As I looked out a moment ago from the Reichstag, that embodiment of German unity, I noticed words crudely spray-painted upon the wall, perhaps by a young Berliner: "This wall will fall. Beliefs become reality." Yes, across Europe, this wall will fall. For it cannot withstand faith; it cannot withstand truth. The wall cannot withstand freedom.--Ronald Reagan, June 12, 1987.
Yesterday, I found myself staring at a janitor's office instead of a seminar room. After circling the floor carefully looking for the seminar with Vernon Smith and Bart Wilson, I asked a staff person for directions; she helpfully asked, do you need to be in Wilkinson Hall or Wilkinson College? I decided that I did not know, but that it was probably the other building. She took me to one of the exits, and said, past the slab of the Berlin Wall, you go into that building on the right. I thanked her. As I started walking, I passed a concrete slab with graffiti, hidden inside a monument, it suddenly dawned on me that's really a piece of the Berlin Wall!
The next morning I went back to look at it and take pictures. The slab of wall is part of a larger monument--on the outside are plaques with quotes by the mighty dead (although not all of them famous) about the nature of liberty, and a larger plaque with a quote from Reagan's famous 'tear down this wall' speech (see above).
When (recall) I visited Rice University a few years ago, I noticed a similar memorial with a section of the Wall (see here). Thanks to Wikipedia (here), I learned that there are bits of the wall not just at quite a few presidential libraries and assorted museums, but also at more US college campuses: Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, California (which I will try to visit this month); Kennesaw State University, Kennesaw, Georgia; Eureka College, Eureka, Illinois (Reagan's alma mater [recall]); Hult International Business School (Cambridge, MA); Grand Valley State University; Westminster College, Fulton, (site of Churchill's famous Iron Curtain speech); University of Hawaii Honolulu Community College, Honolulu, Hawaii; Capital University, Bexley, Ohio; University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia, (I can't believe this I missed this on a visit a few years ago); and The Johns Hopkins University, School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), Washington D.C. I won't be surprised if some clever photo-artist has done a neat instillation reconstructing the wall from these and other in situ slabs, and perhaps reveal the cumulative meaning of these displaced corners of concrete.
In looking over the quotes on the side of the memorial, I was struck, perhaps naturally today, by a passage from a certain Paul Poirot (see my picture below the fold), "The most certain way to halt or prevent the development of a nation and its citizens is to fence them in." It's from a 1968 essay, "progress through travel." Poirot was an economist who worked for the Foundation for Economic education (a pro-free-market institute).* While Poirot's essay is not unproblematic, and not without cliches, one gets the sense of a surprisingly noble vision. The fences Poirot speaks of are natural, artificial, historical, and emotional. And he is quite explicit that it not just trade and immigrants/refugees that get hemmed in by fences, but also travelers. It reminded me of a point in James C. Scott's Seeing like a State, in which he remarks, I think (I can't find it right now), that the great wall of China was as much intended to keep potential invaders out as it was to keep citizens in. It's not for nothing, that in Perpetual Peace, Kant treats the right to visitation as a non-enemy as an original, cosmopolitan right not alienated by the rise of property and states.
Most critics of President Trump's wall and policies rightly focus on the effects on refugees and immigrants as well as trade. But as Poirot and Scott (and Kant) help us see, another great danger is that Trump's wall will encourage the narrowing of visions, the closing in on oneself. In some respects this need not be wholly bad (in reducing the temptation of empire and in addressing, perhaps, important local, social needs), but the diminution of spirit, may well discourage inquisitiveness, curiosity, and travel. Of course, this narrowing of focus, this eagerness to put oneself ahead is part of a larger process that also brought Trump and his wall to power.
There is, of course, a risk in intellectualizing Trump and his supporters. And from the moment, prompted by Jason Stanley, I started writing about his rise (September 2015), I have been sensitive to this charge. But it's equally dangerous to ignore the role of beliefs altogether. Not just because it plays into the stereotype that Trump and his supporters are driven primarily by ('deplorable') emotions, but more important politics is the process by which "beliefs become reality." It is, of course, an interesting question if that slogan really was painted on the Wall, and in what language, but it's noticeable that Reagan insisted that faith, beliefs, and truth can change the status quo.
Many academics find it difficult to say anything positive about Reagan, and there is much to criticize. Even so, I think he is one of the great democratic orators, and I want to close with a modest reflection on his speech that the piece of concrete in Chapman made me revisit.
While Reagan twice pairs himself with Kennedy's great speech, the great theme of the speech is the "rebirth" of democracy. Reagan here echoes (recall) Lincoln's great "a new birth of freedom" at Gettysburg. This rebirth involves simultaneously, being "disabused of illusions" and a willingness to make symbolically grand plans for the future. For example, he plays with the idea of making Berlin a key global city hosting core meetings of the United Nations and Olympic games.
Reagan's speech starts from duty toward freedom, a sense of history, and also beauty. And it turns out aesthetics play a great role in the speech because Reagan makes a point of contrasting the beauty of the great parks/forests of Berlin with the ugly wall that runs from the Baltics down to Southern Europe. The wall is a "scar." The fruits of freedom are prosperity, but also culture and higher learning.+
Let me close. The key moment in the speech is when Reagan addresses those that protested him in 1982, when NATO was deciding to place cruise missiles, and those that protest him during the speech. Rather than vilifying them, he acknowledges their presence and continues his (side of the great) debate over his foreign policy with them. This turns out to set up the closing rhetorical flourish when he closes his speech not with a comment addressed to Gorbachev, the NATO allies, the German government, or Americans watching home (even if they are all implied part of the audience), but with a rhetorical question posed to the demonstrators, "I wonder if they have ever asked themselves that if they should have the kind of government they apparently seek, no one would ever be able to do what they're doing again."
That non-inclusive 'they' is a rhetorical mistake ('you' would have been so much more potent); even if Reagan gets to position himself as the thoughtful one and implicitly treat the protesters as thoughtless. This is not why I admire the speech. Yet, in so doing, and in the historical context, Reagan acknowledges that fundamental confrontations are at the heart of democracy. And, in fact, he turns the right to protest and denounce him loudly into the distinguishing hallmark of democracy; audaciously, his whole speech is a claim that his robust foreign policy is the safeguard of others to criticize him.
Thirty-two years is a longer separation between us and President Reagan than Reagan and President Kennedy. The cold war seems like a blip now briefly interrupting, with the horrific doctrine of mutually assured destruction, the natural rise and fall of demagogues. The vast majority of students who notice the slab of concrete were not born yet when 'the wall' came down. One wonders how many of them will be around to celebrate the fall of President Trump's wall.
+ The rhetorically most audacious moment also involves aesthetics:
"The totalitarian world finds even symbols of love and of worship an affront. Years ago, before the East Germans began rebuilding their churches, they erected a secular structure: the television tower at Alexander Platz. Virtually ever since, the authorities have been working to correct what they view as the tower's one major flaw, treating the glass sphere at the top with paints and chemicals of every kind. Yet even today when the sun strikes that sphere--that sphere that towers over all Berlin--the light makes the sign of the cross. There in Berlin, like the city itself, symbols of love, symbols of worship, cannot be suppressed."
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