The Brooklyn Rail

“It’s easier to change your worldview than the way you hold your spoon.”— Max J. Friedländer

“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”— Mark Twain

Freedom of expression has never flourished under any authoritarian regime, for censorship is the most effective tool to keep any dictator in power. As we have learned from examples in recent history, be it Joseph Stalin, Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, Augusto Pinochet, Mao Zedong, Kim Jong Il, or Vladimir Putin, dictators will do whatever it takes to counter liberal democracy by combining what they characterize as conservative social values with techniques of ersatz populism. This creates an ideology of tribalism that is centered in nationalism, a text-book kind of demagoguery that associates the dictator himself with the identity of the nation. One thinks of the way that Rudolf Hess introduced Hitler at rallies by shouting, “The party is Hitler. Hitler is Germany, just as Germany is Hitler.”

For democracies, one of the greatest problems is to encourage free expression while at the same time maintaining social stability—which is no easy task. For as Joseph Goebbels is supposed to have said as the Nazis rose to power: “The big joke on democracy is that it gives its mortal enemies the tools to its own destruction.” The challenge that we who believe in free expression face is how to calibrate our individual strengths and brilliant sparks of energy with democracy’s great communal attributes, namely the “art of joining” and “self-interest rightly understood.” Given the extreme fragility of democracy today, we must be reminded again and again of the dangers inherent in the psychology of “us against them” that has always worked so effectively in the hands of potential dictators, especially under dire circumstances, including economic disparity and people losing trust in their government.

This kind of fabricated “us against them” conflict has always been an important part of Donald J. Trump’s strategy, which is calculatedly based on strategically confusing his opponents’ dislike of him with a dislike of America itself. In the face of this strategy, we have to ask ourselves whether or not it is too late now in US politics for us to reinspect, reconstitute, and reexamine the ways in which we have tended to dismiss things that are considered contingencies or asymmetrical occurrences, and allowed ourselves only to be spoon-fed with sound-bite tidbits. Our self-tormenting issues of identity politics and cancel-culture are aspects of our tendencies to remedy short-term solutions by inventing endless kinds of social engineering—often forgetting that they were created in the first place to quench the mainstream media’s twenty-four-hour per day thirst. Which leads me to ask: shouldn’t we be paying attention to both the noise and the signal instead of choosing one over the other?

We should also keep in mind that our lives are filled with unpredictable moments that may lead to colossal consequences. For example, there are things that we take for granted, hence allowing them to domesticate our habits, good or bad, which lead us to expect that things will continue to be as they are. For the good outcomes, we tell ourselves how perfect things are, as they have reached the pinnacle of our ideal expectation of happiness in our lives, and we allow ourselves to become habituated to our sense of complacency. This state of mind often blinds us to potential downfalls, and leaves us vulnerable to unexpected turns of fate. It also makes us vulnerable to the glory of once-upon-a-time nostalgia, which gradually erodes our ability to see ourselves or our surrounding environments as clearly as we should. And not seeing our situations clearly can make us vulnerable to the demagoguery that often accompanies wishful thinking.

A prime example of wishful thinking is the way in which we in America have proceeded as a kind of reluctant empire since the end of WWII, when we cheerfully endorsed Henry Luce’s declaration of “The American Century” in his famous editorial (published in Life magazine on February 17, 1941). In it, Luce urged the US to forsake its spirit of isolationism in favor of a missionary role, acting as the world’s Good Samaritan and spreading democracy. But in trying to do so, US policy makers unfortunately remained arrogantly ignorant of the role played by human tribalism in foreign policy. For example, to take an example close to my own heart, as the US tried to implement a better vision of capitalism in Vietnam, they did so without being aware whatsoever that the country’s capitalist enterprises were controlled by a much-resented Chinese minority. Similar flaws can be seen in the way we were not aware that the Taliban were representative of the Pashtun community, who had been marginalized by Tajiks and Uzbeks during the Cold War, and so even before we invaded their country, they had deep support within Afghanistan. Similarly, we attempted to deploy liberal hegemony in Iraq without taking into account the complex history of divisions between Sunni and Shia, the two major and opposing branches of Islam.

Yet, despite our ignorance of the cultures we have invaded in the past, we have also had at times a sense of alertness to other cultures that by chance resulted in positive outcomes. For example, since Henry L. Stimson (Secretary of War from 1940 to 1945) had been to Kyoto on his honeymoon and during other visits in the 1920s, he requested that the city be removed from the list of Japanese cities to be bombed. This not only spared one of the great sites of human culture but also was a gesture that Stimpson characterized as “an assurance of future peace rather than a menace to civilization.” Something similar might be said of American openness to Vietnam after our loss of the war there—the fiftieth anniversary of which will be commemorated on April 30. For, while we lost the war in Vietnam, we have gained peace, as most of the Vietnamese population have now expressed their desire to be part of the West.

At this point in time, I have learned to acknowledge two theories that are based on one or another kind of accumulation: “self-organized criticality” and “illusory truth effect.” The former refers to the sand pile model, in which grain by grain the sand accumulates. Eventually, the growing pile of grains of sand reaches a critical tipping point where it becomes so unstable that when the next grain gets dropped, the whole pile collapses in an avalanche. The latter theory, illusory truth, is predicated on our tendency to embrace false information as being true if it is aggressively repeated over and over again. I should add that while “self-organized criticality” can lead to both good and bad outcomes beyond our control, “illusory truth effect” can all too easily be manipulated and infiltrated into virtually all news media, advertising, and political propaganda. This is how Nazism and Hitler rose in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s, impelled by the fascists’ single-minded ambition to mobilize the politics of tribalism and the psychology of repetition. In situations like this, the true horror begins to grow only slowly, but then suddenly, it’s like a field filled with young corn stalks: before we know it, they are towering over our heads, blocking the sun and infesting our air.

At all costs, we have to avoid undermining this country’s experiment with democracy, and avoid the kind of path that led to the rise of Hitler and Nazism. We have to return to the most basic roots of democracy and liberal-minded thought. As we cast our ideas out into the world, they should be like boomerangs that have been thrust into distant space but come back to their master’s hands. The future of democracy is on us, in our hands indeed.

In solidarity with love, courage, and cosmic optimism to us all,

Phong H. Bui

P.S. This issue is solemnly dedicated to the passings of our mentors and friends, including great artists Richard Serra (1938–2024), Lucas Samaras (1936–2024), Robert Moskowitz (1935–2024); phenomenal poets Neeli Cherkovski (1945–2024), and Marjorie Perloff (1931–2024). Ever since Carl Andre’s singular insistence on sculpture being passively presented on the floor, following Constantine Brancusi’s conception of sculpture and pedestal as one unified work of art, no one has radicalized sculpture’s ability to be assertive and environmentally active in its total presence—be it indoors or out, of mind or of body, of conception or perception—more than Richard and his monumental contributions. Whatever pictorial imagination lies between Abstract Expressionism, Pop art and Minimalism, Bob (Robert) populated his iconic forms with a restrained emotionality that perpetuated a lifelong rumination on flatness and its subversive plasticity, which at once remains as a counter friction against spectacle and noise in painting. As for Lucas’s lifelong exploration on the notion of self and selfhood—which considers practice of the self, individuals as containers in dialogical relationship with social whole—embodied in various mediums, from painting, sculpture, and performance art to installation and photography, has charted an influential alternative to the Enlightenment humanist subject widely critiqued in the immediate postwar period. In the world of poetry, while Neeli generously held up a big candle that illuminated Walt Whitman’s transcendental legacy to his generation and beyond, Marjorie injected the intellectual audacity of her explicit inquiry into the essential and elemental question of what poetry is and should be. We would like to send our deepest condolences to Clara Weyergraf-Serra, Hermine Ford, Jessie Cabrera, Carey Perloff, Nancy Perloff, the respective members of the families, friends, and admirers here and across the world. We’d like to thank Paul Lachman, the treasurer and board member extraordinaire of the Rail, whose indispensable service in the last six years has brought solid structure to the financial stability of our living organism. We send our best wishes to Paul on his new journey. We’d also like to welcome Alex Bacon and Mark Hudson as our two editors-at-large and correspondents from London.