Tag Archives: Georgetown

December 7, 2012 · 10:12 am

Tonight’s Do-Not-Miss Event in Washington: “The Final Gladness”

If you are in the Washington, D.C. area, then I urge you to put this on your calendar for tonight, even if it means leaving work or class a little bit early. For today at 5:00 pm in Gaston Hall, Georgetown University government professor James V. Schall, S.J. will be delivering his final lecture before retirement.  All that we know at this point is its title: “The Final Gladness” – and to be honest, even if we did not have that title, I would still urge those of you who are in the Washington metropolitan region to make an effort to attend, and hear what this great mind is going to share with us.

Father Schall earned his Ph.D. in political philosophy at Georgetown in 1960, and has been one of the great intellects of the university ever since.  The author of more than 30 books, as well as a contributor to many others, for decades he has been a voice of reason and common sense both in the United States and around the world.  His articles and essays have appeared in publications such as the National Review, Economist, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, L’Osservatore Romano, Christian Science Monitor, First Things, Crisis, Commentary, and so many, MANY others, that one is humbled by both the quantity and quality of his output.

Even if you are not a Catholic, chances are you have read Father Schall’s writing somewhere, if you have studied politics or current events beyond the mind-numbingly pedestrian, screaming-as-analysis sort of nonsense that tends takes place these days in certain quarters, both left and right.  He has seen it all, over the past fifty years, and has been a part of the national conversation long before many of my readers were even born.  His calm witness to classical principles, from the virtues of the classical academy to the benefits of a sensibly governed democracy, is no less sharp and insightful now, in his mid-80′s, as our country’s future hangs rather precariously in the balance.

For example, the reader may recall that in April of this year, Congressman Paul Ryan came to speak at Georgetown about the budget battle and the philosophical underpinnings of each side, left and right, with respect to the role of government in out lives.  As it happens, that lecture was given in the very same hall where Father Schall will deliver his final lecture this evening.  The reader may recall that a number of the leftist faculty on campus turned out to criticize Congressman Ryan, even before he made his speech to the faculty and students.

Father Schall was, very decidedly, not among these.  In his review of Congressman Ryan’s speech, Father Schall pointed out that the present Administration appears more and more interested in taking control over the wealth of others, in order to foster greater dependency upon the government:

This accumulation of wealth gives government huge power over citizens who are increasingly dependent on it. They are increasingly afraid to oppose its growth for fear that they will be cut out of societal benefits. Indeed, there is considerable speculation that this growing dependence of more and more citizens on the government is precisely what many politicians, bureaucrats, and other interested parties want. This leaves a mass of voters who do not dare oppose the state but who demand more and more for themselves.

He went on to observe how our increasing dependence on the government as the provider of goodies for all is not going to make our country wealthier and thereby better-able to take care of the poor; instead, the reverse will happen:

The poor are not poor because the rich are rich. The only way for the poor to hope to increase their wealth is for the economy itself to grow as a result of their own endeavors. This is the classic notion that we must allow reward and incentive to flourish. If we take these away, no one will do anything to help himself. Everyone will become more dependent on a government increasingly willing to claim that it is itself the solution. Americans once knew this approach of the all-caring government was, to put it mildly, counter-productive and even dangerous.

In his personal philosophy of education, Father Schall has always been decidedly opposed to the idea that the university is nothing but an over-priced trade school.  Rather, in the Platonic tradition of the Academy, it is a place where minds go to be formed, away from the influences of the outside world, so that they can come to understand what is true.  He has often pointed out that more learning can arise from a good conversation in a pub, asking questions and challenging notions, than in simply memorizing and regurgitating facts in order to get a high mark in a class, and thereafter a high-paying job.

In an interview he gave recently, Father Schall pointed out that many universities, including Georgetown, have abandoned the idea of what the university is supposed to be, becoming “resumé universities” in pursuit of the almighty dollar, rather than classical universities in pursuit of truth:

“Resumé universities have students who focus on their internships, their extracurricular activities, their sports. What’s behind them is the notion that education is more than just knowing, but that detracts from the purpose of a university,” he said. “You can’t be a student if you’re doing 30 hours a week of something else.”  Schall maintains that students should remain actively involved in their educations whenever not in class. “Of course you can do nothing if you want, but you have the time to be free to be thinking about things,” he said.

Whether you have long admired Father Schall’s work, or whether you are now reading it for the first time, this is an event not to be missed.  Although Gaston Hall seats around 600 people, I suspect that it is going to be packed to the rafters with people who will want to hear Father Schall’s last public address to the Georgetown community.  Again, if you are in the Washington area this evening, I urge you: do not miss this opportunity to wish this very great man well, as he leaves the active teaching life to prepare for what comes next.

Schall

The Rev. James V. Schall, S.J.

4 Comments

Filed under culture

Tagged as , , , , , ,

September 12, 2012 · 10:54 am

Reflections on the Death of an American Ambassador

With the breaking news this morning about the murder of U.S. Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens, the attacks on our missions in Egypt and Libya, and unexpectedly running into a diplomat friend twice over the past two days, the subject of diplomacy as a career choice has been on my mind quite a bit over the past 24 hours. In fact, diplomacy was a career which at one point I both studied and fully intended to embark upon – and, never say never, I have always been open to considering in the future. Yet despite what the public often thinks about a diplomatic career, that it is little more than one endless cocktail party out of some James Bond film, it is in fact a rather difficult life, based on the espousal and promotion of principle, which often involves a great deal of personal sacrifice.

My grandfather worked for the United Nations in South America during the 1960′s, and I grew up hearing from my mother about the experiences she had with him and my grandmother living in places like Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, and Peru, among others. This was part of my motivation for becoming interested in international politics, and why I wanted so very much to get into the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown. There were other undergraduate universities I could have attended, but the Catholic roots of SFS – a school founded by a Jesuit priest and housed in a building named for another – really sealed the deal for me, when it came to selecting which institution would become my alma mater.

Once at school, I quickly obtained a part-time position with a diplomatic studies think tank, and set about trying to figure out the best way to graduate and end up in Europe, preferably Spain or Germany, for a diplomatic post upon graduation. I had visions of meeting and befriending interesting people in business, politics, and society in these places, trying to help our respective countries understand each other better for mutual benefit. In fact this was a view which I suspect was shared by quite a number of my classmates, since we were entering into uncharted waters, historically. The Soviet Union had only just recently collapsed; it looked as though Western values had finally triumphed and a new age of democracy and international cooperation was dawning.

Reality, of course, soon comes knocking when one imagines that any sort of career path is going to be easy. Within the first few days of orientation, I became acquainted with one of my classmates whose parents were both diplomats. He had lived all over the world, sometimes in rather exotic and unpleasant-sounding places, and possessed a kind of world-weary air combined with a love of British alternative music which I happened to share.

However over time I began to sense that having no permanent sense of home had left him intellectually bright but personally detached in some way. This was by no means an isolated case, but rather a pattern of personality which I often observed among the children of diplomats whom I befriended at college. It is of course unfair to speak in generalities, as no doubt there are plenty of well-adjusted diplomatic children. However I did hear repeatedly the lament that the constant moving about, having to leave old friends and make new ones, made it difficult for these children to form attachments, knowing they could rupture at any time.

Then of course apart from family strife, there is the danger for the diplomat that you will be sent to work in some horrid place in which you have absolutely no interest, and this is a very legitimate concern indeed if you are not someone who enjoys being far from civilization and organized agriculture. I have never wanted to ride a camel into a desert, nor trek through a rain forest, nor have a pee in a lean-to made out of aluminum siding, and I should hardly care to live in an environment where such things are not uncommon. In short, and with all due apologies to people who live in such places, if the local insects are generally the size of my hand, I will not be going there.

Academically I have always been more interested in Europe than in the other continents, and focused on it in my studies. This made the chances of their being a need for a fluent German speaker specializing in European economic integration or German foreign policy in off-putting corners of the world hopefully rather slim, at least in theory, if I did chose to follow the diplomatic route. Yet over time and meeting more diplomats, it became clear that this was not often the case. When you received your assignment, sometimes you got Paris, but sometimes you got the back of beyond – and frankly I’d rather not go there, thanks all the same.

Then yesterday and today on the way in to work, I ran into a friend in the diplomatic service whom I have not seen for some years, someone who is temporarily back in Washington for a few weeks before the next assignment overseas. I could not help but imagine, from the pure serendipity of the encounters, that my life might have turned out similarly, and there was a faint sense of something appealing about it, even with all of the potential drawbacks involved in living that life. At the same time of course, it is impossible not to think of the risks that career diplomats like my friend or Ambassador Stevens who, though the chances are extremely rare, can find themselves in, by the very nature of who they are and the offices they hold, and indeed by what they represent around the world.

Perhaps I am now at the age when I can appreciate that this is not such a bad thing, which in my late teens and early 20′s I would not have understood. I still want absolutely nothing to do with giant bugs of course, but as you grow older, and you come to not only understand but deeply appreciate the values behind our American form of democracy, you realize that promoting its interests abroad and encouraging others to follow in the good footsteps of our example is not such a bad thing. For however much we may at times fall short of living up to our own values and principles, as a nation we do actually believe in them, and keep striving to achieve and perfect them. It is our can-do attitude and sense of trying to give people a fair shake which makes us such a remarkably effective country around the world.

I think this is something Ambassador Stevens clearly understood, as he risked his life to work in such an extremely dangerous part of the world. He worked to communicate with the Libyan rebels as they sought to free themselves from the Gaddafi regime, and stayed on as the new Libyan state began to form out of the chaos of civil war, when he could so easily have asked to come home. His family ought to be proud, and his countrymen grateful, that he served his country so well.

So forget the black-tie balls and garden parties you see in Hollywood’s imagining of what diplomatic life is like. Instead, remember the example of those who, like Ambassador Stevens, put themselves into personal danger simply by representing your country in a different part of the world, far from home. For that is both a great position to hold, and a great responsibility to one’s nation.


Detail of “The Ambassadors” by Hans Holbein (1533)
National Gallery, London

3 Comments

Filed under culture

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , ,

August 28, 2012 · 11:32 am

Your Time Is Now

Yesterday afternoon I decided to attend daily mass a few blocks from my house, and then pick up some things for dinner at a nearby deli, where I used to shop as an undergraduate at Georgetown University.  Monday happened to be the first day of classes, since the students all moved in this past weekend, and the relative quiet of the neighborhood around campus in summer is now broken once again.  There were young people everywhere, some carrying bags full of shopping, others bumping into one another and asking, “How was your summer?”, others heading back from class, internships, or athletic practice.

As I walked about, I experienced this rather vivid sense of time travel which is a bit hard to describe.  Perhaps the feeling was originally triggered by seeing a classmate of mine (whom I only knew slightly) on C-Span that morning, speaking on a panel discussion about the Republican National Convention, and remembering what she was like when she was about 19 years old.  It wasn’t that I actually ran into someone I knew after mass, for although I still know a professor or two at Georgetown, almost everyone who would remember me there is long gone.

Rather, it was something like putting myself back into that time when I was a new Hoya.  I still remember walking this particular route, on a Monday in August many years ago, as I made my way from campus down into the village for the first time.  It isn’t as though I had never walked this route since: as a matter of fact I probably take it at least a couple of times a month, if I am going to patronize certain commercial establishments, or attend a lecture on campus, etc.

Instead, it was a certain combination of golden, late afternoon light,  walking among these groups of students, that was a sort of journey beyond just that of heading home after church with some groceries.  It was not just that click or flash, where you are suddenly reminded of something and then it fade, but rather quite a lengthy visitation or reverie, putting me in mind of people I had known and had not thought of in many years, whose names I have forgotten but who at one time if I saw them on the other side of Prospect Street I would have acknowledged, even if not necessarily stopped to talk to.  Although I did not know the students around me, and they did not know me, there was a very strange sense that I could almost detail their lives…

And then of course, I realized that this is all rubbish.

Living in the past does no one any good – e.g., Miss Havisham.  We all know people who fit the old stereotypes of people who cannot left go of the past.  There are high school or college athletes for example, who got stuck in their own golden, afternoon light with the wet lawn beneath their feat, when they were young, handsome, and had a full head of hair.  Decades later they are unhappy, and seem to resent life and themselves in equal measure.  And this is simply one example among many.

Today the Church remembers the great St. Augustine, who spent the first part of his life having rather a good time carousing about.  By his mid-30′s however, that attempt to simultaneously hold on to youthful excess underneath a veneer of adult respectability became impossible for him to maintain.  He abandoned what he thought his life was supposed to be as a successful academic, and went down a completely different path.  How fortunate for all of us that he took that later call he received in life, and ran with it, rather than remaining trapped in a kind of hedonistic time which would have become increasingly ridiculous and sad as he grew older.

We are all living in the age in which we were meant to born, which is a rather sobering thought.  The question becomes what each of us will do with that inescapable fact, in the time we have each been given.  There is nothing wrong with periodically looking back with some sense of nostalgia, nor looking to the future with longing.  Yet if you spend most of your life doing these things, then you miss out on the opportunities you have before you today, here and now.

It was certainly an interesting experience I had yesterday afternoon, feeling as though I had returned to the past for several minutes, with my whole future in front of me just waiting to be defined.  In the end, however, I was very glad to find that the feeling passed, with no real sense of regret or loss.  There are too many things that need doing, for me to sit about and live in the past, and after all: if St. Augustine only started to figure out where his talents were really needed in his 30′s, then I am in most excellent company.

Aerial view of Georgetown on a summer late afternoon

4 Comments

Filed under culture

Tagged as , , , , , , ,

August 20, 2012 · 11:23 am

Thoughts on the Fading Summer in Washington

On my way to work, I usually pass by the Four Seasons Hotel in Georgetown.  This morning, while stopped in front of the building at a traffic light, I happened to look up at the hotel facade, and in one of the floor-to-ceiling windows on the third floor stood a little boy of maybe 5 or 6 years old, wearing dark blue pajamas covered in stars, moons, and clouds.  He had slipped between the curtains and was standing by some luggage, watching the traffic and the passersby, probably excited at the bustle of early morning in the city but regretting that it was his last day in the city.  We caught each other’s eye, and waved to each other enthusiastically before the light changed, and I was off again.

This event might have slipped past my notice had I not already observed, while waiting at the bus stop this morning, something else which made me think of the passage of time here in the Nation’s Capital: all of the interns are now definitely gone.  Every summer, a huge flock of university students descends on Washington, to work on Capitol Hill, the White House, at political interest groups, etc.  For the past three months, the bus stop I usually walk to in the morning to catch my ride downtown would have a good dozen or more people waiting, the majority of whom were probably just barely old enough to legally consume alcohol, if that.  At the end of last week thee were still a couple of young faces in ill-fitting suits left, but just one or two.  This morning there were none, only the usual 4 or 5 neighbors I see all the time but never actually speak to.

Tourists are departing, Congress is away, the interns have vanished, and people are trying to get in their last summer breaks at the shore or in the mountains between now and Labor Day on September 3rd, the unofficial end of summer in the U.S.  Whether in anticipation of autumn or no, even the weather the past two days has been more like September than August.  This is not exactly cool, compared to September in other parts of the Northern Hemisphere, because Washington is still quite warm and humid in September, but the deadly, intense heat and humidity of the summer in the Capital always seems to break sometime after the Feast of the Assumption.

It is hard to imagine now that I myself moved to Washington for the first time twenty-one years ago.  There remains a kind of stability in this city at the change of seasons which I quite like, and which you become aware of as you get older.  The patterns of interns, tourists, and students, for example, become ingrained into your seasonal expectations, as much as if you were waiting for the swallows to come back to San Juan Capistrano.  During the summer the standard, preppy Washington men’s summer “uniform” of navy blue blazer, striped tie, and beige trousers is still everywhere, even if there are more hipsters in D.C. now to add other styles of dress to the mix.  And there are still plenty of trees taller than the buildings around them, providing thick but fading green canopies this time of year, which will soon begin to turn to other colors and thereby formally announce the arrival of autumn.

The next few months before Christmas will be exciting ones here in the Capital.  It is first and foremost a Presidential election year, with a great deal at stake.  And as this is the ultimate company town, there will be little else to speak of but conventions, debates, and polls until the beginning of November, with arrivals and departures to be picked over and analyzed after that until the first snowfall in December.

That being said, before we plunge into all of it, it seems to me a good thing to enjoy the quiet now, before things really get noisy again. Anticipation and excitement over what comes next is terrific. Yet if we never take the time to live in the now, to enjoy our surroundings as we have them, but instead focusing always on what is going to come next, then we are losing out on actually living.

View of Georgetown from Arlington, VA

2 Comments

Filed under culture

Tagged as , , , , ,

July 26, 2012 · 11:26 am

Review: “2016: Obama’s America”

Last evening I was invited to a private screening of “2016: Obama’s America”, which is based on two books by conservative author Dinesh D’Souza.  As a conservative myself and someone who appreciates a good story, well-told, I found there was much to appreciate about this film.  Unfortunately, I came away from it wondering who the intended audience of the film was, and whether the movie strayed into moral and logical paradoxes which make it impossible for me to recommend.  This review will probably not win me any friends on either side of the aisle, but there you are, so let’s dive in.

Despite its title, this film is not really about what America will be like 2016 if Mr. Obama wins a second term this November.  Instead, it is an exploration into the question of who our 44th President is, deep down.  While D’Souza does include some discussion about what might happen at the end of a second Obama Administration, the bulk of the film is spent establishing some of the possible motivating factors which brought Mr. Obama to where he is today, pointing to some of the aspects of his views that may have their roots in Mr. Obama’s family background. D’Souza then allows us to draw our own conclusions about what an Obama second term would be, based on these background observations.

For one thing Mr. Obama was lied to in the early part of his life about his father, as becomes very clear in this film, even though the imaginary father he created for himself was something he sought in his future relationships. His family and later he himself associated with people whose political views would horrify most of us, and these people left an indelible impact on how Mr. Obama sees the world around him. The portrait that emerges from D’Souza’s film is of someone who has a massive chip on his shoulder, with something to prove to himself and to others, i.e. that he was more than just the illegitimate son of a Kenyan leftist Lothario who never amounted to much of anything. If you are at all uncertain as to the question of whether Mr. Obama grew up surrounded by some very deeply disturbing political ideas, this film will put that question to rest.

Yet to what extent has that influence shaped Mr. Obama’s views on domestic and foreign policy? This never becomes entirely clear, since D’Souza understandably finds Mr. Obama’s family somewhat more interesting than Mr. Obama himself.  In one of the more fascinating parts of the film for example, D’Souza sits down for an interview with one of Mr. Obama’s half-brothers, George Obama, a man who somewhat eerily has many of the same expressions and gestures of the President.  Unlike Mr. Obama, his younger brother seems more of a practitioner of realpolitik, pointing out that Kenya was economically and politically more advanced than South Korea when it achieved independence, but had subsequently slipped into being a third world country.  George Obama, however, does not believe his older brother owes him anything, for since the President is off running the world, he sees himself as benefiting by extension, as a citizen of the world, from what Mr. Obama does.

Of course the problem is that Mr. Obama has not done very much to improve the world over the past four years, despite his by-default mandate to do so.  There must be something terribly difficult for Mr. Obama to have been fighting or looking down his nose at the establishment all his life, and to suddenly wake up one day and realize that now, he IS the establishment – for if we are talking about being at the top of the secular pecking order on this planet, POTUS is as high as you can go.  One of the problems faced by those who are both opportunists and idealists, as Mr. Obama unquestionably is, is that once you get to the position of power and influence that you hoped you would, people will expect you to actually do something.  The problem faced by this country is one of economic downturn and geo-political uncertainty, but the battles – or as D’Souza puts it, “the “dreams” – of Mr. Obama have more to do with righting perceived wrongs outside of the state he governs, for in his mind that state created or exacerbated these problems.

That being said, there are a number of problems with this film which, while they might be lost on a general audience, caused me some concern.  There is for example an oft-repeated scene of a youth – presumably meant to represent Mr. Obama himself – kneeling down in front of the actual tomb of Mr. Obama’s father.  The actor picks up a handful of dirt, and strews it across the top of Barack Senior’s grave, presumably recreating something Barack Junior did or might have done.  Whatever you think of Mr. Obama, I find it morally difficult to justify filming such a scene.  Imagine if the grave were that of your own father, and you can understand what I mean.

Another issue has to do something which D’Souza takes great pains to establish in his narrative: Mr. Obama comes from somewhere that is not America.  D’Souza is not a conspiracy theorist, so those who believe that Obama was not born in the United States, or hold that 9/11 was a plot by the Bush Administration, or run a tinfoil millinery business will be very disappointed.  Yet what D’Souza does in the film is to show Indonesia and Kenya, where Mr. Obama grew up and where his father’s family hails from, respectively, as places not unlike D’Souza’s native India, with scenes of people picking through gigantic mountains of garbage, and with filth, poverty, and anti-Western viewpoints everywhere.

And herein lies a problem with D’Souza’s argument, or at least his presentation of it.  The filmmaker points out how much he and Mr. Obama are alike, from the year of their birth, the childhood they experienced, their academic careers, and so on. However D’Souza later draws the conclusion that Mr. Obama’s America cannot be what most Americans think of as America, because Mr. Obama’s background is nothing like that of ordinary Americans.  Yet arguably by that logic, if Mr. Obama cannot understand America because, according to D’Souza, his experience and understanding is so foreign to the average American, then neither can D’Souza understand America, since he, too, grew up in an environment nothing like that which most Americans experience.

Finally, there is the question that one cannot help but ask oneself when leaving the cinema at the conclusion of this film. Who is the intended audience for this piece: is this meant for the masses, or is this a party piece for the elites? Whatever impression the posters and trailers for the film may give, “2016″ is not a populist propaganda documentary, a la Michael Moore, so there is little in the way of red meat.  For the average viewer who has made a limited study of history and political theory surrounding topics such as imperialism, distributism, and so on,  I wonder whether the film will come off as too elitist for mainstream consumption. This itself is a problematic conclusion, for leftist elites will not change their allegiance to Mr. Obama, and conservative elites already disdain him, thus leaving the film with nowhere to go.

Of course the reader will have to make up his own mind if and when he chooses to see the film. As a storyteller, D’Souza does a brilliant job of weaving together the threads of his narrative, in a way which anyone who appreciates a complex script or novel will appreciate: you have to stick with it until the end, but then everything gets wrapped up nice and neat, with a bow on top. There is no doubt that Mr. Obama’s background is a strange and, at times, rather disturbing tale indeed.  Yet at the same time I found this to be perhaps too specialist a film, with a few too many questionable judgments made by the filmmaker, for me to unreservedly recommend.

4 Comments

Filed under culture

Tagged as , , , , , , , , ,