An Education in Politics: WHAT DO I READ?

this video is about a topic that's
important enough to me that I think I could honestly say if I made a new video trying to answer the same question once a year every year I'd probably present a significantly different answer as each year goes by and that's not because my own philosophy of life is changing now at age 39 I feel that in many ways my philosophy of life is quite consistent whereas it wasn't if you compare or what I believed at age 16 to what I believe that age 19 and so on but I got a question from Adrian Adrian is not just a I don't know an Internet acquaintance she's actually been a collaborator on this channel she's appeared in several videos here when I talked to her a couple of years ago she was just switching her major to be human rights and she wrote to me now couple days ago asking if I basically had a reading list I could offer if I could offer her encouragement about what to read in now switching her major from human rights into political science and she said sling to me it's quite intelligent but it's almost verbatim something I've said many many times to many other people she said that her problem with the way politics is being taught in her university in the Department of Human Rights was that the professors were neither teaching facts nor methods not teaching you how to research things not teaching how to come to conclusions the professors were teaching what she ought to believe teaching what you ought to think is different from teaching the truth teaching the facts teaching them the way things are and she had various examples of this now that's a huge problem the teaching of politics it's an even greater problem you can imagine in the teaching of religion so very very often what was involved in put a studies it was scholar Buddhism fourth in ten years the fundamental problem I had with other scholars in the field was that they would tell you what you ought to believe and they would not tell you what the text actually said about interpretation and translation of an ancient text they would not tell you historical circumstances historical facts etc very often if you're telling something that's quite quite incompatible with those things so I would say that is really a religious mentality that can be found within politics and I don't think it's too much to say those are people taking religious attitude towards teaching political science in universities now let's play devil's advocate here you can sympathize to some extent these university professors are probably aware that some of their students are racist and they want them to not be racist you know they are aware that some of their students may be our conservative bumpkins and they think that this is a special opportunity for them coming into a university classroom to adopt what our perhaps cosmopolitan and sophisticated attitudes and they're trying to inculcate those attitudes in their students minds however this is fundamentally a condescending and indeed evil attitude for an educator to have you should never teach your students what they ought to think you have to provide them with methodology methods so they can form original research German university level education the heart and soul and body and mind of university education is original research period so it's not about original research then it ain't about a goddamn thing and it shouldn't be in the classroom so you are equipping them to perform original research and you're showing them examples of what original research looks like and nothing else and you've got to deal with those things even when they're unflattering to your political agenda even when they might favor politically incorrect or politically inconvenient things so the interesting thing for me to hear back from Adrian several years after the first video I made with her that she's switching into political science because she's hoping to deal with an end of I guess political philosophy that's dealing more with reality and she felt the things over in her Department of Human Rights were a little bit too unreal so this is the fissure between teaching how the world ought to be as opposed to studying the world as it really is and the problem is it's not just professors in the classroom that have this attitude of telling you what you ought to believe not informing you of facts history etc this is also a tremendous corrupting influence in the textbooks you'll be able to work with as a student history books of any kind but in general general histories are the worst the less specific and less analytical and less incisive a history textbook is or political textbook is the more it tends to become propaganda this is a huge problem in Western culture it's a problem British culture it's prone in American culture it's a problem in Russian culture and fresh culture but even within Western countries once you get more familiar with political science textbooks initiatives books you'll also see that there are really culturally specific ways in which those authors are misleading their audiences the way a British author writes about history is actually significantly different from the way a French or American author generally will and I think many of those differences are unexamined ie the authors themselves are not aware of the stylistic and methodological choices that they're making you can even see that in the organization of books on history and politics but so the first piece of advice here and a younger person asking me for a reading list which course I'm not really going to give you an advice about how to read them what to read when building yourself up as an expert in politics um the best way to avoid that type of bias the unbelievable and really horrifying bias that's built into political science textbooks and general works of history is actually to read first-person sources that openly declare their bias so one of the books that really crystallized my thought about this when I was in my first year of university and by the way at that time I was not scholarly at all in my habits I was working an exhausting full-time job at Starbucks so I was waking up at strange hours and going to sleep at strange hours could some days Starbucks would open at 6:00 a.m. I'd have to be there at 5:30 or signed up from the store it's amazing we close at midnight so I was really exhausted but among them a little bit of reading I did in that first year university is that recall was um the autobiography of the ambassador to Spain during World War two and the years just leading up to World War two and I remember what a shocking contrast this was and of course everyone likes to lie about World War two a lot of reasons why people right you know you know emotionally impassioned distorted versions of the truth but world war two there's such extreme events for the people involved with them and even for the people who are looking back fifty years later and writing about them but wow you know the position of Spain in the Spanish Civil War at the end of the Spanish Civil War and then the beginning of World War two very you know morally murky diplomatically complex situation what was Spain's relationship with the United Kingdom with France with Germany and how did this change you by year even you know what was Spanish fascism and its relationship to German fascism and I remember just having this tremendous feeling with the difference I was reading here I think was the British ambassador to Spain first person account of what the issues were and of course it was much different in terms of the pragmatic struggles involved like in that account it was talking about the struggles of the different governments to gain access to and control over particular metals and particular minerals that were suddenly very scarce trying to produce tanks and armaments rule or - Wow none of these other books mention anything about that and then that there were political and diplomatic aspects of that Germany was trying to secure access to Spanish wolfram Wolfram's the name of a mineral used in hardening steel and the British and other concerns were trying to prevent the Germans from accessing this mineral so it's a peculiar situation but above all else this was a book written in the first person this was a book written with the words I was doing X I did this I did that and that was indeed a tremendous contrast to what you'd get coming out of any kind of history textbook or analytical work in political science so that was one thing that refresh me that the book I've read most recently before making this video was an autobiography written in prison actually house arrest not prison but the former prime minister of China called jeho the young child's knee and so josiane was prime minister of China and in the events of 1989 especially the Tiananmen Square massacre he was kicked out of power and put into again you could say prison you could say house arrest or what-have-you and he writes the history of that period of time from his house arrest obviously as he has a reason to be honest but in some ways of course he has reasons to flatter his own role in history he's writing about his own period as a prime minister of China or premier of China I think technically premier rather than Prime Minister is the rori title but anyway um the quality and the perspective you get from someone who was in power someone who was himself struggling with the different forms of competing influence inside the government there's again there's a tremendous qualitative difference and there's also a difference in including these pragmatic elements and before I was mentioning some of metal shortages okay so that's that's a pretty pretty simple palpable difference in perspective but obviously people running from the inside people running from the first-person perspective they'll also really give you a feeling of how government works how state power operates not just why things happen but how they happen or what alternatives were considered and why those alternatives didn't happen and so on so that's I mean a real window onto political science that I think will shatter your belief in the whole discipline and will change the way you regard histories written by academic outsiders and will I think intensify your appreciation for original research based on primary source materials whether those primary sources are laws you know law can be a primary source whether there are statistics social statistics whether they're direct interviews with witnesses to history or whether some of this an autobiography of a former prime minister in prison or an autobiography of the former diplomat that kind of Reason I think is tremendously powerful and it's a contrast to the problem that Adrienne wrote to me complaining about however there's a caveat there too if you read the perspective of someone involved in foreign policy like a diplomat or you read the perspective of a prime minister like jealousy young you are never going to understand how government operates at the level of the mayor at local government whether that's provincial government County government the city government mayor government and that is tremendously important too I'll come back later in this video so this already gives you the first spectrum of reading I'm talking about it be necessary to do first person perspective reading sort of from top to bottom when you think about autobiographies written by prime ministers witnesses and participants in history and being aware that somebody at the top some like Prime Minister is going to view these things very differently some at the bottom and of course when you're reading those books you you need to be acutely aware of the ways in which the author is motivated to be honest with you and the ways in which the author is motivated to be dishonest with you they may be concealing crimes against humanity they've committed they may be concealing you know very well atrocities however nevertheless you will probably find a type of incisive honesty in them that you're not going to find in general histories official history you might say written from an outside perspective and I guess maybe the most extreme example this a book I really learned a lot from and enjoyed reading was actually on the book called no more Viet Nam's written by Nixon Richard Nixon the president United States now Richard Nixon was a notorious liar he lied about many things but nevertheless there's a lot of truth in that book and even when Nixon is kind of being dishonest with you in blaming other presidents the United States the decisions they made he tries to kind of shift a lot of the blame off of his own decisions and on two presidents united states who served before him pointing out that many of the problems and mistakes were not his fault there was no sofa that nevertheless is actually really valuable information absolutely valuable perspective from someone who's really worth quoting and really worth quoting in an essay and what-have-you so even someone as dishonest as Richard Nixon reading his autobiographical first-person perspectives on the history he was involved in that he had blood on his hands from is actually much more informative than a lot of the dishonest perspectives on that same history from the outside this is my first piece of advice now over the second piece of advice I have simply has to do with the geographic span of politics in history I tried to debate this with professors that in Canada in our Department of Asian Studies I think it's really really important for every young person it's important if you're old to and you've got the time to just look at a map and ask yourself have you done a research project on each of these places each of these geographic areas so for example the whole continent of Africa obviously you could spend your lifetime just studying it but that's not more proposing here do a quick Wikipedia reading above the history of Mally mal I'm Ali and I think if you just look at Wikipedia history of metal you'll get the sense Wow if I took a certain number of hours to read about history and politics of Malley the whole history you know so going back to the earliest records through the current politics today I wouldn't just get an appreciation for history politics in Malley I get a comparative sense of how Malley is unique how it is different from other surrounding countries in Africa I'd be introduced into the discourse surrounding this type of politics in the whole continent of Africa now of course every example is imperfect if you just look at Malley of course it is not a representative example I want to make a separate video with that no example is representative in politics you're not looking for this example to represent something other than itself the history of Malley is simply important in and of itself as the history of Malley period you're not looking for to represent the whole continent but you'll never tha less get a kind of introduction into the politics and history of the whole continent of Africa and of course there are parallels however imperfect when you look at the history of manly and you look at the history of Sudan Sudan and Malley are very fault for our part but nevertheless there are profound things that in common now I'd say that about Africa I'd say that but the Caribbean it really did influence me in life that I did a research project on the history of Haiti Haiti is spelled with an H now of course studying the history of Haiti does not teach you the history of Cuba or even the history of the Dominican Republic or the history of Jamaica but nevertheless just doing one research project like that and try to do the whole history you know beginning to end I can definitely say that I have in a kind of appreciation I'm equipped with the basics where I can pretty rapidly relate to and understand if I start reading about political history of Jamaica or another Caribbean country from what I learned about Haiti and when you're reading sources on the history of Haiti just like reading source of the history of mattli in Africa you're going to get analytical and comparative statements about those other countries surrounding in the region so if you can pick one country and again even just starting with Wikipedia and really do some research find a pretext while you're in university because I don't know how your university program is designed to study you know one country its history and politics out of Africa Central America and the Caribbean South America you know obviously then for the rest he Stasia Southeast Asia etc etc I think that's a tremendously important and tremendously powerful thing when I was at University of Victoria and talking to my professors there I would point out to them the enormous gaps in the curriculum they were teaching just as supposedly asian studies as a survey of asia so that's not even the whole world that's just Asia but pointed to them do you realize that India is not mentioned in even one course you know the single course mentioning or touching on all of India and Pakistan how can this be asian studies this is ridiculous you know of a single course dealing with the the Arabic world so the Muslim world but really talking about Saudi Arabia and the Arabic world is smaller area than the Muslim growth you have any civil course syllabus how can this be Asian Studies you know anything on the history of Islam or nor the history of Buddhism for that matter how this transformed you know politics of Asia these are huge huge issues so yes again you obviously need to also pick some example of a country from the from the Arabic world and study that history too but so I do think there's a geographic span here where you need to cover the whole world and I'm sorry but that's kind of the way politics works if you don't understand everything you understand nothing if you only understand the perspective of a colonial power like England you're never going to understand the perspective of India or Indonesia or even Japan right so there really is a sense in which I think every every student of politics has to dig in and do that work kind of continent by continent or region by region because again Asia if you just call it one continent East Asia is very different Southeast Asia Central Asia the Arabic world or West Asia so-called Middle East and so on all of that you've got to put in some hours so that you are equipped with these kinds of examples with these kinds of case studies and each one is going to deepen and broaden your your ability to deal with politics um what I'm gonna say next so this is 0.3 in this video depends on how we counted 0.3 0.4 but this is the easiest part to preach and the hardest part to practice which is the historical span of politics it's very easy for me to say look you got to look at the historical span and make a checklist and read major works from ancient Greece ancient Rome the English revolution also known as the English Civil War the French Revolution Napoleon the Russian Revolution the Chinese Revolution we could add more to that list right and what about the colonization of North America what about the colonization of Australia you could add many more things but it's easy to make a checklist of the sort of great turning points in the football history of the world and then say there's people well you've got to buckle down and read representative works become what is representative nothings representative in politics you can read a representative history written by someone who's pro napoleon and it's not gonna represent any of the very important facts from someone who is anti napoleon let alone someone actually lived through that period of time and is writing against napoleon in the first person with that passion and that perspective of someone whose own friends and relatives may have been tortured to death by the Napoleonic regime or someone who maybe saw the absurdity of Napoleon trying to recreate slavery a international slave trade in the French Empire after the French Revolution had briefly abolished slavery these are big big questions deep issues and deep sources of bias so the issue of historical span as I say this is easy to preach but tough to practice in terms of actually getting down to what people should read and how to cover this whole span ancient Greece ancient Rome French Revolution etc as I say it's it's not with the list of events that's hard I mean like in a sense everyone in politics knows that the revolution in China is this tremendously important thing in the world's history but what have they actually read about it and do they even know how to approach that issue how to put together a rating list the other fundamental problem here with my third point on the list is that the history of the world's disasters is not the history of the world it's very easy to read political science as the history of crises and the history of crisis management so I said before that I was going to come back to this issue it's a tremendous important issue I said before that um you you really need to be weary you need to be concerned about the fact that reading the perspective of a prime minister or president will not tell you how the mayor's office works it will not tell you how the provincial office works the governor's office how local government works it will not tell you about the normal workings of government nor the judiciary nor the legal system nor the prison system nor the police on the streets and those things all matter in politics they matter tremendously but if you think about it let's say I was talking to a student from China or Cambodia I've lived in China and I've lived in Cambodia and someone in Cambodia asked me for a reading recommendation how what can they read to understand how the police operate normally in the city of Los Angeles had the police and the legal system and the prisons and the mayor's office what's normal in Los Angeles not about say a riot you know that's easy it's easy for me to give you an example of a crisis one of the race riots like the Rodney King riots in the city of Los Angeles there are movies and books about that it's easy for me to present you with a crisis and crisis management and a larger scale you can say that - it's easy for me to recommend to you a book about some particularly terrible event in the French Revolution the great terror and mass murder going on and it's much harder to find out how did that society work in between crises in between revolutions and this kind of thing you said I'm saying so in the same is true of say ancient Greece and ancient Rome how did the society work not just its collapse how did society work before the Russian Revolution and after the Russian Revolution the various periods of communism so this is in a sense the anthropological hole in political science that political science tends to never inform us with the anthropological reality of how people live how Authority operates whether it's the cops on the street in Los Angeles or how your life was actually organized and ordered and planned living in China in the 1960s or living in Russia in the 1930s under any of these political systems even today I mean do you want to know today how really does it country like Saudi Arabia work how does life work in Saudi Arabia and there is no simple solution for this problem I mean I hope if somebody is watching this who's an educator who's actually university professor this is really what you need to think through strategically and putting together a curriculum that covers these bases for any one of these countries I think you need to cover these bases even if you're teaching politics of Canada but almost nobody makes that kind of effort nobody makes an effort to include the anthropological elements nobody makes an effort to conclude the local government development how does the mayor's office work or how does it fail to work and so on let alone these other methodological concerns so I say again the history of the world's great disasters is not the history of the world the the political history of a crisis and then crisis management is never gonna tell you how political Authority operates in that country I mean you can look at a famous disaster like the Deepwater Horizon disaster you can look at how the government responds to for example in Russia the Chernobyl disaster the in Japan there was this great nuclear disaster just a couple of years ago after a tsunami giant wave from the ocean hit a hit a nuclear reactor if you studied that and you studied to the Japanese government responded to it you still wouldn't understand any of these deeper systemic questions of fundamentally how does the Japanese government work etc right so this is the this is the final warning I'm trying to issue in this in this video it is both deep and it's a very hard thing to become a well-read person in politics and you know one of the reasons why it's so difficult is that it's only after you have an advanced understanding that you can appreciate and even enjoy doing the kind of reading I'm recommending here so I talked to my ex-wife on skype a couple of days ago and I mentioned to her I said oh you know I'm reading this book the autobiography of Jones Jones a young sorry the autobiography of this former prime minister of China who ended up in prison you know I was tommix why this because I remember she used to own a copy of the book I never read it back mashita cup and I just bought a copy in and read it and it was really surprising me because my ex-wife was a PhD in anthropology she said that she she it's true she used to own the book but she really couldn't get into it she couldn't enjoy it she couldn't get past chapter one and so she had never really read much of it she'd only read a few pages or something she found alienating on her to understand and to me that same book is really fascinating and really rewarding it seems self-evident to me how important is to read another example is through Sidda teas so Thucydides is an historian from ancient Greek but his work is very political it's very important for political philosophy I can tell you about how moving and meaningful it is for me to read through cities for me to read politics from that perspective in that tradition but at the same time will my own current girlfriend my girlfriend's 25 years old she asked me you know about what you should be reading we were at a bookstore together and you know Thucydides was there on the Shelf if she should be reading through cities and I found myself saying to her well you know I don't I don't know if you're gonna be able to appreciate or enjoy this book I don't know if you'd find an interesting in the same way I'd find interesting you know I'm just standing there and thinking and then it's very difficult for me to analytically unpack why it is I can relate to this book and enjoy it in a profound way as well as why I find utility in it why I find it so useful you know in a shallower sense as really instructive about politics you know and it's difficult for me to think back how would I have responded to this book if I read at age 17 if I read it at age 27 you know um so these things are all interrelated I mean as as much as it may sound unrelated I mean these are all based on the the school of studying human nature and you know in many ways the foundational reading I did about the history of Haiti the slave rebellion ad about Napoleon about the failure of the French Revolution of these unrelated histories from other corners of the world the reading I did about the history of Japan but the wars between Russia and Japan you know if you think but there's like pontal ISM little little points of information really unrelated all around the world of course the history of Cambodia the history of Thailand but the history of Canada the creative way each of these interests they really do inform one another in a profound sense and the reading you do in each province of political science really does illuminate and deepen that your appreciation for the reading you do in the other provinces reciprocal with this your patience and your tolerance for weasel words vague writing and your tolerance for propaganda passing itself off as political science propaganda masquerading as real history your patience for these flaws in the literature will get slimmer and slimmer the older and better informed you get so guys as I said at the intro this is an issue that's meaningful enough to me as a student and as an educator that I feel that if I made another video about this one year from now I would make a profoundly different video even though my old my own philosophy hasn't changed during this last year I've been a professor at the University of level 20 and 21 year old students and I did try to tackle some political historical issues in my students I was really trying to inform them about the history of First Nations in Canada we did a bunch of lessons on the anywhe it also known as the Eskimos but Inuit where are people in furthest north Canada and for them as Chinese University students they never thought about any of that stuff before we talked about history of racial segregation and States many many many issues sir I'm not gonna list them all but actually we did deal with some historical and political issues and I was having to present that curriculum in a way that a 21 year old student in China could relate to and understand and where they also could do their own original research because as I said that's the body and the soul of university level education well ultimately it's not about me telling them what they ought to think or what they ought to believe it's about me giving them enough information and then a really good question is their role being given question based assignments to go out and do their own research and come back and give a presentation in class so my perspective in making this video today unlike a video answering the same question one year ago or one year in the future is partly influenced with the fact that I've just had this experience not just as a student but also as an educator and in the year before that when I was at the University of Victoria in Canada I was talking to a lot of educators I was having a lot of conversations with my professors at the university level that many of them were very friendly to me and treated me to some extent like an equal just cuz my age and you know they didn't talk down to me the way they might talk down to a teenage student and I've got to tell you it is really saddening that the types of questions I'm asking here about how to provide students with a meaningful deep and broad introduction of politics whether the politics of Asia the politics of the the whole world those questions are not being asked by professors in Canada today I don't think they're being asked by professors anywhere in the discipline of political science and I see many broader failings it's a topic for another video in the politics of the 21st century that do reflect the underlying weakness of political science as a discipline political science is a discipline with tremendous responsibility and that has the potential to make a tremendous difference in individual human lives the students who signed up to study it and also in the future of pretty much every nation in the world and it's very saddening to see that almost nobody in the discipline takes that responsibility seriously I would say that the whole discipline is is much less interested in in the truth to put it as simply as that then for example the discipline of history is or the the discipline of anthropology so at this point political science is at such a low ebb is of such low quality that I can openly say they have a great deal to learn from the discipline of history and the discipline of social anthropology and one of the first things they're going to discover is the extent to which in the 21st century political science as it is taught now is not a science pathetically it is much closer to a form of religion