Commentariolum Petitionis

In one section of the Commentariolum Petitionis or “Little Handbook on Electioneering,” published in the May/June Foreign Affairs (“Campaign Tips From Cicero," Foreign Affairs, May/June 2012), Quintus Tullius Cicero gives his brother, the great orator Cicero, who was running for consul, the following advice. “If you break a promise, the outcome is uncertain and the number of people affected is small. But if you refuse to make a promise, the result is certain and produces immediate anger in a large number of voters.” Naturally the Commentariolum, emanating from the first century B.C., anticipates Machiavelli’s The Prince which appeared over 1500 years later, but the section in question does for politics what Bergson and Proust did for involuntary memory. It’s the Proustian Madeleine of politics since it nails the fundamental duplicity that’s at the heart of all political behavior. “Promise them anything, but give them Arpege,” was an old advertising slogan. But what Quintus is counseling his brother Marcus on is the need for hope. Hope is the be all and end all of political success and it trumps honesty. Honest Abe is what they called Lincoln. However, the fact is that truth and politics seldom go hand and hand. Politics, as Quintus makes quite clear, is a dirty business. “The most important part of your campaign is to bring hope to people and a feeling of goodwill toward you.” Foreign Affairs was canny in publishing the Cicero piece since as we approach another election, it’s apparent little has changed in politics since Roman times. In fact, an accompanying commentary by the great political tactician and Democratic Party pundit, James Carville, is entitled “Plus Ca Change.” The question is how do the Darwinian verities Quintus suggests translate into human progress and the betterment of the polity? If a politician tells the truth--like those who argue for austerity in the EEC--he or she is unlikely to get elected.

Xuetong's Prince

Yan Xuetong, a professor of political science at Tsinghua University recently wrote an Op Ed piece in The Times entitled “How China Can Defeat America." Mr. Xuetong is also the author of a book entitled Ancient Chinese Thought, Modern Chinese Power. One can be sure his Op Ed piece was studied by our own intelligence services as Mr. Xuetong is uniquely qualified to talk about power in a mysterious country that maintains two parallel systems: one a competitive market economy and the other a dictatorship of the proletariat as represented by the continued importance of the Communist Party. Xuetong begins his piece by saying that though he is often considered a hawk, he is "a political realist." He goes on to point out that “realism does not mean that politicians should be concerned only with military and economic might.” Xuetong cites “the ancient Chinese philosopher Xunzi" who described “three types of leadership: humane authority, hegemony and tyranny.” Essentially Mr. Xuetong has written a 21st Century version of Machiavelli’s The Prince that is a benign prescription for Chinese dominance. “Humane authority,” Mr. Xuetong avers, “begins by creating a desirable model at home that inspires people abroad.” He goes on to conclude, “thus the core of the competition between China and the United States will be to see who has more high-quality friends. And in order to achieve that goal, China has to provide higher-quality moral leadership than the United States.” In The Man in the High Castle Philip K. Dick imagines a parallel universe where Japan (along with is fascist allies) wins the Second World War. The implication of the book is that Japan wins by military might. How would Dick describe the triumph that Xuetong envisions? How would the economic juggernaut that is modern China assert its moral superiority? Confucius say, country with population well over billion have many mouths to feed.

Waste Land

Lucy Walker’s Waste Land is a film about Vik Muniz, the Brazilian artist who, to put it euphemistically, uses organic matter in his art. The net result of his preoccupation, which started with making portraits of children out of sugar to point out the sweetness that was missing in their lives, becomes a project based on the Jardim Gramacho, the enormous garbage dump in Rio where equality finally asserts itself when the waste produced by millionaires is mixed with that of the impoverished occupants of the favelas. The catadores who occupy the dump are pickers of recyclable goods. From the beginning, comparison with the artist is unavoidable—the artist recycles reality just as the pickers recycle garbage, transforming often-painful circumstances into beauty. The dump, in fact, looked at from afar, resembles a palette, in much the way that Monet’s water lilies assume their form when looked at from the distance. Muniz, who himself grew up in a poor family, employs extensive art historical referents. In one iconic setup, for instance, he employs a pose based on David's Marat, using a tub that has been extricated from the garbage. The dump’s resident intellectual, an autodidact who has read a volume of Machiavelli’s The Prince that he found in the detritus, compares Rio to the world of Machiavelli and its fiefdoms. The transformative power of art is another theme the film explores, since Muniz looked at the film as a social act, in which his pickers would participate in and profit from the production of art. The project that Munoz describes is utopian, in that it aims at liberation, and yet it is curiously Candidian. The film ends with Muniz offering a whole new world and life to his subjects (one of the most affecting scenes takes place at an auction in London where the work is being sold off), whose expectations are heightened and whose ability to survive without him must be a source of concern to both Muniz and anyone who views the filmic document of this esthetic and social experiment.