Disunion

Louisiana’s Stillborn Constitution

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Disunion

Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.

On Christmas Eve 1864, Abraham Lincoln wrote to Maj. Gen. Nathaniel Banks in New Orleans to reassure him that he was master “in regard to re-organizing a State government for Louisiana” and “in regard to the military matters of the Department.” Frustrated at the slow pace of Banks’s reorganization efforts, the anxious president also entreated his commander of the Department of the Gulf to “give us a free-state re-organization of Louisiana, in the shortest possible time.”

Gen. Nathaniel P. Banks Library of Congress

Banks had already been in New Orleans for nearly two years, having replaced the notorious Benjamin “Spoons” Butler in late 1862. One of the Union’s many political generals, Banks was a former speaker of the House of Representatives and Massachusetts governor who had yet to distinguish himself on the battlefield (and never would). His less-than-stirring performance during the Shenandoah Valley campaigns had earned him the sobriquet “Nothing Positive” Banks. One modern day biographer characterized Banks as a man who dealt “in compromises and reversals, catch phrases, weasel words, and politicians’ tricks.” On the other hand, noted the ever-observant Navy secretary, Gideon Welles, although Banks probably lacked “the energy, power or ability of Butler,” he was “less reckless and unscrupulous.” Read more…

Private Lives

Breaking My A.L.S. Promise

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Private Lives

Private Lives: Personal essays on the news of the world and the news of our lives.

CHICAGO — Like most people, I was impressed and amused by the A.L.S. ice bucket challenge — that so many people got involved and that both funds and awareness were raised. But I was also conflicted.

Thirty-six years ago, my husband died of A.L.S. Gene, age 26, thought he had jammed his thumb playing softball, but when he could no longer muster the strength to open the car door, he went to a neurologist. At first the doctor thought he might have a pinched nerve. But the weakness progressed and I finally nagged Gene into getting a second opinion. It turned out that he had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a disease so hard to spell and pronounce that everyone referred to it as A.L.S. Read more…

The Conversation

Our Reluctant National Security President

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The Conversation

In The Conversation, David Brooks and Gail Collins talk between columns every Wednesday.

David Brooks: Gail, I’d like to start by asking you about embarrassing omissions. Are there books you haven’t read or places you haven’t been that you really should have in your cultural repertoire?

Gail Collins: Good grief, David. I’m not going to compare cultural repertoire defects with you. You’ve read half the books in the world.

David: Actually, my gaps are glaring. Pretty much everything by Dickens is a void for me — I just can’t get into the guy. And every epic poem ever written except “The Divine Comedy.” If I’m going to read a story, I need paragraphs.

Gail: O.K, that makes me feel better. There’s nobody I love better than Charles Dickens. “Bleak House” was my inspiration as a pundit. Also, since you don’t read epic poetry I am going to pretend that I do. Yes! “Orlando Furioso” is my favorite.

David: As for places, I have never been to Norway, which you just visited, but I don’t feel any moral obligation to see Scandinavia again. I should have visited Greece, Turkey and Japan, though.

Gail: David, are you suggesting that I attempted to raise questions about your geographic well-roundedness by telling you I’ve been to Norway? Honestly, you don’t have to go. It’s all right.

David: I raise this question for grand strategic reasons, naturally. Over the past few years the United States has been guilty of an embarrassing glaring omission. A succession of presidents has neglected to shore up the global state system.

Gail: Stop a second. When people bring up terms like “global state system,” I tend to blank out. Perhaps it’s like you with Dickens. But please, rephrase. Do you mean the United Nations and NATO or just a general working-together by countries of good will?

David: I’d put it this way. In the past, maintaining the global state system was almost instinctual for presidents. From Franklin Roosevelt through George H.W. Bush, we’ve had a series of leaders whose foreign policy visions were formed by the conflicts against fascism and communism. These leaders had a reflexive commitment to global institutions that contributed to global regularity and order. Leaders of this generation know how much effort it took to tend to these institutions.

Read more...
The Stone

Sam Harris’s Vanishing Self

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The Stone

The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless.

Sam Harris is a neuroscientist and prominent “new atheist,” who along with others like Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and Christopher Hitchens helped put criticism of religion at the forefront of public debate in recent years. In two previous books, “The End of Faith” and “Letter to a Christian Nation,” Harris argued that theistic religion has no place in a world of science. In his latest book, “Waking Up,” his thought takes a new direction. While still rejecting theism, Harris nonetheless makes a case for the value of “spirituality,” which he bases on his experiences in meditation. I interviewed him recently about the book and some of the arguments he makes in it.

Gary Gutting: A common basis for atheism is naturalism — the view that only science can give a reliable account of what’s in the world. But in “Waking Up” you say that consciousness resists scientific description, which seems to imply that it’s a reality beyond the grasp of science. Have you moved away from an atheistic view?

Sam Harris: I don’t actually argue that consciousness is “a reality” beyond the grasp of science. I just think that it is conceptually irreducible — that is, I don’t think we can fully understand it in terms of unconscious information processing. Consciousness is “subjective”— not in the pejorative sense of being unscientific, biased or merely personal, but in the sense that it is intrinsically first-person, experiential and qualitative.

The only thing in this universe that suggests the reality of consciousness is consciousness itself. Many philosophers have made this argument in one way or another — Thomas Nagel, John Searle, David Chalmers. And while I don’t agree with everything they say about consciousness, I agree with them on this point.
Read more…

Bedside

When It’s the Doctor Who Can’t Let Go

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Bedside

Bedside is a series about health care from a nurse’s-eye view.

Sometimes it’s the doctors, not the families, who can’t let a patient go.

My elderly patient had lived much longer than seemed possible at the time of his cancer diagnosis. Ten years later, though, his relapsed lymphoma had become medically unstoppable.

The palliative care team was called in to manage his growing confusion and discomfort, and to discuss what we call “goals of care.” That’s what palliative care does: It focuses on keeping symptoms under control for the seriously ill and, for patients who can’t be cured, addressing how they want to die, including the option of hospice care. Now that this patient’s disease could not be restrained, what did he want? He could no longer answer, but his wife and son, sad but cleareyed, chose to stop all treatment aimed at curing his cancer.

Hearing this, his oncologist, standing beside me at the nurse’s station, cried, heartbroken that her patient of so many years would not rally one more time. Read more…

Menagerie

Filling the Empty Nest With Animals

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Menagerie

Menagerie: Just between us species.

Within a week of dropping off our daughter at college, we brought home a puppy. The reason, I persuaded my husband, was to help her younger brother feel less alone — even though we already had two cats.

Five years later it was our son’s turn to leave. Though our nest wasn’t quite empty — one cat remained and the puppy had become a 65-pound dog — I felt baffled. For 23 years my husband and I had operated in a universe dominated by children and the myriad connections we made through them. Now it was just the two of us — or the four of us, depending on who was counting. Read more…

Fixes

Reclaiming ‘We the People,’ One Person at a Time

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Fixes

Fixes looks at solutions to social problems and why they work.

About two years ago, I had the opportunity to participate in a retreat led by the renowned author and activist Parker J. Palmer. The retreat was based on a methodology called a Circle of Trust, drawn from Palmer’s writings, intended to help people step back from the noise of modern life, reflect, and return more centered and effective in their vocations. I was amazed at how, in just two days, this process brought 40 individuals together into respectful and strikingly honest discourse. It helped participants connect to their core values and sparked many new relationships.

This was not a one-off experience. The Center for Courage & Renewal, which creates these retreats, has served more than 50,000 people through similar programs. Studies reveal that they help people strengthen their sense of purpose and deepen their self-awareness and understanding of others.

I came away from my own experience wishing that every member of the Congress could go through the same thing. However, as a Pew Research Center study revealed this past June, polarization today runs well beyond the political realm, deep into the fabric of American society. It’s not just politicians who need to learn how to relate better; it’s all of us. Read more…

Disunion

Destination: Atlanta

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Disunion

Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.

One hot August day in 1864, Cpl. Joseph W. Ely of the 19th Michigan sat down in his camp in northern Georgia to write his sister Adelia. Ely’s regiment had been engaged in almost constant marching and fighting since the Atlanta Campaign began three months earlier. Now the men were on the outskirts of Atlanta, hunkered down in trenches under deadly rifle and artillery fire.

Apparently, Ely had read that the folks back home were under the impression that the Atlanta Campaign was all but over. In his letter, he disabused Adelia of that notion:

I see the people in Michigan have been made to believe that we have taken Atlanta, but they are slightly mistaken. It is no child’s play to take it. Many good lives have been lost trying to take it and I fear a good many more will be lost before our army marches into the streets of Atlanta.

Gen. William T. Sherman’s Atlanta Campaign, which ended with the city’s fall in early September, has often been described as one of maneuvers more than large battles. While that may be true when compared with Gen. Ulysses S. Grant’s much bloodier Overland Campaign in Virginia, underway that summer, in fact few Civil War campaigns were as grueling in terms of poor living conditions and daily combat attrition. Read more…

Private Lives

Giving Up My Small-Town Fantasy

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Private Lives

Private Lives: Personal essays on the news of the world and the news of our lives.

A few weeks ago, after a Pilates class in a studio above my former office, I rolled up a mat while the teacher spoke to another student, someone who seemed new in town — a potential friend. Lingering near the exercise bikes, I pretended to stretch, and then edged in to the conversation.

“So,” I said, “what brings you to Hudson?”

What brings you to Hudson? It is the question that I have asked myself ever since I moved from San Francisco to upstate New York at the end of 2012. Even longtime residents ask it over and over. Hudson, N.Y., like many “cool” towns, has been changing in recent years, buoyed by an influx of city folk priced out or just tired of urban life. But living in a small town, even one with fancy coffee shops, competing yoga studios and the patina of all things Brooklyn, is complicated. Read more…

The Stone

ISIS Is a Disgrace to True Fundamentalism

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The Stone

The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless.

It has become a commonplace in recent months to observe that the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, is the latest chapter in the long story of the anticolonial awakening — the arbitrary borders drawn after World War I by the great powers being redrawn — and simultaneously a chapter in the struggle against the way global capital undermines the power of nation states. But what causes such fear and consternation is another feature of the ISIS regime: The public statements of the ISIS authorities make it clear that the principal task of state power is not the regulation of the welfare of the state’s population (health, the fight against hunger) — what really matters is religious life and the concern that all public life obey religious laws. This is why ISIS remains more or less indifferent toward humanitarian catastrophes within its domain — its motto is roughly “take care of religion and welfare will take care of itself.” Therein resides the gap that separates the notion of power practiced by ISIS from the modern Western notion of what Michel Foucault called “biopower,” which regulates life in order to guarantee general welfare: the ISIS caliphate totally rejects the notion of biopower.

While the official ISIS ideology rails against Western permissiveness, the daily practice of the ISIS gangs includes full-scale grotesque orgies.

Does this make ISIS premodern? Instead of seeing in ISIS a case of extreme resistance to modernization, one should rather conceive of it as a case of perverted modernization and locate it into the series of conservative modernizations which began with the Meiji restoration in 19th-century Japan (rapid industrial modernization assumed the ideological form of “restoration,” or the return to the full authority of the emperor). Read more…