What Is Living and What Is Dead in Social Democracy?

By Tony Judt

The following is adapted from a lecture given at New York University on October 19, 2009.

Americans would like things to be better. According to public opinion surveys in recent years, everyone would like their child to have improved life chances at birth. They would prefer it if their wife or daughter had the same odds of surviving maternity as women in other advanced countries. They would appreciate full medical coverage at lower cost, longer life expectancy, better public services, and less crime.

When told that these things are available in Austria, Scandinavia, or the Netherlands, but that they come with higher taxes and an “interventionary” state, many of those same Americans respond: “But that is socialism! We do not want the state interfering in our affairs. And above all, we do not wish to pay more taxes.”

This curious cognitive dissonance is an old story. A century ago, the German sociologist Werner Sombart famously asked: Why is there no socialism in America? There are many answers to this question. Some have to do with the sheer size of the country: shared purposes are difficult to organize and sustain on an imperial scale. There are also, of course, cultural factors, including the distinctively American suspicion of central government.And indeed, it is not by chance that social democracy and welfare states have worked best in small, homogeneous countries, where issues of mistrust and mutual suspicion do not arise so acutely. A willingness to pay for other people’s services and benefits rests upon the understanding that they in turn will do likewise for you and your children: because they are like you and see the world as you do.Conversely, where immigration and visible minorities have altered the demography of a country, we typically find increased suspicion of others and a loss of enthusiasm for the institutions of the welfare state. Finally, it is incontrovertible that social democracy and the welfare states face serious practical challenges today. Their survival is not in question, but they are no longer as self-confident as they once appeared.

But my concern tonight is the following: Why is it that here in the United States we have such difficulty even imagining a different sort of society from the one whose dysfunctions and inequalities trouble us so? We appear to have lost the capacity to question the present, much less offer alternatives to it. Why is it so beyond us to conceive of a different set of arrangements to our common advantage?

Our shortcoming—forgive the academic jargon—is discursive. We simply do not know how to talk about these things. To understand why this should be the case, some history is in order: as Keynes once observed, “A study of the history of opinion is a necessary preliminary to the emancipation of the mind.” For the purposes of mental emancipation this evening, I propose that we take a minute to study the history of a prejudice: the universal contemporary resort to “economism,” the invocation of economics in all discussions of public affairs.

For the last thirty years, in much of the English-speaking world though less so in continental Europe and elsewhere, when asking ourselves whether we support a proposal or initiative, we have not asked, is it good or bad? Instead we inquire: Is it efficient? Is it productive? Would it benefit gross domestic product? Will it contribute to growth? This propensity to avoid moral considerations, to restrict ourselves to issues of profit and loss—economic questions in the narrowest sense—is not an instinctive human condition. It is an acquired taste.

More via What Is Living and What Is Dead in Social Democracy? – The New York Review of Books.

How messy it all is

The argument of this fascinating and deeply provoking book is easy to summarise: among rich countries, the more unequal ones do worse according to almost every quality of life indicator you can imagine. They do worse even if they are richer overall, so that per capita GDP turns out to be much less significant for general wellbeing than the size of the gap between the richest and poorest 20 per cent of the population (the basic measure of inequality the authors use). The evidence that Wilkinson and Pickett supply to make their case is overwhelming. Whether the test is life expectancy, infant mortality, obesity levels, crime rates, literacy scores, even the amount of rubbish that gets recycled, the more equal the society the better the performance invariably is. In graph after graph measuring various welfare functions, the authors show that the best predictor of how countries will rank is not the differences in wealth between them (which would result in the US coming top, with the Scandinavian countries and the UK not too far behind, and poorer European nations like Greece and Portugal bringing up the rear) but the differences in wealth within them (so the US, as the most unequal society, comes last on many measures, followed by Portugal and the UK, both places where the gap between rich and poor is relatively large, with Spain and Greece somewhere in the middle, and the Scandinavian countries invariably out in front, along with Japan). Just as significantly, this pattern holds inside the US as well, where states with high levels of income inequality also tend to have the greatest social problems. It is true that some of the most unequal American states are also among the poorest (Mississippi, Louisiana, West Virginia), so you might expect things to go worse there. But some unequal states are also rich (California), whereas some fairly equal ones are also quite poor (Utah). Only a few (New Hampshire, Wyoming) score well on both counts. What the graphs show are the unequal states tending to cluster together regardless of income, so that California usually finds itself alongside Mississippi scoring badly, while New Hampshire and Utah both do consistently well. Income inequality, not income per se, appears to be the key. As a result, the authors are able to draw a clear conclusion: ‘The evidence shows that even small decreases in inequality, already a reality in some rich market democracies, make a very important difference to the quality of life.’ Achieving these decreases should be the central goal of our politics, precisely because we can be confident that it works. This is absolutely not, they insist, a ‘utopian dream’.

Read more here:

LRB · David Runciman: How messy it all is.

Zizek’s new website

I’m not sure exactly who is running it – not the man himself I suspect – but it’s the hub for Zizek related matters, with a US emphasis, I assume.

Slavoj Žižek —.

Adam Curtis Films here:

Adam Curtis, The Trap, The Power of Nightmares, The Century of the Self and others….

(You might need to scroll down a little to find them)

All on Rewtube.

you can see his new film It felt like a kiss on his blog, here.

Adam Curtis

We’ve had a drug czar for a long time. Various other czars have come and gone. [See update.] But we’ve never had a language czar, not even when William Safire was penning screeds for Nixon. I think it’s time. Moreover, just as according to the Bush Doctrine we must go to war with countries that might at some time in the future support terrorism, so too we must learn to recognize treacherous phrases long ere they cast their sickly pale o’er our powers of thought. Otherwise, the illiterates win.

• green shoots: In mere weeks this metaphor has gotten so tired it has to shoot meth just to keep breathing.
• fell off a cliff: Nothing “suddenly decreases” anymore, or “declines precipitously”—no, we have to watch it go over that damned cliff again.
• animal spirits: When Keynes used it, the phrase was a colorful anachronism. Having been repeated roughly 104 times in the last month, it now has the flavor of theatre-seat chewing gum.
• claw back: Sounds ever so much more exciting than “shrink” or “reclaim”… [Wavy dissolve:] “It was five pm, Friday. I clawed back my change from the vending machine and took my espresso back to the office. What I needed pronto was some animal spirits, 180 proof. Then she walked in, and my green shoots fell over a cliff…”

From:

Philosophical Fortnights.

* Do not think of your faults, still less of other’s faults; look for what is good and strong, and try to imitate it. Your faults will drop off, like dead leaves, when their time comes.

* Education is the leading of human souls to what is best, and making what is best out of them.

* Tell me what you like and I’ll tell you what you are.

* There is no wealth but Life. Life, including all its ­powers of love, of joy, of admiration. That ­country is the richest which nourishes the ­greatest number of noble and happy human beings; that man is richest who, having perfected the functions of his own life, to the utmost, has also the widest helpful influence, both personal, and by means of his possessions, over the lives of others.

John Ruskin

Since this blog was first posted the news has had it that the government is discussing the value of the natural world in the UK (open spaces, parkland, meadows, forests, all the countryside one assumes) in directly monetary terms. How much is having a field near your house worth? £3,000? £12,000? Clearly we still need to recall what Ruskin had to say about this ‘economic’ mentality. If our measure of value is as crudely quantitative as this, the spirit of nihilism is well and truly with us. (June 2011)

I’ve been re-reading some Ruskin this week, while I perspired on the tube to work: Unto This Last. Quite a book for its day (1860), and for our day too, given his polemic against the idiocy of the classical economists, their assumptions about ‘rational man’, and the supposed primacy of narrow self interest  in the market  and in society generally (=‘greed is good’). It was a controversial work, and not at all well received by some of his target audience – the Victorian Bourgeoisie. (For a bit more on what Ruskin has to say in this book , see the post I re-blogged from Jonathan Glancy on Unto this Last).  Reading Ruskin again, I was impressed by another aspect of his polemic.

I was  struck again by the sense that with Ruskin there is an assumption that his audience shares with him a grounding in Christian teaching, particularly the New Testament. Its language and imagery pervades the book (including the title). Of course it’s a Victorian, protestant version and not one that everyone, even at that date, was taking literally. Ruskin certainly wasn’t: he had moved well away by then  from the evangelical creed in which he had been raised. This was due to a number of reasons, but Darwin’s Origin of Species and the accumulating evidence of the great age of the earth played a large part in making the religion of his parents unacceptably simple minded and  narrow. Still, when Ruskin wants to talk about justice, or love, or even the dismal science of economics, he turns to the Bible.

Which leaves me with this thought. What shared language do we have now, when we want to talk about such matters? I’m very far from thinking that no God = no morality, and I’m also alive to the evil Christians have sometimes done. I just wonder whether, when you erase a tradition and a shared discourse in which love and justice find a natural place, you find much left standing. What’s left? economics? evolutionary psychology?

Nietzsche makes a remark somewhere, apropos George Eliot, that the English, having killed their God, were still proceeding as if nothing had changed, that nothing would change in their moral universe. I think he added that they would wake up to what had been lost ‘sometime in the next century’ (i.e. the 20th century). Into the moral vacuum of the late 20th century rushed the promotion of private advantage over the public good. It spoke the language of Gordon Gekko and Milton Friedman  and it  colonised almost every area of public life. Now we live with the results.

This seems to me to be a political and social question, not just one for private moral reflection. Do Darwin, Dennet and Dawkins lead to market fundamentalism? I ask this because it’s a naive piece of liberal ideology to hold that ‘morality’ is somehow just for the private life, with a neutral state acting as a policeman and the market ensuring the efficient impersonal distribution of goods. The state, for them, has a greater or lesser role in supplying a safety net for the injured, or acting as an equal opportunities  enabler for the less fortunate; it  has no substantive vision of the good life that would go beyond this. That’s the point of liberalism.

But if the only driver for social change lies in capitalism itself, then only the self interest of  persons (increasingly imagined as consumers) will stand against the worst that the market can do to jobs, families, and lives. Liberals were keen to finish off socialism (with its Judeo-Christian and Marxist heritage); keen to launch into culture wars against all that would stand against the logic of the individual and the market. But what have they got to show in its stead? The selfish gene?

We need to recover the language, and  practice of public justice, and social solidarity. The promotion of the Good Life that lies beyond the horizons of the dismal science of economics. This is a public thing: the  res publica . And it’s a matter for all of us, as citizens, not mere consumers. So perhaps we need more, not less, of the wisdom of Solomon, the ethic of the New Testament, the polemics of Ruskin and the analysis of Marx. Otherwise what’s left? Sir Alan Sugar? Sir Fred Goodwin? I’m reminded of another of Ruskin’s titles: The  Ethics of the Dust.

Sarko: victim of liberal ideology

Sarkozy, the President of the French Republic, says that the burka has no place in France because it represents the oppression of women. For this, liberals have applauded him for defending secular values in France.

But he has no plans to ban veils on nuns or legislate to force the Catholic church to allow women priests. This might be because there are more Catholic voters than Muslims ones in France;  or that he wants to look strong on an issue where he doesn’t have to spend money. But perhaps that is too cynical.

There is another issue I’d like to raise in connection with Sarko’s pronouncement. Sarko’s view seems to be that even if a woman says she wants to wear a burka, it is still somehow not a free choice. This is because of ideology, or to be cruder, ‘brainwashing’ – the notion that the mind has been so externally affected that apparently free choices are in some sense forced.  This may be true.

So: a liberal (male) politician is going to tell a woman she can’t wear what she likes because she is being told what to wear by (muslim) men.  It’s hard to be sure where this approach will end: a dress code  like they have in Saudi Arabia but with different rules, perhaps.

But Sarko knows what’s best for them, and wants to make them do it. This is paternalism, of course, something liberals are supposed to be against. I wish some of my liberal friends would consider this  before inveighing against so-called patriarchal islamic ideology. Not liking the burka can’t be a liberal justification for banning it.  Or perhaps their ‘tolerance’ for diversity means only: ‘you can be different, but not too different;  if you are  too different  we’ll make you conform’.

An alternative might be to drop the idea that freedom is revealed by the choices people actually make. I’m quite ready to go along with this, provided it isn’t restricted to the choices made by Muslim women. How many of our choices are truly ‘free’? The main ideological driver in ‘the liberal west’ is surely capitalism – with consumerism as the classic example of the addictive lifestyle which, unlike the burka, is regularly described as an unfree state by its victims. For a ‘liberal’ to  focus on sartorial choices that don’t harm others, while ignoring the real status of our abstract  ’freedoms’ is to act in bad faith. Or to be the victim of ideology – which is it, M. Sarko?

Helen Bamber

Photograph: Helen Bamber in Belsen, 1945

She calls herself “a witness to the vulnerability of humanity”. From her home in north London, a pint-sized divorcee has emerged as one of the world’s most prominent campaigners against the very worst type of personal suffering, that of deliberate and coldly calculated torture.

For more than half a century, Helen Bamber has devoted her life to the care of survivors of horror and violence. In 1985 she created the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture. Its very name, says Bamber’s biographer Neil Belton, tells us “more than most of us wish to hear”. She and her colleagues have provided therapy to more than 30,000 people, from more than 90 countries.

The “Good Listener”

Bamber has never had any formal training, but believes the most important part of her work is to “listen to clients for as long as they wish or can bear to talk”. The title of Belton’s book about her is The Good Listener, a neat summary of her life and work.

Bamber believes the world is divided into two types, bystanders who see only what they want, and proper witnesses who observe and record the truth. She joined the latter group in 1945, when she volunteered to go into the concentration camp of Belsen to help with the physical and psychological recovery of Holocaust survivors.

As a 19-year-old girl, Bamber found herself on the receiving end of some of the worst human horror stories imaginable. She has described the survivors there who “would dig their fingers into your arms and hold on to you to get to you the horror of what had happened.”

Moving on from Amnesty

This tenacious teenager returned to London to work with children who had survived the camps, and later joined Amnesty International, where she worked to expose torture regimes in such countries as Chile and Argentina.

It became increasingly apparent that the AI brief to expose these regimes and look after its victims was too wide, and Bamber saw a greater need for individual care. She was moved to create her own foundation, where the role of therapist is “to receive, not to recoil” and often “simply sit rocking somebody while they tell their story”.

Never moved to tears by these tales, Bamber remains strangely affected by the sound of survivors singing together. It reminds her of “what capacity people have for creativity and what’s denied them”.

Bamber sits on human rights committees from Belfast to Gaza. Former hostage John McCarthy is impressed by her energy and power, her combination of compassion and determination.

Unusual childhood reading

He believes her work must require a certain anger. Bamber admits to this fuel for her gruelling schedule, and the source of it may be found in her childhood. Born to Jewish parents of Polish descent, young Helen grew up in a house where the Nazi threat was overpowering.

Her father read her sections of Mein Kampf to remind her of the evil in the world, and she has described a sense of constant foreboding. Her trip to Belsen was about overcoming her own fears.

Bamber has since dedicated her life to helping others do the same, and describes a sense of satisfaction in helping people learn to live again. And as to what really drives her on, she explains that even in the midst of such evil and suffering, or perhaps especially in such places, “there’s something very good to be retrieved from people”.

Caroline Frost

http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/documentaries/profile/helen_bamber.shtml

BBC – BBC Four Profile – Helen Bamber.

This is quite interesting! I just wish Mr Jeffries had taken the Hegel a little further: there’s a lot more to his philosophy of freedom than is intimated here. Still, it’s a pleasure to see anyone noticing that liberal ideas of ‘negative freedom’ are a bit inadequate, to say the least.

Brush up your Hegel, Sarko

Monsieur Président’s burka outburst suggests he can’t tell his abstract and concrete freedoms apart

Brush up your Hegel, Sarko | Stuart Jeffries | Comment is free | The Guardian.

Excerpts from The Present Age (1846)

The present age is one of understanding, of reflection, devoid of passion, an age which flies into enthusiasm for a moment only to decline back into indolence….

..When first a clever society makes concrete reality into nothing, then the Media creates that abstraction, “the public,” which is filled with unreal individuals, who are never united nor can they ever unite simultaneously in a single situation or organization, yet still stick together as a whole. The public is a body, more numerous than the people which compose it, but this body can never be shown, indeed it can never have only a single representation, because it is an abstraction. Yet this public becomes larger, the more the times become passionless and reflective and destroy concrete reality; this whole, the public, soon embraces everything. . . .

The public is not a people, it is not a generation, it is not a simultaneity, it is not a community, it is not a society, it is not an association, it is not those particular men over there, because all these exist because they are concrete and real; however, no single individual who belongs to the public has any real commitment; some times during the day he belongs to the public, namely, in those times in which he is nothing; in those times that he is a particular person, he does not belong to the public. Consisting of such individuals, who as individuals are nothing, the public becomes a huge something, a nothing, an abstract desert and emptiness, which is everything and nothing. . . .

The Media is an abstraction (because a newspaper is not concrete and only in an abstract sense can be considered an individual), which in association with the passionlessness and reflection of the times creates that abstract phantom, the public, which is the actual leveller. . . . More and more individuals will, because of their indolent bloodlessness, aspire to become nothing, in order to become the public, this abstract whole, which forms in this ridiculous manner: the public comes into existence because all its participants become third parties. This lazy mass, which understands nothing and does nothing, this public gallery seeks some distraction, and soon gives itself over to the idea that everything which someone does, or achieves, has been done to provide the public something to gossip about. . . . The public has a dog for its amusement. That dog is the Media. If there is someone better than the public, someone who distinguishes himself, the public sets the dog on him and all the amusement begins. This biting dog tears up his coat-tails, and takes all sort of vulgar liberties with his leg–until the public bores of it all and calls the dog off. That is how the public levels

Søren Kierkegaard

Kierkegaard had an important insight into information technology and its link to ‘publicness’ and anonymity ; the philosopher was thinking about newspapers and not the internet of course, but what he says seems more relevant to our own mediated condition than it was to his. It seems that only now have conditions  caught up with his insights. I suppose that’ll seem true in 2109, too.

There’s another point in question  – that of modernity itself, of speed and distraction as the mode of life now, and the aesthetics of distraction that seem to arise from it. Attention and distraction: the twin poles of modernity.  In so far as Modernism  advocated attention it continued an aesthetic of concentrated experience of the object; late modernity seems to invoke the spirits of distraction. A crucial figure here may be Baudelaire, the flaneur, strolling through a city which had already become a spectacle inviting dispersion of attention – the modern artist who already celebrates the charms of the aleatory, the ‘low’, the quotidian.

Attention: as intensity or contemplation (which can be active or receptive, a ‘wise passiveness’ derived from the romantics) and distraction (discontinuity, jump cuts, hyperlinks, compilations, editing, multi layering, bricolage and – opposite ‘equivalent’ to romantic passivity, the gently immersive pulsations of minimalism and ambient music and light). How can we grasp, let alone evaluate their claims on us? What do they mean for modern life, for art, for politics?

It doesn’t follow from this that texts composed according to the logic of discontinuity and montage  are necessarily the ones that invite the distracted gaze. Those texts may be complex and concentrated – think of Adorno’s  paratactic arrangement of his Aesthetic Theory, Nietzsche’s  ‘aphorisms’, certain musical and film works, where montage and the discontonous are prevalent. Texts don’t simply mirror a preexisting social reality, so I wonder if we can say that these styles are modern because they generate a modern meaning, a way of reading which is necessarily fragmentary?

The task is to attempt  something like Fred Jameson’s ‘cognitive mapping’ – getting a sense of where we are in all this, and how we got here, as a precondition to any meaningful action. Trying to make sense of this, if we can, we turn to Baudelaire, Benjamin  – and Kierkegaard. But in the end that task is ours, mine, yours.

Kierkegaard’s “Mystery Of Unrighteousness” In The Information Age

Brian T. Prosser and Andrew Ward

“The world’s fundamental misfortune,” the 19^th century Søren Kierkegaard writes, “is …the fact that with each great discovery …the human race is enveloped … in a miasma of thoughts, emotions, moods, even conclusions and intentions, which are nobody’s, which belong to none and yet to all.” [Kierkegaard (1967), #2650] The great discoveries to which Kierkegaard is referring are made possible by the use of technology, and part of his concern is that the use of technology often results in human beings having “destitute” relations to one another. As exemplified for Kierkegaard by the popular press, the uses of technologies not only transform face-to-face relationships, they create masks behind which people hide from one another. It is this latter point that is especially important. For Kierkegaard, what ultimately drives people toward certain technological practices is fear. “What rules the world,” Kierkegaard writes, “is… the fear of humanity. Therefore this fear of being an individual and this proneness to hide under one abstraction or another…. Ultimately an abstraction is related to fantasy, and fantasy becomes an enormous power… [T]he human race became afraid of itself, fosters the fantastic, and then trembles before it.” [Kierkegaard (1967), #2166] The use of technology to mediate communication, claims Kierkegaard, provides people with the means to escape, or at least hide from those aspects of interpersonal relationships they most fear.

This tendency to “hide” behind the impersonal masks provided by technologically mediated communication reflects, for Kierkegaard, a flawed attitude regarding what is most essential to veracious communication practices. The attitude is one that he claims characterizes an age “which reckons as wisdom that which is truly the mystery of unrighteousness, viz. that one need not inquire about the communicator, but only about the communication, the objective only”. [Kierkegaard (1962a), p.44] Such an approach to the communication process, one that displaces the communicator from his or her place of centrality, undermines an appropriate sense of what it means to participate in such processes. Accordingly, an impersonal means of communication transforms the sense of ownership in the information being exchanged – that is, it transforms our sense of authorship. As Kierkegaard writes:

… in our age what is an author? An author is often only an x, even when his name is signed, something quite impersonal, which addresses itself abstractly, by the aid of printing, to thousands and thousands, while remaining itself unseen and unknown, living a life as hidden, as anonymous, as it is possible for a life to be, in order, presumably, not to reveal the too obvious and striking contradiction between the prodigious means of communication employed and the fact that the author is only a single individual – perhaps also for fear of the control which in practical life must always be exercised over everyone who wishes to teach others, to see whether his personal existence comports with his communication…. [Kierkegaard (1962a), p.45]

Although the prose may be somewhat oblique, Kierkegaard is making two important, interrelated points. The first is that traditional face-to-face encounters between individuals structure the dynamics of communication in ways that permit the possibility of genuine human relationships. For instance, face-to-face communications often permit the immediate and dynamic clarification of the appropriateness of a particular piece of information. Moreover, the contexts of face-to-face communications generally impose a stronger concern for the veracity of information and instil in the participants a greater sense of responsibility both for what is communicated and how it is communicated. For Kierkegaard such elements are essential to our most “important” and characteristically human experiences. Kierkegaard’s second point is that humans are often fearful of their own individuality as revealed in such exchanges. For this reason people seek to change the dynamics of such exchanges so as to hide that part of themselves they fear to reveal. Thus, a principal motivation for the development of technology is largely negative; the use of technology to mediate communication permits a kind of interaction in which the participants can hide or mask their individuality. It is in this respect that the use of technology to hide or mask individuality represents, for Kierkegaard, a fear of, and an attempt to flee from what it is that is most important and characteristic of our own humanity. As Kierkegaard writes:

The highest triumph of all errors is to acquire an impersonal means of communication and then anonymity…. [A]ll true communication is personal…. But error is always impersonal…. Without the daily press and without anonymity, there is still always consolation that there will be a definite, flesh-and-blood individual person who voices the error…. But it is frightful that someone who is no one (consequently has no responsibility) can set any error into circulation with no thought of responsibility and with the aid of this dreadful disproportional means of communication…. [Kierkegaard (1967), #2152]

Like other writers after him, Kierkegaard sees in technology an inherent tendency to transform human experience. This is an important observation about technology, but it is not one that, by itself, distinguishes Kierkegaard as a critic of technology. What Kierkegaard understands that most other writers do not, or do so only in an unfocused way, is that the impetus to use technology is driven by an ambivalence in human nature. On the one hand we are driven to interact with other people and to find a kind of identity and validation in our interactions with them. It is this aspect of human nature, and the ability of technology to satisfy this desire, that partly accounts for our willingness to embrace technologies such as the Internet. On the other hand, we are also driven to try to control and hide important aspects of ourselves that, in the act of communication, reveals us to others as the individuals we are. Thus, in the use of technology to mediate our communications with one another, what particularly concerns us is that the use of technology permits the reconstruction of human relationships devoid of the experiences most important to our humanity. In this respect, the use of technology is driven by a fear of, and an attempt to escape from the most important aspects of our own humanity as realised though our face-to-face interactions with others. For these reasons Kierkegaard writes that, “[F]rom fear of the others, one dares not to be an I and therefore strives to become an impersonal something…. This again has led to anonymity.” [Kierkegaard (1967), #3219] The dynamic force behind contemporary technology is, for Kierkegaard, fear, which turns the impersonal, anonymity-enhancing powers of technology into an attraction.

More from Brian T. Prosser and Andrew Ward:

Kierkegaard’s “Mystery Of Unrighteousness” In The Information Age.