a blog by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl

#65. Creative Aggression – “The talk below was given to a luncheon meeting of the New York Institute for the Humanities on November 18, 2011 at Deutches Haus, NYU.

Being among friends, I feel that I can indulge myself a bit of intellectual autobiography and catch you up on what I have been doing in recent years –to this moment when, as many of you know, I have taken on the General Editorship of The Collected Writings of D.W.Winnicott. For me, this new task has turned out to be a continuation of an older one. Let me tell you, then, the story of this continuity –continuity being a hard thing to come by these distracted and distracting days!”

#64. A thinking space – “A talk given at the German Consulate in Toronto on October 24, 2011, to celebrate the opening of an installation of “The Hannah Arendt Denkraum” brought to Toronto from Berlin.

So, let me begin again, in English, by saying that Frau Sparwasser has asked me to reflect on the relevance of Arendt’s thinking for today. To do that, I must first say something about today. It is obvious to all of us, I think, that we live in a time of intense, world-wide anxiety, an anxiety that is spread through the human world like a toxic mist, like a pollution, like a global warming.   Every corner of the world is connected to every other by the various media of news reporting and the various forms of electronic networking, so whatever happens somewhere is transmitted to some degree  everywhere –degrees of truth and distortion and spin being more or less equal in the process…”

#63. In memoriam: Lois (“Bea”) Williams Young Sutton -

“Dear Relatives and Friends, Ladies and Gentleman,

My step-father Ernst Sutton has honored me by requesting that I eulogize his wife Lois Sutton, who departed our family, our community, and our world on the 7^th of October in this year 2011.”

#62. Reading Winnicott – “Last June, I sat on the veranda of the Arowhon Pines Lodge in the Algonquin  National Park –Canada’s largest nature conservancy–watching through a pair of binoculars as a  small loon on the far side of  Little Lake Joe swam along peacefully and then, suddenly, dove out of sight.  I waited for her to surface.  She was gone for so long that I thought I must have missed her reappearance. Then, three hundred yards or so off to the west, she came up, shook the water off her beautiful black and white head, and paddled on, munching on the plant that drooped down from either side of her beak…”

#61. Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship – “Last week, I wrote two short pieces –750 words were allowed for each–for newspapers. One was a reflection on Hannah Arendt’s concept ‘the banality of evil’ for a series that The Guardian of London is doing on ‘Big Ideas.’ The installment of the series on “the banality of evil” was meant to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, about which Arendt had written her controversial Eichman in Jerusalem: A Report on The Banality of Evil (1963).  The second piece was a book review for Toronto’s main newspaper, The Globe & Mail, of a book entitled Childhood Under Siege: How Big Business Callously Targets Children, which appeared last week from Penguin/Canada…”

#60. Tax evasion, tax aversion, and the starve the government movement - “It astonishes people who live in the European social democracies and here in Canada that in America a major party, the Republicans, and its smaller unofficial ally, the Tea Party, not only claim that taxes are too high but that there should never be –no matter what—any increases in taxes, for anybody. The Tea Party members invoke with their name the Boston Tea Party and the precipitating slogan of the American War of Independence: “No taxation without representation.”  But they are not really concerned with representation, they are focused on taxation itself, which they reject. They want to “starve the beast” of government, so voracious for revenue, and thereby shrink it into the “small government” –the smaller the better—they tote as an ideal. That tiny remaining government should, they think, be controlled by them as the grateful people’s triumphant representatives: the people will have representation without taxation…”

#59. Our Children, Our Future - By Lawrence D. Blum, M.D. and Leon Hoffman, M.D.

“Our children and our future are at stake in today’s Congressional budget wars. The current temporary government funding bill passed by Congress will soon expire, and the battle will resume with the House pursuing a budget that will make devastating cuts to programs for children. Even programs that save the government money are threatened. That our leaders can propose this, with so little public outcry, requires explanation. We suggest that there are psychological reasons for this state of affairs…”

#58.  Socio-political Assessment and Diagnosis – “In  my last blog (#57), where I presented some of D.W. Winnicott’s post war reflections on the word “democracy” and what he called the “innate democratic tendency” in societies, I indicated that he thought in terms of a basic analogy between individuals and societies. Both have developmental courses, growing –if they are lucky and well-supported—into maturity or adulthood. Mature individuals want to feel free,  be free,  live in freedom, and democratic societies permit that, or even — the best of them– foster it. He offered some examples of people living in adolescent societies where they could not be free and were actively prevented from coming to any consciousness of what they were doing. So many, as Hannah Arendt said of Adolf Eichmann, acted without thinking. thoughtless; they lived like adolescents in an ultra-peer-pressure gang or peer cult with a charismatic adolescent leader; a formula for comitting atrocities…”

#57. “The Meaning of the Word Democracy”: a Fourth of July reflection Note to my readers – “As you know from my recent blog posts (#54-56), I am in the process of taking on the job of General Editor of The Collected Writings of D.W. Winnicott. Already, with my contract still being worked out, I have become preoccupied by Winnicott and by the magnitude of my task. Because it is proving so difficult to do at the same time this new editing job, my on-going blog-writing job, my lecture preparation obligations, and my co-direction of Caversham Productions (where we have just published an eBook primer entitled What is Psychoanalysis? through Kindle), I have made two decisions. The first is to post to this blog less frequently (every other week or so rather than weekly for at least the next few months, while I get reoriented). And the second is to integrate into the blog, whenever it seems right to me, the work I am doing to learn my way around Winnicott’s papers…”

#56. Go the Fuck to Sleep – “Well, the internet’s astonishing capacity to generate social phenomena was on display again  as ‘a children’s book for adults’ hit the number one spot on Amazon. com’s bestseller list and stayed there  for a month until it was  published on June 14^th. Yes, it hit the bestseller spot through advance sales, before it was published. The first printing of 150,000 was sold out and the book is now in its second printing from a little outfit in New York called Akashic. Meanwhile,  Canongate has acquired the UK and Commonwealth  rights, and Fox 2000 has optioned it for a film…”

#55.  D. W. Winnicott, continued. – “Since I began this blog in May of 2010, I have missed my self-assigned goal of writing a post each week only twice –once in the fall of 2010 when I was traveling in Holland and England without a moment of unscheduled time, and then last week, when I had returned to Toronto after another trip to England (which I wrote about in my last post, #54). Both times, D.W. Winnicott was on my mind, because both times I had been in discussion with the members of the Winnicott Trust about their project of producing a Collected Writings of D. W. Winnicott…”

#54. London weekend diary – “It’s Sunday the 5^th of June, and I’m on my way back to Toronto after a weekend in London where I, wearing my historian of psychoanalysis hat, was doing a consultation with the Winnicott Trust. This is a group which oversees the literary estate of the pediatrician-psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott (1896-1971), and is now preparing a complete edition of his papers in some ten volumes.  The Winnicott papers will be the largest collection in English of a single individual’s psychoanalytic production since the Standard Edition translation of Freud (in 24 volumes) and the comparable Bolligen edition of Jung (in 19 volumes)…”

#53. Lotte Kohler, in memoriam (written for the Hannah Arendt Newsletter, Berlin) – “As we spent the long Easter weekend together at his home in Greenport, Long Island, in April, 2011, Jerome Kohn and I had leisure to return several times to talking about our friend Lotte Kohler, who had died on March 24^th in New York, at the age of 91. Each time, we registered an ‘end of an era’ feeling. A world, organized around Hannah Arendt and her friends and their legacies, had lost its last member, and the one who had become, after the death of Arendt’s literary executor, Mary McCarthy, the chief literary preserver and the reservoir of stories. After she had finished the compiling the Arendt-Jaspers and the Arendt-Bluecher correspondences, Lotte had handed on to Jerry, across a generational difference, the role of the executor and ‘the editor.’ But she had remained at her guard station, watching over the next generation: Jerry edited volume after volume of Hannah Arendt’s posthumous papers, and I brought out a second edition of my 1982 biography of Arendt and a little book to celebrate her centenary, Why Arendt Matters. But now our guardian Lotte is gone…”

#51. Institutionalized  Hypocrisy – “Institutions that are founded on or dependent upon a belief that the people in them are the good people and the others, outside, are bad guys, inevitably turn into cultures of hypocrisy. The leaders of such institutions are the ones who have received word of their own and their followers’ goodness from some source that is higher than they are –some transcendent source or some source in the authoritative past.  No matter what kind of institution they preside over, the leaders are in a hieros class, priestly or like priests, and the institution is a hierarchy under them. This means that they are in charge of absolving all the important members of hypocrisy, starting with themselves, and in charge of preserving the image of the institution as a bastion of goodness.  It also means that they transmit prejudice down the line, particularly against the lowliest and most vulnerable in the institution, which usually means against the women and children. Women and children are most like the outsiders, that is, bad…”

#51. On Hypocrisy – “Every once in a while, a psychological process that is having enormous influence in our national political life is noted in the newspaper, explicitly, and even given the proper name.  This morning, Friday the 13^th of May, that happened in a New York Times editorial entitled ‘Mitt Romney in a Time Warp.’  The moment of illumination was brief, however, and by the second half of the editorial darkness had descended…”

#50. On Revenge (a reflection after the assassination of Osama bin Laden) – “Soon after the Second World War, Donald Winnicott, an English pediatrician who later became the most important pediatric psychoanalyst of his generation and any since, launched himself on a train of thought about hatred and revenge. This train of thought, as he developed it over the rest of his life –he died in 1971—became a seminal contribution to psychoanalysis post-Freud. Winnicott helped psychoanalysis free itself of a profound misunderstanding of human aggression –Freud’s “blunder” (Winnicott’s word) in thinking that there is a “death instinct” at the root of aggression. In England, starting in 1952, Winnicott began to urge Melanie Klein and her followers, among whom he had trained, to give up their rigid and doctrinaire allegiance to the death instinct idea, to destroy (as he put it) the institution of Kleinianism and look again, without distortions, at the phenomena of aggression.  Look specifically at how the roots of aggression lie not in biology but in early caretaker-child interactions where the hate is coming (unconsciously) from the caretakers. Winnicott really opened the variegated territory of aggression to independent, non-doctrinaire psychoanalytic exploration…”

#49. One Small Step for Genkind – “On Thursday, I phoned Kate Swift from Middletown, Connecticut, where I taught at Wesleyan University for almost twenty years, from 1975 until 1993. It was during those years that I had come to know Kate and her partner Casey Miller, who were great heroines of the Women’s Liberation Movement. Everyone knew their article ‘One Small Step for Genkind,’ which had appeared in the New York Times Magazine, 1972. It had sent out into the world a completely revolutionary idea: we could stop using the pronoun “he” for all people, male and female; we could stop referring unthinkingly to ‘mankind,’ leaving half the human species, half of genkind, unacknowledged…”

#48. Women Who Frame the World - “Last week registered pretty high on the scale of bald-faced lying in public. Of course, the topic of abortion does tend to bring out the worst in people for whom abortion represents the greatest threat to Christian civilization as we know it. Opposing abortion is a Crusade, not an effort to speak truthfully. With her usual verve and witty common sense, Gail Collins offered a perfect portrait of the Crusade in her Thursday (4/14)  New York Times column.  Senator Jon Kyl, thankfully in his last term in Congress, lashed out with a lie: ‘If you want an abortion, you go to Planned Parenthood and that’s well over 90 percent of what Planned Parenthood does.’”

#47. On political debate – “American political debate is currently in the vise grip of a sound-bite.  The sound-bite,   ‘limited government,’ has been offered, and not by a neutral party, as THE topic of debate. Now everyone –citizens and their elected representatives—is supposed to say whether they are for it or against it. Yea or nay.  Our debate seems to have something like the structure of a parliamentary debate or a debating society event, but actually it is missing all the crucial debate ingredients. The phrase ‘limited government’ is vague and polemical; ‘limited’ to what?  ’limited’ in what way?  It bears no resemblance to a proposition; nothing like ‘resolved: the state should be limited to X activities.’  Our situation is like the one that engulfed us in the 1970s, when ‘family values’ was the focus of pseudo-debate.  What did ‘family values’ mean?  What was the implied opposite of ‘family values’?  What were you saying yea to, and what nay?  People were being asked to debate about a totalistic conservative world-view represented by a sound-bite…”

#46.  Political Judgment – “You probably have a feeling similar to mine as you get the daily news –in a paper, or online, or on the TV, or through your phone, or however  it is that reportage and images flood in upon you. That is, you are overwhelmed,  your head swims at the sheer volume  of stories, the cascade of events, the clamor of opinion, the strange whirrrr of  history going very, very  fast. It’s hard to think in the rush of it.  And in the rush of emotion, from sadness to elation to fear, as the news  from Japan to Libya to our own towns and cities sweeps in…”

#45. The state as a corporation: a dangerous misunderstanding – “Around the developed world, economists and politicians are wracking their brains to figure out how to reign in the states they work for and lead. The common wisdom is that we are in a historical moment of ‘Taming Leviathan’ –as the cover story of this week’s (March 19^th) issue of The Economist announces. The problem is that ‘many rich-world governments are on course for bankruptcy –unless they raise taxes to levels that would wreck their economies.’  States have been ‘grabbing an ever larger share of the economy’ throughout the 20^th century, and, at the same time, extending their ‘regulatory sweep.’  So, states have grown obese –to use The Economist’s metaphor–and need to follow two basic ‘austerity’ dietary rules: learn how to do more with less by modernizing; and learn how to do less…”

#44 American exceptionalism - “In an upcoming issue, the journal of the Psychohistory Forum, Clio’s Psyche, is conducting a symposium focused on two interesting papers, one by the journal’s editor, Paul Elovitz, and one by Frank Summers, a member of Psychoanalysts for Social Responsibility. Both of the papers offer psychoanalytic interpretations of American exceptionalism, which Elovitz defines as ‘the idea that this is a special country whose people are a model for humanity with a special mission to enlighten others.’ He continues: ‘This vision has inspired both the drive to improve the lives and human rights of other people and justified a sense of national superiority, entitlement, and exemption from international standards.’”

#43. On Ironies in History – “Usually, historical ironies are clearly visible only in retrospect.  Isn’t it ironic, we can say with some decades of distance, that in the late 1960s, a youth revolt propelled so many Americans and so many American institutions in a progressive direction; while, at the same time, America was beginning its most remarkable regression, longer lived than any in its history…”

#42. Indignez-vous! - “Just as the youth-led revolts in the Middle East were cooking up, and the Tunisians were getting ready to blow the lid off the pot,  a small book published by a small publishing house in Montpellier hit the best-seller list in France. More than half a million French bought it. Young readers, especially, were happy to have a renowned 93-year-old veteran of the Resistance, Stephane Hessel, writing directly to them and encouraging them to, as his title put it: Indignez-vous! Get Angry!  Get Outraged!”

#41. On Youth Movements: 1970, 1990, 2010 - “In the forty globalizing years since the early 1970s, there have been three broad waves of youth-led revolts. The first was launched in the late 1960s and lasted into the mid-1970s, while the Cold War dominated international affairs.  Its immediate political focus was opposition to the Vietnam War, and it was strongest in the countries waging that War, that is, the USA and its NATO allies in Europe. But in Eastern Europe there was a related movement aimed at the regimes of the Warsaw Pact.  In South America, young people protested the dictatorships –particularly in Argentina and Brazil—that were supported by the USA, while in Mexico an action against the government was sparked by a violent crackdown on students before the 1968 Olympics and by human rights protests by young athletes from the United States and Eastern Bloc at the Olympic ceremonies, on world-wide TV.  International from its inception in the early 1970s was the Environmental  Movement –and it has retained its internationalism through to the present…”

#40. Learning in and through action – “I’ve been reading and thinking a lot this week about youth-led revolts and revolutions, and will write about this topic next week. But this week I wanted to share with you a letter I wrote on April 30, 2008 to a colleague in Caracas, Venezuela (whose name I will withhold, not knowing his current safety or lack of it). He had been on a committee that invited me to lecture on Hannah Arendt in several Caracas universities. In June, 2007, I arrived just in time to witness a wave of student-led protests against the Chavez regime and particularly against it interferences at that time  with free speech and its arrests of dissenters. The situation was–and still is—very complex, because Chavez is an authoritarian, but a populist one; a former military man, but allied with the socialist left; a benefactor to many poor Venezuelans as well as to cronies who work for the petro-state and the Army, a bane to the struggling middle class and the unemployed; supported by some of the left intelligentsia (including some ‘stars’ in his cabinet), but not by most of the university students and professors.  If Chavez had not been so hated by Washington, he might  have been a contender for a Mubarak role…”

#39. The Young Face Forward – “The Egyptian people have triumphed over their dictator today, February 11, 2011, and dealt a blow to their country’s whole post-war history of military rulership. They have set an example for the peoples of their region and everywhere. The celebrating millions, who had protested for thirteen days in Tahrir Square and in squares and workplaces across Egypt’s cities, come from all walks of life and educational backgrounds, all religious and secular sectors, all classes, genders and ethnicities. But what was most striking about the crowds, and is most striking about the population of Egypt, is their youth. Their “median age,” as demographers say, is 24…”

#38. Dear Korean readers: on the Egyptian Revolution

-

“Dear Korean readers,

I write today, February 4, 2011, to welcome you to this Korean translation of Why Arendt Matters, which was first published in English in 2006, to mark the centenary of Hannah Arendt’s birth. Her centenary was celebrated all over the world with conferences, collections of essays, radio and TV conversations, and even a Hebrew translation of my 1982 biography Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World. It was very obvious that in the three decades since her death in 1975 Hannah Arendt has come to matter even more widely and more deeply than she did during her lifetime…”

#37. Parenting and Politics – “In the Globe and Mail this morning, there is a report on deliberations in Ottawa about maternity and paternity leaves and how long they should be. For me, as an American, it is amazing to observe the terms of the debate.  Some controversial scientific research is being reviewed to consider whether parental leaves over the guaranteed time appreciably help infants’ developments. The guaranteed 52 week leave for mothers and fathers to divvy up between themselves is not in question. The research on benefits to children of longer leaves  ’that has been done is inconsistent at best, and its largely because it’s very complex and challenging to assess,’ says one professor. At the center of the discussion is a court case concerning a couple whose twins were born 5 weeks premature. Their parents received a year-long leave, their father  wants an extension so he can continue to help care for the little girls…”

#36. Parenting Wars – “I went to Pennsylvania again (see blog # 18) at the beginning of the week to help my 88 year-old parents transition back to their home after a few weeks in a rehab facility. The Jamaican cab driver whom I had hired to return me to the train station for my trek home to Toronto kindly asked about them. Growing old, we agreed, certainly has its challenges, for the old ones and for their families. He had been fortunate, he told me, that when he went to Jamaica last November to bury his father , who had ‘passed on’ at the age of 95, he had felt only a deep sadness –’I think on him every day’—but no regret: ‘He live a good life, he a good man, he say it his time to go, the Lord want him home.’”

#35. A Principle for Judgment, and an assassination attempt - “A principle of the sort that I have been discussing –that parents, who bring children into the world, should care for and educate them, thereby earning their children’s honor and help as they age—is a guide for judgment. It helps us make judgments  which are, as we say, principled; they have the principle built in, they demonstrate it.  A principle that is going to have this guiding function should be one that is widely shared –even universally shared—so that we can say with confidence ‘this is a principle all human beings agree upon, in principle, although they certainly have found different ways to demonstrate it.’”

#34. Childism and the Conflict of Generations – “The principle that governs relations between generations goes, in Aristotle’s words from the Nichomachean Ethics (7.11.2): “The parent gives the child the greatest gifts, its existence, but also cherishment and education (trophes kai paideias); and because the child receives, it owes the parent honor and helpfulness.”  I cited this in my last post while I was making a claim that  the kernel of childism, prejudice against children, is abandonment of this principle, or attack on it…”

#33. Childism – “Every five years, countries signatory to the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child are evaluated by the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, an international group with rotating membership, collaborating with UNICEF.  Signatory countries are required to submit documentation on their efforts to PROVIDE for, to PROTECT, and to encourage the societal and eventually political PARTICIPATON of children—the “3Ps” organizing the Convention’s 52 Articles. The Committee reviews the national documentation and then recommends specific further efforts, following guidelines developed in work done since 1989 to implement the Convention world-wide…”

#32. Diagnosis and Treatment of the Public Schools – “American public schools have problems, all agree. Here’s a mental exercise to consider the situation, what has been done, and what might be done. Imagine that the American public school system is a patient, and it comes to a clinic where there is an office, a department, headed by a doctor supposedly trained to help a public school system…”

#31. Public Education – “Thinking last week about healthy skepticism and old-fashioned cynicism or “simplicity of living”, I came to the topic of public education.  “Public education,” it seems  to me, should be a big revivalist tent of a concept under which public schools and universities gather along with public radio and TV broadcasting, public libraries and information centers, public theatres and museums, public communications networks, public assemblies and forums, and also public healthcare, public transportation. All kinds of public services where public servants work should be there, too. Public-spiritedness or willingness to engage in community action, public action, would be the guiding spirit –not a religious Spirit, but a political one–in this capacious tent of public education…”

#30. Reflections on Skepticism – “The New Internationalist, a fine Canada-based progressive monthly magazine run by a worker’s co-operative, announced in its December issue that it would focus next month on the ‘murky world of corporate lobbying’ As a preview, it reported that Exxon-Mobil has pumped $19 million into ‘promoting skepticism about global warming in order to water down any legislation on carbon emissions.’“

#29. One Very Big Elephant – “The America-Wins ideology that I described in my last post is made up of a number of ingredients, and this is one of the reasons why it is so difficult for those who see it, see its untruth and its deleterious effects, to mount an educational campaign. It is the elephant in the living room of our national life...”

#28. The America-Wins Ideology – “Here in Canada, the technique that the conservative  Prime Minister  Stephen Harper uses to support the fossil fuel energy industries, including the tar sands oil extraction industries, is to detour around the Parliament…”

#27. Delusions Further Discussed – “To take my reflection on delusions in the political arena a step further, I’m going to write today about one of the great  amazements of the present American historical moment.  Here is an introductory fact: close to 100% of the scientists who study global warming agree that it is happening, that it is producing climate change,  and that human enterprises –including high use of fossil fuels—contribute significantly to it…”

#26. Delusions and Self-defeats – “Over the last several years, I have been in a transition: winding down my psychoanalytic practice and reorganizing myself to live in Toronto; turning my work attention to finishing a book and starting another and writing this blog.  My thoughts have gone again and again to what I learned from my nearly twenty years as a therapist, and these retrospective thoughts often intersect with my reactions as I read the daily newspapers and immerse myself in the stream of books that enter our house from the little independent and used bookstores that are thick in our neighborhood...”

#25. Where do Democrats Go Next? – “The results of the 2010 mid-term elections could have been a great deal worse. They could have been as game-changing as the mid-term elections of 1994, when Clinton and the then Democrats lost both their House and their Senate majorities and entered into a phase of marching to the right, toward the center, from which came the “workfare” policies that contributed so much to the growth of poverty in America and the deregulation of banking that eventually became so disastrous for the nation’s economy…”

#24. Expropriating Feminism – “Last Spring, when Sarah Palin began to market herself nationally as a “conservative prolife feminist,” responding articles and op-eds by feminists waved like signs at a protest march…”

#23. What is Facism? Then and Now – “When Marx wrote in The Communist Manifesto in 1848, capitalism was marching across the world imperialistically. … Capitalism is on the march again, in the new form that goes under the name globalization…”

#22. ‘A Spectre is Haunting Europe…’ – “Over the last week, preparing ourselves, we have been talking about immigration, especially because Holland, our first stop, is such a complex example of the immigration phenomenon that is so deeply testing the European social democracies now…”

#21. Further Reflections on Prejudice, and Election Day – “After she had dinner and a bath last Saturday, Daphne, our two and a half year old granddaughter, made her usual bedtime request—happily, to me, one of her babysitters that night. ‘Read me! Read me!’ At her age, ‘me’ is the central ingredient of most communications, it requires no prepositions, just lots of imperatives…”

#20. Prejudices and the Principle of Equality – “You might ask: what difference does it make how you understand prejudices? What is the value of classifying them in terms of the motivations and purposes they serve rather than in terms of the specific groups targeted? First, by not either treating every instance of prejudice separately or lumping them all into one vague “ethnocentrism,” the motivations classification takes you past the symptoms and right to the basic disease processes…”

#19. A Perfect Storm of Prejudices – “Every day the New York Times offers more depressing reports on the fall electoral campaign in America. They match the reports in the Globe & Mail on the possibility of an up-coming Canadian election, which would also feature far right candidates –including the present Prime Minister—who are shockingly prejudiced…”

#18. Prejudices, from a Psychoanalytic Perspective – “I am in rural southeastern Pennsylvania, having traveled down from Toronto to celebrate my mother’s 88th birthday. She and my step-father –also 88—and I went out to dinner last night at our favorite local place, Miss Oxford’s Diner, in Oxford, a town near their retirement community. Without any retro effort, Miss Oxford’s, like the town around it, is ‘lost in the 50s tonight,’ so it feels like my childhood…”

#17. Elements of Old Age Capitalism – “In the psychoanalyst Erik Erikson’s scheme of eight human developmental stages, the seventh, Middle Adulthood (ages 35-65), is characterized by a spectrum of possibilities for its main activity, called Care. These range from Stagnation (at the negative end) to (at the positive end) Generativity…”

#16. Putting on New Thinking Caps – “For 18th and 19th century worldly philosophers whose analyses of capitalism Robert Heilbroner wrote about, the problem with capitalism was its inherent instability. The economic growth machine kept producing recessions, sometimes –by the end of the 19th century—accompanied by panics and bank-runs…”

#15. Capitalism Analyzed – “Among American economists, Robert Heilbroner was quite unusual –perhaps even unique, although John Kenneth Galbraith, Paul Sweezy, and others of large, inter-disciplinary vision were his friends—in being able to put a truly analytical question: ‘what is capitalism?’”

#14. A Worldly Philosopher – “While I was a graduate student in the late 1960s at the New School for Social Research in New York City, I knew I was in an outpost of Europe. But I really had no idea how different from the rest of American academia this outpost was…”

#13. Preface to a Short Treatise on Economics – “Gandhi is the exemplary figure for the strategy and the philosophy of non-violence—an exemplary figure world-wide and within the transnational peace movement. And the figures who were exemplary for him –particularly the great exponents of compassion and human solidarity who were the originators of universalist religious traditions– are invoked when he is invoked, so non-violence is now associated with opposition to the fundamentalist religions that abuse the ancient teachers…”

#12. Experiments in Truth – “It has been my privilege to be the first biographer for two of the 20th century’s exemplary people, Hannah Arendt and Anna Freud. For a biographer, the significance of being the first is that no textual image or collection of images of the subject precedes the one you create. Your view is clear, no one before you has mapped the whole lifestory, from birth to death…”

#11. Exemplary Figures in Judgment – “Hannah Arendt thought that republican political communities come into being as people gather together, talk with each other, deliberate, decide on a course of action that they will undertake together. In their talk and in their action they reveal themselves to each other; they make an appearance in the public realm that their common undertakings require them to create –a space that, once created, they cultivate as their common world…”

#10. The Superpower and the Superviolences – “In November of 1998, the United Nations General Assembly made a remarkable declaration. The first decade of the new millennium, 2001-2010, the delegates said, would be an International Decade for the Promotion of a Culture of Peace and Non-Violence for the Children of the World. This followed upon a declaration made a year earlier that set the millennial year 2000 as the Year of the Culture of Peace. In the intervening year non-violence’ had entered the conceptualization, as the positive premise of ‘the culture of peace.’”

#9. Ghandi’s Example – “When Nelson Mandela was released from prison on February 119, 1990, he made a speech to the South Africans, and, because it was immediately broadcast live everywhere, to the world. His commitment to peace and reconciliation with the white minority that had held him in prison for 27 years and that had kept the black and colored majority in apartheid since 1948, was the central message of his speech...”

#8. On Citizen Action – “Since last weekend, the Toronto newspapers and radio talk shows have all been full of discussion of the G20 protests –the violent ones and the non-violent ones–and the police action against the protesters. Reading and listening, I found myself taking a tour in my mind of what I learned about citizen action from my teacher, Hannah Arendt…”

#7. WE PAUSE FOR A WORD FROM OUR ECONOMISTS – “No one has to wait for the help of future historians to see that the last fifty years of world history have been the Boom years, the years of unprecedentedly explosive growth in human population and — for some of the humans—unprecedentedly explosive growth in material prosperity…”

#6. A FEW GOOD WORDS: University, Ecology, Social Democracy – “In a university, each student joins a community by taking time to make a first draft of a proposal for directing his or her life. A university is a meeting where students participate in a process known to the Romans as unis-versus, turning into one. Becoming part of a universus of people, with all their ways of life, ideas, histories, cultural activities, scientific pursuits, each student develops a sense of who, what and how amongst all these riches are compelling to her or him, and joins the whole as a matter of free choice, self-direction, and belonging...”

#5 The Fourth Branch of Government – “America’s original independent government, as every school child knows (one hopes…), was set up so that two key “checks and balances” would keep it in lawful harmony. Way ahead of the science of ecology, the Founding Fathers thought like political ecologists, understanding that if too much decision-making accumulated at any place in the governmental system the principle of equality that animated the whole would be lost…”

#4. The Root of Evil (Radix malorum) – “On May 7, 2009, nine months into the Great Recession, the fiftieth birthday of C.P. Snow’s famous Two Cultures essay was celebrated . The celebration came at a time  in our country’s intellectual life when a third culture had fully developed and was looking down upon the other two…”

#3. The Priority of the Political – “The great social movements of 20th century America were movements for inclusion of excluded groups into political life, citizenship.  The two exemplary movements were Abolitionism, which brought voting rights to the former slaves, and Women’s Suffrage, which brought voting rights to women in the 1920s…”

#2. Come, Let Us All Be Marry – “Today (May 16) is our second wedding anniversary,  and I asked Christine at breakfast for her permission to celebrate  it with you by writing a post on marriage politics.  Fine, she said, as long as she gets final edit. Fine, I said, that will make it just like our marriage…”

#1. The Second American Civil War & The New Secessionists – “Four decades its been now since Richard Nixon’s November, 1969 Inaugural address, in which he appealed to “the better angels of our nature” to listen to each other rather than shouting past one another…”

Welcome to ‘Who’s Afraid of Social Democracy?’ – “This blog has been created by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl and it will consist of  commentaries on current affairs and reflections on contemporary political issues and questions. Occasionally, invited guests will contribute as well…“