Global Headlines Express | The Nation Revisits the Question People Asked 50 Years Ago — "What Is Freedom?" — and Other Important News
Global Headlines was QDaily's new column for 2018. It ended on August 3. Thanks for reading.
Global Headlines was QDaily's new column for 2018. It ended on August 3. Thanks for reading.
What the Agenda-Setters Are Talking About
The Nation (US): What Is Freedom?
There is a reason 1968 keeps coming back this year. The countries that lived through student-led political upheaval half a century ago — the United States, France, Japan, Germany and others — keep using that memory to examine social problems they still cannot solve.
After The New York Times, The Atlantic and other outlets ran their own packages, the US magazine The Nation put a huge 1968 on the cover of its August issue and opened with a question that looks plain and answers hard: "What is freedom?"
The opening essay is by Arthur Goldhammer, a 71-year-old American scholar and translator, who uses memory and analysis to ask what young people wanted 50 years ago, and how we should think about "freedom" now. We have excerpted a few passages below:
A documentary shown recently in France includes a dinner conversation from 1968 between then-president Charles de Gaulle and his grandson, Yves de Gaulle. The "May storm" was nearing its peak.
President de Gaulle, 77: "What do these wildly agitated young people actually want?"
Yves de Gaulle, 17: "To live better!"
President de Gaulle: "As head of state, what should I do to satisfy these wishes, which I understand completely?"
Yves de Gaulle did not answer his grandfather's question.
He had taken part himself in the exhilarating protest at the Odéon National Theatre, where students, artists and workers occupied the building and declared it a site of "permanent and revolutionary creativity." The crowd's passion had clearly fired him up: he had never seen a social spectacle so unbound, so freely spent.
Yves de Gaulle tried to convey this unprecedented scene to his grandfather, but he believed his grandfather would never grasp what "this bunch of good-for-nothings" wanted. To the old man, restoring order only required "changing society."
That is the typical conservative answer to the baffling wish to "live better" — and it is the strategy Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa made unforgettable in The Leopard: "Everything must change so that everything can stay the same." And so it did.
Yet somehow we, "this bunch of good-for-nothings," seem to have made a mess of things, leaving traditionalists and reformers alike at a loss.
Half a century ago we had just come of age, carrying luck we had not earned, free to test the limits of liberty as we pleased. Our parents, after the Great Depression and the hardships of the Second World War, set about rebuilding society.
Their discipline produced a prosperous world. But behind that prosperity were lonely souls who knew only how to obey the group.
We wanted more. The whole of 1968 can be read as the process by which those wants seeped into public life. And what set this want off — longing, I would rather call it, since it is vaguer than want, unbounded, aimed at nothing in particular — was the rioting we happened to witness on the streets of Paris that spring.
For the young, 1968 was a beautiful year and a terrifying one: riots, crackdowns, blood, assassinations, racism. To some older liberals, that "romance" deserved suspicion. The French political theorist Raymond Aron warned that all of it was an illusion.
A well-known writer had foreseen long before that elders would think the young were wrong.
In 1958, when the noted social and political theorist Isaiah Berlin took up the chair of political theory at Oxford, he gave an extremely famous lecture, Two Concepts of Liberty. It was later collected in his 1969 book Four Essays on Liberty, and it set the terms philosophers would use to argue about freedom afterwards.
Berlin proposed the concepts of negative liberty and positive liberty. Many readers at the time, unsettled by the events of the previous year, read him as a prophet and said that "positive liberty led the younger generation astray."
Berlin argued that the two concepts look as though there were "no great logical gap" between them, but in practice they often stand "opposed," because someone drawn to positive liberty may take the "true self" to be "a social whole," with the individual only one element or one aspect of it.
"In pursuit of a sliver of positive liberty, a person risks voluntary enslavement, submitting to some seemingly transcendent cause, and then slides down the slope, perhaps coming to feel entitled to coerce others who are blindly, ignorantly or corruptly unaware of what is best for them."
For Berlin, this "coercion toward the good" was, if not a political trap, then an easy road to servitude. Careless positive liberty is likely to squeeze the zone of "not interfering with others" — that is, the idea of negative liberty. In Berlin's view, that restraint was exactly "the mark of a high civilization."
All these ideas came wrapped in a single package, which summed up a Cold War notion of democratic freedom. In fact the liberalism that existed never reached the best of all possible worlds, yet the wish to live better endangered freedom itself. For if we already had everything the world had to offer, then failing to indulge in our luck would be plain selfish.
Of course most of us knew, even then, that politics was not the young's calling. We were known, after all, for insisting on "doing our own thing" — the opposite of the collective action politics demands. And yet the "own thing" we did was never only a private pursuit. However far it stood from the "collective," it was still social.
What mattered is that these young people made a connection, one that tied all sorts of people together in a society that would not stop changing. That is the lasting legacy of the 1960s.
24-Hour News Makers
Apple Becomes the First Company in the World Worth $1 Trillion
At 11:48 a.m. Eastern time on August 2, Apple's shares rose from an opening price of $200.58 to $207.05, making Apple the first company in the world with a market value above $1 trillion.
The climb followed Apple's third-quarter results on August 1, which showed record total revenue of $53.3 billion and profit up 32 percent — and sent the stock higher.
Outside observers think Apple must launch a strong new product to keep sales and revenue growing, but healthy iPhone 8 and iPhone X sales, especially in China and Japan, along with rising App Store revenue, kept pushing the stock up anyway.
Thirteen Wall Street analysts expect the share price to keep climbing, with targets above $225; some are more bullish still and see it passing $275, which would put the market value at $1.3 trillion. As for the other two tech giants, Amazon's market value has recently passed $900 billion and Google's has topped $800 billion.
Apple is not the first company in history to be worth a trillion dollars, though. In 2007, PetroChina (PTR) shares trading in Shanghai briefly reached a $1 trillion valuation, before the price fell fast. Its market value today is about $205 billion.
What Else Happened in the World
Japanese media reported that Tokyo Medical University had long been "deducting points" from female applicants' scores. Nikkei spoke with people familiar with the matter at Tokyo Medical University: in the general entrance exam for the medical school's medicine program, female applicants' scores had been cut across the board to hold down the number admitted. The university says it will explain publicly only after an internal investigation.
Zimbabwe has seen one clash after another since its presidential election; the government has put down protests in the city, and six people have died so far. A coup in late 2017 forced out Robert Mugabe, who had ruled for 37 years, and the country held its first election in 2018. Results were slow to come after the vote, and the opposition later said the election was unfair and took to the streets. The government sent soldiers into the city to put the protests down, and six people have died so far.
Students in Bangladesh are protesting over a road-safety accident, paralyzing traffic in the capital for five days running; the government has now decided to close high schools nationwide to stop more students from joining in. The protests began on July 29, when a bus pulling over to pick up passengers hit and killed a man and a woman. Traffic in Bangladesh has long been a serious problem, and the crash was only the spark that set public anger alight. "We don't want to see unlicensed drivers," one protester told the Associated Press.
Four new Ebola cases have appeared in Congo. The World Health Organization (WHO) said it has rushed staff and supplies to the area. WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom wrote on Twitter: "We will fight this new wave of cases as we always have."
Wildfires in California have burned down 1,000 homes this summer. Mike Mohler, a spokesman for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, told the New York Post that one month into the fiscal year, the state's firefighting budget had already been exceeded by a quarter. Sixteen wildfires have also drawn more than 13,000 firefighters and forced 32,000 people to move out.
Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree on Monday creating a "Military-Political Directorate" in the armed forces to promote patriotic work. Some analysts think this could bring back the Soviet practice of cadres giving soldiers Marxist-Leninist instruction. Alexander Kanshin, an expert who helps shape Russian military policy, said the new department is "mainly a response to the current international situation. With Russia facing off against Western countries, it is necessary now to unify political and moral awareness inside the military." One million serving soldiers will be affected by the decree.
Someone Said
On August 2, Pope Francis announced that the section on the death penalty in the Catechism of the Catholic Church has been changed: from now on, carrying out the death penalty is wrong in any circumstance.
There are about 1.2 billion Catholics in the world, and the Catechism is, in effect, their textbook of doctrine.
The change is both decisive and challenging. The Catechism did not previously reject the death penalty outright; it stressed how exceptional the penalty was, allowing it only where it was the one possible punishment in a given situation. The declaration is expected to create difficulties for the countries and places that still keep capital punishment. The Vatican added that it will now actively push for abolition everywhere.
Amnesty International said most Catholic countries, including those in Europe and Latin America, have already abolished the death penalty.
The New York Times argued that the declaration will present the biggest challenge to the United States, since many American Catholics support the death penalty. The pope's move could bring changes in places with large Catholic populations, and might even affect whether executions are carried out.
Things You Might Also Be Interested In
On September 20 last year, Namie Amuro wrote on her official site and Facebook page, with no warning: "I, Namie Amuro, would like to take this chance to tell all my fans that I have decided to retire officially on September 16, 2018." The announcement shook Japan's music world, and a matching gloom spread across Japanese social media under the name "Amuro Loss."
As the retirement date approached, events honoring Namie Amuro were held all over Japan, from commemorative merchandise to retrospective exhibitions, and she has now finished her final concert tour.
In her last month before retiring, West Japan Railway announced that it would replace the departure chimes on all its trains with her song "Hero" as a tribute. The chime uses only the chorus and plays for seven seconds.
Tokyu Corporation in Tokyo also plans to switch the chimes at some of its stations entirely to "Hero" from August 17 to September 16. Every passenger will then meet her retirement day to the sound of her voice: "The hero who exists only for you will be by your side no matter what kind of day it is. I'll be your hero."
On This Day in History
August 3, 1914: Germany declares war on France.
August 3, 1923: Lu Xun publishes his short story collection Call to Arms.
August 3, 1992: Black South Africans launch a nationwide strike against white rule.
The Next Two Days in History...
August 4, 1789: France abolishes feudalism.
August 4, 1914: In the First World War, Germany invades Belgium and Britain declares war on Germany.
August 4, 1990: The third Gay Games opens.
August 5, 1966: The decade-long Cultural Revolution begins.
August 5, 2003: China successfully rears its first artificially bred giant panda.
August 5, 2013: The Washington Post Company sells The Washington Post and its assets to Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos for $250 million.
Cover image: from "Clash of Images," the Paris art exhibition on the May revolution held this year. Image copyright: Visual China Group
Translated from the original QDaily article. Original publication date retained.