Heart of Darkness, a novel by Joseph Conrad, was originally a three-part series in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1899. It is a story within a story, following a character named Charlie Marlow, who recounts his adventure to a group of men onboard an anchored ship. The story told is of his early life as a ferry boat captain. Although his job was to transport ivory downriver, Charlie develops an interest in investing an ivory procurement agent, Kurtz, who is employed by the government. Preceded by his reputation as a brilliant emissary of progress, Kurtz has now established himself as a god among the natives in “one of the darkest places on earth.” Marlow suspects something else of Kurtz: he has gone mad.
A reflection on corruptive European colonialism and a journey into the nightmare psyche of one of the corrupted, Heart of Darkness is considered one of the most influential works ever written. (less)
Frederic William Henry Myers (6 February 1843 – 17 January 1901) was a British poet, classicist, philologist, and a founder of the Society for Psychical Research.[1] Myers’ work on psychical research and his ideas about a “subliminal self” were influential in his time, but have not been accepted by the scientific community.[2][3] However, in 2007 a team of cognitive scientists at University of Virginia School of Medicine, led by Edward F. Kelly published a major empirical-theoretical work, Irreducible Mind, citing various empirical evidence that they think broadly corroborates Myer’s conception of human self and its survival of bodily death.[4]
Early life
Myers was born on 6 February 1843 at St John’s parsonage, Keswick, Cumberland, the son of Revd Frederic Myers (1811–1851)[5] and his second wife Susan Harriet Myers nee Marshall (1811–1896).[6] He was a brother of poet Ernest Myers (1844–1921) and of Dr. Arthur Thomas Myers (1851–1894).[5] His maternal grandfather was the wealthy industrialist John Marshall (1765–1845).[7]
Myers was educated at Cheltenham College and at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he received a B.A. in 1864,[8][9] and university prizes, including the Bell, Craven, Camden and Chancellor’s Medal, though he was forced to resign the Camden medal for 1863 after accusations of plagiarism.[7] He was a Fellow of Trinity College from 1865 to 1874 and college lecturer in classics from 1865 to 1869. In 1872 he became an Inspector of schools.[7]
In 1867, Myers published a long poem, St Paul, which includes the words of the hymn Hark what a sound, and too divine for hearing.[10] This was followed in 1882 by The Renewal of Youth and Other Poems. He also wrote books of literary criticism, in particular, Wordsworth (1881) and Essays, Classical and Modern (in two volumes, 1883), which included an essay on Virgil.[11]
Personal life
As a young man, Myers was involved in homosexual relationships with Arthur Sidgwick, the poet John Addington Symonds,[12] and possibly Lord Battersea.[13] He later fell in love with Annie Eliza, the wife of his cousin Walter James Marshall. Myers’ relationship with his cousin’s wife has been questioned by different researchers to be sexual or Platonic.[14][15] Annie committed suicide in September 1876 by drowning.[16]
The British writer on the occult Richard Cavendish commented: “According to his own statement, he [Myers] had very strong sexual inclinations, which he indulged. These would seem to have been mainly homosexual in his youth, but in later life, he was said to be wholly heterosexual.”[17] In 1880, Myers married Eveleen Tennant (1856–1937), daughter of Charles Tennant and Gertrude Tennant. They had two sons, the elder the novelist Leopold Hamilton Myers (1881–1944), and a daughter.[7] English author Ronald Pearsall suggested that Myers had sexual interests in young lady mediums, writing “[I]t is certainly true that Myers’s interest in young lady mediums was not solely due to their spiritualistic talents.”[18]
The researcher Trevor H. Hall argued that Myers had an affair with the medium Ada Goodrich Freer.[19] However, Trevor Hamilton dismissed this and suggested that Freer was simply using her acquaintance with Myers to gain status in the psychical research movement.[20]John Grant has suggested that Myers was a womaniser who was easily duped and “probably seduced” by Freer.”[21]
Biographer Bart Schultz wrote that “Myers was suspected of all manner of sexual quirks and it was alleged that he looked upon psychical research as giving him opportunities for voyeurism.” He also noted the odd behaviour of Myers, such as insisting to be with Edmund Gurney with his bride on their Honeymoon even against strong protest from the bride.[22]
A relationship between eroticism and Myer’s interest in psychical research was examined by Professor of Philosophy Jeffrey J. Kripal.[23]
Biographer Trevor Hamilton has defended Myer’s against the allegations of sexual misconduct.[24]
Psychical research
Myers
Myers was interested in psychical research and was one of the founding members of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) in 1883.[25][26][27] He became the President in 1900.[28] Myers psychical ideas and theory of a subliminal self did not impress contemporary psychologists.[2] Psychologists who shared an interest in psychical research such as Théodore Flournoy and William James were influenced by Myers. However, according to historian Janet Oppenheim “not even all Myer’s colleagues at the SPR accepted his hypotheses.”[2]
Some historians have suggested that Myers was strongly biased to believe in the paranormal and held a secret religious agenda. After the publication of Charles Darwin‘s On the Origin of Species (1859), it was difficult for those with a scientific education to retain a belief in tenets of the Judeo-Christian religion.[29] Early SPR members like Myers and Henry Sidgwick hoped to cling to something spiritual through psychical research. Psychical researcher Eric Dingwall wrote regarding the early formation of the Society for Psychical Research, “Myers, among others… knew that the primary aim of the society was not objective experimentation but the establishment of telepathy.”[29][30]
British historian G.R. Searle described Myers as “having lost his Christian faith, sought a new kind of religion that could reassure him that death did not lead to extinction.”[31]
Mediums and psychics
In opposition to Richard Hodgson and Eleanor Mildred Sidgwick who held the view that many physical mediums were fraudulent, Myers believed that although many of these mediums cheated they could also produce genuine physical phenomena.[32] According to Trevor Hamilton “Myers had no direct involvement in the exposure of physical fraud.”[24]
In the late 19th century Douglas Blackburn and George Albert Smith were endorsed as genuine psychics by Myers and Edmund Gurney. Smith even became an SPR member himself and the private secretary to the Honorary Secretary Gurney from 1883 to 1888.[33][34] However, Blackburn later confessed to fraud.[35] Blackburn called Gurney and Myers a “couple of credulous spiritualists” and wrote “we resolved that we should be doing the world a service by fooling them to the top of their bent, and then showing how easy a matter it was to ‘take in’ scientific observers.”[36]
Myers’ 1884 essay Visible Apparitions with Gurney claimed a “personal experience” by a retired Judge Edmund Hornby involving a visitation from a spirit was true, but Joseph McCabe wrote that the story was a “jumble of inaccuracies” and “Sir E. Hornby was compelled to admit, that the story was entirely untrue.”[37][38]
In July 1895, Eusapia Palladino was invited to England to Myers’ house in Cambridge for a series of investigations into her mediumship. According to reports by the investigators such as Richard Hodgson and magician John Nevil Maskelyne, all the phenomena observed in the Cambridge sittings were the result of trickery.[39][40] Her fraud was so clever, according to Myers, that it “must have needed long practice to bring it to its present level of skill.”[41] However, despite the exposure of her fraud, Myers was convinced some of her phenomena was genuine.[32]
Clinical neurologist Sebastian Dieguez has commented that Myers “was seriously duped by many people”.[42]
Phantasms of the living
Myers was the co-author of the two-volume Phantasms of the Living (1886) with Gurney and Frank Podmore which documented alleged sightings of apparitions. Myers wrote an introduction and concluding chapter.[43] The two volumes consist of 701 cases of alleged spontaneous apparitional communications. It also explored a telepathic theory to explain such cases.[44] Psychical researcher Thomas Walker Mitchell commented that “the chief aim of [the] book was to produce a cumulative quasi-statistical proof of telepathy.”[45] It was enthusiastically praised by psychologist William James as a “most extraordinary work…exhibiting untiring zeal in collecting facts, and patience in seeking to make them accurate.”[46]
Some scholars, however, criticised Phantasms of the Living for its lack of written testimony and the time elapsed between the occurrence and the report of it being made.[47] Some of the reports were analysed by the German hallucination researcher Edmund Parish (1861–1916) who concluded they were evidence for a dream state of consciousness, not the paranormal.[48]Charles Sanders Peirce wrote a long criticism of the book arguing that no scientific conclusion could be reached from anecdotes and stories of unanalyzed phenomena.[49] Peirce argued that the stories were “worthless, partly because of the uncertainty and error of the numerical data, and partly because the authors have been astonishingly careless in the admission of cases ruled out by the conditions of the argumentation.”[50]
A strong attack on the book was made by physiologist William Thierry Preyer.[51] Mathematician Simon Newcomb noted that there were many possible natural explanations for the stories including “unconscious exaggeration; the faculty of remembering what is striking and forgetting what is not; illusions of sense, mistakes of memory; the impressions left by dreams; and, finally, deceit and trickery, whether intentional or unconscious.” Because of all these possible factors that were not ruled out, he concluded “there is therefore no proof of telepathy in any of the wonders narrated in these volumes.”[52]
Alexander Taylor Innes attacked the book due to the stories lacking evidential substantiation in nearly every case. According to Innes the alleged sightings of apparitions were unreliable as they rested upon the memory of the witnesses and no contemporary documents had been produced, even in cases where such documents were alleged to exist.[53]Edmund Gurney replied to the criticism, but “could only point to three cases that met Innes’s requirements, one of which later turned out to be fraud”.[54][55]
Another major criticism of the book was that it endorsed the tests of the Creery Sisters as genuine evidence for telepathy. However, in 1887 two of the sisters had been detected in fraud, utilising a code of signals and the third sister confessed to using the signals in the experiments.[56] The psychologist C. E. M. Hansel noted that the stories in Phantasms of the Living were not backed up by any corroborating evidence. Hansel concluded “none of the stories investigated has withstood critical examination.”[57]
Shane McCorristine in his book Spectres of the Self (2010), explores the criticisms of Phantasms of the Living in depth.[58]
Human personality and its survival of bodily death
Myers wrote a small collection of essays, Science and a Future Life which was published in 1893. In 1903, after Myers’s death, Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death was compiled and published. This work comprises two large volumes at 1,360 pages in length and presents an overview of Myers’s research into the unconscious mind.[27][59][60] Myers believed that a theory of consciousness must be part of a unified model of mind which derives from the full range of human experience, including not only normal psychological phenomena but also a wide variety of abnormal and “supernormal” phenomena.[59][60] In the book, Myers believed he had provided evidence for the existence of the soul and survival of personality after death. The book cites cases of automatic writing, hypnotism, mediumship, possession, psychokinesis, and telepathy.[61]
In Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death, Myers speculated on the existence of a deep region of the subconscious mind, which he termed the “subliminal self”, which he believed could account for paranormal events. He also proposed the existence of a “metetherial world,” a world of images lying beyond the physical world. He wrote that apparitions are not hallucinations but have a real existence in the metetherial world which he described as a dream-like world. Myers’ belief that apparitions occupied regions of physical space and had an objective existence was in opposition to the views of his co-authors Gurney and Podmore who wrote apparitions were telepathic hallucinations.[62]
It was well received by parapsychologists and spiritualists, being described as “the Bible of British psychical researchers”.[63] Théodore Flournoy and William James both positively reviewed the book.[64] It was negatively reviewed by psychologist George Stout who described the concept of the subliminal self as “baseless, futile, and incoherent.”[65]Andrew Lang and Gerald Balfour were unconvinced about some of Myers ideas.[2]William McDougall in a detailed review for Mind also criticised the book.[60] French psychologist Henri Delacroix commented that Myers “experimental metaphysics” was a failure.[66] Psychologist G. T. W. Patrick criticised Myers concepts as a “metaphysical, not a psychological hypothesis.”[67]
Myers’ book greatly impressed Aldous Huxley. In 1961, Human Personality was re-published with Huxley’s foreword.[68]
Kant proposed a peace program to be implemented by governments. The “Preliminary Articles” described these steps that should be taken immediately, or with all deliberate speed:
“No secret treaty of peace shall be held valid in which there is tacitly reserved matter for a future war”
“No independent states, large or small, shall come under the dominion of another state by inheritance, exchange, purchase, or donation”
“National debts shall not be contracted with a view to the external friction of states”
“No state shall by force interfere with the constitution or government of another state”
“No state shall, during war, permit such acts of hostility which would make mutual confidence in the subsequent peace impossible: such are the employment of assassins (percussores), poisoners (venefici), breach of capitulation, and incitement to treason (perduellio) in the opposing state”
Three Definitive Articles would provide not merely a cessation of hostilities, but a foundation on which to build a peace.
I.—“The civil constitution of each state shall be republican.”
II.—“The law of nations shall be founded on a federation of free states.”
III.—“The rights of men, as citizens of the world, shall be limited to the conditions of universal hospitality.”
Kant’s essay in some ways resemble modern democratic peace theory. He speaks of republican, Republikanisch (not democratic) states, which he defines to have representative governments, in which the legislature is separated from the executive. Kant claims that the republics will be at peace with each other, as they will tend towards pacifism more so than other forms of government. The essay does not treat republican governments as sufficient by themselves to produce peace: universal hospitality (ius cosmopoliticum) and a federation of free states are necessary to consciously enact his six-point program.
Kant also specifies the rights universal hospitality affords strangers: to visit a foreign land under the presumption that they will be treated without hostility if presenting without malintent—as well as its limitations:”the nation may send [the visitor] away again, if this can be done without causing his death” and that it is “not a right to be treated as a guest to which the stranger can lay claim” [6]—these rights being necessary to accomplish the ultimate goal of intercommunication and peaceful relations between nations.
Kant argued against a world government, arguing it would be prone to tyranny.[4] The preferable solution to anarchy in the international system was to create a league of independent republican states.[4]
In the early days of the First World War, H.G. Wells stated that it would be “the war to end war“, on the grounds that, once Prussian militarism and autocracy was replaced by popular government, European nations would not ever go to war with each other, because militarism and armaments resulted from the German threat. This idea was much repeated and simplified over the next four years; at present, the idea that democracy by itself should prevent or minimize war is represented by various democratic peace theories.
In 1909, Norman Angell relied only upon the second leg, arguing that modern commerce made war necessarily unprofitable, even for the technically victorious country, and therefore the possibility of successful war was The Great Illusion. James Mill had described colonialism as outdoor relief for the upper classes; Joseph Schumpeter argued that capitalism made modern states inherently peaceful and opposed to conquest and imperialism, which economically favored the old aristocratic elites.
This theory has been well developed in recent years. Mansfield and Pollins, writing in the Journal of Conflict Resolution, summarize a large body of empirical work which, for the most part, supports the thesis.[8] There are various exceptions and qualifications which seem to limit the circumstances under which economic interdependence results in conflict reduction. On the other hand, moving beyond economic interdependence to the issue of economic freedom within states, Erik Gartzke has found that economic freedom is about fifty times more effective than democracy in reducing violent conflict.[9]
The third leg is the old idea that a confederation of peaceable princes could produce a perpetual peace. Kant had distinguished his league from a universal state; Clarence Streit proposed, in Union Now (1938), a union of the democratic states modelled after the Constitution of the United States. He argued that trade and the peaceable ways of democracy would keep this Union perpetual, and counted on the combined power of the Union to deter the Axis from war.
Jeremy Bentham proposed that disarmament, arbitration, and the renunciation of colonies would produce perpetual peace, thus relying merely on Kant’s preliminary articles and on none of the three main points; contrary to the modern theorists, he relied on public opinion, even against the absolute monarchy in Sweden.
This is a wonderful report. Volunteers are making thousands of Ukrainian-style dumplings for soldiers and displaced people. They’re stuffed with potato, meat, borscht, or fried fish.
Lead me from death to life, from falsehood to truth; lead me from despair to hope, from fear to trust; lead me from hate to love, from war to peace. Let peace fill our hearts, our world, our universe.
How do ancient stories of talking elephants and singing birds encourage a life of truth, nonviolence and compassion?Gajendra, king of the elephants, attacked by a crocodile, with Vishnu alongside Lakshmi and Garuda; painting on two sheets of paper, India, c1820. Courtesy of the British Museum
Keerthik Sasidharan is a writer whose work has appeared in The Hindu, The Caravan and other publications. He is the author of The Dharma Forest (2019). He lives in New York.
As a child, for every summer vacation, my parents took me to Kerala in southern India to spend three months with my aunt in her large family-estate. It was an age before televisions were widely available and therefore at night-time she told us stories from the vast oeuvre of Indian mythologies called the ‘puranas’. These stories often involved a moral exemplar as a protagonist – a hero who embodied Immanuel Kant’s ‘categorical imperative’ – whose life’s arc exemplified devotion, truth, sacrifice, love and other ennobling ideas. The dramatic twists in these stories came from the gods and their caprice, which tested the commitments of righteous men and women in the face of opportunities to abandon their ideals and save themselves. They invariably never did, at great cost to themselves. My aunt referred to these men and women as ‘symbols of dharma’ (dharma prateekam), although she left that capacious word – dharma – unexplained. Thus, over the years, I learnt stories about Harishchandra the truthful king, Gajendra the worshipful elephant, and others – all of whom were, to my young mind, moral paragons.
For generations, these puranic stories have acted as templates for emulation – learning morality by mimesis – that aimed to break down the natural instincts of selfishness and self-preservation and, instead, rebuild a listener’s inner world in the service of dharma.
The locus of virtue in those stories lay not in ritual or rank but in sustaining commitment to an ideal that demanded some form of sacrifice. When faced with morally complex situations in their own lives – be they a child listening to his aunt, or an audience hearing them from a religious teacher – the listeners could theoretically ask themselves: ‘What would Shravana the filial son do?’ Or: ‘What would Savitri the faithful wife do?’
As a young boy, Mahatma Gandhi had seen a play about the legendary truthful king Harishchandra – a man who sacrifices everything, including his child and wife for the sake of truth-telling. He later wrote about the impact of that story in his life: ‘It haunted me and I must have acted Harishchandra to myself times without number … The thought of it all often made me weep.’
But beyond such instances of moral emulation, at the heart of this pedagogic agenda was also a model of how humans are born: they emerge in a new womb carrying along with them all the deeds and knowledge from their previous lives (the Katha Upanishad from 700-500 BCE summarises this principle as: yatha karma yatha shrutam). The role of these stories is therefore more than just simple moralising: by emulating the actions they prescribe, the stories help cleanse the mind, like a previously used but unwashed utensil, and help improve our abilities to choose better in life. However, nothing is preordained in this pedagogic nudge. Implicit in this model of human birth, or more accurately the emergence of sentient beings, are two outcomes: one can very well ignore these stories and ideals of self-improvement and go on to accumulate more ‘karmic’ muck, or one can live as per these stories and steadily avoid ‘karmic’ burdens. The freedom to choose is yours. Amid all this, there remains a supervening question often left unanswered: what is this dharma that these stories speak of and point towards?
The answer is not easy to arrive at. Even the Mahabharata, that ocean-sized epic tale, reminds us that ‘the essence of dharma is hidden in a cave!’ Vishnu Sukhtankar, the first editor of The Critical Edition of The Mahabharata (1944), writes: ‘I am not going to make the attempt to give you another perfect definition of Dharma, a task which … has taxed better brains than mine.’ But this kind of self-aware humility has not prevented scholars or lay people from forming opinions. A traditional answer has been to look for the etymological origins of ‘dharma’. The root in the Sanskrit language is dhr-, meaning ‘to hold’ or ‘to support’ or ‘to maintain’, and which appears for the first time in the Rigveda – a vast corpus of religious poetry that was arranged in its hymnal form some time during 1400 BCE to 1000 BCE. In Book 8, we find one of its earliest meanings:
Him [the God Indra], the double lofty, whose lofty power holds fast the two world-halves, the mountains and plains, the waters and sun, through his bullishness.
Here, ‘dharma’ refers to the act of preventing the world from falling into chaos. Before the gods performed this act, all was chaos, the world was an unrecognisable inchoateness.
But the word ‘dharma’, and the derived cognates, is a shapeshifter over time, and occasionally even within one text alone. Stephanie Jamison, the co-translator of the monumental Oxford University Press Rigveda (2014), memorably writes elsewhere that, while the word ‘porridge’ has a specific association to Goldilocks in most of our minds, the word ‘oatmeal’ doesn’t carry that same cultural reference. Thus, while a form like dhármanappears ‘63 times’ in the Rigveda and is relatively staid at that stage in the term’s reception history (‘far more “oatmeal” than “porridge”’, as Joel Brereton put it in 2004), this hasn’t helped modern translators, thanks to at least three millennia of meanings that have smuggled into the term since those verses were first composed.
‘Dharma’ was the froth born from performing ritual
This efflorescence of meanings was vividly visible when the German linguist Karl Friedrich Geldner translated the Rigveda in 1928 and used ‘no fewer than 20 renderings’ – from ‘law’, ‘order’, ‘duty’ ‘custom’, ‘quality’ and so on – to describe dharma in various contexts.
In a recent conversation with Bibek Debroy, translator of the epic 10-volume Penguin edition of the Mahabharata (2015), he told me that: ‘The basis of Sanskrit is the verbal root, the dhatu … Looking at it from the point of view of the root, the verbal root – actually [‘dharma’] is very, very precise.’
In this seemingly simple remark, however, lie the seeds of two distinct types of Indian thought, which began from the Rigveda and evolved over time: a ‘verb-centric’ understanding and a ‘noun-centric’ interpretation. As Daya Krishna put it in 1997, the verb-centric view spawned the long-lived Mimamsaka (hermeneutic) traditions that lay a premium on verbal declarations, injunctions, the ritual sacrifice, and ultimately a theology of action (karma) – for which ‘dharma’ was the froth born from performing ritual. In contrast, a noun-centric view grew into the Upanishadic tradition that understood reality as being described by ‘being’ rather than by ‘becoming’. This view elevated non-ritualistic speculations and methods of debate and, importantly, drew a link between reality and knowledge (jnaana). Thus, whereas for the Mimamsaka traditions, ‘dharma’ is tied to instruction and performance of action – as we see in the Mimamsa Sutras of Jaimini, where he instructs: codanaalakshnaartho dharmah (‘Dharma is that referent distinguished by “injunctive verbal force”’) – for the Upanishadic worldview, dharma in its essence is born out of a transcendent ideal: truth (yo vai sa dharmah satyam vai tat; ‘Now, dharma is nothing but the truth’).
By the 4th century BCE, when early Buddhism grew into a movement, it began to contest and reject the primacy of the Vedas. To do so however, it borrowed ideas and images, including that of ‘dharma’, from the Vedic world from which it had emerged. But, unlike the Vedic worldview in which dharma is first seen as the order-making mechanism and then, over time, acquires its ritualistic flavour, in the Buddha’s discourse, it acquires a different and more radical meaning.
In the Vedic world, despite its luminously sceptical passages – such as in the Nasadiya Sukta (the Hymn of Creation), in which the poets question the existence of the gods themselves – the poetic utterances are seen as a revelation, a transcendent reality witnessed by the seers (‘drashta’). The result was a verbal universe in which words and the world were marked by ‘substantiality’. They contained real stuff – whatever that may be – and were held together by foundations.
In contrast, in the Buddha’s discourses, words and concepts were presented as fluid potentialities. In Pali, the language of the early Buddhist works, our reality is born from an intricate play of sounds and symbols that rise and fall. As David Kalupahana writes, this was a world where ‘a word occurs’ (akkharam anupatati) or ‘a conception takes place’ (sankham gacchati). In the Buddha’s world, while the Pali word dhamma (which is dharma in Sanskrit) is often translated as ‘statements of doctrine’, the dhamma emerges as a set of instructions to annotate a model of reality that is understood to be an assemblage of phenomena that arises and dissipates.
Krishna is an embodiment of an ancient idea of dharma that is of this world and beyond it
Over the next two millennia, various schools of Hindus and Buddhists sought to establish the grounds – metaphysical, linguistic, epistemological and ontological – out of which their respective understandings of dharmas or dhammas arose. That didn’t preclude dharma from becoming an ideological complex of norms, rules and rituals that binds society together. This transformation came, despite the Buddha, who loved using similes, saying that the dhamma was merely a ‘raft’ that helped us cross from this side of the river of life to the other. Inbuilt in his description was a pragmatic instinct teaching us that, on occasion, we would have to forsake what is considered the ‘good’ in order to discover a more moral order.
If there is a figure in Indian thought who embodies this pragmatic spirit, it is the god Krishna who, as Jonardon Ganeri writes in 2007, often plays the role of a ‘moral expert’, one who parses between choices that present themselves as duties with opposing outcomes and offers a solution that doesn’t explicitly change tradition, but at the same time refuses to reduce the truth of a situation into a banal either-or. Krishna’s understanding of dharma allows him to happily abandon some commitments to transcendent ideals in order to facilitate the wider goal of human flourishing and social stability. In this, Krishna is the opposite of the puranic heroes my aunt was telling me about.
Dharma, Krishna suggests, is not a programme to achieve moral perfection but rather a practice to live better with each passing day, contingent on where we find ourselves in history and society. His is a form of radical conservatism – conservative because he values the preservation of a traditional social order, and yet radical because he enjoins the individual to see beyond the world and its accompanying despair, and sublimate one’s ego unto a theophanic vision of god. And, amid these socioreligious valences, Krishna is also an embodiment of an ancient idea of dharma that is of this world and beyond it, a way of being in which, as Arindam Chakrabarti put it in 2020: ‘one lives, with a wonderful lightness, without any interest in world-affirmation or world-denial’.
By 200 BCE, the proliferation of urban settlements, the rise of non-Vedic religions such as Buddhism and Jainism, and the new Indo-Hellenic cultural discourse following Alexander’s invasion in 327 BCE gave rise to a great tradition of textual codification and exegesis on ‘dharma’ as a lived practice. This enterprise would go on until the 18th century and birth a vast collection of works called Dharmashastras and Dharmasutras – the treatises and formulae to instantiate dharma and verify the fidelity to its practice. Thus arose a vast set of conventions and rules on how to live, how to organise society, whom to marry, what to eat, and more – all of which were formulations on social hierarchies and establishment of order. The overwhelming set of duties imposed in these texts is on the householder. These duties emphasise moderation, and a heightened and explicit concern for one’s spouse, child, the priests, the animals, one’s own labours, one’s own community, and the gods. There is no ambition to evangelise another into one’s own way of life – in fact, illicit relationships are a perpetual horror in these texts.
What animates these elaborate sets of injunctions and prohibitions is the recognition that humans are alive but for the briefest of moments – ‘Time cooks all beings, inside its own self,’ says the aged warrior Bhishma to his great-nephew Yudhishtira. In the worldview of many of these Dharmashastras, the great enemy comes in three forms: chaos – which includes upheaval of political order (‘Of all the dharmas, the King’s dharma is the most important and it protects all the other dharmas’); marrying someone who violates your commitment to rituals and duties; and, ultimately, the abandonment of the gods themselves.
The most famous of these legalistic dharma works (by the early colonial period in 18th century) was the Manu-smriti, or Manava-dharma-shastra – attributed to the sage Manu, who devised an archipelago of norms and customs that has lasted, in varying forms, for nearly 2,000 years. Dharma, in the Manu-smriti, is both a verb – the performance of duties – and a noun – a religious life within an action and penance system (dharmavidhi and prayschittavidhi). Much of Manu’s work is dedicated to affixing the lives and routines of the ritualists (the brahmana) and the warlords (the kshatriya), while the merchants (vaishya) and the artisans (shudra) are barely discussed. For Manu, women threatened to unravel his carefully architected social system of restraints and duties. To his view, they inspired moral delinquency and, inevitably, a drift from one’s commitments – and yet he also insists that women were to be seen as sources of blessings, and warns men against abusing women.
Contradictions of this sort are rife in Manu’s text. Inevitably, the social norms derived from Manu’s words have sought to sustain a heterogenous society through carefully calibrated hierarchies – and in turn allowed for supremacist and chauvinistic furies to inflict a great amount of human suffering and indignities on the rest. And yet, the sociological mystery is that Manu’s dictums survived, flourished, and were innovated upon for millennia – which indicates that the story of a hierarchical and heterogenous society is more complex than a simple tale of oppression and cruelty.
‘Dharma’ became a site for critical reflection and social actions in the age of colonialism
Manu’s worldview operationalises ‘dharma’ by devising a social order that adheres closely to what is called the varnaashrama ideology – a neologism comprised of two capacious words: varna and ashrama. Here, ashrama is understood to refer to the four stages along a life’s path: brahmacharya – the celibate student; grihastha – the householder; vanaprastha – the forest dweller; and sanyasa – the renunciate. The other component of the varnaashrama ideology is the more fraught term of varna, which was often used to describe a community of fellow spiritual aspirants whose livelihoods were marked by a similar material basis. Thus, we often find mention of four varnas – priests, warlords, merchants, labourers – which has, over the centuries, been conflated with jaati, an occupational cluster that, in turn, was translated and traduced into an assorted repertoire of lived realities and symbolisms that we ascribe to ‘caste’ today.
While for many over the centuries dharma has been tantamount to a defence of the caste system, the opposite has often been true as well: dharma as an ideal of flourishing that transcends caste. The Mahabharata is explicit that there are often occasions when demands on individual conduct supersede all else. The primordial man, Swayambhu Manu, advises: ‘One must also entirely ignore dharma that concerns jati, shreni, adhivasa, and family. These are not dharma, because there is no real dharma in them.’ But elsewhere, Bhishma who views the world from the perspective of governance and order cautions that the god Vishnu is ‘not affectionate towards those who do not follow the dharma of their jati and varna’. The Mahabharata’s attitude is one of a begrudging pragmatism. It seems to say that human societies will inevitably cleave into groups and clusters, often on the basis of economic arrangements, and form rules unto themselves. These cleavages, the Mahabharata suggests, will happen despite knowing very well that such boundaries are man-made and that the truly enlightened one sees no divisions. It begrudgingly accepts that both truths – the truth of groups, and the truth of the individual insight – will inevitably thrive and contest for primacy.
When the British actively began to study India – scholasticism financed by organised loot – it had an unexpected impact. A new class of Indians who were slowly coming to terms with the surrounding oppressive air of colonialism – and yet felt seduced by the new intellectual spaces opened up by access to European knowledge – began to think anew about dharma. They had their feet in both worlds – the world of European academia and the world of traditional Hinduism, often called ‘Sanaatana dharma’, the eternal dharma. From the radical poet Bankim Chandra Chatterjee to the reforming politician Mahatma Gandhi, ‘dharma’ became a site for critical reflection and social actions in the age of colonialism.
At the same time, the social stratification that had been preserved in the name of dharma, and had survived centuries, had begun to fall apart. The ‘untouchables’ – now called Dalits, the group that had suffered the most in this extraordinarily cruel arrangement of social stigma, punishments and taboo – organised in 1935 under the guidance of the constitutional scholar B R Ambedkar and passed a resolution with the title ‘To the Untouchable Community: A New Message of a New Manu’. Their willingness to co-opt the persona of Manu in order to announce their manifesto of social independence speaks to the extraordinary influence of his social order. In the early 1950s, Ambedkar and many of his followers converted to Buddhism, an act of self-redescription that revealed the importance of ‘dhamma’ as a word containing other readings filled with emancipatory promise. Ambedkar’s move was an active effort to separate, through a study of dharma, the ideal of flourishing from the orthodox social arrangements that had encrusted around it.
This brief social history has left little space to ask why dharma as a philosophical construct acquired such pre-eminence over time. To attempt to answer this, especially from our modern perspective, we must return to the singular and schismatic presence of the philosopher-saint Adi Shankara (8th century CE) with whom, as the contemporary scholar Pratap Bhanu Mehta describes, every person who thinks about Indian intellectual history – from the Marxist D D Kosambi and the anticolonialist Gandhi to the mystic-poet Aurobindo and the contemporary politician Narendra Modi – is forced to wrestle. It is from the rejections, reactions and reconciliations to the ontological framework that Shankara laid out, and the acts of textual privileging he performed, that emerge the main strands and their contestations that make up modern-day Hinduism. In his commentary on the Bhagavad Gita – the philosophical poem that appears in the epic Mahabharata – Shankara offered the ‘definition’ ‘praaninaam saakshaad abhyudaya nihshsreyasa hetu ya sa dharma’, or ‘Dharma is that which occasions (material) wellbeing and (spiritual) liberation of all sentient beings.’
Here, dharma is defined indirectly, by which I mean dharma is the ‘A’ that allows for ‘B’ to occur. As is often the case with descriptors and knowledge structures from the ancient world, this description is analogical in nature and opens itself up to more questions. Shankara’s definition opens up two possible avenues to explore further. One, ‘dharma’ appears as a capacious word in whose name dogmatism, radicalism, iconoclasm, conservatism and humanism can be advocated as long as the speakers of those words purport to speak of human welfare. This poses the natural, and seemingly intractable, question of how are we to recognise whether an action comports with dharma?
A traditional answer to this question is to try to stick to the rituals and the ways of one’s ancestors. This way of facilitating dharma relies on the reproducibility of virtue through repetition of action across generations. It relies on a largely self-sufficient social and endogamous marital arrangement – both of which the caste system ensured. But the world intrudes in ways we can’t force. Even Shankara – the fountainhead of modern Hinduism – was deemed in violation of rituals at specific junctures in his life. In essence, if we assess our fidelity to dharma by solely inspecting our commitment to ritual, we may preserve a way of living but inevitably run the risk of engaging in sterile debates that have little to do with the challenges of a fast-changing world.
Dharma insists that the virtues of the child burnish the life of an imperfect parent
The other approach to the question of how to discern dharma in an age when everything is in a flux is to rely on a heuristic by which Aristotle evaluated whether a person was a eudaemon, or one who flourished by living ‘an active life of reason and virtue’. Aristotle asked us to evaluate a life by awaiting to see ‘how the grandchildren turn out, as it were,’ as Owen Flanagan wrote in 2011. In this sense, whether the aunt who told me those puranic stories about dharma exemplars herself lived a life of dharma can be known only by seeing the conduct and virtue of my grandchildren. This approach runs in the face of our modern, progressive views, whereby the individual and her actions are the sole locus of our investigation seeking to evaluate her life.
This way of thinking about dharma makes explicit the assumption that the life of a human can’t be evaluated on its own terms. It sees a human being as striving to disentangle a net of correlated commitments – to one’s self and to other sentient beings. Thus, while karma may very well operate by means wherein the sins of the parent are visited upon the child, this view of dharma insists that the virtues of the child burnish the life of an imperfect parent. This dharma-centric view remains avowedly of this world, one in which the ends are an intergenerational commitment that recognises our historically and socially contingent selves, to the flourishing of an ever-expanding locus of affiliations.
The other consequence of Shankara’s definition imposes upon each historical age the burden to critically rediscover what constitutes ‘wellbeing’ and ‘liberation’. This poses the obvious problem of who is to be included in our circle of concern? Who is entitled to ‘wellbeing’ and ‘liberation’? Who gets to decide that? As our concern for fellow beings grows larger in a democratic age, in due course, there will inevitably arise questions on what constitutes dharma when we begin to include all organic life and even artificial general intelligence in our ever-expanding taxonomy of sentience.
A more immediate and vexing question is how to understand dharma when opposing but equal truths force us into an ethical cul-de-sac. If economic growth results in poverty reduction but also in environmental degradation, whose dharma must one privilege? The result is that, when we begin to think about ‘dharma’ as a form of rule-dependent flourishing, we come face to face with a heterodoxy of dharmas – such as swa-dharma: the dharma of the individual; yuga-dharma: the dharma of the zeitgeist; and so on. One consequence of this approach to understanding dharma as the series of contesting ethical frameworks is that it forces us to live in the present rather in some reactionary idyll of the past or in the revolutionary utopias of the future. This makes us ask questions of composition (how do we put together different viewpoints?), of social choice (how should we determine which viewpoint matters more?), and about the relationship between dharma and the manifoldness of reality. If we take Shankara’s definition seriously, by virtue of the questions it forces us to face up to, we are made to acknowledge the non-onesidedness of reality – we are nudged into non-radicalism.
A few years ago, before my aunt passed away, I visited her and, out of nostalgia, asked her to tell me another of her stories from the puranas. She demurred and laughed, and then said: ‘Those are stories for children.’ A moment later, with a hint of her old steely self, she added: ‘Are you still a child?’ I wasn’t sure what the appropriate answer was. Maybe I had grown past those stories of talking elephants and singing birds who sacrifice themselves for some transcendent ideal. Or perhaps she was nudging me to recognise that one can never outgrow those stories, for to do so would be to outgrow the seeds of dharma contained within them: truth (satya), nonviolence (ahimsa) and compassion (anrishamsya). Seeds that she, and generations of storytellers before her, hoped would one day grow into a tree of dharma.
Links & books
Given the vast expanse of time through which ‘dharma’ has travelled as a concept and social phenomenon, this list of books is but a subset of the works that engage with it directly or otherwise; they are largely accessible as well.
The historical experience of women is understudied, barring for a few stellar exceptions, such as Mandakranta Bose’s Women in the Hindu Tradition (2010) and Kathryn Blackstone’s Women in the Footsteps of the Buddha (1998). Hajime Nakamura’s Gotama Buddha (1977) has nudged me into many happy exploratory digressions. Mark Siderits’s Buddhism as Philosophy (2nd ed, 2021) is a marvel of lucidity and exposition. Donald R Davis, Jr’s The Spirit of Hindu Law (2010) and Patrick Olivelle’s A Dharma Reader (2016) open our eyes to many forgotten interpretations of dharma. Bimal Krishna Matilal’s Ethics and Epics (2002) and David Kalupahana’s Causality (1975) are examples of how to think widely while living inside a tradition.
Antarctic areas reach 40C above normal at same time as north pole regions hit 30C above usual levels
A drop of water falls off an iceberg melting in the Nuup Kangerlua Fjord in south-west Greenland. Earth’s poles are undergoing simultaneous extreme heat. Photograph: David Goldman/AP
Startling heatwaves at both of Earth’s poles are causing alarm among climate scientists, who have warned the “unprecedented” events could signal faster and abrupt climate breakdown.
Temperatures in Antarctica reached record levels at the weekend, an astonishing 40C above normal in places.
At the same time, weather stations near the north pole also showed signs of melting, with some temperatures 30C above normal, hitting levels normally attained far later in the year.
At this time of year, the Antarctic should be rapidly cooling after its summer, and the Arctic only slowly emerging from its winter, as days lengthen. For both poles to show such heating at once is unprecedented.
The rapid rise in temperatures at the poles is a warning of disruption in Earth’s climate systems. Last year, in the first chapter of a comprehensive review of climate science, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned of unprecedented warming signals already occurring, resulting in some changes – such as polar melt – that could rapidly become irreversible.
As polar sea ice melts, particularly in the Arctic, it reveals dark sea that absorbs more heat than reflective ice, warming the planet further. Much of the Antarctic ice covers land, and its melting raises sea levels.
Scientists warned that the events unfolding were “historic”, “unprecedented” and “dramatic”.
Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Centre at Pennsylvania State University, said the extreme weather being recorded was exceeding predictions to a worrying extent.
“The warming of the Arctic and Antarctic is cause for concern, and the increase in extreme weather events – of which these are an example – is a cause for concern as well,” he said. “The models have done a good job projecting the overall warming, but we’ve argued that extreme events are exceeding model projections. These events drive home the urgency of action.”
The latest unprecedented weather patterns follow a series of alarming heatwaves in 2021, most notably in the US Pacific north-west, where previous records were shattered by several degrees as temperatures climbed close to 50C.
Mark Maslin, professor of earth system science at University College London, said: “I and colleagues were shocked by the number and severity of the extreme weather events in 2021 – which were unexpected at a warming of 1.2C. Now we have record temperatures in the Arctic which, for me, show we have entered a new extreme phase of climate change much earlier than we had expected.”
The Associated Press reported that one weather station in Antarctica beat its all-time record by 15C, while another coastal station used to deep freezes at this time of year was 7C above freezing. In the Arctic, meanwhile, some parts were 30C warmer than average.
James Hansen, former NASA chief scientist and one of the first to warn governments of global heating more than three decades ago, told the Guardian the heating of the poles was “concerning” and that sea ice in the Arctic this year could shrink far enough to break a decade-old record on its lowest extent.
“The average sea ice thickness has been declining, so it’s ripe for large sea ice loss,” he warned. “The effect of reduced sea ice cover is to amplify Earth’s energy imbalance that’s caused by increasing greenhouse gases (GHGs) — the GHGs reduce outgoing heat radiation, thus causing a net imbalance that’s heating the planet.
“Reduced sea ice cover increases the planetary energy imbalance, as a dark ocean reflects less sunlight than sea ice does.”
When the Knight of Swords comes up to indicate a man, he will be intelligent, subtle and clever. His capacity for abstract thought will be well developed. He is also highly intuitive and perceptive.
His nature will be elusive and ethereal, yet he has a strength and fascination that is hard to deny. He compels attention, except when he doesn’t want it, and at those times you will not even notice him pass by.
Because of the enquiring and analytic nature of his mind, you will often find him involved in occult study, and following spiritual pursuits. Whilst tolerant of those who know less than him, he will not divulge his knowledge easily. Rather those who wish to learn from him must fight to see him clearly, rather than falling for the projections he readily casts around him.
If this man is badly dignified his subtlety turns to manipulation, and his fascination to glamour. In this way, he becomes unprincipled and self-seeking. There is a certain ruthlessness present in the Knight of Swords at all times.
Even when we meet him at his best, he makes a hard task master, and an acutely keen observer. The sword in his hand will quite often be used to cut to the heart of things – and sometimes we will not be comfortable with what is revealed.
When this card comes up to indicate a state of mind in a man not normally seen as a Knight of Swords, we are then dealing with quite another issue. Now we must address the darkest qualities of the card. This is an angry man, who has quite possibly been emotionally hurt, and may well be looking for revenge.
He has the potential to be physically violent and mentally cruel. He is a nasty enemy and somebody who needs to be treated with the utmost caution.
Six experts discuss how worried we should be about its future.
By Charles Homans March 17, 2022 (NYTimes.com)
Early last year, Freedom House, an American organization that since World War II has warned against autocracy and repression on the march around the world, issued a special report on a country that had not usually warranted such attention: its own. Noting that the United States had slid down its ranking of countries by political rights and civil liberties — it is now 59th on Freedom House’s list, slightly below Argentina and Mongolia — the report warned that the country faced “an acute crisis for democracy.” In November, the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, an influential Stockholm-based think tank, followed suit, adding the United States to its list of “backsliding democracies” for the first time.
The impetus for these reassessments was Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election results and the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol that followed. But as the reassessments themselves noted, those shocks to the system hardly came out of nowhere; like the Trump presidency itself, they were both products and accelerants of a process of American democratic erosion and disunion that had been underway for years and has continued since. In states across the country, Republican candidates are running for office on the platform that the 2020 election was stolen — a view held by about three-quarters of Republican voters. Since the beginning of 2021, Republicans in at least 25 state legislatures have tried, albeit mostly unsuccessfully, to pass legislation directly targeting the election system: bills that would place election oversight or certification in the hands of partisan legislatures, for instance, and in some cases even bills specifically punishing officials who blocked attempts to overturn the 2020 election outcome in Trump’s favor. And those are just the new developments, happening against a backdrop of a decade-long erosion of voting rights and a steady resurgence of political extremism and violence, and of course a world newly at war over the principles of self-determination and democracy.
How bad is it, really? We convened a panel of experts in an attempt to answer that question: political scientists who have studied the lurching advances and retreats of democracy in other countries and the dynamics of American partisanship; a historian of and activist for civil rights in the United States; and Republican legal and political operatives who guided the party to victories in the past and are now trying to understand its current state.
The Panelists:
Carol Anderson is the Charles Howard Candler Professor of African American Studies at Emory University. She is the author of “One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy.”
Benjamin Ginsberg practiced election law for 38 years, representing Republican candidates, elected officials and party committees. He is co-chair of the Election Officials Legal Defense Network, a distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution and a lecturer at Stanford Law School.
Sherrilyn Ifill will step down this month after nearly a decade as president and director-counsel of the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense Fund.
Steven Levitsky is professor of government and director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University. He is co-author (with Daniel Ziblatt) of “How Democracies Die.”
Sarah Longwell is a founder of Defending Democracy Together and executive director of the Republican Accountability Project. She is also the publisher of The Bulwark.
Lilliana Mason is an associate professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University and the SNF Agora Institute. She is the author of “Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity.”
Charles Homans: Steven, when you and Daniel Ziblatt published “How Democracies Die” in 2018, you considered the possible futures ahead of us as a country after Donald Trump’s presidency. And you concluded that the likeliest scenario was maybe not the worst outcome — full-blown authoritarianism — but a moderately grim one: an era “marked by polarization, more departures from unwritten political conventions and increasing institutional warfare.” How do you think that prediction holds up?
Steven Levitsky: I think it was broadly right. Trump didn’t consolidate an autocracy. But things got a lot worse more quickly than we expected. Even though our book was considered a little on the alarmist side when it was published, I think we were insufficiently alarmed.
We did not anticipate the rapid and thoroughgoing Trumpization of the Republican Party. We did not consider the Republican Party to be an antidemocratic force when we wrote the book in 2017. Today I consider the Republican Party to be an antidemocratic force. That’s a big change. We thought that there were elements in the party capable of constraining Trump four years ago. We were wrong. And we never anticipated anything remotely like the attempted presidential coup of 2021.
Sarah Longwell: I agree. When I co-founded Republicans for the Rule of Law in 2018, I looked at Trump’s victory in 2016 and thought, OK, this is an accident of history. I would have told you that Trump is a cancer on the party, but if you cut him out, you know, there’s enough institutional memory that the party will bounce back. But Trump metastasized, right? He reconstituted much of the party in his image. In 2022, there are hundreds of mini-Trumps running for office.
That Jan. 6 happened isn’t the most surprising part. What is most alarming is that Trump wasn’t held accountable for it, and that the party has decided today that, even after he incited an insurrection, he should still be the leader of the party. People like Tim Scott — people that you might have said, “These are the good, reasonable, post-Trump Republicans,” the people I counted on to constrain him — are now happy to be considered for his vice-presidential candidate and to endorse him for 2024.
Sherrilyn Ifill: I think that it’s really important for us not to begin with Trump. I have repeatedly described Trump as an accelerant. But he was able to accelerate something that already existed. One of the issues that I’ve been most frustrated by is the failure of so many of those who really study democracy, and who see themselves as people who are committed to democracy and democratic ideals, to see the signs that were quite apparent long before Trump came into office. Things like voter suppression against Black voters, or police officers killing unarmed Black people with impunity, were treated as a race issue and not a democracy issue, when if we saw them in any other country, we would recognize them as indicators of something being wrong with a democracy.
Carol Anderson: With Obama, there was this narrative: “Woo, we have crossed the racial Rubicon! We have overcome! We put a Black man in the White House!” Without looking at the data that shows that a majority of white people did not vote for Barack Obama and that they have not voted for a Democratic candidate for president since 1964, the year Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act.
Ifill: Our democracy was in terrible trouble when we had a Black president and a Black attorney general, and there was this thin veneer that we were moving in one direction. I remember at the time being in a meeting with President Obama and saying: “Let me explain to you what is happening in Texas. Let me explain to you what’s happening in Alabama.” After the Supreme Court decided the Shelby County v. Holder case, which removed the preclearance provision, a critical provision from the Voting Rights Act, there was this wave of voter-suppression laws that were happening around the country with very explicit statements from Republican leaders of those states, saying, “We’re free and clear now.”
The Legal Defense Fund and other civil rights organizations were litigating cases in 2014 in Texas and North Carolina. And in both of those cases, you had courts saying that the legislatures had passed these laws for the purpose of discriminating against Black voters. That’s kind of a big deal. That sounds to me like a democracy problem. That is a problem that existed before Trump.
Homans: In the past year, there have been many more state-level Republican legislative efforts to pass laws on voting in the vein of the 2013 and 2014 laws you mentioned, and also more novel legislation directly targeting the election system — though very few of those bills actually passed. Congressional Democrats spent a lot of last year trying to respond to all this legislatively. Their first move was the For the People Act: a sweeping bill that Democrats passed in the House (though not in the Senate) in 2019. It mostly addressed longstanding Democratic priorities regarding voting rights, gerrymandering and campaign-finance reform, not the new election-related concerns, and it ran into total Republican opposition and the unwillingness of some Senate Democrats to scrap the filibuster to pass it. After that, Democrats introduced narrower bills like the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, but so far they have run aground on the same obstacles. Now we finally have a small, bipartisan group of senators exploring whether it would be possible to at least fix holes in the Electoral Count Act, an archaic and confusing 19th-century law that Trump tried to use to overturn the election in 2020.
Did the Democrats blow what might have been their one chance to avert a future constitutional crisis by making it, in effect, about the whole fight over voting — which is to say, over race — in America? Or were the Republicans never going to go along with this anyway?
Benjamin Ginsberg: The elections bills the Democrats proposed included the reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act, which had historically gotten significant Republican support. For whatever reason, the Democrats layered their proposal extending the Voting Rights Act into a massive bill with numerous provisions that, from a Republican perspective, were all designed to gain them partisan advantage: taking redistricting away from legislatures by mandating commissions, after failing to flip any state legislative chambers despite spending many millions of dollars; public funding from the U.S. Treasury for political candidates; endorsing statehood for the heavily Democratic District of Columbia to offset the party’s decline in rural states; changing the makeup of the Federal Election Commission; and trying to create a one-size-fits-all set of voting rules in all 50 states. Including this political wish list with the Voting Rights Act provisions was a political miscalculation and a huge disservice to the Voting Rights Act. By making it all such a partisan power play, Democrats poisoned the well for Republican support, which meant they also couldn’t win over Democratic senators who did not believe the filibuster should be broken to pass a partisan bill.
Ifill: Ben is right that the Voting Rights Act had long been a bipartisan bill and had received overwhelming Republican support of each reauthorization. But the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act was a proposed amendment to the Voting Rights Act that was decoupled from the other provisions that Ben talked about, which, I agree, were much more likely to draw partisan resistance. But the only Republican senator willing to vote for just moving that bill to debate was Lisa Murkowski. Just one.
Ginsberg: But I think there were reasons for that. The John Lewis act did not fix the coverage formula of which jurisdictions would be subject to preclearance of their voting changes in a way Republicans could embrace as not targeted at them and designed to give Democrats an electoral advantage. Democrats made the Voting Rights Act part and parcel of a partisan bill that was never designed to win any Republican support.
Ifill: I did work on the bill, and there was a lot of attention to making sure the bill was in fact not targeted at any particular state. I think the truth is, having been freed from the preclearance provisions, why would you want to now be back under them if not being under them is working for you and your party? I was in a meeting with about 13 Republicans talking about these bills last summer, and I remember one Republican senator said: “Well, we’ve never been covered by the Voting Rights Act. So why would we agree to a bill with nationwide coverage that would now suddenly cover us? Why would I impose on my constituents something that they’ve never had to comply with before?”
I think we in this country tend to think of civil rights legislation as being about advancing the fortunes or the power of particular groups of people and not as pro-democracy legislation. I started out as a civil rights lawyer in 1988, and one of the lawsuits I was involved in was a voting rights case against then-Gov. Bill Clinton. The first case that I put together myself that went up to the Supreme Court, the person who argued it with us for the Justice Department was the then-solicitor general, Ken Starr. So this is something of a new phenomenon, where it’s impossible for Republicans to imagine that they have something to gain in a piece of legislation that is really pro-democracy legislation, because what they’re counting on is whether it would disadvantage them in the next election. That’s not how Republicans voted in 2006, when the Senate voted 98 to 0 to reauthorize the Voting Rights Act.
Lilliana Mason: The important thing is to remember that the parties are not static objects. They have been changing consistently and gradually in a single direction since the civil rights legislation of the 1960s. Republicans and Democrats had to work together to pass that legislation, but the legislation itself was a signal to Southern white conservative Democrats that this was maybe not their party anymore. But because partisanship is such a strong identity, it took a generation for those people to not just leave the Democratic Party but join the Republican Party. That process happened so gradually that it was sort of hard to see for a lot of people. What Trump did was to come in and basically solidify that trend.
For a recent article, I worked with co-authors to look at data from interviews conducted with people in 2011 and then again in 2016, 2017, 2018. You can predict who’s going to like Trump in 2018 based on their attitudes in 2011 toward African Americans, Latinos, L.G.B.T.Q. Americans and Muslims. And those are people coming not just from the Republican Party; they’re also coming from the Democratic Party, they’re independents. Trump basically worked as a lightning rod to finalize that process of creating the Republican Party as a single entity for defending the high status of white, Christian, rural Americans.
It’s not a huge percentage of Americans that holds these beliefs, and it’s not even the entire Republican Party; it’s just about half of it. But the party itself is controlled by this intolerant, very strongly pro-Trump faction. Because we have a two-party system, we effectively empowered 20 to 30 percent of the country that is extremely intolerant and doesn’t really believe in democracy; we’ve given them a whole political party. And the last time we did that was really around the Civil War.
Homans: Sarah, I’m curious how that squares with your experience. You’ve spent the past several years working in various organizations to mobilize opposition to this faction within the Republican Party, but you’ve also been regularly conducting focus groups to explore why Trump has elicited so much support within that party.
Longwell: I still try to really remain optimistic about the goodness and the decency of a lot of Americans and of parts of the Republican Party. I have to. I mean, the old Republican Party did support the Voting Rights Act. But there was this recessive gene in the party that went through the Pat Buchanans and Sarah Palins. The party would say, “Palin can have the vice presidency” — like, she’ll be a nationalist-populist type, and that’s going to sate this recessive gene. And of course, Trump turned it into the dominant gene.
But I don’t want to let Democrats off the hook entirely here. You know, when I started doing the focus groups, I would ask G.O.P. voters who really didn’t like Trump why they voted for him. And the No. 1 answer you would get was: “I didn’t vote for Donald Trump. I voted against Hillary Clinton.” A lot of that is the longstanding hatred Republicans have for the Clintons and probably a bit of sexism as well. But there is also a reaction to a Democratic Party that is moving left and has a more difficult time appealing to swing voters. It is increasing negative polarization: I hate their side more than I like my side. And the cultural-war stuff is so much of it now. Whether it’s critical race theory, defund the police or the fight over using pronouns, Democrats often sound like aliens to many voters — including Black and Latino voters. Republicans have been increasing their support among minorities, because often these groups are more culturally conservative in ways that wedge them off from the current Democratic Party.
Ifill: We’re only talking about political parties. And in my view, that’s part of the problem, because a democracy has many, many elements that hold it together. You need a functioning fourth estate. You need transparency, you need good information, you need education, you need the professions. I mean, I’ve been on this tear about my profession, the legal profession, and how much it has been part of this. We have to be looking at our professions, we have to be looking at the faith community, we have to be looking at our educational system. All of those are elements of what is going to decide the future of American democracy.
Levitsky: I take your point, Sherrilyn, but I think there is a difference. I think that for all the many weaknesses of other institutions, there is nothing within the judiciary, the media and the professions comparable to what is going on in the Republican Party.
Ifill: I agree with you, but I don’t think it’s possible to imagine creating a healthy democracy just by politically overcoming one party without also addressing the weakening of the other institutions that are supposed to constitute a check on the excesses of political parties. How would it have happened without the excesses in our media, the 24-hour megaphone of Fox News and One America News Network? How would it have happened without these other unravelings that actually aided and abetted it, without the judiciary itself? Without the disinformation that social media has allowed on those platforms?
Levitsky: But it’s entirely possible to polarize and break down without social media, right? We did it in the 1850s and 1860s. The Chileans managed to do it in the 1970s; the Spanish did it in the 1930s. And cable media exists in democracies across the world today, and only our Republican Party is going over the railing. I’m not saying the media is performing well, but I think that the central problem is the Republican Party.
Ginsberg: If it’s the Republican Party’s fault and the Republican Party’s fault alone, what’s the solution? What can you do about it? You have to recognize that the Democratic brand is as toxic in rural America as the Trump brand is in the salons of Manhattan and Northwest D.C. There are lots of solutions being proposed, but they’re being discussed only by people who agree with one another. I mean, there’s nobody in this conversation, with the possible exception of Sarah, who has the ability to impact the Republican Party at this point. The country is so divided that the red team and the blue team are not talking to each other, and the dismissal of one side by the other is not going to solve the problem.
And this divide goes beyond the political. There’s a much more fundamental and basic shift that has taken place in the country over the last 50 years, and that’s the “Big Sort” that Bill Bishop has described. We now have a country where people are more and more wanting to live with people like themselves. Now, that certainly has an impact in our politics, but it’s not being driven by our politics. It’s being driven by something deeper.
Homans: Lily, one detail that I found fascinating in your book “Uncivil Agreement” is that according to survey data, since 2008 partisan enmity has increased much more rapidly than disagreement over the parties’ policy positions, which hasn’t changed that dramatically since the late 1980s. At this point, our arguments are not primarily about what the parties stand for but whom they stand for.
Mason: The word “identity” keeps coming up, and this is a really crucial part of it. And remember that we have research about intergroup conflict, right? Don’t look at this as, like, a logical disagreement situation. We’re not disagreeing on what kind of tax structure we should have. We’re not just disagreeing about the role of the federal government in American society. What we’re disagreeing about is increasingly the basic status differences between groups of people that have existed in America for a very long time. One of the things that Nathan Kalmoe and I found in our forthcoming book is that if you look at Democrats and Republicans who really, really hate each other and call each other evil and say the other party is a threat to the United States, the best predictor of that is how they think about the traditional social hierarchy.
White Democrats and Republicans had basically identical levels of racial resentment in 1986; today they’re 40 points apart. So one of the most passionate divides that we’re seeing between the parties right now, more than it has been in decades, is, does systemic racism exist? Does systemic sexism exist? Have we done enough to overcome it? Have we gone too far? When Trump made that an explicit conversation instead of a dog whistle, we actually had to start talking about it. And now we’re having this extremely difficult conversation as a country, and it’s never going to go well. It’s just not. There’s no possible way for us to have this conversation and stay calm and rational and reasonable about it. We’ve never done it before. It’s just very messy, and it’s going to be messy, and it’s going to get even uglier than it currently is.
Homans: With that in mind, we should talk about the resurgence of overt political violence that we’ve seen in this country in the last two years. Obviously this is a country that’s had a whole spectrum of political violence over the course of its history, even its relatively recent history. But the thing that really struck me in 2020 was that we saw things that really looked like partisan violence.
Levitsky: From a comparative perspective, it is really troubling to see mainstream parties’ reactions, or lack of reaction, to acts of political violence. You’re right, Charles, we’ve seen periods of violence before — a lot of violence in the late 1960s and early ’70s, for instance. But it was not partisan violence in the same way that we’re potentially seeing now. And one of the things about democratic breakdowns in Europe in the ’20s and ’30s and in South America in the ’60s and ’70s is that without exception, they were preceded by periods of paramilitary violence that was tolerated, condoned, justified, sometimes encouraged by mainstream political parties.
When acts of violence occur, mainstream parties need to close ranks in defense of democracy. The left, right and center need to stand up and, essentially in unison, publicly and forcefully denounce these acts and hold perpetrators accountable. That’s what needs to be done. And in cases when that happens, like Spain during its 1981 coup attempt or Argentina during its 1987 military uprising, democratic institutions can be shored up. But when one or both mainstream political parties is silent or winks at — or encourages or gives a fist pump to — acts of political violence or declares it “legitimate political discourse,” that is a really troubling sign.
Anderson: What we’re seeing, I liken it to a land, sea and air attack. The land attack is on voting rights. That is one of the ways that you begin to undermine democracy. The sea attack are these attacks against teaching critical race theory and “divisive” topics, so you can erase people from American history and erase the role of various people in American history. And the air attack is the loosening of gun laws that we’re seeing in Texas, Tennessee and Georgia. This is a full-blown assault on American democracy that’s going after voting rights, that’s going after education and that is reinforcing political violence as an acceptable method of bringing about your political aims. That’s where we are, and that’s why this moment is so dangerous.
Ifill: I will share with you some of the most depressing moments for me in the past two years. One, of course, was Jan. 6 — and as you said, Sarah, not just Jan. 6 but the subsequent lining up of Republicans to say this was OK or to be silent. The second one was during the massive protests that happened following the release of the video of the killing of George Floyd, when the administration assembled a constabulary that stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial with masks on. We didn’t know where they were from, whether they were National Guard. We had no idea what their names were. Their badges weren’t visible. There was something so antidemocratic, something so crude about that, that truly frightened me.
And then the third one was the killing by Kyle Rittenhouse of two people in Wisconsin, and the reaction to that — because again, I’m presuming, whatever you believe happened in the interaction, that most of us who are parents would rather our children not have killed people by the time they’re 18 years old. That was a kind of an article of faith among us, as parents: that he would have been treated as a child who engaged in a traumatic activity, and not instead hailed as a hero. The Republican Party had been the party that regularly wagged its fingers at the Black community about our family values, and his mother was greeted with a standing ovation at a G.O.P. dinner. These were the three moments where I thought, This is so off the rails. The places where I would have thought, you know, some Republicans might say enough is enough.
Homans: Ben, you worked for the Republican Party for decades as an election lawyer. Did the way in which the party metabolized Trump’s response to the 2020 election, and the Jan. 6 attack, surprise you?
Ginsberg: The whole thing, honestly, has shocked me. It’s not so much the elected officials who were giving the fist pumps on Jan. 6, because they were sort of predictable in doing that. It’s the many people within the party whom I know and have known for years who are good, decent, principled people, who are silent. It’s the silence of the Republican Party that is most surprising to me and most upsetting. We’ve described the problem in this conversation, but the much more difficult part is figuring out what to do about it. I think that’s what Sarah and I as Republicans have a particular obligation to do. But I don’t know how you bring the people within the Republican Party who should be speaking out to do exactly what you say, Steve, which is to make clear that this violence and election denial is not acceptable.
Homans: Steven, one clear takeaway from “How Democracies Die” is that the resolution to democratic crisis really has to come from within the party that is incubating the anti-democratic movement. This was what the center-right parties in Germany and Italy failed to do in the 1930s, which delivered Hitler and Mussolini to power. But other European center-right parties in Sweden and Belgium, for instance, succeeded in expelling fascist movements within their ranks in that same period.
Levitsky: But I think the Republicans will not reform themselves until they take a series of electoral defeats, major electoral defeats — and given the level of partisan identity that Lily describes, and given an electoral system that is biased toward the Republicans through no fault of their own, that’s not going to happen.
Ginsberg: Well, part of that is, to me, a completely inexplicable series of strategic decisions by the Democrats. To much of the country, the current Democratic disarray does not present a viable alternative. I mean, I hate to go back to the small politics of it all, but honestly, look at what the Democrats in Congress have done legislatively in this session. They control all three branches of government, but they’re constantly squabbling among themselves and failing to pass much of their agenda. I know these debates over the issues they’re having among themselves are heartfelt. But as a strategy, their infighting only makes sense if they’re either trying to lower expectations for 2022 and 2024 — which they have done masterfully — or if they’re trying to reward Republicans for bad behavior, which is what the polls say they’re about to do in the 2022 elections. The Republicans are the bad actors right now, that’s absolutely accurate and true, but the Democratic Party is contributing to this by its own fecklessness and failing to present a viable alternative.
Levitsky: Some of that is obviously true. I think what’s needed in the short term to preserve democracy, to get through the worst of this storm, is a much broader coalition than we’ve put together to date. Something on the lines of true fusion tickets that really brings in Republicans — maybe not a lot of the electorate, but enough to assure that the Trumpist party loses. That would mean bringing in a good chunk of that Bush-Cheney network that’s out there — that in private says the same things that I’ve said, but that has thus far been largely unwilling to speak out publicly — and having them in many cases on the same ticket.
And that means something that we have not seen enough of in the last couple of decades, which is real political sacrifice. It means that lifelong Republicans have to work to elect Democrats. And it means the progressives have to set aside a slew of policy issues that they care deeply about so that the ticket is comfortable to right-wing politicians. And we’re nowhere near that, neither in the Bush-Cheney network nor in the Democratic Party. Having talked to a number of Democratic elected politicians, I can tell you that we are nowhere near Democrats being willing to make those kinds of political sacrifice. But that is what is needed.
Longwell: Republicans have to lose elections, and the Democrats have to build a sufficient pro-democracy coalition, one that spans from Liz Cheney to Liz Warren, to defeat this authoritarian version of the Republican Party. My criticism of Democrats is this: I’ve always been focused on the national debt. Big issue for me; real deficit hawk over here. I still care, but I now have higher-order concerns because I think American democracy is at stake. If you believe that the Republican Party is the existential threat that we have all just laid out, and I agree that it is, then the only thing to do is win elections and defeat antidemocratic Republicans.
And right now, this insane authoritarian party appears poised to kick Democrats’ butts in 2022. Why? Democrats keep putting forward unpopular ideas. We’re being told they’re popular, but they’re not. Voters weren’t interested in “transformational change” from the Build Back Better plan. They wanted Covid under control. They wanted gas prices to be lower. They don’t want runaway inflation. Even voter ID is popular — and I’m not saying you should run on voter ID, but there needs to be a sense among Democrats of, how do we reach the swing voters on the center-right that do think the Republican Party is going too far? Why aren’t they talking to Republicans from the beginning about how to put together a voting rights bill that could pass?
Ifill: I agree with you that the big tent is the way, but I’m skeptical that we get there on the kind of logical proposals that in the past might have attracted a coalition. Going back to the voting bill: The summer of 2021 was devoted to giving Joe Manchin a chance, which he requested, to shop to Republicans a more modest and pragmatic bill, which did include voter ID. We realized that that’s what people like. I think we’re at a point right now where the offer of the sensible deal does not seem to be the kind of thing that people are prepared to coalesce around because of just what you described. There’s a kind of a madness in the air. There’s a kind of a decadence.
But can I ask — because I rarely get this opportunity and Ben is here — I’m wondering, what do you see? Are there avenues to get in to the party that you have known and to tap into some remaining moral integrity and vision of people who are in that party?
Ginsberg: Your question does point up the problem. I’m not at all in lock step with the current Republican Party, but I’m as close as many on the left get to interacting with a partisan Republican. We are so polarized that the different sides just are not talking to each other at all. It seems to me that if there is an avenue that’s going to work, it has to be that we all swallow hard and again start talking to people with whom we really don’t agree, and maybe think we don’t respect, to see if there is common ground. We need, as a country and as individuals in communities, to take the really difficult step of figuring out how to start having those conversations.
Longwell: Part of what has changed is that Republicans have decided that it’s no longer important to be tethered to the truth. Even if Republicans don’t explicitly repeat Trump’s lies about the 2020 election, they help add credibility and fuel to his claims by auditing elections and pushing bills under the guise of “election integrity” even though there’s no evidence of widespread voter fraud in 2020. Just ask Trump’s attorney general, Bill Barr. You guys know who is most worried about democracy being under attack?
Mason: Republicans.
Longwell: Republicans! There’s a good CNN poll on this that asks, do you think American democracy is under attack? 46 percent of Democrats said “yes,” 46 percent of independents said “yes” and a full 66 percent of Republicans said “yes.” That’s because Republicans labor under the delusion that the 2020 election was stolen. So they are the most concerned about democracy. The people who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 thought they were fighting for democracy.
So “democracy” can be kind of an opaque term for voters. The public doesn’t really care about democracy the way we are talking about it in this conversation. And one of the reasons I reach for politics as the best solution is that there has to be a lever by which we defend democracy by winning elections.
Mason: One possible scenario is that we are just in the middle of this very bumpy part of a very necessary road that we have to drive down. And ultimately, we might get to a better place, to a smoother part of the road, or the wheels fall off the car, right? We just don’t know what’s going to happen now because we’re in the middle of it. It feels totally chaotic because it is chaotic. And Trump’s presidency allowed us to see that for the first time.
Ifill: Something that we underestimate, that Trump sold, he sold a kind of freedom. Those rallies, you know, “punch him in the face,” “grab women by the P” — what he offered is: “You know how you’ve been in these meetings, and you’ve been wondering whether to call the person Black or African American, or felt uncomfortable making a joke that might seem sexist? You don’t have to worry about that anymore. Just be you, man. Just be you.” He sold that. And that was incredibly attractive.
Mason: On the other hand, we’ve never explicitly talked about equality in a productive way without also encountering violence. True multiethnic democracy is an elusive goal, and it’s not clear that we know how to get there.
Anderson: What is so scary is that, you know, what generally happens is that if you have a common enemy, it causes a coalescence among these disparate groups. Covid-19 was that common enemy, and instead, you saw greater fissioning between folks, greater division with this common enemy that has killed almost one million Americans. We couldn’t pull it together. We couldn’t rally around. We couldn’t agree on basic facts. That fissioning tells me how in trouble we are. I worry greatly about our democracy because where we should be able to see us coming together, instead of a “we” moment it is an “I” moment. And we’ve got to get to the “we.” We have got to get to the “we.”
Homans: I wonder, though — is there a “we”? I’ve been thinking about this, watching the war in Ukraine, which, besides bringing the matter of democracy’s global health to the fore, has so clearly centered on the question of how nations define things like cultural identity, sovereignty and an agreed-upon history — and what they define them against. Are Americans anywhere close to having a shared answer to that question themselves? Have these events changed your thinking at all about the fragility — or resilience — of democracy, or suggested any lessons we should apply to the United States?
Levitsky: I think it’s too early to tell. This is precisely the sort of issue that should bring our leaders together, as it has in most Western democracies. It certainly is good to see many leading Republicans taking a strong stance against the Russian invasion, but I am skeptical that the MAGA faction will come around in any serious way. And given the extremism of the Republican base, it’s hard to imagine many Republicans giving Biden the support he needs. In short, I’d be mighty pleased if Russian militarism helped bring our parties together, but I’d also be somewhat surprised.
Homans: Is there any reason to think there’s an alternative to the very bumpy road ahead that Lily talked about?
Levitsky: The crossroads that American democracy is at right now are pretty damn close to unique. I mean, we are on the brink of something very new and very challenging. So it is not easy to find solutions, best practices elsewhere; the creation of a truly multiracial democracy is uncharted territory.
Charles Homans covers politics for The New York Times.
This discussion has been edited and condensed for clarity, with material added from follow-up interviews.
This is an excellent discussion. It is depressing at times, but also great to have all of these views in print and widely distributed.
There are a number of threads. One of them is expressed by the last words of the conversation: “the creation of a truly multiracial democracy is uncharted territory.” I think this statement needs to be thought about and discussed by every literate person. It is a very stark statement about what we as a country are up against.
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