappoint. I cannot read ancient Greek, so translation is the best I can do. I have read the Fagles, Pope, and Fitzgerald translations at different points in school, but almost every classicist I have spoken to speaks most highly of the Lattimore. The verse is a superb mix of keeping the poetry, while not taking liberties with the story. I cannot get enough of Homer and this was a great excuse to remember the tales of Hector and Achilles.

“Unfabling the East” by Jurgen Osterhammel

The thesis of Osterhammel’s massive tome is that “the Enlightenment’s discovery of Asia entailed a more open-minded, less patronizing approach to foreign cultures than suggested by those who see it as a mere incubation period of Orientalism.” He considers the Enlightenment to be the timespan of the long eighteenth century, from around 1680 through 1820. Osterhammel’s breath and depth in this book is impressive. It is a comprehensive survey of European Enlightenment thought on Asia, taken from a plethora of primary sources: explorers, merchants, and expats, as well as from contemporary social scientists and theorists who relied on these travelogues to expound more sweeping pronouncements. Osterhammel is candid when authors might be embellishing the truth or spinning complete yarns from cloth. He is also a keen judge of their prejudices and strengths. Osterhammel also spends a great deal of space comparing and contrasting what different Europeans thought of differences between Asian cultures. Through the course of the book, Osterhammel seamlessly weaves between large themes and a minutia of facts in a coherent fashion. Among the larger topics discussed are border policy, urban planning, language and translation barriers, despotic governance, aesthetics, religious differences, slaves, treatment of women, social stratification, and political modernization. 

Osterhammel begins by conceding that “Asia” itself was a European term. “In the eighteenth century the individual peoples of Asia did not identify themselves as “Asians”…. Societies on the Asian continent were considerably more heterogeneous than their contemporary European counterparts.” There also was not a homogenous pattern of thought from the European minds regarding Asia. It’s thinkers were diverse and nuanced. When discussing India, he mentions, “no accusation hit Warren Hastings harder than Burke’s claim that he adhered to a relativist “geographical morality” in his dealings with the Indians, treating them in ways that would be proscribed in Europe as tyrannical and criminally reprehensible.”

However, as an interesting general statement, Osterhammel describes the difference in cultures many Enlightenment thinkers felt there was between the countries of Asia deemed most relevant to European outsiders. “Nobody in Europe dreamed of calling the Japanese “barbarians.” Japan was the only country in Asia that was always recognized as a civilization in its own right. Differing opinions could be expressed about China, even if the voices proclaiming it to be barbarian remained at all times in a minority. The opposite held true of the Turks, who were respected by Europeans for their military prowess far more than they were admired for their cultural achievements. Even their most vocal champion, Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, ultimately saw the conflict between Austria and the Ottoman Empire as one “between civilization and barbarism.”… The Persians, conversely, had been regarded since the days of Herodotus as a highly civilized nation, an appraisal that their political renaissance in the sixteenth and early seventeenth century seemed only to confirm. The chaos that descended on the land in the eighteenth century cast doubt on this judgement. Persia now became the only Asiatic country in which a Hobbesian state of nature—the war of all against all—appeared to have been realized in the present…. No contemporary inhabitants of Asia fitted the eighteenth century’s image of “barbarian” better than the Tatars.… Unlike the desert Arabs, the competing candidates for the role, the Tatars not only fulfilled the criterion of nomadic people who had moved beyond the stage of primitive savagery; they also embodied the raw forces of history that had been pacified not long before.”

In regards to the nomadic lifestyle of many in the Near East, Osterhammel makes an astute point. He states, “because nomads are not tied to any fixed place, temples as well as immobile images of the divine are foreign to them. As a consequence of their way of life, they therefore possess fairly abstract ideas about god, making them receptive to monotheistic religion, particularly Islam, the most aniconic among them.” However, throughout most of his book, Osterhammel tries to let his sources do the talking, battling out competing theories between themselves, with little commentary from Osterhammel in between. He reports what Enlightenment contemporaries thought about the East without value judgement and in the context of the times. Osterhammel commends Montesquieu as “the creator of a general framework of a general social science…. [Montesquieu] also never plays off a specific concept of anthropology as the science of “them,” the exotic others, against something like “sociology” as the science of “us.” Montesquieuean social theory is transcultural and universal, comparative and counter-teleological, empirical and nonnormative. Societies in all civilizations are studied as they are or as they appear to be; they are not assigned to one of the stages preordained for them by a philosophy of progress.”

Osterhammel also points to how European scholars contrasted the lack of an aristocratic class throughout most of Asia with their own cultures. “Had not Francis Bacon and Niccolo Machiavelli already taken the absence of a nobility to be a chief characteristic of despotic states?” Now, during the Enlightenment, “the seventeenth-century insight [was] that highly sophisticated civilizations could survive and even flourish without an aristocracy…. There was no such thing as aristocracy in China. There were no dynastic magnates, no vassals, no patrimonial privileges, no feudal dues, no great landholdings, no courtly society outside the imperial power center, no code of chivalry, and no estates-general or parliaments…. The bureaucratic hierarchy (which was indeed made up of nine ranks) fulfilled many of the functions performed by the aristocracy…. The “mandarins” [Europeans] encountered at court had spent years mastering the classical texts in preparation for the grueling and highly competitive state examinations…. The scholar could now take his place in the legally privileged elite group of the shenshi or “gentry.” Only if he went on to achieve success in the central examination, gaining his “doctoral degree” in the presence of the emperor himself, was he now qualified—although by no means guaranteed—to secure one of the few bureaucratic offices in the territorial administration of this enormous country and at the imperial court. These coveted offices, like the title of gentry, were nonhereditary.” As a contemporary German scholar put it, the Chinese “associate nobility with the person and not with his blood.”

Osterhammel points out that Europe, educated and modernized by Enlightenment thought, was poised to takeover after Asia’s own self-inflicted decline. “When early modern Asian states did collapse, this was hardly ever the result of European intervention; the Crimean Khanate was a notable exception. The British, for example, played no part in the breakup of Aurangzeb’s Mughal Empire; they merely understood how to take advantage of it…. In the seventeenth and eighteenth century, Europeans, now armed with the highly efficient institution of the militarized chartered company, set about integrating Asia’s coastal regions into worldwide trading networks.”

Throughout Osterhammel’s book he stresses that, for the most part, the cross-cultural learning was a one-sided affair. Scholars and travelers from Europe explored, studied, and debated the merits of Asian cultures. For much of the Enlightenment, Asia was viewed in the West as different and exotic, but not necessarily inferior. In contrast, Asians, for most of the long eighteenth century, rarely showed the slightest curiosity towards the Other. “Asian interest in Europe was desultory. Phases of mental opening to the West, such as the high water mark of Chinese curiosity about Europe reached in the second half of the Kangxi emperor’s reign (circa 1690-1720) and the Ottoman “Tulip Period” shortly thereafter (1718-30), proved short-lived. Only in Japan, the most inaccessible of all Asian countries after Korea, was Europe studied in anything like a systematic way on the basis of imported books, mainly in Dutch. This willingness to learn from the outside world was the legacy of a centuries-long absorption of Chinese civilization…. The anticolonial self-strengthening reforms undertaken by Haidar Ali in India, later pursued with similar intent by Pasha Muhammad Ali in Egypt, belong to a new era: they are already reactions to Europe’s burgeoning power.”

“In Search of Lost Time Vol. 1: Swann’s Way” by Marcel Proust (translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff & Terence Kilmartin)

The narrator eats his madeleine dipped in tea. This is an epic length classic, told in such sustained detail and fervor. “Swann’s Way” starts with the narrator still in childhood. His recollections are priceless and his reflections insightful. It depicts a young boy growing up in Paris and the surrounding countryside in such intensely described vignettes that fascinate the mind. You see a changing aristocracy, an eccentric extended family, a loving mother, a detached father, and old servants still stuck in a disappearing formality. Proust’s words flow with such vigor and zest it is hard to tell where his own memory ends and where his imagination begins. No detail is missed. No thought left unexplained. Suddenly, we are swept away, back in time, into the world of Monsieur Swann, the narrator’s countryside neighbor. In this section of the novel the narrator remains in the background, as Swann’s tale begins years before his birth. Swann moves in the most notable and eligible of circles while in Paris, dining frequently with the Prince of Wales. However, it is intimated that he also has a disreputable side. Soon we hear of Swann’s passionate dalliance with Odette, a lady rumored to be of ill repute. What starts as a hot and heavy affair turns into a fractious relationship with Swann eventually maneuvered into the role of the spurned lover. Yet his attraction will not yield. The more he is tossed aside, the more his infatuation grows. He is consumed by his passion for Odette, even as he learns more and more of her notorious past. Proust relishes in giving every detail and intriguing morsel. Finally, the spell is broken and Swann’s consuming vigor passes. The love has finally faded. Or so we think, until the narrator starts up again, retelling the days of his own youth, and his own unrequited love affair with Swann’s daughter.

“Private Governance” by Ed Stringham

This is a good primer for anyone unaware of how the market can establish laws and regulations outside of a government framework. Stringham uses the example and analogy of private clubs that are able to form their own personal codes without the recourse to a monopoly of force. He then deals with the problems of negative externalities that often arise with public goods and how to best avoid free-rider problems. Much of the book details the rise of financial institutions that arose despite the lack of formal government laws and, in fact, sometimes, with laws that actually forbade them. Stringham recounts the formation of the first joint-stock companies like the United East India Company in 1614 Amsterdam. The Dutch government tried to prevent trading in stock-paper and especially short selling and futures contracts, but these inventions flourished nonetheless. Despite having no recourse to formal law, traders still acted honestly and fulfilled their obligations, for the most part. In London, barred from the main trading facilities for goods, stock traders formed their own private coffee houses, which eventually transformed into the City’s stock exchange. More controversially, perhaps, Stringham then goes on to detail how even brick and mortar services such as fire and police provisions have been provided by private parties when the government was unwilling or unable to adequately perform the task. The Patrol Special Police in San Francisco is just one modern example of private firms setting up where there was a demand that was not being met by public services. This private force was tailored to the demands of their clients, so whereas they prevented burglary and assault in San Francisco’s Chinatown, they were little concerned with the consensual acts of opium smoking and gambling. Stringham posits that absent government enforcement there would still be private law that evolves spontaneously, organically, and evolutionarily where and when the need occurs. Law can exist without legislation, but legislation rarely is enforceable when its contradicts civil society’s notion of law.

“The Plains” by Gerald Murnane

The most famous of Murnane’s novels, “The Plains” is a strange book. The novel’s narrator is a filmmaker, an outsider from Outer Australia, hired by one of the patrons of the Great Houses of the plains to live amongst them, to soak in their way of life, to study, and to create art. “The plainsmen were not always opposed to borrowings and importations, but in the matter of culture they had come to scorn the seeming barbarisms of their neighbours in the coastal cities and damp ranges.” The people of the plains have unique ways about them and a mythic quality. “They seemed to know what most men only guess at. Somewhere among the swaying grasses of their estates, or in the least-visited rooms of their rambling homesteads, they had learned the trues stories of their lives and known the men they might have been.” The story contains embedded within it a rivalry between two sects of plainsmen- the Horizonites and the Haresmen. “Almost any duality that occurred to a plainsman seemed easier to grasp if the two entities were associated with the two hues, blue-green and faded gold.” There is also much socializing, drinking, philosophizing, and debating. “In moods like this I suspect that every man may be traveling towards the heart of some remote private plain.” And most of all, there is a lot of looking at and contemplation about the greatness of the plains. “The plains are not what many plainsmen take them for. They are not, that is, a vast theatre that adds significance to the events enacted within it. Nor are they an immense field for explorers of every kind. They are simply a convenient source of metaphors for those who know that men invent their own meanings.”