May 2016

The Birth of the Asylum

By in books, history, identity, non compos mentis, philosophy No Comments

Another pertinent excerpt from The Authenticity Hoax:

Arthur and I have an inside joke where, when commiserating over all the madness of society, we periodically shake our fists at the heavens while growling, “Jean-Jacques!” This developed out of our discovery that quite a few things that we consider unfortunate about our culture can be fairly traced back to the demented scribblings of that deranged lunatic. Like I said recently, it’s interesting to note how so many of the intellectual contests in our day and age are taking place on a playing field whose boundaries were painted by Burke and Rousseau almost two and a half centuries ago. Here, we can clearly see the philosophical origins of today’s postmodern insanity, where passionate feelings count as irrefutable evidence.

Say Now Shibboleth

By in conspicuous crusading, gender, identity, moralizing, the cult of multi, the geist of the zeit No Comments

Damon Linker:

Too lazy and impatient to do the hard work of formulating arguments and trying to persuade, and too addicted to sanctimonious displays of moral righteousness, these liberals now prefer to use the ever-expanding edifice of anti-discrimination law to impose edicts from the top down.

Such liberals get to enjoy the satisfaction of reenacting the civil rights movement every few years, holding up victims of ever-new forms of discrimination as heroes of a great moral saga and demonizing those on the other side as bigots. Once the courts accept the narrative, the logic of anti-discrimination locks in, new rights become codified, and the former victims of injustice get to enjoy total victory while decades or centuries of communally based norms, practices, and beliefs get pulverized.

A few short years ago, if you had asked me my opinion on transgender rights, I would have shrugged and paraphrased Thomas Jefferson’s line about religious belief: whether my neighbor says there are twenty genders or no genders, it neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. And in the context of an individual’s choice to dress and present themselves however they want, I still feel that way. In a personal context, I still have the ability to opt out. If you’re the kind of person who wants to force the issue over your pronouns, to demand respect and validation from me regardless of whether it would have been naturally forthcoming or not, well, fine; I’ll likely just decide you’re too much trouble to bother talking to at all. Problem solved.

I’ve come to see this as a bit short-sighted. The problem is, that strict libertarian-ish stance essentially forfeits the right to have any say in deciding which issues even become part of the agenda, the conversation, or whatever else you want to call it. Like a political form of Stoicism, it accepts that other people will act to create the normative framework, and the only thing you can control is how you react to it. And as I just said the other day, the whole fight over trans rights, as silly as it can be in some of the particular details, is fundamentally an important philosophical argument over whether we even share a common reality. It is not merely a logical extension of already-existing rights to an excluded group who simply want to be seen as, and treated like, everyone else. It’s a demand for a special exemption from a bedrock social consensus. It’s an argument over the significance of biology versus a postmodern dogma that asserts reality can be changed through linguistics and abstract theorizing. What does it truly mean to be a man or a woman, and what is the basis for making the distinction? Partisan activists naturally have no interest in debating the question for the sake of truth; they simply want to impose their standard by fiat.

Even Snopes, in the course of debunking some of the wilder, inflated claims about NYC’s new law, allows that:

For instance, an individual who simply mistakenly uses the wrong pronoun when referring to a transgender individual will not be fined under the new law. However, a person who intentionally and repeatedly refuses to use an individual’s preferred pronoun would be subject to fines (that could reach as high as $250,000 for multiple violations) under the the law…

I don’t care if you want to believe in an absurd form of mind/body dualism that involves being a different gender “on the inside”; it’s no crazier than most religious beliefs. I don’t care if you want to challenge the arbitrary cultural standard that says men can’t wear makeup and dresses; in fact, I’d support you. But that kind of respect is earned, not given as a birthright. It develops in the context of strong personal relationships. Forcing people, under threat of financial punishment, to deny their very perception of reality in deference to an alternative version which, as we’ve said, is by no means conclusively settled, is unjust. You have every right to demand that people not overtly discriminate against you in housing, employment, education, etc. even if they think you’re a delusional weirdo. But you shouldn’t have the right to use the power of the state to compel them to participate in your delusional honorifics. It’s a question of individual conscience. I may not be legally permitted to heap abuse and vitriol upon you, which is fine, but I shouldn’t be legally compelled to address you with your preferred terms of respect either.

Perhaps as a result of life under a two-party political system, arguments like this tend to break down along stark partisan lines. Black/white, left/right, you’re either with us or against us. Progressives, as Linker says, are indeed hopelessly addicted to their own narrative, compelled to invent new categories of victimization, if need be, simply to avoid having to give up the righteous thrill of crusading against oppression. Part of that narrative is the assumption that anyone with misgivings about the latest crusade is plainly a fascist who wants to see members of the oppressed group beaten to death in the streets. That sort of relentless bigotry-baiting serves well to enforce ideological conformity within the tribe — progressives who have participated in the group shaming rituals directed at opponents are viscerally afraid of receiving the same treatment themselves if they fall out of lockstep. But I can’t help but think that oppression narratives are the new fossil fuels — increasingly labor-intensive and cost-prohibitive to extract. We’re getting into the fracking stage at this point, becoming increasingly reckless in our pursuit of cheap sources of outrage and righteousness. Perhaps some of the more far-sighted progressives should be attempting to develop more sustainable sources of self-worth and purpose before the inevitable crash.

I happened to be reading this just last night, from Andrew Potter’s excellent The Authenticity Hoax:

Despite all the sensational media coverage, the bathrooms in question are actually peripheral. Why do we have segregated bathrooms by gender anyway? Who knows — probably because of the fact that exposed genitals are involved. Why do men and women have to occupy different rooms in order to void their bladders and bowels? Why is a metal stall door not an acceptable barrier, but a layer of drywall and plaster can keep chaos at bay?

You can go on at length, but the basic point is, social norms and taboos are produced at the end of a long cultural game of Telephone. At some point in the distant past, someone probably noticed that a significant number of people who ate shellfish or pork were puking their guts out shortly thereafter. After a couple centuries of the Telephone game, the message morphed from “Don’t eat that stuff because it’ll make you sick” to “God says don’t eat that stuff or you’ll burn in hell forever.” Likewise, the fact that men and women go to different restrooms in public is just one particular reflection of the widespread, underlying assumption that there are some essential differences between the sexes that require ritual acknowledgment for society to function smoothly. Like making small talk with strangers about the weather, it’s just gear oil for the social machinery — one of those things that’s not strictly necessary, but not really worth the energy to make a scene about either. This is what people are reacting to — the perception that a useful, fundamental social norm is being needlessly destroyed by an elite progressive vanguard without anyone’s else’s desire or consent. As the above excerpt suggests, a widespread perception like that is just as corrosive to a society as all the economic inequality that progressives are so monomaniacally obsessed with.

Taboos don’t have to be precise or efficient; for society’s purposes, they just have to be clear and easily understood. There’s always a certain amount of arbitrary absurdity to them, which isn’t necessarily a serious problem. But for progressives, who look at culture the way Frederick Winslow Taylor looked at workers on the factory floor, taboos are irrational remnants of an archaic, superstitious past, illegitimate rules imposed on us by illegitimate rulers, and obstacles to true, rational human flourishing. The sooner they’re demolished and replaced by rules based on the latest brain scans and sociological studies, the better.

This isn’t to say that taboos are sacred and can never be challenged or modified, of course. But you’re more likely to be successful at it if you modify them from within, as someone with a certain amount of standing and earned respect within a community, rather than as an imperious outsider giving orders and dripping contempt. I realize that it’s progressive dogma at this point to have a Menckenesque sense of themselves as isolated, civilized cosmopolitans in a wasteland of ignorant, inbred, fundamentalist, redneck barbarians, but as satisfying as it may be to keep indulging in that sort of ego-stroking, it’s ultimately dangerous. Even from my own perspective as an antisocial loner who can’t stand people in any group with more than three members, it doesn’t require much effort to feel genuine sympathy for social conservatives. I mean, on the very day of the Obergefell ruling, Freddie deBoer published a viral article explicitly urging progressives to start pushing for legalized polygamy next. The bottom-feeding progressive tabloid Salon has recently published several articles attempting to humanize the public’s attitude toward pedophilia. Even for those who just want to tune out all this political bullshit and watch ESPN, they still had to endure an extended propaganda barrage over how Caitlyn Jenner is an amazing beautiful woman with the exquisite bravery of a beautiful butterfly flying against the wind. All after having been tirelessly mocked for raising concerns about a slippery slope during the push for gay marriage. And now, this top-down edict from the administration ordering public schools to accept the new, tendentious party line on gender. Now, I’m just wondering what form the inevitable backlash will take.

Nothing to Do With What You Think, If You Ever Think at All (Slight Return)

By in moralizing, the statusphere No Comments

Emmett Rensin:

The smug style has always existed in American liberalism, but it wasn’t always so totalizing. Lionel Trilling claimed, as far back as 1950, that liberalism “is not only the dominant, but even the sole intellectual tradition,” that “the conservative impulse and the reactionary impulse … do not express themselves in ideas, but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.”

Richard Hofstadter, the historian whose most famous work, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, this essay exists in some obvious reference to, advanced a similar line in writing not so well-remembered today. His then-influential history writing drips with disdain for rubes who regard themselves as victimized by economics and history, who have failed to maintain correct political attitudes.

But 60 years ago, American liberalism relied too much on the support of working people to let these ideas take too much hold. Even its elitists, its Schlesingers and Bells, were tempered by the power of the labor movement, by the role Marxism still played in even liberal politics — forces too powerful to allow non-elite concerns to entirely escape the liberal mental horizon. Walter Reuther, and Bayard Rustin, and A. Philip Randolph were still in the room, and they mattered.

Sixty years ago, the ugliest tendencies were still private, too. The smug style belonged to real elites, knowing in their cocktail parties, far from the ears of rubes. But today we have television, and the internet, and a liberalism worked out in universities and think tanks. Today, the better part of liberalism is Trillings — or those who’d like to be, at any rate — and everyone can hear them.

Rensin’s essay was making the rounds last month, and if you missed it then, do read it now; it’s a good one. I just recalled that section in order to take minor, gentle exception to it, because as it happens, I’m currently reading Christopher Lasch’s The True and Only Heaven: Progress and its Critics, written in 1991, and he identified a fairly prominent example of the smug style as far back as 1922, when the Nation ran a collaborative, state-by-state series entitled “These United States”, in which contributors strove to outdo each other in performing their scorn and contempt for the shortcomings of each state. (As Lasch tells it, Walter Lippman and H.L Mencken made this sort of attitude mainstream):

Croly’s confidence in public opinion and “virtuous social actors” struck most liberals by this time as old-fashioned and unsophisticated. They were more impressed by Walter Lippman’s analysis of the irrationality of public opinion and by H.L. Mencken’s ridicule of democracy as the reign of the “booboisie.” Mencken taught liberal intellectuals to think of themselves as a “civilized minority” and to wear unpopularity as a badge of honor… Evidently the editors of the Nation saw no contradiction between a celebration of regional diversity and a satire of local customs bound to leave the impression that the United States was populated largely by rednecks, fundamentalists, and militant adherents of the Ku Klux Klan.

…Taken as a whole, these reports conveyed an unmistakable impression of liberal intellectuals’ sense of alienation from America. It was not that the country had failed to “keep faith,” as Croly wrote in 1922, “with its original idea of the United States as a Promised Land.” The Nation’s contributors seldom invoked the “original idea” of America. Most of them wrote as if the “promise of American life” had been a swindle from the beginning. Croly’s brand of social criticism implied that whatever democracy Americans managed to achieve in the future would have to rest on their achievements in the past. The authors of “These United States” assumed, on the other hand, that “breaking from the past” was the precondition of cultural and political advance. That Americans refused to make the break proved the country’s backwardness and immaturity, its hatred of intellectual and artistic freedom, its fear of new ideas, its intolerance of of anything that called the old ways into question, its puritanical obsession with sexual purity, and worst of all, its suspicion of intellectuals.

…[M]ost liberals had come to identify liberalism with the cultural critique of backwardness and provincialism. Thinking of themselves as a civilized minority in a nation of Babbitts, Rotarians, and rednecks, liberals fell into a style of social criticism that had the curious effect of reinforcing complacency instead of disturbing it. The authors of “These United States” implicitly invited their readers to count themselves among the elect. The rest of America might live in darkness, but they themselves — the knowing authors and their readers — had seen the light. A perceptive commentator, Louis Siegel of Cleveland, noted in a letter to the Nation that Mencken’s criticism of American life, seemingly so sweeping, lost most of its force in its very excess, since readers understood that his spleen was directed not at themselves but against everyone else. Mencken voiced the mockery and contempt for their neighbors, based on a conviction of their own superiority, that his readers also felt but hesitated to express. “Each and every American thinks himself too intelligent to be the target of Mencken’s venom, admiringly endorses it as aimed at his neighbor, and takes a vicarious satisfaction in brutality his [own] humaneness inhibits.” The only readers who resented Mencken’s satire were those who failed to recognize his appeal to exempt themselves from his indictment of the common man.

Mencken’s view of social criticism assumed that since we find fault with others more easily then we find fault with ourselves, we need to turn our neighbors into aliens before we can find fault with them. But “such easy fault-finding,” as Michael Walzer has recently remarked in another context, quickly becomes self-defeating. It makes social criticism “superfluous,” Walzer argues, because it does not “touch the conscience of the people to whom it is addressed” — and the “task of the social critic is precisely to touch the conscience.”

Ploosa shawnje, ploosa la memshows. Progressives long ago outgrew fantasies about creating heaven on earth; now, they’re content, almost eager, to see everything go to hell just so they can get the smug satisfaction of screaming “I told you so, you idiots, but you wouldn’t listen!” Hell, their reaction to Trump has a barely-concealed kinky sexual vibe to it, like they would have the most mind-blowing transgressive orgasms if he were to get elected and confirm all their worst suspicions about the nation. Seriously, someone hook a group of progressives up to a libido meter and ask them to imagine Trump getting sworn in. I’ll bet you a large amount of imaginary money that you’ll get some interesting results.

Construe Looks Like a Lady

By in extraordinary popular delusions, gender, identity, the geist of the zeit No Comments

David Marcus:

If the LGBT editor at Think Progress can’t manage to come up with a reasonable definition of who is and is not transgendered, then how is a gym manager supposed to do it? Or a police officer responding to complaints from women? Ford’s certainty that the person in the image is not a transgender woman is laughable. The idea that he can look at someone and on that basis determine his or her gender is literally the opposite of what he has been saying for years.

The simple fact is that Ford and his allies in the fight for transgender access to bathrooms and locker rooms do not have the slightest idea who is and who is not trans. They never have. This has always been sophistry. This has always been an attempt to legitimize a delusion. This has always been an effort to pigeonhole men and women into gender stereotypes. Today, inadvertently, Ford proved it.

So, just to recap. Things that make you a man: Facial hair. Short hair. Arm hair. A man’s watch. Things that don’t make you a man: Having a penis.

There’s no explaining why North Carolina restrooms, of all things, ended up being the battlefield on which this particular skirmish in the culture war is being fought. It’s just one of those emergent properties of complex phenomena which no one could have chosen or predicted. The virtue signaling of progressives is of course ridiculous, as is their opponents’ attempt to conjure up viscerally shocking (if highly unlikely) scenarios, like creepy male predators taking advantage of trans acceptance to kidnap and molest young girls at interstate rest stops. Nevertheless, however clownish the details may be, this is at bottom a fundamental argument over whether we share a common reality or not, and as such, it’s one well worth having.

Walk Like a Man

By in fresh hell, gender, non compos mentis, silent moving pictures No Comments

Jackie Strawbridge:

A few years ago, politicians in Berlin made headlines for their attempts to bring gender equality to their city’s crosswalk signals. They wanted to create an “Ampelfrau,” or “traffic light woman,” a female counterpart to the iconic “Ampelmann” invented in East Germany in the 1960s. It became clear right off the bat that Ampelfrau would be laden with biases and complications that Ampelmann escapes. In her motion requesting Ampelfrau, Social Democrat District Leader Martina Matischok-Yesilcimen specified that the figure should represent a self-assured, modern-day woman, yet without any “sexist stereotypes” — meaning no ponytails or skirts, and definitely no high heels or mini skirts — according to the Local.

Sofie, Ampelfrau and other female-designed crosswalk symbols do challenge a male-centric worldview just by existing. They occupy a crucial space in our roadways, where we are required to look at them in their skirts and ponytails, reminding us that there are people besides men and perspectives besides men’s perspectives. However, they simultaneously highlight the difficulty of dismantling that worldview.

For Wade, creating female crosswalk icons — even if it requires us to use imperfect, clichéd markers of femininity — is inherently valuable because it challenges the male-centeredness of our public space.

“It would force men to see themselves in that ‘walking woman,’” she says. “That is actually a really profound thing, because it requires men to see female people as human beings, just like they are.”

So are Amersfoort, Valencia and others wasting (albeit minimal) resources on feminized crosswalk signals? Are these cities attempting to treat a symptom of sexism and hoping it will cure the disease?

So if there is a perfect feminist crossing signal design, we may have many more streets to cross before we find it.

White Man’s Burden

By in conspicuous crusading, jests japes jokes jollies, moralizing, race, the cult of multi No Comments

Progressive media is best pictured as a bunch of attention-deficient, not-too-bright children batting a balloon around. Soon enough, the balloon pops, and the poor little dimwits stand there looking befuddled, and then they start to cry and wet their pants until someone blows up another balloon and floats it back into the group.

A couple years ago, we snapped a photo of one of the resident SJW writers at the A.V. Club in full tears-and-pissy-pants mode:

Despite consistently negative media attention on the topic (and negative reaction to that negative media attention), apparently two-thirds of Americans still believe that the name “Washington Redskins” isn’t disrespectful toward Native Americans. This stance, most fervently defended by people who own warehouses full of “Washington Redskins” T-shirts…

Oooh, now, that’s just painfully awkward!

But for more than a decade, no one has measured what the country’s 5.4 million Native Americans think about the controversy. Their responses to The Post poll were unambiguous: Few objected to the name, and some voiced admiration.

…Even as the name-change movement gained momentum among influential people, The Post’s survey and more than two dozen subsequent interviews make clear that the effort failed to have anywhere near the same impact on Indians.

Across every demographic group, the vast majority of Native Americans say the team’s name does not offend them, including 80 percent who identify as politically liberal, 85 percent of college graduates, 90 percent of those enrolled in a tribe, 90 percent of non-football fans and 91 percent of those between the ages of 18 and 39.

Even 9 in 10 of those who have heard a great deal about the controversy say they are not bothered by the name.

What makes those attitudes more striking: The general public appears to object more strongly to the name than Indians do.

I’m sorry, Ms. Rife, you were saying something hilarious…? You were disregarding the lived experience of People of Color in order to impose your own white intellectual/moral colonial standards, just like your racist ancestors did? Surely, you’re not going to violate one of the bedrock commandments of intersectionality and “appropriate” the native struggle as your own, right? Surely you’re not going to condescendingly “whitesplain” to these benighted savages how they’re too primitive and uneducated to understand what they should be offended by, are you?

(As of this writing, Ms. Rife’s byline at the A.V. Club displays no posts commenting on this latest setback for white SJWs in their mission to take offense on behalf of all those too weak or politically ignorant to take offense for themselves. But we’ll see if that changes soon.)

Those interviewed highlighted again and again other challenges to their communities that they consider much more urgent than an NFL team’s name: substandard schools, substance abuse, unemployment.

It’s like some random blogger once said:

These people are pathetic truffle pigs who squeal in delighted outrage whenever they root out another trivial instance of this-ism or that-phobia; once their flickering attention span is distracted by the next pseudo-issue, they’ll go right back to knowing and doing absolutely nothing about the lives of actual, living American Indians.

But If You Go Carrying Pictures of Chairman Mao

By in fresh hell, non compos mentis, the cult of multi No Comments


Seriously?

I didn’t notice, but Monday was the 50th anniversary of the Cultural Revolution — did Google feel that was also worth commemorating in a doodle? I mean, that had something vaguely to do with “equality”, too, didn’t it? Perhaps the same SJWs who are currently praising Kochiyama as an inspirational “human rights activist” on Twitter would have likewise been inspired by the heroic example of the Red Guards.

I Went to You, a Woman-Man, a Courageous Friend, I Thought

By in extraordinary popular delusions, gender, identity, non compos mentis, the geist of the zeit No Comments

Janice Turner (non-paywalled version here):

I’d never thought about my gender identity before. It hadn’t occurred to me that not being a “girly” girl meant I wasn’t 100 per cent woman. The point, I’ve always believed, is to expand the categories “man” and “woman”, to tear down pink and blue prisons. So a little girl can like trucks, spacemen, getting dirty and still be a girl; a boy can put on nail polish, play with dolls and be no less a boy.

…The trans cause is hailed as the latest liberation struggle. And we should defend trans men and women from discrimination and the hideous violence many have endured. But this should not stop us opposing a view of gender, spun off from the trans movement, that is as conservative as the Mad Men 1950s. Until recently Eddie Izzard was a transvestite, wearing skirts and make-up: “These aren’t women’s clothes,” he’d say, “they’re my clothes”. Like Bowie, Prince and Grayson Perry, he made the category of man bigger, brighter, less confined. Now Izzard says he has “boy genetics and girl genetics”. Filmed rushing into a manicurist, he gushed: “Being a transgender guy, I do like my nails.”

Men, I’ve found, can’t understand why this enrages women. Why are feminist ladies so mean to Eddie? Well, because he’s no longer saying “I’m a bloke who likes pretty nails”. He has declared: “Because I like pretty nails I am female.” He is reducing being a woman down to make-up and sparkly shoes. By which definition, he’s more woman than “gender fluid” ol’ me.

…The challenge now is how to support genuine, heartfelt young trans people, while addressing an internet culture that lures teenagers, amid the maelstrom of adolescence, towards ever greater confusion. At heart the trans lobby upholds the same nonsense that underpins porn and men’s mags and the Tea Party right: that men are muscly hunks and women are passive pink fem-bots. To feel you are neither doesn’t make you gender fluid – or any of the other 72 crazy gender categories on Facebook – it just makes you human.

As I’ve said before, growing up in the ’80s and imprinting on the norms of glam metal gave me a far more progressive view of gender than the current trans fashion allows. My mom still has pictures of me at four years old, wearing some of her clothes, along with wigs, makeup and nail polish. At that age, the only thought I had about it was that it was fun. As a teenager, I had long, straight hair reaching halfway down my back, and in keeping with the glam fashion in rock music at that time, I liked to wear poet’s shirts, leather boots and gaudy earrings. Again, there was no existential angst involved, no sense of dueling gender identities. I wasn’t a “typical” guy, but I was still unquestionably a young man, and still attracted exclusively to girls. There was never any anxiety over the possibility of being gay, and I don’t think the idea of being a woman in a man’s body would have even seemed coherent to me and my friends. If asked, I would have said that I was expanding the idea of what it means to be a guy. I was rebelling against the idea that you are predictably defined by your clothes or your interests.

And yet, I didn’t feel constrained at all by being defined, in a very basic sense, by biology. By contrast, I know several people who seem existentially aggrieved by the existence of biological limitations and determined to overcome them, but in their rebellion, they paradoxically end up empowering those old social conventions to define them instead. Now, a woman I know who sometimes likes to wear t-shirts and cargo shorts muses that perhaps this means she’s gender-fluid. An acquaintance who “identifies” as an extinct apex predator wants to be addressed by the impersonal pronoun “it”. Social constructions like clothes and language are now considered to convey something essential about you, while the unexceptional fact of biology is experienced as tyrannical oppression.

According to the progressive narrative, glam metal was politically insignificant, culturally irrelevant, one particularly prominent example of why we’re all better off forgetting the ’80s ever happened. And yet, the attitude toward gender norms that can be found in any typical hair band video of the period — playful, irreverent, incapable of taking itself too seriously — is far healthier than the current climate of opinion. The funniest part, though, is that our reigning progressive fashion pertaining to gender is just another fad, no different than men wearing hairspray, makeup, and pink, tiger-striped spandex, and destined to look just as ridiculous in hindsight. They just don’t know it yet.

Lucubrations, no. 21

By in lucubrations No Comments

Timothy Garton Ash:

“On no other account do I congratulate myself more,” Erasmus wrote toward the end of his life, “than on the fact that I have never attached myself to any party.” It takes perseverance to keep calmly advocating an independent, liberal position — balanced, fair, respectful of complexity, more concerned to get at the truth than to be entertaining — when what Jacob Burckhardt called the terribles simplificateurs are harvesting youthful enthusiasm and collective emotion.

Now there’s an ideal worth striving for and a consoling mantra in times of madness. Hear, hear.

“Erasmians” is the term that Garton Ash, echoing Ralf Dahrendorf, applies to thinkers like Isaiah Berlin, one of the two main subjects of this interesting essay. Speaking of Berlin, I have actually been planning to re-read all of his books later this summer (yes, yes, I know I said that in 2014, but it’s for real this time). And just to tie it all together in a nice, serendipitous bow, Garton Ash himself was recently named, in another interesting article, as one of the “Children of Berlin” whom the world could stand to see more of.

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