Temas de relações internacionais, de política externa e de diplomacia brasileira, com ênfase em políticas econômicas, em viagens, livros e cultura em geral. Um quilombo de resistência intelectual em defesa da racionalidade, da inteligência e das liberdades democráticas.
O que é este blog?
Este blog trata basicamente de ideias, se possível inteligentes, para pessoas inteligentes. Ele também se ocupa de ideias aplicadas à política, em especial à política econômica. Ele constitui uma tentativa de manter um pensamento crítico e independente sobre livros, sobre questões culturais em geral, focando numa discussão bem informada sobre temas de relações internacionais e de política externa do Brasil. Para meus livros e ensaios ver o website: www.pralmeida.org. Para a maior parte de meus textos, ver minha página na plataforma Academia.edu, link: https://itamaraty.academia.edu/PauloRobertodeAlmeida;
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quinta-feira, 13 de setembro de 2018
Democracia e liberalismo em perigo, inclusive na Europa - The Economist
quinta-feira, 2 de novembro de 2017
Protestantismo: 500 anos desde Lutero e ainda ativo - The Economist
In Luther’s native Germany roughly half the Christians follow his denomination. But today Europe accounts for only 13% of the world’s Protestants. The faith’s home is the developing world. Nigeria has more than twice as many Protestants as Germany. More than 80m Chinese have embraced the faith in the past 40 years.
There are many ways to be a Protestant, from the quietist to the ecstatic. The fastest-growing varieties tend to be the evangelical ones, which emphasise the need for spiritual rebirth and Biblical authority. Among developing-world evangelicals, Pentecostals are dominant; their version of the faith is charismatic, in that it emphasises the “gifts” of the Holy Spirit, held to be a universally accessible and sustaining aspect of God. These gifts include healing, prophecy and glossolalia. According to the World Christian Database at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in Massachusetts, Pentecostals and other evangelicals and charismatics account for 35% of Europe’s Protestants, 74% of America’s and 88% of those in developing countries. They make up more than half of the developing world’s Christians, and 10% of all people on Earth.
Changed lives change places. Almolonga’s Pentecostal believers have brought new energy to their town. Where once the prison was full and drunks slumped in the streets, there is now a buzz of activity. A secondary school opened in 2003; it sends some of its graduates, all members of the indigenous K’iché people, to national universities. “We want one of our students to work at NASA,” says Mr Riscajche’s son, Oscar, who chairs the school board.
Scholars have been surprised by the developing world’s Protestant boom. K.M. Panikkar, an Indian journalist, spoke for many when he predicted in the 1950s that Christianity would struggle in a post-colonial world. What might survive, he suggested, in both Protestant and Catholic forms, would be a more modern, liberal form of the faith. The Pentecostal expansion proved him quite wrong. Peter Berger of Boston University, a leading sociologist of religion (who died this summer), saw it as a key part of a wider “desecularisation” of the world.
To some extent, this growth of Pentecostalism among the global poor marks a loss of faith in political and secular creeds. As Mike Davies, an American writer and activist, put it in 2004, “Marx has yielded the historical stage to Mohammed and the Holy Ghost.” But it is worth noting that between 2000 and 2017 the 1.9% annual growth in the number of Muslims was mostly due to an expanding population, whereas a significant part of Pentecostalism’s expansion of 2.2% a year was due to conversion. Half of Latin America’s Protestants did not grow up in the faith.
Their emphasis on personal experience makes Pentecostalism and similar beliefs culturally malleable; their simplicity and ability to dispense with clergy gives them a nimbleness that suits people on the move. They tend to erode distinctions of faith based on ethnicity or birthplace. To Berger, that made this sort of Protestantism a modernising force. It is, he argued, “the only major religion which, at the core of its piety, insists on an act of personal decision.” Its mixture of distinctive individualism and strong, supportive communities, he wrote, makes it “a very powerful package indeed”.
It is a bootstrapping faith. Anyone pulling himself up in the world can join. Many of those who do are from the margins of society. Churches provide migrants in their congregations with employment, support and the possibility of advancement. Where the faith is not part of the establishment, as in Latin America or China, it carries the potential for disruption.
For some sociologists, such ideas evoke the ghost of Max Weber, whose book, “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism”, published in 1905, posited that modern capitalism was the unintended consequence of an “inner-worldly asceticism” in early modern Protestantism. Such people made money but did not spend it, creating a thrifty, hard-working, literate, self-denying citizenry who drove forward the economies of their countries.
Few economists these days put much stock in Weber’s views. They point out that there was plenty of proto-capitalism—in 13th-century Italian city-states, for instance—before the Reformation, and the development of its modern form was influenced by many other factors. Today the idea seems out of date: the borders that once ensured an overlap between national markets and economic moralities have given way to capital flows and a consumer culture in which unrestricted gratification seems to be the norm.
Yet some hear echoes of Weber’s ideas in Pentecostalism’s growing social influence. “In Guatemala the Pentecostal church is just about the only functioning organisation of civil society,” says Kevin O’Neill of the University of Toronto. Almost all the drug-rehabilitation centres in Guatemala City, of which there are more than 200, are run by Pentecostal volunteers. Throughout Latin America, there are hints of the faith’s socioeconomic impact. A recent study of Brazilian men by Joseph Potter of the University of Texas and others found that Protestant faith was associated with an increase in the earnings of male workers over a 30-year period, especially among less educated people of colour.
In Almolonga itself, in the first decade of this century, farmers on average earned twice as much as those in the next village, where Protestantism had not taken off. Sceptics attribute this to the more fertile soil or new methods of farming. But according to Berger, “Max Weber is alive and well and living in Guatemala.”
How a turbulent monk turned the world upside down
LUTHER was an accidental revolutionary. He was not trying to modernise his world but to save it. Had he become a lawyer, as his father wanted, Christendom—the European order organised by its rulers along lines largely set by the church—might have evolved very differently. The church might have reformed more from within; it might have fractured even more deeply than it did.
It was change from within that Luther wanted. Having entered an Augustinian monastery, he went on to teach at the University of Wittenberg. He still believed in Christendom, but his experience of God persuaded him that the church was getting it wrong.
In 1521, at the Diet of Worms—an assembly called to discuss Luther’s teachings presided over by the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V—Luther was asked to recant his heretical view that men and women are saved by the grace of God alone. He replied that he could do so only if the Bible could be shown to prove him wrong. “My conscience is captive to the word of God. I cannot and I will not recant anything, for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe.” He may or may not have then said the words “Here I stand. I can do no other.” But that is the phrase that went on to define him and his faith.
Some who of those who took Luther’s Reformation further were better at systematising the faith. By the 1550s John Calvin had turned Geneva into a model Protestant city. Others were holier and shrewder. But few were such prolific agitators. Luther was responsible for more than a fifth of the entire output of pamphlets from the empire’s newfangled printing presses during the 1520s. “Every day it rains Luther books,” sighed one churchman. “Nothing else sells.”
Cantankerous and fiercely anti-Semitic, Luther was far from otherworldly. He abandoned his vows of chastity and entered an affectionate marriage, swore freely, drank eagerly and referred frequently to the state of his bowels. He was by no means a democrat, but his ideas had a huge political impact. In 1596 Andrew Melville, a Scottish Presbyterian, explained Luther’s doctrine of the “two kingdoms” to his king, James VI. In one kingdom James was a king, ruling in earthly pomp. But in the other, the kingdom of Christ, James was “not a king, nor a lord, nor a head, but a member”—the same as anyone else.
To begin with, Luther and other Protestants were keen that church and state should continue to be bound together—just with much clearer lines between their realms of authority. Keeping the state out of the church’s business meant clerics lost the power to suppress heretics by force. But Luther was content with that. He insisted that heresy should be fought from pulpits and in pamphlets, not by coercion. “Let the spirits collide,” he wrote. “If meanwhile some are led astray, all right, such is war.”
The result was a fissile movement. Protestantism’s first split was between the “magisterial” reformers, such as Luther and Calvin, who believed in national churches backed by state power, and the “radical” reformers, such as Anabaptists—men and women who wanted to form their own separate, perfect communities without waiting for the world to catch up with them. Those in the second group were often millenarians who believed in the imminent return of Jesus, John Milton’s “shortly expected King”. It is partly from this wing of the faith that the Pentecostal, evangelical and charismatic strands of modern Protestantism have grown.
The division in Protestantism had political repercussions. The German Peasants’ Revolt in 1524-25 was led by men who denounced serfdom as incompatible with Christian liberty and said they would desist only if they could be proved wrong on Biblical grounds. Luther was shocked at what he had unleashed, penning a pamphlet entitled “Against the Robbing and Murdering Hordes of Peasants”. But it was too late. The sects would not do as they were told. If God had spoken to them directly through his word, what was there to fear from kings and bishops?
Though the magisterial reformation triumphed in the transformation of northern European establishments from Catholic to Protestant, it was the longer-term triumph of the radical reformation that arguably had the deepest effects, in northern Europe and elsewhere. The new Protestant sects’ insistence that they be free to practise their faith did not extend to others—notably Catholics—seeking to practise theirs. But it did open up some space for the toleration and freedom of conscience that eventually helped create the principle of limited government. Milton’s “Areopagitica” of 1644 urged freedom of thought and freedom to publish. Uncensored printing offered the possibility of choice, ending the state church’s monopoly on opinion-forming.
Protestant toleration was good for business, too. The Calvinist Netherlands of the late 16th century became the world’s richest society as Huguenots, Jews and other hard-working refugees from Catholic lands flooded in. “The really radical twist that Protestantism added was the idea of human spiritual equality having a political consequence,” says Alec Ryrie of Durham University, author of “Protestants”, the best recent history of the faith.
This played out in the aftermath of the English civil war when religious groups such as the Diggers and the Levellers demanded universal male suffrage and common ownership of the land. In 1647 one of them, Thomas Rainsborough, said in the Putney debates with Oliver Cromwell, the Puritan who had led parliament, that “The poorest man in England is not at all bound in a strict sense to that government that he hath not had a voice to put himself under.” The Diggers were dispersed, but the idea that equality before God implied full democracy took root.
If people were to find Bible-based salvation independent of the clergy, literacy was indispensable. By 1760 about 60% of England’s men, and 40% of its women, were able to read. Protestant education provided opportunities for social mobility, improved the status of women and fostered economic growth. Elie Halévy, an influential early 20th-century French historian, believed that Methodism helped 18th-century England avoid a revolution of the sort that later befell France by educating the lower classes and bringing about social reform. This admiration was not universal: Britain’s pioneering Marxist historian of the working class, E.P. Thompson, considered Methodism to be a “ritual form of psychic masturbation”.
Before the Toleration Act and other developments made Britain and northern Europe more amenable to radical Protestantism, many seeking religious freedom had crossed the Atlantic to secure it. A strong tradition of radical Protestantism became a feature of the American colonies and the subsequent history of the United States, refreshed from time to time by revivalist “great awakenings”. That America became the fullest example of limited government enshrined in law is in large part a consequence of its Protestant settlement. The truths the Founding Fathers held to be self-evident had not seemed so to anyone before the Reformation.
Like Roman Catholics, Protestants sought to bring their faith to other peoples, too. The motives for this were mixed, the respect for indigenous cultures often scant and frequently nonexistent and some of the results disastrous. That said, Robert Woodberry of Baylor University in Texas has mounted statistical arguments that former colonies where evangelical (what he calls “conversionary”) Protestant missionaries were active have become more democratic. He attributes this to mass education, religious liberty and a legacy of voluntarism.
In the colonies and Europe alike, Protestant Christianity brought bloodshed and persecution aplenty. Protestants and Catholics burned each other at the stake. During the Thirty Years War, fought mainly between Protestant and Catholic states, 8m people died. Britain, with its established Protestant church, did more than any other country to build up the trade that shipped some 12m people across the Atlantic in chains; Protestant America whipped the slaves thus delivered to work. In the 20th century the apolitical attitude inherent in Luther’s “two kingdoms” approach led German Protestants to believe they should not interfere with the state even when power fell into Nazi hands. Many were “either complicit or indifferent as unimaginable crimes were committed around them”, says Mr Ryrie.
Throughout, Protestants had an almost comical capacity for hypocrisy of all kinds. It could be seen not just in their vices, but also their virtues—particularly a rather selective toleration. The respect for their religious rights that 16th-century Mennonites demanded from the Dutch Republic was not extended to dissenters within their own ranks. By 1600 there were at least six Mennonite groups in the country. They hated each other with a passion.
How far from the tree can the fruits of the spirit fall?
PROTESTANTISM’S fissiparous tendencies persist. When searching for Mr Riscajche’s church in Almolonga, the Evangelical Church of Calvary, your confused correspondent thought he had arrived when he discovered the Mount Calvary Church. Not at all the same thing, it turned out. Almolonga, small though it is, has at least a dozen Pentecostal churches. But if the individual congregations for each are small, their cumulative effect is not.
Until the 1970s Guatemala was a staunchly Catholic country. When Protestant aid agencies rushed in after a massive earthquake in 1976, the faith gained a substantial foothold. After the country’s bloody civil war ended in 1996 it spread as if unshackled. Guatemalans took to the faith for many reasons, says Virginia Garrard of the University of Texas, but upheaval had a lot to do with it. The civil war represented a definitive break with the past: when so much had been destroyed anyway, losing your Catholic heritage meant less. At a time of painful economic dislocation, people who felt that Catholicism and liberation theology had failed them turned to an aspirational faith that promised a new upward mobility. With a low bar to entry and almost no hierarchy, new Pentecostal churches matched the entrepreneurial spirit of the times.
The message has resonated elsewhere. In South Korea, the Protestantism that accompanied the country’s dizzying economic rise was an expression of Korean nationalism. In China, a modernising population is looking for a moral framework to go with its new mobility. Yang Fenggang of Purdue University predicts that there could be at least 160m Protestants in China by 2025. He expects the country will soon be home to more Protestants than America.
As in early modern Europe, women in developing countries have often been especially affected by Protestantism. Having studied churches in Colombia, Elizabeth Brusco, author of “The Reformation of Machismo”, was surprised to find that evangelicalism was a women’s movement “like Western feminism”, explaining that “it serves to reform gender roles in a way that enhances female status.” Male Colombian converts had previously spent up to 40% of their pay in bars and brothels; that money was redirected to the family, raising the living standards of women and children. Temperance helped employment, too. Scholars also argue that the voice this has given women helps consolidate democracy; Mr Martin sees parallels with England’s 19th-century Methodists.
That does not mean the faith is egalitarian. Pentecostalism reforms traditional gender roles rather than abolishing them; it tends to be robustly patriarchal, and profoundly intolerant of homosexuality. But a sober patriarch committed to a moral code that, crucially, treats domestic violence as sinful can provide stability. An acceptance of birth control also eases women’s lot.
More stable, economically active households and well-knit communities have undoubtedly made places like Almolonga more agreeable for most who live there. But what effect do they have on a grander scale? Can they remake not just villages but whole countries and their economies?
Pentecostals have traditionally been suspicious of politics as too “worldly” and of development work as too long-term. But in Guatemala and elsewhere some are now mobilising for social change. Witness a rap battle in a community hall in one of the areas of Guatemala City known as “red zones”. Teenagers take it in turns to get up on stage and rap against each other, with judges deciding who goes through to the next round. The event has been organised by Angel, a local man who joined one of the city’s notorious gangs when he was 14. By the age of 22, he had shot “a lot of people”, he says. When he found himself about to be executed by a rival gang, he called out to God for help; he escaped death and was born again. For the past ten years, in a typically Pentecostal bottom-up initiative, he has been saving kids from gangs.
As yet, it is hard to see a broader impact from these individual transformations. Guatemala remains poor and desperate. Many people do not vote or pay tax; only a tiny fraction of murder investigations lead to convictions. The country lags behind the rest of Latin America on many development indicators. “Guatemala tests the limits of religion as an agent of change,” says Kevin O’Neill of Toronto University. “It’s not that the religion is ineffectual. It has changed a lot in society. It’s just that it has not changed things measurable by the metrics we use, such as security, democracy and economy.”
Perhaps the sort of change that can be measured will arrive in due course. Guatemala’s history has left it poor and oligarchic. “Five percent of the population controls 85% of the wealth,” says Mr O’Neill. More than three-quarters of the cocaine from South America heading for the United States now passes through it; many gang members have been deported from Los Angeles. Any society, never mind one recovering from a 36-year civil war, would struggle. “Guatemala is like a 400lb man who has lost 100lb in weight. He is getting better, but he is still in a bad state,” says Ms Garrard, who first visited in 1979. She ascribes much of the progress to the churches.
But it may also be that there are limits to 21st-century Protestantism’s capacity for large-scale reform. For one thing, it is largely a faith at the margins of society. In the places where Protestantism made its clearest mark in early modern Europe it took root in the bourgeoisie, among people of influence. A classic example is William Wilberforce, a British politician whose legislation banning the slave trade stemmed from his evangelical beliefs. Moreover, northern Europe’s Protestants lived in countries that already had clear property rights and the rule of law. By contrast, Protestants in the developing world are often among the poorest members of society, living in places with endemic corruption.
The otherworldly nature of Pentecostalism does not help. Believing in imminent apocalypse militates against strong social engagement. The ship is sinking; rather than try to fix it, Pentecostals want to get as many people as possible into the lifeboats. “What Guatemala needs is tax reform, voter registration, microloans, community organising,” says Mr O’Neill. But “people are just sitting there praying.”
That is not entirely true. “We know we need to change the system,” says Cash Luna, pastor of Casa de Dios, one of Guatemala’s half-dozen megachurches. “We pay our taxes and we encourage our congregation to do the right thing,” he says. The church also tries to mediate in the city’s gang warfare (Angel is a member) and holds classes for policemen on how to engage better with the public. Pentecostals took part in the anti-corruption movement that brought down the country’s president in 2015. But Protestant involvement in Guatemalan politics has been messy, and plentiful compromises have dragged the faith into disrepute.
In many places they lean to the right. Efraín Ríos Montt, who took control of Guatemala in a coup in 1982—and thus became the country’s first Protestant leader—waged the civil war as a fierce anti-Communist. He was responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of people, 80% of them indigenous Mayans; for some, Protestantism became a survival strategy. At the same time many Nicaraguan evangelicals supported the left-wing Sandinista government. In Brazil many of the country’s new evangelicals supported Lula, a left-wing president, in the 2000s. The movement’s political engagement there has not gone well. One pastor talks of the problem being “a church without a tradition…and an incapacity to think Christianly about society.”
It might be argued that the faith has been politically more successful in opposition than in power. Protestant churches, in particular the historic denominations established by missionaries, were instrumental in apartheid’s downfall in South Africa. Similar stories abound. “In Kenya during the 1980s, when all opposition activity was banned, the leaders of the opposition were, in effect, churchmen,” says Paul Gifford, emeritus professor of religion at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London.
But there were Protestants on the other side, too: apartheid was underpinned by the Dutch Reformed Church. Besides, the time for such opposition has largely passed, and the churches that offered it have not themselves become more democratic. Their leaders, including Desmond Tutu, a South African clergyman and theologian, have admitted that they have not adapted as well as the less hierarchical Pentecostal churches to the post-apartheid order. “We knew what we were against,” says Mr Tutu. “It is not nearly so easy to say what we are for.”
Early Protestantism tended to play down possessions. Luther himself called worldly success a sign of God’s displeasure. The wealth observed by Weber was treated to some extent as an unintended consequence of its possessors’ Calvinist faith. But in the “prosperity Gospel”, a recent export from the United States, wealth is very much the intention. Many of the new generation of pastors tell their flocks that God does not want them to be poor.
In Africa, many Pentecostal churches are concerned with “this-worldly” victory, says Mr Gifford. In Nigeria congregations with names like the “Victory Bible Church” hang banners saying things like “Success is my Birthright”. One of Nigeria’s best known pastors, David Oyedepo, whose church has been attended by the country’s presidents, says that Christians must be rich. Such preachers suggest that “planting seeds” (giving money to the church) will bring a harvest of its own, and that wealth is proof of God’s love. God must love Mr Oyedepo a lot; the Nigerian press reports that he is worth more than $150m and owns four private jets.
What Protestants do best is protest
IN 1882 Friedrich Nietzsche, a philosopher raised in Saxony as the son of a Lutheran minister, declared that God was dead. The vibrant spiritual lives of billions would seem to give this the lie. But in 20th-century Europe, at least, there seemed to be some truth to it; and a fair bit of the blame, or credit, fell to the Reformation. In helping to shape the West, Protestantism sowed the seeds of its own destruction. In giving people space to believe what they wanted and choose what sort of life to lead, it allowed them to stop believing at all and choose something else. And it has not fought as hard to resist this trend as some faiths might. After all, the whole point of Protestantism is that, in Mr Ryrie’s words, “it values the personal and the private over the political and the public.”
One effect of European (and, to some extent, American) secularisation is that old religious divisions are healing. There is still sectarian prejudice in parts of Europe, but much less than there was. And Protestantism is also less distinct than it was. According to the Pew Research Centre, 46% of American Protestants say faith alone is needed to attain salvation—the basis of Luther’s stand—but more than half now believe that good deeds are needed, too.
As interdenominational divisions have healed, some individual churches have started to fall apart. In the Anglican communion, which contains the Church of England and many of its offshoots, homosexuality is driving a wedge between believers in the northern hemisphere, many of whom increasingly support gay rights, and those in developing countries, who mostly do not.
Even in America, the proportion of Protestants is declining. Mainline, often more liberal, denominations fell from 18.1% to 14.7% between 2007 and 2014, according to the Pew Research Centre. The proportion of evangelicals dropped less drastically, from 26.3% to 25.4%. Meanwhile, the religiously unaffiliated rose from 16.1% to 22.8%. In future, churches “that disdain the corruption of public life and offer spiritual rather than political power may find that their message resonates most,” predicts Mr Ryrie. But the faith will no doubt continue to be used as a weapon in the culture wars.
As for the developing world, the growth of Protestantism in Africa and Latin America does not seem to be just a way-station on the road to secularisation. But nor does it yet look like something that will transform the economy or politics on a large scale. Its effects may be strong, but they may also be largely indirect.
In some places Protestantism may settle down, with Pentecostals perhaps shifting to more staid denominations—or, indeed, fading into secularism. Some Protestants have understood that when they become the dominant religion, their faith’s power—its here-I-stand refusal to accept orders from any source but God or conscience—tends to seep away.
The places where Protestantism is most alive and seems politically most salient—where its churches continue to argue about who is right and what the Bible means, issuing statements and counterstatements just as Luther did—are often those where it has retained its outsider status. The growth of evangelical faith in China, for example, is taking place in a context of disapproval from which it seems to draw strength. In 2015 Wang Yi, a leading pastor, issued his own 95 theses on “Reaffirming our Stance on the House Churches”—the congregations outside the control of the government. It reiterated the need for freedom of conscience and for house churches to be allowed their independence, while protesting against the distortion of scripture and attacking state-approved churches for collusion with the Communist Party authorities. Wherever overweening rulers clash with people demanding their right to religious freedom, Luther’s divisive, dynamic spirit will remain an inspiration for a long time to come.
quinta-feira, 27 de julho de 2017
Os animais mais rapidos do mundo: e os menos rapidos?
Eu não sei onde ficaria: provavelmente a um terço do Usain Bolt, ou menos...
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
Animal speeds: Race to the middle |
A study published this month examines the relationship between animals’ size and their speed. It finds that the top speed of an animal (or fish) rises in tandem with body mass up to a certain point, after which it declines. Though bigger beasts do have the highest theoretical maximum velocity, they tire before reaching it. The result suggests that a race between a man and an elephant would be close to a fair contest, writes our data team |
sexta-feira, 23 de junho de 2017
India: como a religiao pode destruir a prosperidade de um povo - The Economist
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quarta-feira, 5 de abril de 2017
Armas quimicas: ditador da Siria continua matando seu povo - The Economist
Syria’s latest atrocityBashar al-Assad kills at least 72 with chemical weapons
One young boy was filmed slowly suffocating on the ground, his chest heaving and his mouth opening and closing like a fish out of water. Photographs show dead children lined up in rows on the floor or piled in heaps in the back of a vehicle, their clothes ripped from them by rescuers who used hoses to try to wash the chemicals from their bodies. Other images show victims foaming from their mouths or writhing on the ground as they struggle for air. Hours after the attack began, witnesses say regime warplanes circled back over the area and dropped bombs on a clinic treating survivors.
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The probable passivity of the West ought not to come as much of a suprise. When the Syrian government gassed to death more than 1,400 of its own people on the outskirts of Damascus in August 2013 it seemed inevitable that America would respond by launching air strikes against the regime. One week after the attack—the deadliest use of chemical weapons since Saddam Hussein gassed Iraqi Kurds in 1988—John Kerry delivered one of his most bellicose speeches as secretary of state, arguing the case for American military action in Syria. “It matters if the world speaks out…and then nothing happens,” Mr Kerry said.
Yet nothing, at least militarily, is what happened. Instead, working with the Americans, the Russians brokered a deal that saw the Syrian regime supposedly dismantle its chemical weapons programme. The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) destroyed about 1,200 tonnes of Syria’s chemical stockpile. Barack Obama hailed the deal as a triumph for diplomacy over force.
Yet chemical attacks by regime forces continued, experts believe. Last year, American and European officials began to voice growing fears that Damascus might have held onto nerve agents and other lethal toxins, in defiance of the deal cooked up by Mr Obama and Vladimir Putin. “Syria has engaged in a calculated campaign of intransigence and obfuscation, of deception, and of defiance,” Kenneth Ward, America’s representative to the OPCW, said in July. “We…remain very concerned that [chemical warfare agents]…have been illicitly retained by Syria.”
All these fears now appear to have been borne out. As part of the deal in 2013 to end Syria’s chemical weapons programme, both America and Russia promised to punish the Syrian regime should it use chemical weapons again. Despite evidence of the regime’s repeated use of chlorine gas since then, neither side has honoured this promise. In February, Russia once again blocked efforts at the UN Security Council to sanction military and intelligence chiefs connected to the country’s chemical weapons programme. A similar fate doubtless awaits the latest attempt by Britain, France and America at the Security Council. Hours after the attack, the three countries demanded a resolution ordering the Syrian government to hand over all flight logs, flight plans and the names of air force commanders to international inspectors. Russia called the resolution “unacceptable”.
Barring a significant shift in American policy towards military action, the latest use of chemical weapons is unlikely to alter much the war’s trajectory. The rebels are increasingly weak. They lost their enclave in the city of Aleppo, the opposition’s last big urban stronghold, in December. Pockets of resistance remain around Damascus, north of Homs city, and along the southern border with Jordan; but these areas grow ever more isolated. In Idlib an alliance led by a group linked to al-Qaeda has gained strength, allowing America to argue that there are few appropriate rebel partners left to work with on the ground.
Indeed, now that Donald Trump is in charge, removing Bashar al-Assad from power is no longer a stated aim of American policy in Syria. In recent weeks, senior American officials have said for the first time in public that they are willing to live with Mr Assad as they concentrate on defeating Islamic State. Ironically, this approach is in fact more likely to fuel further extremism in Syria as jihadists seek to take advantage of the vacuum that America’s political disengagement now presents them with. It also means that, with Mr Assad at the reins, the Syrian regime will continue to drop gas on its own people. There is nothing to stop it.
terça-feira, 27 de dezembro de 2016
Vienna: capital of the century - The Economist (December 24, 2016)
ViennaHow Vienna produced ideas that shaped the West
ACROSS the cobbles of Vienna’s Michaelerplatz the world of empires, waltzes and mutton-chop whiskers glowers at the modern age of psychoanalysis, atonal music and clean shaves. In one corner, the monumental, neo-baroque entrance to the Hofburg palace, seat of the Habsburgs; in the other, the Looshaus, all straight lines and smooth façades, one of the first buildings in the international style. This outcrop of modernism, designed by Adolf Loos, was completed in 1911, less than 20 years after the dome-topped palace entrance it faces. But the building embodied such a different aesthetic, such a contrary world view, that some wondered whether a society that produced such opposites in quick succession could survive. The emperor Franz Joseph is said to have kept the curtains drawn so he would not have to look at the new world across the square.
The sceptics were right. Imperial Viennese society could not survive. But the ideas and art brought forth during the fecund period of Viennese history from the late 1880s to the 1920s endured—from Loos’s modernist architecture to Gustav Klimt’s symbolist canvasses, from Schoenberg’s atonal music and Mahler’s Sturm und Drang to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophy. Those Viennese who escaped Nazism went on to sustain the West during the cold war, and to restore the traditions of empiricism and liberal democracy.
This ferment was part of a generational revolution that swept Europe at the end of the 19th century, from Berlin to London. But the Viennese rebellion was more intense, and more wide-ranging. And it provoked a more extreme reaction. Hitler arrived in Vienna from the Austrian provinces in 1908 and developed his theories of race and power there. Vienna was thus the cradle of modernism and fascism, liberalism and totalitarianism: the currents that have shaped much of Western thought and politics since Vienna itself started to implode in 1916 until the present day. It has been the Viennese century.
What distinguished pre-1914 Vienna from most other European capitals, and what gave the Viennese school its particular intellectual tang, was that it was an imperial city rather than a national capital. Vienna was the heart of an Austro-Hungarian empire of about 53m people that stretched from Innsbruck in the west almost as far as the Black Sea in the east. After 1867 the empire was divided into two: a Magyar-dominated Hungary, ruled from Budapest, and a heterogeneous, multi-ethnic, multilingual other half, ruled from Vienna. In deference to its multinational character, this half was not called Austria but was often referred to as Cisleithania, named after a tributary of the Danube.
In the second half of the 19th century Franz Joseph’s subjects poured into the city: Italians, Slovaks, Poles, Slovenians, Moravians, Germans and, especially, Czechs. By 1910 Vienna had a population of 2m, the sixth-biggest city in the world. Fortunes made in the fast-industrialising empire, many by Jewish and assimilated Jewish families such as the Wittgensteins and Ephrussi, changed the urban landscape. Their enormous palaces adorned the Ringstrasse, the city’s most elegant boulevard. By 1914 Jews made up about 5% of Cisleithania’s population. They did not enjoy rights as a nationality or language group, but benefited from full civil rights as individuals. As Carl Schorske, the greatest historian of the period has written, they “became the supranational people of the multinational state, the one folk which, in effect, stepped into the shoes of the earlier aristocracy. Their fortunes rose and fell with those of the liberal, cosmopolitan state.”
Vienna was a mixture of classes and nationalities, faiths and worldviews. Order a Wiener melange in a Viennese coffee-house today, suggests Steven Beller, a historian of Austria, stir the hot milk into your bitter coffee, and imperial Viennese culture emerges, a dissolving of differences to produce something fresh. The Viennese cultural elite encouraged intellectual collisions to give birth to the new. “There was sperm in the air,” as the writer Stefan Zweig somewhat off-puttingly put it.
Amid a babble of peoples and languages—one in which, as elsewhere at the time, gender roles were being redefined—Viennese thinking was driven by an urge to find universal forms of communication. It aimed to discover what people had in common behind the façade of social convention, “to show modern man his true face”, in the words of Otto Wagner, an architect. Out of this came some of the most important intellectual schools of the 20th century, as well as the influential, and often highly eccentric, characters who went with it. These included one Sigmund Freud, who developed psychoanalysis in Vienna, in order to expose the common archetypes of the unconscious.
Ludwig Wittgenstein’s “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus” remains the most famous text of Viennese philosophy. The pioneering logical positivism of the Vienna Circle, dominated by Moritz Schlick and Rudolf Carnap (both originally from Germany) was probably of greater influence, setting the scene for modern analytical philosophy with its strong affinity for the sciences. The most accomplished of the circle was Otto Neurath. On top of his philosophy, he revolutionised the transmission of knowledge with new ways of translating complex information into simple, graphic pictograms: to make knowledge accessible was to make it democratic. All sorts of formats for data visualisation in use today can be traced back to these “Isotypes” (example on next page).
The Viennese school also pushed into new fields, such as, famously, sex. Before Freud, there was Richard Krafft-Ebbing, who studied in Graz before coming to Vienna and in 1886 published “Psychopathia Sexualis,” the first attempt to apply some rigorous methodology to the study of sexuality. He drew on court cases to analyse homosexuality and bisexuality (albeit often in Latin). His work popularised the terms sadism and masochism. (Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, eponym to the latter and author of “Venus in Furs,” though a subject of the emperor, was not Viennese.)
It was partly the emperor himself who opened the way to modern sensibilities. Ultra-conservative in taste he may have been, but Franz Joseph’s duty was to all the peoples of his empire, and he tried to guarantee the freedoms—of movement, of religion, of the press and of equal rights—that the liberal constitution of 1867 enshrined. So Europe’s crustiest old monarchy often supported some of the most avant-garde artistic projects of the day, such as the Vienna Secession movement of 1897, in the interests of strengthening the universal language of art and architecture that might unite the empire. Secession artists were engaged to design the empire’s postage stamps and currency. The emperor might have drawn his curtains against the Looshaus, but he let it be built.
Jews, as the supranational people of the multi-ethnic state, readily became the target of every nationalist enemy of the empire. Georg Schoenerer, son of a successful Viennese industrialist, was the first to turn anti-Semitism into a political programme, denouncing the “sucking vampires” who knocked at the “narrow-windowed house of the German farmer and craftsmen”. Unemployment, rising prices and a lack of housing in Vienna fuelled the anger of many Germans after 1900, leading to frequent riots and violent attacks on other nationalities. Karl Lueger channelled Schoenerer’s anti-Semitism into a political movement, campaigning to be mayor on the slogan “Vienna is German and must remain German”. His explicit rejection of the multi-ethnic character of Vienna brought him into direct conflict with the emperor. Lueger won a majority on the city council to elect him mayor in 1895, but for two years Franz Joseph nobly refused to appoint him because of his anti-Semitism. Eventually, in 1897, Franz Joseph bowed to popular pressure, and Lueger ruled the city until 1910.
That, essentially, was the beginning of the end of liberal Vienna. After the war and the end of the monarchy there was a brief flourishing of progressive social democracy in the city, the era of “Red Vienna”. But all the time, in the new, truncated republic of Austria the more conservative provinces slowly tightened their grip on the country. In 1933 Engelbert Dolfuss seized power in the name of Austrofascism, which gave way to Nazi fascism in 1938 with the Anschluss. Hitler, who moved to Vienna from Linz in upper Austria, had been transfixed by Schoenerer and, particularly, Lueger. He hungrily absorbed all his hero’s complaints about the Jews and the mixing of “races”; he called the Viennese a “repulsive bunch”. Thus liberal Vienna had produced its exact opposite: militant nationalism and anti-Semitism. During the interwar years these forces gradually took hold of the new Austria and from the 1920s onwards many began to flee abroad. One of the last out, in 1938, was Freud.
Most of the exiles went to Britain and America, where they were often gratefully received. The most valuable aspect of Viennese thinking for the West at the time was the application of up-to-date “scientific” methods to fields that had previously been left to amateur theorising, or that had been altogether neglected. This transformed many aspects of life.
Take the work of Charlotte Buehler, a pioneer in child psychology. She was born in Berlin to Jewish parents, but moved to Vienna, together with her husband Karl, in 1922. At the University of Vienna, through painstaking direct observation, the Buehlers worked out their influential response-testing techniques: ways to calibrate a child’s development, through the accomplishment of gradually more complex tasks. These tests are, in effect, still in use today. By six months, an infant should be able to distinguish between a bottle and a rubber doll. At 18 months, he or she was expected to respond to the order “No”.The Viennese tended to be more persuasive than the intellectual competition
Often the Viennese intellectuals leapt ahead by transferring knowledge gained in one discipline to others, gloriously indifferent to the mind-forged manacles that have come to stifle modern academia and research. In America, several Viennese-trained devotees of Freud used the tools of psychoanalysis to revolutionise business. Ernest Dichter, author of “The Strategy of Desire,” transformed the fortunes of companies through marketing that purposely tapped into consumers’ subliminal desires.
Another example was Paul Lazarsfeld, the founder of modern American sociology. Born of Jewish parents, he studied maths in Vienna, completing his doctorate on Einstein’s gravitational theory, and thereafter applied his expertise in data and quantitative methods to what became known as opinion, or market research—finding out what people really feel about anything from television programmes to presidential candidates. In Vienna in 1931 he conducted the first scientific survey of radio listeners, and also co-wrote a revolutionary study of the devastating social and psychological impacts of unemployment. His team of investigators conducted what is now called “field research”, meticulously recording the results of face-to-face interviews with laid-off factory workers in the town of Marienthal.
Moving to America in 1933, Lazarsfeld went on to found the Columbia University Bureau for Social Research. His team was the first to use focus groups, developed with Dichter, his one-time student, and statistical analysis to delve into the mysteries of voter and consumer preferences or the impact of the emerging mass media. Lazarsfeld and others thus helped revivify moribund, antiquarian modes of inquiry, and re-equip them with the latest Viennese techniques, often saving entire Western intellectual traditions from decrepitude, or possibly extinction.
Von Mises and Hayek, one of his students, saw earlier than most that by the interwar years the liberal era in Europe was being overwhelmed by the collectivism and totalitarianism of the right and the left. They subsequently devoted their lives to reversing the tide. Hayek, like the best of Vienna’s intellectuals, combined technical expertise in economics with a wide breadth of inquiry; as well as economics, he published on law, sociology and more. His greatest contribution was to restore intellectual rigour to the free-market school, expositing in detail the “price mechanism” to show that socialist economics could not possibly work in theory, let alone practice.
But Hayek was not just a dry theorist. He was also a relentless circus-master for the liberal cause. Emigrating to Britain in 1931, he was the author of the first call to arms for the liberal fightback, “The Road to Serfdom,” published in 1944. This was provocatively dedicated to the “Socialists of all Parties”, implying that at the end of the second world war all Britain’s political parties, including Winston Churchill’s Conservatives, had drifted into collectivism by advocating the welfare state.
To organise the fightback he founded the Mont Pelerin Society (MPS) in 1947. Named after the Swiss mountain where the first meeting was held (simply because the founding members couldn’t agree on a more appropriate alternative), the MPS was Hayek’s own Circle for liberalism. It fused the Viennese liberals in exile, including Karl Popper, who had just published The Open Society and its Enemies, with their embattled fellow-travellers from Germany, France, Britain and America, most notably Milton Friedman. Over the next decades the MPS spawned scores of think-tanks around the world dedicated to spreading the word of the Austrian school. Politicians often attended their meetings. The “Chicago school” of economists was made up largely of MPS members. After decades of quiet campaigning, Hayek’s ideas were taken up again by a subsequent generation of politicians in the mid-1970s, including Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.
The consensus on free markets and democracy won in the 1980s remained intact for decades—a tribute, in part, to the intellectual efforts of Franz Joseph’s Viennese. It also provides a clue as to why they have been so influential in the West. The Viennese school placed the lived experience of individuals—rather than the abstractions of class, race and nationalism favoured by their opponents—at the heart of their intellectual enterprises. Thus the empirical research of a Buehler or a Lazarsfeld tended to work with the “the crooked timber of humanity”, as Immanuel Kant put it, rather than trying to straighten it out, as Marxists, fascists and all systematisers try to do. After a lecture by John Maynard Keynes, always the systematiser, Vienna-born Peter Drucker, the founder of modern management theory, saw the distinction in clear relief: “I suddenly realised that Keynes and all the brilliant economic students in the room were interested in the behaviour of commodities, while I was interested in the behaviour of people.”
For this reason alone, the Viennese tended to be more persuasive than their competitors. Furthermore, the stress on the individual also chimed with the exigencies of an exhausted West taking on the Soviet Union in the cold war after 1947. The Viennese émigrés were vital in sharpening the intellectual and cultural claims of liberal democracy at a time when many young people in the West had deserted to more fashionable leftist causes. They were swiftly promoted to university posts and other influential positions by their Anglo-Saxon admirers. The Viennese could articulate a more convincing defence of freedom because they had direct personal experience of the totalitarian enemy.
However, the freedom that the Viennese espoused came at a price; self-expression could be accomplished only by intellectual rigour and self-discipline. Even at the time this was too much to bear for many of Vienna’s young, several of whom committed suicide as they fell short of their own high standards—three of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s brothers took their own lives. Today, if this year’s elections are any guide, politicians and demagogues seem content to wrap themselves in the language of freedom while abandoning any obligations to intellectual rigour or self-discipline. The Viennese century has ended. Its legacy is fraying.