Political Critique: How Serious are CEU’s Troubles? And Why is it Being Attacked Now?

Since the Fidesz government began its attacks against Central European University (CEU), Hungary’s streets have filled with protesters in opposition. Marta Tycner of Political Critique sat down with Szilárd István Pap, an anthropologist, political analyst, and member of the editorial team of Kettős Mérce, for a discussion on the meaning and seriousness of the CEU protests, in addition to what possibilities Hungary’s political landscape has in the future. [...]

I’m pretty sure that CEU does not pose any meaningful threat to the government. But, just like in Poland, the government is always trying to identify actors who are not in accordance with the official conservative, nationalistic, Christian ideology and demonize them. One of the biggest issues in pro-government media is that CEU has a gender studies department, and that it “teaches” feminism and other subjects that are against traditional family values. This rhetoric was already present in right-wing politics even before Orban. But with Orban, something started that I would call a proto-fascist discourse, about how healthy Hungarian society is endangered by ‘diseases’ that exist within it. It has been presenting CEU as a cosmopolitan, anti-national foreign element on the body of the nation. Obviously, a lot of Christian academics are working there, and a lot Fidesz’ members also were taught at CEU, including the current spokesperson of the government. One political official from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs is a student there, and the government is paying his tuition. Why would they do it, if they believed that the CEU brainwashes Hungarian students, or makes them into fighters against the government? The general ideology of the university is, of course, different and opposed to the Hungarian government ideology, but it doesn’t mean that there is no pluralism within. [...]

In the case of CEU the government was not much focused on this anti-elitists part, but rather on the anti-foreign and anti-cosmopolitan part. What Fidesz is trying to do is portray the government as representative of the entire Hungarian nation. To criticize the government is to criticize the Hungarian nation. Attacking the government is the same as attacking the Hungarian nation. This is such a dominant, discursive frame that you don’t even notice it anymore after seven years of Orban. But it is not anti-elitist. Fidesz used to be anti-elitist in the sense of overturning all corrupt elites. But after being in power for so long, it is much more difficult to present yourself as anti-elitist, and much easier to keep up nationalist rhetoric. And on the level of public policy it becomes  obvious that they are not on the people’s side. Their entire social and economic policy screams elitism, screams favoring the rich. The elements of the welfare state are being destroyed, and it’s the same with the public education or the public health system. The corporate tax was decreased from 19 percent to nine percent last year, a 10 percent drop, while there were no tax cuts for ordinary people.

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Nautilus Magazine: To Fix the Climate, Tell Better Stories

That we love heroes is something we can all intuitively understand. Less obvious is that climate, too, has a considerable narrative weight and is something we understand through storytelling. “Climate cannot be experienced directly through our senses,” writes Mike Hulme in his book Why We Disagree about Climate Change. “Unlike the wind which we feel on our face or a raindrop that wets our hair, climate is a constructed idea that takes these sensory encounters and builds them into something more abstract.” That abstraction has a moral and a historical quality: from the portrayal of flood myths as part of our relationship with the divine, to the birth of fictional monsters like Frankenstein in the wake of climate events, to our association of storms and earthquakes with emotional states—climate has always been more than a mathematical average of weather. In fact, Hulme says, it is only recently, and primarily in the West, that the cultural and physical meanings of climate have become so separated. [...]

Faced with an absence, we revert to old narratives, and there are few older than utopia and dystopia. The skeptic storyline of the rise of a dictatorial world government usurping American values must be considered not as a unique reply to climate change but as the latest instance of a well-established dystopic trope, stoked by the climate narrative vacuum. Something similar can be said for attacks on the capitalist enterprise from the left. The public, for its part, is served visions of an apocalyptic future, whether it’s from politicians or from Hollywood—and, simultaneously, the utopianism of far-distant science fiction, which as a category is consumed in greater quantity than science journalism and which reflects and encourages what sociologists call “optimism bias” or “technosalvation.” These utopian instincts are strengthened by a historical data point obvious to all: Our species has survived every obstacle we’ve encountered, and we are still here. [...]

philosopher Richard Rorty, “We understand knowledge when we understand the social justification of belief, and thus have no need to view it as accuracy of representation.”4 In the absence of social justification, the public ends up being called on to be the judge of accuracy of representation—in other words, of scientific content. Sure enough, quasi-scientific arguments based on misinterpreted data fragments abound in the skeptic community.5 Why did temperatures stay flat during World War II, despite an emissions increase? Was there an 18-year hiatus in temperature rise? The only reasonable answers to these questions lie with the scientific community, but they will be ignored if that community hasn’t earned an authoritative public voice. That is especially true when the answer is, “We’re not sure yet.”

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Al Jazeera: The Trump Show

From his long, unwieldy press conferences to the nomination of a Supreme Court Justice in prime time, Donald Trump delivers on spectacle.

There is conflict, there is humiliation, and there is supreme confidence - dramatic elements pulled straight out of a reality TV playbook that for Trump has been years in the making. The Apprentice, a show fronted and co-produced by Donald Trump, established him as a gospel of success, despite being plagued by bankruptcy and scandal.

Building on this image, and through similar projects, Trump has arguably become a brand unto himself, endearing himself to a segment of the American public that supported him all the way to the White House.

Now in the early days of his presidency, the showmanship continues, as 24-hour news channels race to cover his every move. Is Donald Trump in his own reality show? And what does it mean for the United States?

Josh Rushing explores Trump's reality TV rise from a C-list New York celebrity to the most powerful office in the world.

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Al Jazeera: Will Iranians re-elect Rouhani?

Ranking third from the bottom was the country's former chief nuclear negotiator, Hassan Rouhani, who polled at 6.5 percent - double-digits behind the early favourite, Mohammad Baqer Ghalibaf, mayor of Tehran.

By June 10, Rouhani had improved his ratings, but was still stuck in the middle of the pack. But as he gained momentum, he got hit by disqualification rumours, raising doubts he could even finish the race.

Yet on election night four days later, Rouhani had surged to the top, shocking political observers. In the final tally, he beat Ghalibaf by a 34.42 percent margin, winning the presidency with more than half of the votes, avoiding a second round. [...]

Since 1981, every Iranian president had consistently won a second term including Mahmoud Ahmadinejad during the contested 2009 election. But there have been suggestions that Rouhani could break that streak this year. [...]

A look at the real numbers offers a mixed bag for Rouhani. Latest figures from the Statistical Centre of Iran showed over 12 percent unemployment. But the economy also posted a 7.2 percent GDP growth mostly driven by post-sanction oil production. Inflation is also at its lowest in 10 years, according to the Central Bank of Iran.

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Nautilus Magazine: Do Aliens Have Inalienable Rights?

If we do ever meet an intelligent alien, even a tasty one, I hope we have sufficient ethical awareness to think of more than pleasing our palates or filling our stomachs. My view that this would be the wrong way to respond to such an encounter, however, leads to a deeper question: What moral status would extra-terrestrials have? Would we have obligations to them? Would they have rights? And would our answers depend on their intelligence? [...]

I use E.T. as a thought-experiment to challenge students to reconsider their speciesism—the still widely held assumption that the boundary of our species is also the boundary of beings with rights, or with interests that we ought to take seriously. So far, the only nonhumans we have encountered are animals, plants, fungi, and microscopic living things such as protozoans, bacteria, algae, and spirochetes. When we consider the moral status of these organisms, our thinking is likely to be biased by our own interests in using them, especially as sources of food, or in avoiding being made ill by them.

This is clearest when we think about how we ought to treat nonhuman animals. We have deeply embedded customs of killing and eating animals and using their skins for fur and leather.  Many people can hardly imagine a meal without meat or other animal products. Religious and philosophical thinkers are as susceptible to bias as other people, and so most of them have justified this practice. In doing so, these thinkers have dug a broad gulf in our minds between ourselves and nonhuman animals. Even the term “nonhuman animals” sounds odd, because it implies that we are animals. It should not sound odd at all, because we have known, ever since Darwin, that we are animals. Yet we persist in thinking that we are a separate creation, that we alone are made in the image of God, or that we alone have an immortal soul. [...]

Albert Schweitzer famously advocated an ethic of “reverence for life” and some deep ecologists hold that rivers and mountains have intrinsic value. We don’t need to go to those lengths in order to see that the existence of another mind—another center of consciousness—places moral demands on us. If there is something that it is like to be another being, then we have a moral responsibility to avoid harming that conscious being, and, in so far as it is within our power and a reasonable use of our resources, to make that being’s life go as well as possible.

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Infinite Coincidence: The ideological psychopaths behind Trump, Putin and Brexit (February 6, 2017)

Figures like Bannon, Surkov and Cummings may have different visions of a perfect society, but they share a commitment to elite rule and an idea of how to aggressively pursue it: by creating chaos, using what Rebecca Solnit (in one of the best assessments I’ve yet encountered of why Trump won) describes as ‘gaslighting’ to destabilise accepted values and undermine trust in established institutions. I found out about Surkov through Adam Curtis (a very skilled propagandist in this own right), who says that Surkov has “turned Russian politics into a bewildering, constantly changing piece of theater…(creating) a constant state of destabilized perception, in order to manage and control”*. This interest in disruption is something all ideological psychopaths share. An appropriate analogy might be that shaking a baby vigorously enough a) might somehow make it grow up quicker and b) will stop things getting boring. I don’t think it’s hyperbole to say that historical precedents to such projects lie in the Chinese Cultural Revolution and the Khmer Rouge. Figures like Bannon, Surkov and Cummings also have literary antecedents. Kane defines Cummings as “a mercurial figure who could easily stalk the pages of the Booker Prize longlist”. After all, part of the thrill and success of the Booker-winning ‘Wolf Hall’ lay in Thomas Cromwell’s machiavellian machinations. Much of what I’ve read about the three ideological psychopaths in question reminds me of a quote from H.G. Wells’ Doctor Moreau:“Each time I dip a living creature into the bath of burning pain, I say; this time I will burn out all the animal, this time I will make a rational creature of my own.” [...]

There’s also been a lot of talk over the last few months about tricksters: Pied Pipers who lead the masses astray. Ideological psychopaths seem to make use of charismatic leaders, or at least to put themselves at their service. They are often not the figureheads themselves but the powers behind the throne. The Italian populist leader Beppe Grillo keeps himself out of direct political involvement and tries to get someone else to do the dirty work (he’s not very good at choosing). Then there’s the question of which ideology they adhere to. Bannon recently claimed to have once been a Leninist but has very clear fascist and possibly Nazi sympathies. Surkov’s inspiration apparently comes from contemporary art, and both he and Bannon have been associated with the fascist Russian ‘philosopher’ Alexander Dugin, who believes Russia should provoke an all-out world war. As for Cummings, despite his intellectual posturings, he may be stupid enough to be a fan of that ultimate Godhead of failed teenage bullies with megalomaniac pretensions, Ayn ‘Medicare’ Rand. He is an extreme Neoliberal and a reminder that the origins of Neoliberal thought lay partly in nazi belief in the purity and goodness of elite power.

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Vox: I worked for Putin's government, then became one of his biggest critics.

There’s also financial pressure to stay out of opposition politics. Businesses face their own threats for working with anyone who criticizes the government. I’m fortunate that I work as an established energy analyst, which allows me to stay afloat financially and continue my work as a leader of the Democratic Choice party here in Russia. For others committed to political causes, it’s much harder to feed themselves and their families when they are iced out of the job market. Those who oppose Putin live in a state of constant pressure. [...]

When I think about those first few years under Putin, I realize that we overslept. We saw the signs of authoritarianism gradually taking over, but many still believed democracy would help us correct ourselves. We thought, if the people aren’t happy, they’ll make themselves known in the polls. What we didn’t take into account was that Putin was dismantling these democratic institutions systemically, on all fronts, and it was a very well-organized power grab masked under “gradual adjustments.”

I believe, also, that Putin sold a vision of a better standard of living in exchange for democracy and civil rights. In the first decade or so under his leadership, Russia’s GDP grew. Putin promised to continue to deliver us economic strength even as he took away our rights. Back then, many people in Russia saw these moves as separate and disconnected. They did not recognize that it was a systemic threat.

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Quartz: All but one of France’s presidential candidates want to reverse globalization

Ten out of the 11 candidates competing to be France’s next president have pledged to fight the forces of globalization in myriad ways. If polls are any indication, French voters may end up deciding between protectionist Marine Le Pen, of France’s far-right National Front, and globalist Emmanuel Macron, the upstart candidate pushing a liberal agenda. [...]

Macron is the only candidate explicitly in favor (link in French) of the comprehensive free trade deal between Canada and the EU. The pact, which has yet to be ratified by EU national parliaments, would make it easier and cheaper for French companies to export goods and services to Canada (roughly 10,000 French companies export to Canada). Most other candidates argue these agreements benefit big multinational companies at the expense of the environment, and French workers and consumers. The exception is conservative candidate François Fillon, whose stance on the pact is neither here nor there. [...]

The protectionist bent is not new (pdf) to France. In a 2016 year study (pdf) by German think tank the Bertelsmann Foundation, 54% of the French considered globalization as a threat, a higher proportion than every other EU country except Austria, thanks in part to immigration fears. In a separate YouGov poll published last year, French respondents were least likely to see globalization as a force for good, and ranked second to last among countries surveyed on its view of immigrants (ahead of Indonesia).

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Quartz: Why Germans pay cash for almost everything

On average, wallets in Germany hold nearly twice as much cash—about $123 worth—as those in Australia, the US, France and Holland, according to a recent Federal Reserve report on how consumers paid for things in seven countries. Roughly 80% of all transactions in Germany are conducted in cash. (In the US, it’s less than 50%.) And cash is the dominant form of payment there even for large transactions.

No one knows precisely why Germans have such a strong preference for cash, though survey data offer some hints. German respondents suggested that using cash makes it easier to keep track of their money and spending [pdf]. [...]

Other responses suggest Germans like the anonymity of cash, in keeping with their general enthusiasm for tightly protecting privacy. [...]

One explanation is that, as researchers have found, memories of hyperinflation have quite a bit of staying power. People in countries that suffered banking crises quite sensibly often prefer to save in cash—though typically in foreign currencies such as US dollars—rather than put money in the bank. (Federal Reserve Bank of New York economists found that demand for US dollars rises for at least a generation in countries after they suffer a searing experience with high inflation.) And countries such as Bulgaria and Romania, which have recent histories of currency instability and financial crises, also are quite heavy users of cash.

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