The Adoration of the Magi by Diego Velázquez, 1619
Madrid
This past Saturday, in anticipation of Three Kings Day, I headed up to the Prado Museum hoping to see all the paintings of the adoration of the Magi in its collection. I drew up a list, marked up a museum floor plan, and hopped on the bus.
Crisscrossing the vast halls and floors, I saw numerous paintings and triptychs that captured the scene but the highlights included a sumptuous and powerful baroque depiction by Peter Paul Rubens that wowed me with its scale and theatricality. And I deeply admired the more intimate yet dignified depiction that Velázquez painted when he was only twenty years old using his infant daughter and wife as inspiration.
But between the Rubens and Velázquez galleries, I happened to pass by a painting by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo on a similar but distinct theme that I had not planned to view that day.
The Adoration of the Shepherds, Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, Ca. 1650
It’s the depiction not of the Magi kneeling before the baby Jesus but of humble shepherds fawning over the infant. Instead of frankincense, gold, and myrrh, the three peasants brought a lamb, some hens, and a basket of eggs. Their faces are rugged but full of tenderness. The painting was clearly rendered as a humble counterpart to the Adoration of the Magi, and it highlights simple human connection over grandeur. I was so moved by it that I decided to come back the next day to see the museum’s paintings of the adoration of the shepherds.
So the next morning, I followed the same routine. Counting only paintings and not triptychs or altarpieces, I believe there are at least as many depictions of the adoration of the shepherds as there are of the Magi.
Art historians argue that for centuries wealthy families sometimes liked to commission paintings of the Magi to reflect their own social status. Paintings of the adoration of shepherds became popular at the end of the 16th century as taste in art turned toward more pastoral, humble, and emotional themes.
In addition to the Murillo, my other favorite paintings of the adoration of the shepherds are by Juan Bautista Maíno and El Greco. El Greco’s depiction is spectacular for the way he mixes tenderness with wonder and excitement. The light emanating from the baby bathes all who gaze upon him. This was the last painting El Greco ever produced.
But my absolute favorite of the day was a more humble painting by someone with whom I was not familiar, Juan Bautista Maíno, a Spanish Dominican friar born in the 16th century. While lacking the elegance of a Murillo or the emotional expressiveness of El Greco, there’s a clarity and straightforwardness to Maíno and the faces of the most prominently represented shepherd–as well as the angels above him–are filled with wonder and joy. But what makes this painting sing is the depiction of a figure who generally plays a minor role in this scene, St. Joseph. Here Jesus’ dad is leaning over him and gently holding and kissing his rather chunky forearm. His face is not filled with awe or devotion or wonder but instead reflects paternal love and attentiveness.
The Adoration of the Shepherds by Juan Bautista Maíno, 1612-14.
By the time I left the museum in the afternoon to head to lunch, I was smiling at the thought of my own little epiphany. I had come to the Prado expecting to be moved by images of wise men humbled by the sight of a divine child. I left even more moved and inspired by much humbler images of human connection and love.
America’s Crass President is Pulling Back the Curtain on the American Empire
Venezuelan Emigrants Celebrate in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol. (Photo by Gregory Rodriguez)
When I learned of the news from Caracas, I texted three Venezuelan friends to gauge their reaction. Later in the day, I spoke to several more. With no exceptions, every single one of them was happy that the U.S. had deposed Nicolás Maduro. Everyone was still worried about the future of the country they felt forced to abandon. Two were upset that the U.S. had not captured notorious Venezuelan Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello.
No one was under the illusion that the military action was about U.S. benevolence. Indeed, there was zero romanticism in their words. The enemy of their enemy was their friend, but that didn’t make him the second coming of Simón Bolívar.
Dozens of emigrants were celebrating in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol. Their joy was palpable and, in my eyes, legitimate. I am happy for them. Whatever valid domestic or international legal issues make this military intervention problematic, it doesn’t take away from the fact that there are likely millions of Venezuelans both inside and outside their country who are thrilled that the wicked warlock is gone.
I don’t see how this act helps the American people, but that holds true for most of the nation’s 400 foreign military interventions throughout its history.
More often than not, leaders of empires neglect the interests of their domestic public. But Donald Trump didn’t invent the American Empire. He just doesn’t pretend American imperialism is about saving democracy. Indeed, in his press conference today, he mentioned oil at least 9 times without uttering the word democracy once.
Had he bullshitted about the need to preserve democracy or sovereignty in foreign lands, as have so many U.S. presidents, I’m not sure Venezuelans would have believed him in any case. But plenty of Americans would have fallen for the self-serving language of benevolent interventionism for the umpteenth time.
The Town Hall as Advent Calendar, Neustadt an der Weinstraße, Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany
Last April, during Holy Week, a Catholic neighbor of mine in Madrid corrected me when I wished him “Happy Easter” in the middle of the week. You don’t say Felices Pascuas until Sunday, he explained, because that’s when Christ was resurrected. That made perfect sense given that the joy of Easter can only be understood in the context of the story of Jesus’ persecution and crucifixion.
It occurred to me that in the U.S. our greetings sometimes lack nuance and squeeze the meaning out of celebrations whose significance are as much about process as they are about outcomes. Public culture in America is deeply secular and, therefore, time is generally seen as linear. Things are assumed either to get better over time or to fall off a cliff like Thelma and Louise.
While European societies have been thoroughly secularized, the memory of ancient, circular liturgical time is still baked into the language and ways of celebration. Their language still implicitly retains the wisdom that Catalán architect Antoni Gaudí articulated so well. “The straight line belongs to man, the curved one to God.”
In Germany, where my wife was raised, Advent, the four-week season leading up to Christmas, is widely observed publicly by media and political figures. In my wife’s hometown, the city hall is turned into a giant Advent calendar with a new window being opened every night to reveal a picture behind it. The final window is opened on Christmas Eve.
That helps explain why each November, wherever we are, I buy my wife an Advent calendar so she can count down the days leading up to Christmas. Ticking off the days and enjoying the calendar’s embedded chocolate treats only enhances her anticipation for the holiday. And that’s the point.
Yet, I still had not fully learned my lesson about the importance of process and anticipation. A few days ago in Madrid, a friend rebuffed me for wishing him a happy new year too early.
In Spain, he told me, we wish people una buena salida y entrada de año (good exit to this year and entrance to the next) in the days leading up to the New Year. That, too, makes sense. Ending this year well helps ensure a good start to the next.
In Germany, where I am today, I’m determined not to make the same mistake. Today, I am wishing people Guten Rutch, a good slide into the new year, another saying that places the meaning in the process of transition rather than merely on the culmination of a story or the start of a new one. Only after midnight on December 31, will I begin to wish folks a Frohes Neues Jahr.
Tomorrow, we’ll fly back to Spain to prepare to celebrate the arrival of the Three Kings, another story whose ultimate meaning can be found in their journey and their search for Jesus.
But the denouement of the story of the Magi also carries tremendous meaning which I’ve always found appealing. Having been warned in a dream of Herod’s desire to have Jesus killed, the Three Wise Men journeyed home by another way to keep the Christ Child’s location secret. Their willingness to make a last-minute change of plans may be the best advice of all on how to approach a new year.
Barack Obama, Kamala Harris, and Zohran Mamdani all have at least two things in common. 1) They all had/have foreign-born fathers with associations to elite American universities. Obama’s at Harvard. Harris’s at Stanford, and Mamdani’s at Columbia. 2) They all spent years of their childhoods outside of the U.S. Obama in Indonesia. Harris in Quebec, Canada, and Mamdani in Uganda and South Africa. There is nothing wrong about these shared experiences. However, I think it’s important to distinguish this narrative from the feel-good, Statue of Liberty, upwardly-mobile, melting pot story of yesteryear. This new narrative owes less to America the economic engine for the tired, poor, huddled masses than it does to America the empire that pulls in talented elites from across the globe. Whatever good this may say about the U.S., it does not speak to the classic American narrative of opportunity and self-improvement. Indeed, the story of successful migrating elites may simply support the idea that neoliberal globalization reinforces rather than alleviates inequality.
Some of the People We Came Across on Our Travels Over the Past Two Months to East Java, Singapore, Kansas City, Montreal, Utrecht, Marseille, Neustadt an der Weinstraße, Cologne, Paris, and Madrid. (And yes, that’s Plácido Domingo.)
Autocracy Threatens When the Two Can’t Come Together.
One of the principal conceits of liberalism—the political doctrine, not the agenda—is that it places great faith in human reason and rationality. Yet if humans are so rational, why then does liberalism seek to curb the collective power of humans?
In his new book, Anger, Fear, Domination: Dark Passions and the Power of Political Speech, political theorist William A. Galston explains that when using the term “liberal democracy,” the antithesis of liberal is not conservative, but “total.” Liberal democracy means “limited democracy, a form of government in which the power of democratic majorities is limited in multiple ways.”
To restrain democratic majorities, liberalism reserves for itself the power not only to establish the rules of the game—as in the case of the U.S. Constitution—but also to set the boundaries of political action and public debate. By establishing the limits within which debate can occur and the norms under which it is discussed, liberalism can take certain political topics off the table, determine the language used when permitted subjects are discussed, and otherwise frame whatever matter to which the public is ultimately asked to give its consent.
For most of its short history, liberalism also sought to limit government in the interest of increasing the sphere of individual or group freedom. Limiting government power, particularly in the realm of culture and morality, allowed for a variety of incompatible minority worldviews to coexist more or less peacefully under a—more or less—morally neutral state.
This type of modus vivendi liberalism worked well—particularly for minorities—and, in the western world, often triumphed against more insular, parochial power bases. But with those triumphs, particularly in the United States, a more assertive liberalism began to drop its goal of governmental neutrality and insert itself in the private sphere, the very realm it once sought to keep separate.
Arguing that the “personal is political,” political liberals began to use the government that they had once hoped to be neutral to actively reconstitute family, gender and sexual norms. Once liberalism invaded the private realm, it brought with it its rules of engagement, its right to set the boundaries of debate, even determine the language we use.
While regulating racial speech in the public square was normalized rather quickly and considered successful, the monitoring of more intimate speech and behaviors in the private realm was always more problematic. Historically, the relative neutrality of a secular liberal state allowed traditional religions to operate unimpeded. But once the secular liberal state began to espouse secular liberalism as the preferred universal norm for all citizens it placed the state in opposition to the beliefs and behaviors of many religions. A political doctrine that first emerged as a call to curb the abuse of power evolved into a full on dispensation, or even, as one enthusiastic scholar recently called it, “a way of life.”1
Today’s surge of populism is the democratic reaction against the growth of liberal agenda setting in what was once considered the private sphere. What began as the establishment of the rules of the game of public life devolved into proscriptions on speech and behavior in everyday life.
***
I have to say upfront that I found an eminent political theorist needing to argue that humans are not always driven by reason and self interest a bit sad. (At one point, Galston himself acknowledges that he finds is “almost embarrassing.”) That he felt the need to cite the likes of Aristotle and Thucydides to prove the point also made it a little ridiculous. The book’s second major point, that “persuasive speech” is the core of politics, is also painfully obvious. What is fascinating, however, is the extent to which he felt the need to throw himself at the altar of common sense.
But desperate times call for desperate measures. Liberal democracy, Galston writes, is currently under the most pervasive attack than at any time since the 1930s. Yet, despite the “gathering strength of its external enemies,” this form of government is still “more likely to perish from within—from public dissatisfaction with its vulnerabilities, from demagogues’ ability to mobilize popular passions against it, and most of all, from the myopia and naïveté of its defenders.” In other words, those who adhere to liberalism have helped to bring this moment upon themselves.
A combination of their “unrealistic understanding” of human psychology and their naive belief that the movement toward tolerance at home and abroad was inexorable has provoked a far reaching negative reaction against liberalism as well as rendered liberals incapable of defending themselves against it.
If liberal democracy is to survive, Galston argues, its defenders “must set aside their illusions about human nature and history” and drop their “mistaken faith in historical progress.” That’s because “the dark side of our nature is here to stay, and liberal democracy” . . . “can buckle under pressure from the passions. Noble dreams have their place, but rigorous realism offers the best defense against the threats we now face.”
This adjustment of assumptions, however major, seems pretty straightforward until you realize that one’s baseline assumptions about human nature and history deeply influence whatever political objectives liberalism will seek to achieve on the ground.
The person who believes that people are essentially reasonable and make decisions largely on the basis of their self interest is more likely to place his faith in the type of utopian political goals that seek to remold and reinvent human nature. Conversely, liberals who have witnessed great political evil tend to be more pessimistic about the nature of man and therefore more suspicious of utopian goals to mettle with his nature. Pessimistic liberals, to borrow from philosopher Hans Jonas, should “give the prophecy of doom priority over the prophecy of bliss.”2
But is liberalism stripped of its optimism still liberalism? Yes, if you believe that the historical core of liberalism is the distrust of power and a broad commitment to protect individual autonomy.
Is liberalism stripped of its optimism worthwhile? Not entirely if one believes that liberalism should place its faith in the perfectibility of man.
The point here, once again, is that one’s assumptions about the essential nature of humans predetermines how ambitious one thinks political liberalism should be in the cause of freedom. Put another way, how the broader public assesses human nature predetermines how much “change”—to use that lazy, loaded term—it is willing to tolerate.
Lest he fall prey to critics who believe that pessimistic liberalism undercuts calls for transformative change,3 Galston threads the needle and insists that “realism about the dark side of the human soul does not rule out an aspirational liberal politics.” After all, he reminds us, Lyndon B. Johnson, a man who “was hardly naive about human motivation,” was the architect of the Great Society.
***
In addition to never forgetting that humans are often driven by irrational, negative emotions, realism, Galston insists, calls for liberals to acknowledge that “human beings bring themselves in full to politics.”
As I stated up top, liberalism restrains majorities and constrains debate. One of those constraints came to include the expectation that people refrain from bringing their religious beliefs into the public square. Galston, however, now concludes that liberals have often underestimated “the persistent power” of religion. He concedes that “culture and religion will not lose their independent power to shape understanding and motivate action.” Thus, if liberals don’t want to “continue to be surprised by political events,” they had better “make the effort to understand the enduring influence of religion and traditional morality in the hinterlands.” If nothing else, it may help them understand how “the exercise of liberty shades over into what many see as license or outright moral anarchy.”
In the end, Galston never clearly states what kind of political objectives a realistic liberalism would seek to promote. He only implies that cultural issues are their weak flank, the place where angry populists hit the hardest and most effectively. “They advance their cause by battling their liberal adversaries on the terrain of culture,” he writes, “invoking traditional gender roles and moving such issues as homosexuality, same-sex marriage, and transgenderism to the front lines of the struggle. They oppose most immigration, not only on economic grounds but also because immigrants can challenge, and eventually change, long-established cultural traditions.” What Galston is hinting at, but never dares utter, is the question lurking beneath this important yet imperfect book: How much toleration will the public tolerate?
Galston delivers many sophisticated kernels of truth that can ultimately be boiled down into common sense lessons one would hope a child would learn on a playground. “People can be mean.” “You can’t win ‘em all.” “The world isn’t fair.” “Pick your battles.” You don’t have to read Saint Augustine or Reinhold Niebuhr to reach these conclusions. What’s astonishing is that it took Galston until 2025 to pull the alarm.
I say that, because the late social critic Christopher Lasch made the same argument way back in 1991, long before the attack on liberal democracy had become so severe. Lasch warned liberals that “in their eagerness to condemn what is objectionable” in lower-middle-class culture, evils “such as “racism, nativism and anti-intellectualism,” they had “lost sight of what is valuable” in it, namely its “moral realism, its understanding that everything has its price, its respect for limits, [and] its skepticism of progress.”4
***
Political scientist Giovanni Sartori understood the relationship between liberalism and democracy in terms of geometry. “Liberalism has a vertical impetus,” he wrote, “while democracy is a horizontal diffusion.”5 Although liberalism first emerged in the 18th century in opposition to the established powers of aristocracy and the Church, it nevertheless retained the view of “ethical truth as a universal norm linked in a hierarchical chain of increasing purity.”6
Liberalism, in other words, is high-minded and tends toward elitism because its ideals are generally interpreted, taught, and monitored by enlightened elites. (John Stuart Mill suggested that liberal democracy required “philosophers” to “enlighten the multitude.”)7
But because democracy is about public opinion and participation, it tends toward the parochial and the visceral. The multitude can be anarchic. While liberalism uplifts, democracy levels. Each puts constraints on the other.
For liberal democracy to work, the former and the latter have to meet at some point to form an axis. It’s when the union between the two breaks that autocracy is most likely to threaten the entire enterprise.
Galston is right, “liberal democracy is the best form of government possible in our current circumstances.” Liberalism without democracy becomes elitist.Democracy without liberalism lacks foundational ideals. If realists don’t soon wrest liberalism from the hands of naive utopian-minded optimists, we may not be able to enjoy the benefits of the combination much longer.
Liberals can either continue to castigate the public for its intolerance and backwardness—thereby alienating them further—or the political demands of liberalism can be brought more into line with what the public is willing to tolerate.
***
Alexandre Lefebvre, Liberalism as a Way of Life (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2024).↩︎
Hans Jonas, Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984), x. ↩︎
Samuel Moyn. Liberalism against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2023).↩︎
Christopher Lasch, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991), 17.↩︎
Giovanni Sartori, Elementi di Teoria Politica (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1995), 145-146.↩︎
Barry Alan Shain, The Myth of American Individualism: The Protestant Origins of American Political Thought (Princeton, N.J. Princeton University Press, 1994), 85.↩︎
G.L. Williams, ed., John Stuart Mill on Politics and Society (London: Harvester, 1976), 184.↩︎
When I picked up a copy of Dan Wang’s Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future, I had no clue how much it would teach me about the United States.
Wang, a Chinese-Canadian tech analyst and writer, doesn’t merely tell the story of China’s meteoric economic rise. He compares and contrasts the strengths and pathologies of the world’s two great economic superpowers. What’s more, his focus is not on abstract measures of economic or military dominance. He could care less about sources of national vanity.
Instead, he assesses the countries by how well they work for the people living in them. He builds on this decidedly humane approach by drawing on his family’s emigrant story and by mixing in his own experiences of having lived and worked equal amounts of time in both the U.S. and China. (Wang was also a fellow at Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center.)
The result is an astonishingly lucid, fair, fun-to-read analysis of two nations grappling with very different types of flaws. And lest you think he gets stuck in the usual rote comparisons of two opposing systems—one democratic, one authoritarian, blah, blah, blah—be aware that Wang wields his Canadianness brilliantly and insists that “no two peoples are more alike than Americans and Chinese.”
If that declaration doesn’t wake you up, his explanation will:
“A strain of materialism, often crass, runs through both countries, sometimes producing veneration of successful entrepreneurs, sometimes creating displays of extraordinary tastelessness, overall contributing to a spirit of vigorous competition. Chinese and Americans are pragmatic: They have a get-it-done attitude that occasionally produces hurried work. Both countries are full of hustlers peddling shortcuts, especially to health and to wealth. Their peoples have an appreciation for the technological sublime: the awe of grand projects pushing physical limits. American and Chinese elites are often uneasy with the political views of the broader populace. But masses and elites are united in the faith that theirs is a uniquely powerful nation that ought to throw its weight around if smaller countries don’t get in line.”
Stunning. Wang’s analysis is both humane and independent. Yet, for all its insights on China, what struck me most about Breakneck was its critique of—and advice for—America.
***
The primary, and most stark, contrast Wang explores is that, for better or for worse, China is a nation run by engineers while the U.S. is run by lawyers. Because of that fact, China can build monumental projects in a short amount of time while the U.S. has become a “vetocracy” obsessed with proceduralism. Because lawyers know how to obstruct, he argues, the U.S. has lost sight of how government can and should build in the service of people.
On the flip side, lawyers can curb government power and protect individual rights, while engineers tend to employ ham-fisted, “literal minded” solutions to social issues, which not only make matters worse but “smother” people with political control. It stands to reason that a state that moves fast and breaks things can also “break people.”
Of course, once upon a time the United States was also an engineering nation. It would not have become a global power otherwise. But in the 1960s, in response to social problems, elite lawyers shifted course. “As Americans grew alarmed by the unpleasant by-products of growth—environmental destruction, excessive highway construction, corporate interests above public interests—the focus of lawyers turned to litigation and regulation. The mission became to stop as many things as possible.” So, while the lawyerly society emerged as a “necessary corrective” to America’s social problems, over time it “became the cause of many of its present problems.”
In addition to complicating—and rendering incomprehensible—the rules governing nearly every realm of society, lawyers are “too often the servants of the rich.” While in principle a lawyerly society serves to protect the rights of many, in practice it serves primarily to insulate and protect the wealthy. Furthermore, its ability to slow and stop countless public projects has made average Americans “lose faith that the government can meaningfully improve their lives.” Today, writes Wang, Americans live “in the ruins of an industrial civilization, whose infrastructure is just barely maintained and rarely expanded.”
To earn back the faith of its people, Wang argues, the United States must stop catering to the wealthy, “recover some of its engineering prowess and make room for nonlawyers among its ruling elites.” There’s a lot about China that Americans would never want to emulate, but over the past two decades, the Chinese have been beating the Americans at their own game: optimism in the future, an outlook “in large part driven by physical dynamism.” Ultimately, Wang concludes, Americans will never again feel that kind of optimism unless the United States commits to relearning how to make and build big things.
The Transept of the Mariakerk in Utrecht, Seen from the Northeast, Pieter Jansz Saenredam , 1637.
Utrecht, Netherlands
A good writer knows what to leave out of a sentence. A great photographer knows what to exclude from the frame. Sculptors chip away what they don’t need on a slab of marble. Composition invariably involves acts of subtraction. This I had known.
But it wasn’t until earlier this month that I learned that realism–or at least Dutch realism–was also born of a type of subtraction, the destruction and subsequent banning of religious imagery.
I was in Utrecht trying to catch the last rays of summer. On my first day, I walked 8 miles along canals, under sunny skies, stopping only twice to visit the Centraal Museum and then the Museum Catharijneconvent, which has a wonderful collection of religious art. Among the highlights of each were stark 17th century paintings of the interior of Dutch churches that had been stripped of devotional art by pious Calvinists in what the Dutch call the Beeldenstorm, the “attack on images.” English-speaking historians refer to this spasm of violence with more euphemistic terms like the Iconoclastic Fury of 1566 or just the Great Iconoclasm.
Initially instigated by the rantings of a zealous Reformed preacher in Flanders, the violence spread throughout much of Habsburg Low Countries. Under the guidance of Calvinist pastors, wandering rioters plundered sanctuaries, shattered altarpieces, defaced tombstones, and mutilated sculptures. The outbreak emboldened Reformed Protestants and led to their decision to use military tactics to fight their Spanish Catholic rulers. The Attack on Images was the start of the 80-years-long Dutch Revolt during which seven northern provinces united, declared their independence, and founded the Dutch Republic, a state often credited for giving birth to the Enlightenment.
The Reformed Church was central to the Dutch Republic’s identity. While it did not require that all citizens be members of the church, secular authorities nonetheless acknowledged it as the “only church that was allowed to publicly perform religious functions and to intervene publicly in moral affairs.”1 Government positions were reserved exclusively for Calvinists, and all forms of Catholic public expression were outlawed. In 1578/79, the Calvinists confiscated Catholic Churches, and “in accordance with Calvinist proscriptions on religious imagery,” further “denuded them of all religious objects—paintings, sculpture, stained glass, and alters”—that had survived the Fury of 1566.2
The justification for destroying and banning religious imagery was found in Calvin’s insistence that God could not be captured in art because He was transcendent and immaterial. Any attempt to do so, Calvin argued, simply degraded the glory of God. “We believe it wrong that God should be represented by a visible appearance,” he wrote, “because he himself has forbidden it and it cannot be done without some defacing of his glory.” Therefore, he concluded, “it remains that only those things are to be sculptured or painted which the eyes are capable of seeing: let not God’s majesty, which is far above the perception of the eyes, be debased through unseemly representations.”3
Art historians generally agree that the destruction and discouragement of sacred imagery had three unintended consequences. The decline in ecclesiastical commissions meant that art largely migrated from churches to the open market place, that art became increasingly valued for its aesthetic rather than spiritual qualities, and, lastly, that the suppression of religious themes encouraged artists to turn to varying genres of realism. “Whereas before 1566,” historian Angela Vanhaelen wrote, “the majority of artistic commissions were for churches and devotional purposes, after 1600 there was a significant rise in the development of specializations.”4 Painters focused on new genres like still life, household scenes, portraits, or landscapes. Once considered marginal at best, images of the mundane and the quotidian now became common—if not primary—themes in Dutch painting.
Realism as an artistic style arose in tandem with what historians call religious liberty. Religious liberty is associated with the the Enlightenment. But as the story of the Beeldenstorm suggests, it really flourished under a mandate from the Reformed Church. Artists were careful not to produce any works that could be considered idolatrous. Scholars disagree as to whether painters were merely avoiding sacred themes or had found the sacred in the mundane. I assume both can be true.
I’ve always been drawn to realism, both in art and ideas. To my cluttered head, simplicity and clarity can come across as sublime, even liberating. But it’s important to remember that there’s also a proscription involved, a self-limiting aspect, a refusal to perceive beyond what the eye can see. Realism can both reveal and obscure.
I enjoyed my few days in Utrecht. But then I took a train to Cologne to marvel at the sight of its magnificent Catholic Gothic cathedral that inspired my eyes and spirit to look toward the heavens.
Willem Frijhoff, “Was the Dutch Republic a Calvinist Community? The State, the Confessions, and Culture in the Early Modern Netherlands,” in The Republican Alternative: The Netherlands and Switzerland Compared ed. André Holenstein, Thomas Maissen and Maarten Prak (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2008), 105. ↩︎
Shelley Perlove and Larry Silver, Rembrandt’s Faith: Church and Temple in the Dutch Golden Age, (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009), 17. ↩︎
Angela Vanhaelen, “Calvinism and Visual Culture: The Art of Evasion,” in Cultures of Calvinism in Early Modern Europe, ed. Crawford Gribben and Graeme Murdock (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 141. ↩︎
Vanhaelen, “Calvinism and Visual Culture,” 141. ↩︎
So pervasive is the integrationist logic of post-civil rights America that it’s sometimes instructive–if not a little jarring–to talk to minorities abroad who could not imagine abiding by its rules.
To that end, I conducted an interview with a thirty-something ethnic Chinese professional to get her perspective on interethnic relations in this thriving multicultural East Javanese port city of 3 million inhabitants. Surabaya is the second largest city in Indonesia, which, with almost 300 ethnicities, is one of the most diverse countries in the world. While the level of ethnic mixing varies across the country, the overall intermarriage rate is low. A 2020 study found that almost 90% of Indonesians marry within their ethnic group. The ethnic Chinese are thought to be the least likely to outmarry.1
Given the sensitivity of the topic and the recent political turmoil, my interviewee asked that I not publish her name. We talked over a poolside table at a luxury hotel, where I had thought she could speak honestly about her experiences as an ethnic Chinese Indonesian.
Although there were few people around, my interlocutor still looked around to make sure that no ethnic Javanese hotel guests or hotel workers could overhear her. She’d occasionally break into a whisper. Once, when asked what her parents had taught her to think of the Javanese, she refused to cite specifics. I then nudged her to tell me just two things they had said. She obliged. Just two. I can only assume that she thought that whatever else her parents had said would either have reflected poorly on them or have been just too insulting to the Javanese.
Ethnic Chinese in Indonesia are widely known to enjoy a higher economic status than other ethnicities in Indonesia. They are what author Amy Chua has called “market-dominant minorities,” ethnic groups “who for widely varying reasons, tend under market conditions to dominate economically, often to a startling extent, the ‘indigenous’ majorities around them.”2
The resentment this economic imbalance inevitably creates has periodically erupted in anti-Chinese scapegoating and even violence. In 1998, during the Asian financial crisis, some indigenous Indonesians blamed the ethnic Chinese minority for the nation’s economic plight. This sparked two days of large-scale rioting in Jakarta in which Chinese-owned businesses were looted and burned and dozens of Chinese Indonesian women were raped.
That level of violence pushed some wealthy Chinese Indonesians to emigrate to Singapore, but it also ultimately led to the collapse of President Suharto’s authoritarian regime, a watershed moment that has since led to growing democratization and acceptance of ethnic pluralism in Indonesia.
***
Under Suharto’s 32 year rule, the government’s cultural policy was stridently assimilationist. Although “Unity in Diversity” was the national motto, government policy promoted cultural homogenization. In August of 1967, Suharto called for the complete assimilation of Indonesians of foreign heritage. Ethnic Chinese were pressured to assume Indonesian names and abandon Chinese customs. Chinese-language newspapers were banned with the exception of one that was published by the government. While private Chinese groups could still establish schools, Chinese-language instruction was prohibited. Enforcement of assimilation laws was uneven and sometimes nonexistent, but the message was clear. Under Suharto, Chinese Indonesians developed multiple strategies to obscure their distinctiveness while preserving their networks.
All that changed when the regime collapsed in 1998. Decentralization and democratization allowed both ethnic and regional identities to reemerge. After more than a generation of restrictions, “Chinese Indonesians were now allowed to publicly display their religions, beliefs and customs and to start civil rights groups to reassess their position in society.”3 Of course, the new openness also enabled greater public expression of simmering ethnic tensions.
If my interlocutor’s story suggests anything beyond the anecdotal, it’s that the ethnic Chinese residents of Surabaya are eager to remain separate yet not necessarily very traditionally Chinese. I recount our conversation mostly because I think it sheds light on the very different ways Americans perceive and manage ethnic difference.
***
In both the governmental and the cultural spheres, diversity is generally celebrated as a positive social benefit in the United States, At the same time, anti-discrimination laws combined with strong contemporary social dictates on what is acceptable to say or discuss make many Americans reluctant to speak openly about ethnic and racial differences. So, ironically, what is presented in the abstract as an overall social good is also seen as a minefield that’s best to avoid.
The civil rights era push for racial integration also had the ancillary effect of encouraging ethnic assimilation. Starting with the 1954 Brown v. Board decision, which, as historian Anders Walker has written, “rested on the unsupportable assumption that black history, black traditions, and black institutions were inferior and should be destroyed, erased in favor of assimilating blacks into mainstream white America” had a profound effect on how Americans viewed the integration of all non-white groups.4 While diversity in America–as in all multiethnic nations–was always challenging, a desire to remain separate from the Anglo-centric mainstream was now viewed by both conservatives and liberals as being contrary to the judicially-sanctioned national drive to a harmonious future.
Ethnicity, which was once understood to be a more or less inevitable, if unfortunate, part of being an immigrant nation, came to be seen as a vestigial remnant of a primordial past, one characterized by ancient grudges, irrational loyalties, and primitive religious rituals and beliefs. The new integrationist nationalism now saw the embrace of ethnic identities as old-fashioned tribalism, which ran counter to the modern goal of national unity.
By the early 1970s, however, evolving anti-discrimination law and the advent of affirmative action–or positive discrimination as the British call it–incentivized the claiming of minority identities. Ethnic pressure groups lobbied the government to be granted protected status on the grounds that they had collectively suffered historic discrimination. Gaining protected status ensured that their co-ethnics benefitted from anti-discrimination laws and strategic advantages in college admissions and job applications.
This new regimen did not replace integrationist nationalism. It lived uncomfortably alongside it. While integrationism pushed assimilation, the civil rights regime encouraged continued ethnic identification. These conflicting regimes forged a new dynamic in which, in order to implement the new civil rights policies, government bureaucracies began to categorize members of specific national origin groups into larger administratively-convenient aggregate categories. Just as early modern governments in Europe once impose standardized weights and measurements on distant villages that had long since developed their own varied techniques, the U.S. government imposed new groupings in order to better keep track of the nation’s population.
What this meant was that growing numbers of immigrants from Asia and Latin American were now funneled into a new system in which, upon arrival, they were now categorized not as, say, Chinese or Korean, but as “Asian” and then assessed as to whether they could be designated as “protected minorities,”
The conflict between the ideologies of integrationism and minority protection forged a new type of assimilation, one that encouraged the children and grandchildren of immigrants to abandon the premodern elements of their heritage while remaining identified with one of the government-created categories. A Mexican Catholic, for instance, would transform into a “Hispanic,” with all the warmth, history, texture, and ancient religious customs that this cold bureaucratic term implies. The post civil rights American ethnic, in other words, was encouraged to drop the specific texture of their heritages while remaining vaguely distinctive from the majority. They were expected to strip themselves of ancient roots while integrating into a deracinated, aggregate “ethnic” category. In short, foreign-born parents could remain Korean while their children were transformed into “Asian Americans.”
The one exception to this rule was reserved for indigenous peoples largely because progressive whites saw their primordial identities as a powerful symbolic challenge to the prevailing norms of “western civilization.” Whereas Catholicism, for example, was viewed part and parcel of an oppressive western order, ancient indigenous beliefs were seen as fundamentally innocent, a quality many late 20th century American whites began to crave for themselves.
In any case, by the late 20th century, genuine cultural pluralism, the acceptance–however grudgingly or even racist–that all groups did not act, believe, or see the world the same as one another had given way to a conflicted ideology of national unity/homogeneity wrapped in faux, officially-sanctioned diversity. At the same time, Americans received constant warnings to watch what they said and did around protected minorities–or at least those with powerful allies–because any missteps might land them in a heap of trouble.
***
My interlocutor, I’ll call her Angela, is a third-generation Chinese Indonesia. Her grandparents were born in the Fujian Province in southeastern China and mostly spoke Hokkien. The street she grew up on was entirely Chinese. She estimates that her childhood neighborhood was maybe 90% Chinese. She attended all Chinese schools but the instruction was in Bahasa Indonesia, a standardized version of Malay, which was once the language of a tiny minority that for political and linguistic reasons was chosen to be the country’s official language upon independence in 1945. (Not entirely unlike Standard High German, Bahasa Indonesia was made the official national language in an effort to unify a nation of many tongues). Every single one of her friends is Chinese. She dated only Chinese men and eventually married one.
Thanks to a class she took for a summer in China, she speaks a little Mandarin, but not very well. Still, she says, the Chinese business people who come to Surabaya consider her fully Chinese. And, with China’s growing commercial presence in the region—it is, by far, Indonesia’s largest trading partner—that’s a big advantage.
When she was a little girl, Angela’s parents made it clear that the Javanese were not like her. Not only were they not at their same “cultural level,” but when they got paid they just frittered away their money. “They don’t know how to save,” she said in a concerned tone. She wouldn’t tell me what else her parents told her.
Other than language, the biggest difference Angela saw between herself and her parents and grandparents was religion. A few years ago, she said she began to question why her elders “worshipped their ancestors rather than God.” She converted to Catholicism not long after. While Christian missionaries had been proselytizing the Chinese in Indonesia since at least the 19th century, the number of conversions exploded under the Suharto regime. Some converted as a way of obscuring their ethnicity, their way of complying with the national policy of assimilation. Conversion was “not a matter of what they believed,” writes sociologist Andreas Susanto, “but what they perceived was safe.” So why not convert to Islam, the majority religion? It may have been a reflection of their “reluctance to assimilate into the indigenous society,” of keeping “their distance” from the Indonesian majority.5 Converting to Christianity also gave Chinese Indonesians a sense of belonging to a global network. Today, almost half are either Protestant or Catholic.
But Angela isn’t living under a coercive assimilationist policy, and other than her apparent disdain for what she called “ancestor worship,” I didn’t get a full grasp of why she converted. It’s quite possible that she did so religious reasons, that she was looking for some meaning in her life. Still, her parish is 60 to 70% Chinese, but the rest are mostly from migrants from outlying Nusa Tenggara and Madura islands. It’s the first time she has ever chosen to be in an ethnically-mixed private setting. She said she enjoyed it.
Without language and religion, it’s not entirely clear what Chineseness means to Angela other than the networks, attitudes, and behaviors that make for success in a global marketplace.
Before we said our goodbyes, we discussed the ethnic tensions that still exist between the Chinese and Javanese. We talked about the growing upward mobility among the Javanese. I asked her whether that was a good thing, thinking that perhaps Javanese economic success could undercut some of the jealousy and resentment some had felt for the Chinese. She disagreed. She didn’t like the trend. She said, “It just means there’s less for us Chinese.”
***
I have no idea whether Angela’s opinions are reflective of Chinese Indonesians at large. All I can say is that her honesty rattled me. It bothered me. I wasn’t used to it.
Sure, I’ve heard Americans utter all sorts of raw things on racial and ethnic matters over the years, but rarely so openly, and never to a complete stranger with a notebook in his hand. It made me wonder how much of America’s post-civil rights era “unity in diversity” regime has been based on the policing of speech, whether free intellectual–and cultural–expression had been among the costs of America’s much celebrated diversity. I wonder whether the price of social peace means we actually have little idea what Americans are thinking when no one is around. And, if so, can that really be considered peace?
Amy Chua, World on Fire : How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability, (New York: Doubleday, 2003), 6. ↩︎
Marleen Dieleman et al., “Chinese Indonesians and the Regime Change: Alternative Perspectives,” in Chinese Indonesians and Regime Change, ed. Marleen Dieleman, Juliette Koning, and Peter Post, (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2011), 3. ↩︎
Anders Walker, The Burning House: Jim Crow and the Making of Modern America, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), 232-233. ↩︎
Andreas Susanto, “Diversity in Compliance: Yogyakarta Chinese and the New Order Assimilation Policy,” in Chinese Indonesians and Regime Change, ed Marleen Dieleman, Juliette Koning, and Peter Post, (Leiden/Boston, 2011), 80-81. ↩︎
Progressives are right to be up in arms about the right’s efforts to have people fired for speech they deem inappropriate. But they’d have a whole lot more credibility if they had spoken up any time over the past decade when folks on the left kept plenty busy employing the very same tactics.
Smith contends that the “threat of progressive cancel culture in America has been defused,” but only because the right, which currently holds the balance of political power, has adopted the strategy for itself.
He argues that “cancel culture” has harmed the country by substituting “nastiness for persuasion” and “robbed America of the incisive commentary of which intelligent progressives would otherwise be capable.” But I’d add that it has also hurt the country in additional, more profound ways. In an effort to protect their own hides from the mob, countless numbers of Americans—particularly those in the world of ideas—allowed themselves to be cowed into silent complicity. And there is no intellectual integrity in cowardice.
If liberals don’t come clean about their own complicity in the culture of cancel, then we’re probably looking at a future of alternating cycles of crackdowns, with each side justifying firings and the suppression of speech as a legitimate means to protect their party’s preferred groups and favored minorities.
So, yes, the Trump/Vance administration does pose a threat to free speech in America. And I hope that liberals in the business of thinking and writing can figure out effective means of combatting that threat. But their arguments won’t fix anything if they don’t first acknowledge that they, too, sat by silently while the left-wing fringe ran around punishing apostates like a secular version of the Taliban Morality Police. No matter which side is doing the flogging, cancel culture is bad for America.
