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Friends of photography, and of French heritage, are mourning the death of Willy Ronis, most famous for his Nu Provençal, Gordes (1949). It's striking how many of the iconic images of France were created by immigrants or their children -- Ronis, Brassaï, André Kertesz -- just as the Hungarian-born cinematographers Laszlo Kovacs and Vilmos Zsigmond created the look of all-American classics like Easy Rider, The Deer Hunter, and Deliverance. An aspiring composer as a young man, Ronis came to photography through a mixture of accident -- taking over his ailing father's commercial studio -- and inspiration from an exhibition of art photographers' work. The Depression and the mass demonstrations of Paris let Ronis become a participant observer of Popular Front militance -- to his dismay when American publications started using his images in what he considered a hostile, conservative sense after the War.
Ronis was one of the last stars of humanism, the search for universal experience in moments of happiness and tragedy transcending race, religion, nationality, and social class -- a movement epitomized by the blockbuster international traveling exhibition that William Steichen organized for the Museum of Modern Art in 1955, The Family of Man, to which Ronis contributed. (A kindred theatrical work, the Pulitzer prizewinning play, The Diary of Anne Frank, opened the same year on nearby Broadway.) Originally a Cold War bridge between East and West and a healing gesture following war and genocide, utopian humanism has survived the trends that scorned it, including the New Left and postmodernism. But we should temper our nostalgia; newer studies remind us that some Marxists and conservatives alike saw the exhibition as subtle propaganda for the other side. And Ronis himself was slow to see the evils of Stalinism, not resigning from the Communist Party of France until the 1960s.
The Times (London) obituary has a shocker of paragraph toward the end:
In 1999, in an important test case for the right of privacy in France, Ronis and [his agency] Rapho were heavily fined for his having taken 50 years earlier a photograph of a flower seller without her written consent. She had proudly displayed the image in her shop all that time until it was spotted by a zealous lawyer.
There's more about the case in a 2002 article in the Guardian; Ronis remained gentle, and a gentleman, about the case. But curiously -- considering the economic stakes in photography, and the implications of privacy legislation -- I found nothing about it in an electronic search of US law reviews. Some people would say that the French law, at least as I understand it from just two brief articles, is the true affirmation of humanism, the individual's freedom from unauthorized commercial exploitation of his or her image. But it's also an attack on a French national treasure, the heritage of candid street photography not only of Ronis but of Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Doisneau. Consider another immortal Ronis image, a little boy bounding joyfully along the sidewalk, a baguette under his arm. What was the photographer supposed to do, get arrested following him home to get a parental signature? The law all but kills Ronis's definition of humanist photography as a difficult walk "toward a poetric representation of modest happiness." (See one of Ronis's last interviews, in French, here.) Probably for this reason, scores of his subjects ignored their "rights" and congratulated the photographer on the occasion of his valedictory retrospective show in Paris's Hôtel de Ville in 2005.
The Web era has dealt another blow to humanism, promoting a new aesthetic of vividly colored, electronically manipulated imagery and making 35mm black-and-white street photography look hopelessly grainy. Noting this trend on the photo-sharing site Flickr, the New York Times Magazine columnist Virginia Heffernan last year recounted a member's mischievous posting of a Cartier-Bresson classic of a bicyclist passing a spiral staircase, as his own, and the jeering response of members apparently ignorant of its provenance:
"When everything is blurred you cannot convey the motion of the bicyclist," one commenter carped. "Why is the staircase so 'soft'? Camera shake?" wrote another. "Gray, blurry, small, odd crop," someone concluded.
Nothing can bring back the humanist moment, but considering the alternatives, including some of the new online photography featured by Heffernan, it's looking better all the time.
(Photo: Patrick Kovarik/AFP/Getty Images)
Hats off to Daniel Brook for his series on Slate about the September 11 ringleader Mohammed Atta. It's a gem of reporting legwork and historical insight, based on a visit to Atta's thesis supervisor in Hamburg and sharp observations in the ancient city of Aleppo, where Atta was misled by his upbringing to misunderstand its heritage:
With the crumbling legacy of European imperialism and American-backed dictatorship written into its Paris-meets-Houston cityscape, Cairo is one of the world's worst advertisements for East-West relations. With that city as his tragic starting place, Atta refused to comprehend historic Aleppo, a cosmopolitan trading city where Europeans and Arabs, Christians, Jews, and Muslims lived side-by-side for centuries. He scorned diverse, mercantile Hamburg; he attacked polyglot New York. By allowing a discordant present to blot out a more hopeful past, Atta ensured further discord in the future.
Brook mentions but doesn't expand on the engineering background of the September 11 planner Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who selected the targets. As the official US report put it:
Highly educated and equally comfortable in a government office or a terrorist safehouse,KSM applied his imagination,technical aptitude,and managerial skills to hatching and planning an extraordinary array of terrorist schemes. These ideas included conventional car bombing,political assassination,aircraft bombing, hijacking, reservoir poisoning, and, ultimately, the use of aircraft as missiles guided by suicide operatives.
Generations of educators have assured us that that the study of science and engineering create international understanding across religious and ideological lines, promoting an international language that puts problem-solving ahead of dogma. And many scientists, engineers, and physicians around the world have indeed been outstanding ecumenical advocates.
But there's a dark side of technical knowledge. It's equally compatible with intolerance. Osama bin Laden, too, was educated not as a mullah but as a civil engineer. While many Iranian science professors are prominent in the resistance to the of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the brutal strongman appears to have an impressive technical background, even claiming on his blog that he had score 132 out of 400,000 engineering university applicants on a competitive examination. (Link via Wikipedia.) The world's second most wanted terrorist next to bin Laden is also no cleric but a physician, Ayman al Zawahiri. Well before September 11, 2001, the English historian Simon Sebag Montefiore noted the rise of medically trained tyrants, the Doctators, in the Spectator:
'Doctatorship' may be defined as the process by which a medical doctor, devoted to sacrificing himself to save lives, becomes a political dictator, devoted to sacrificing lives to save himself. 'Doctatorship' is a murky place where bedside manner meets state planner, where torture meets cure.
Whereas the Zawahiri and Atta families belong to the higher Egyptian intelligentsia, Ahmedinajad would be an obscure village artisan like his forebears if the passionately modernizing Shah had not promoted technical education for the masses, not only to promote growth but to weaken the hold of the religious conservatives.
The lesson is not that scientific and technical education are dangerous, but sadly that education alone has been overrated as a source of humane values.
Dan Akst wonders:
Why, given their horrific history during the 20th century, aren't Europeans more wary of the power of the state? After the horrors of WW I, the rise of European fascism, the Nazis, the Second World War, the protracted disaster of Communism etc., it would seem to me that something like paranoia would be the mildest sensible response toward government.I've often asked myself about this. For example, I studied in Germany in the late 1960s and had to register with the police like all other residents, including the Heidelberg students who had finished one of the most tumultuous years in the university's history by the time I arrived there in 1968. Yet questioning such police powers were not on even the student radicals' agenda.
Part of the answer might have been Lenin's famous remark that if German communists ever stormed the railroad stations, they would buy platform tickets first. But there's another explanation. The leftist critics of the European state have not wanted to demolish it but to retain its machinery for their own uses once they achieved power.
Another part is that while rich Europeans pay higher taxes than the US wealthy, that includes the right to use state services to the fullest, and not just in health care. No New York City private-school admissions neurosis (or $450/hour consultants), no private university tuition financing headaches. And the ineffable joy, unknown to our Interstates, of watching slower cars deferentially slink into the right-hand lane as your fast Audi overtakes them on the Autobahn at 200 km/hour (I've had a taste of this as a passenger -- with a State car and driver). You've paid your annual tax bill for that big engine and your heavy fuel tax. Enjoy!
On the other hand, most Americans didn't share Dwight Eisenhower's alarm about the Military- Industrial Complex, and the armed forces and military contracts have a much bigger role here than there. To Europeans, American aerospace giants are at least as State- subsidized as their own Airbus. Yes, we kept Western Europe under our nuclear and conventional umbrella during the Cold War. It's the "horrific history" of two wars and interwar militarism that Dan mentions that made outsourcing part of defense to the our State look like a good deal. Even Sept. 11 hardly changed this attitude; I remember arriving for a conference in Ulm on one of the first flights back, virtually silent on board, but there seemed no concern there, even though it was already known that terrorist cells in Germany were behind the attacks. Meanwhile, polls reveal that many Americans support the State's right to torture and condone maltreatment of other prisoners. "Paranoia toward the government?" Au contraire.
Republican presidents from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush talked about reducing government's role but changed little. And the American multi-tiered Federal - State - County - Local jurisdictions, with their frequent conflicts and correspondingly greater role for larger numbers of lawyers, means a greater rather than a small government presence. Wall Street in the bailout age has been clinging to the State for dear life, not to mention bonuses. (A deal's a deal, right?)
(Photos: Wikimedia Commons)
Neither my mother nor father had ever graduated from college. My father hadn't gone beyond the 8th grade, and they were determined that I would go to college. I took the entrance exams for Stanford; at that time (this was 1932 and 1933), very few first-class universities required entrance exams. Stanford did; I passed. But it didn't take me long to figure out that, even working part-time and receiving scholarships, I couldn't possibly pay the board, room, and tuition at Stanford, so I came to Cal. That's the only reason I was here. It was the only first-class university in the country that I could afford to go to. What did I pay? Well I lived at home. I paid $52 tuition per year. And for that I am eternally grateful.And he continued:
I hope I am an enlightened rationalist, and to the degree that I am, it came from this university. Surely I went to Harvard, and I've in a sense been educated in all the years after I graduated from formal education, but my basic philosophy, my basic moral standards, my basic ethical values came out of this university. . . .In the demonstrations of the Vietnam Berkeley was divided between liberal and radical factions that turned these values against themselves, bringing their mutual foe, Governor Ronald Reagan, to the fore in national politics. Reading between the lines in the interview, I can sense that McNamara regretted not only the outcome of the war but its effect on his alma mater.
Giant troves of quantitative data were collected, analyzed, disaggregated and reassembled. Plans -- typically on a five-year timetable -- were conceived and then, presumably, executed. He once called the Bank "an innovative, problem-solving mechanism . . . to help fashion a better life for mankind." Nobel Prizes in economics would later be awarded for disproving this mechanistic notion of institutions. But no Nobel was required to understand that rationalism isn't a synonym for reason, much less common sense, or that a planned solution was a workable or desirable solution, or that war or poverty were "problems" in the same sense as, say, a deficit.While Stephens cites McNamara as a cautionary tale for the Obama administration, the risks of unchecked rationality have been all too evident in the last ten years in industries like energy trading, insurance, and banking, staffed by people from places like Berkeley as well as Harvard. Calm deliberation can mask doubtful assumptions. As G.K. Chesterton put it, the madman is not the one who has lost his reason, but he who has lost everything but his reason.
Tatyana A. Karasova, head of the Israel department at the Institute for Oriental Studies in Moscow, said Mr. Putin and Mr. Lieberman had a rapport because they are both "gosudarstvenniks" -- a term that derives from the Russian word for state or government and implies a person who likes wielding official power. "Putin, as a gosudarstvennik, can really understand another gosudarstvennik like Lieberman," she said.(I asked some of my local Slavic gurus about the Karasova/Levy definition, and they have their doubts; they consider the word a more general Soviet-era euphemism for an influential political insider. Levy 's use of it may not be the originally Russian sense but a subtly hostile repurposing by the British journalist and blogger Edward Lucas, author of The New Cold War. Never mind the pedigree; it's an irresistible concept.)
You don't have to be Russian, or Israeli, to be a gosudarstvennik. The term also helps distinguish those American, Western European, Asian, and other leaders who relish wielding authority from the more reticent. Dick Cheney clearly is one, Joe Biden not. George Washington consciously decided to reject the role. (I love The Onion's take on this.) John F. Kennedy wasn't; Lyndon Johnson may have been the most natural since Andrew Jackson.
Gosudarstvennik isn't an exclusively political concept. One broader definition might be a company man or woman who runs the company. Not every CEO, and especially not all company founders, are gosudarstvenniks. Henry Ford was; his only child and successor, Edsel Ford, was not and proved to be doubly jinxed in death as a namesake of failure.
To conservative critics, Barack Obama is a stealth gosudarstvennik, advancing the power of the state step by step in response to real or perceived crises (as of course George W. Bush and Congress did after Sept. 11). To some liberals he is doing the opposite, compromising where he had promised reforms. (The Onion, again.) Whatever course he takes, I don't think we've heard the last of this expression.
[a]t a meeting of Asian health ministers in Bangkok today, the WHO director general, Dr Margaret Chan, said the world was "better prepared for an influenza pandemic than at any time in history", largely because of precautions taken over the threat of bird flu.But the newspaper also notes rising skepticism in the UK and around the world about public health warnings. Authorities fear it could imperil a possible return of a more virulent strain of the virus this fall:
"People are taking a sigh of relief too soon," said Dr Richard Besser, acting director of the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.
"The measures we've been talking about - the importance of hand-washing, the importance of covering coughs, the real responsibility for staying home when you're sick and keeping your children home when you're sick - I'm afraid that people are going to say, 'Ah, we've dodged a bullet. We don't need to do that,'" he said.
Welcome to the world of "risk communication," a hybrid of corporate public relations, government public health, sociology, psychology, and lobbying. Lindsay Tanner and Mike Stobbe of the Associated Press have noted other experts' alarm about the spread of skepticism.
So the interaction of viruses, animal production, transportation, and communication -- especially, of course, the Web -- is a system that may be growing more complex, and potentially dangerous.
If people had a vivid enough imagination of the threats they really face, the reactions that might occur could be almost as severe as the threats that we're anticipating.The dark side of the attention economy, in which human time becomes the scarce resource no matter how much content on the Internet is free, is competition among our anxieties, from emerging viruses to suitcase bombs. We probably worried too much about cyberterrorism in 1999 (and in general about computer failures in the date transition to the year 2000) and not enough about supposedly old-fashioned hijacking.
In a world of multiple threats, boldness and caution can lose their meaning. President Gerald Ford's decision to follow expert recommendations and immunize all Americans against the last feared swine flu pandemic in 1976 led to hundreds of cases of paralysis from Guillain-Barré syndrome and more than 30 deaths from the vaccine, versus only one from swine flu itself. Today, voluntary and imposed travel limits and government-ordered destruction of pigs can create economic, social, and political disruptions rivaling all but the most deadly strains. But how do we know how virulent the current swine flu virus will become? As Faye Flam reports, researchers still have a lot to learn about its complex ancestry and possible new forms. But the strain that caused the 1918 pandemic is definitely on its family tree.
So while we should be doing more to prepare for disruptions -- I remember how few people in my area had enough bottled water on hand when flooding in central New Jersey disabled a pumping station for a week or so -- it's good and healthy that we're not more concerned. We have learned to delegate our worrying.
In finance, too, safeguards can over time become dangerous. For many of Bernard Madoff's victims it might have been better to have no Securities and Exchange Commission than one that could not discover the fraud even after persistent complaints. While the full story may take years to tell, it's likely that Madoff used his good standing with the agency to make the Ponzi scheme harder to detect. The journalism professor and Ponzi expert Mitchell Zuckoff has even speculated that tax regulations requiring a five percent payout of foundation assets attracted philanthropists to the steady returns that Madoff appeared to offer, another unintended consequence of apparently progressive rules.
So is "a centralized, unitary financial-intelligence apparatus in government that would have complete and continuous access to the books of all financial institutions" the long-term answer? Possibly, but even if such a monitoring system would work and could be built at an acceptable cost, its software would instantly become a target of espionage and terrorism, needing constant upgrades and fixes, each of which could introduce new vulnerability. And even without malicious attacks, the search for honest anomalies and loopholes would have unforeseen results, just as Congress's 1993 cap of $1,000,000 for tax deductions of executive salaries produced even more excessive, and dangerous, options-based compensation.
The Conservation of Catastrophe is only a tendency, not destiny. But it does suggest any reform of complex systems will take exceptional vigilance. Or as Lewis Carroll's Red Queen put it in another great phrase I quoted, "it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place."
Edward Tenner
