Home now - thinking back over all those train stations and subway stations full of people (and about the SHOCK of a two day train strike), I want to ask a question dangerously close to nonsense: what do all the Minnesota counterparts of those people have in mind - that is, all the people who would be in train stations and subway stations and regional train centers, if we had (more than 2 or 3) such things? How many hundreds of thousands of intentions get redirected or strangled in their bassinets, for lack of civilized, affordable public transportation? Some projects can be transferred to cars, or to electronic media, surely. But most of them just don't go anywhere. And so, one has the mystery of ghostly frustration, of all those aborted travel plans, all those millions of missed connections, failed homecomings, cancelled reunions. I can't believe that the explanation of people's lives is just: they work with what is possible for them. To some extent, they also suffer from what isn't possible. They keep lowering their expectations. And somehow, out of all that, the character, the typical attitude, of a people emerges. And that is partly what one encounters as the mood of a city, the rhythm of a city.
The problem is that good political thinking has to take account of all those ghosts. We can't just work to improve what we have. The ghosts of what we could be are really just everywhere. And I don't see any way to know that except to move around, to smell different air.
I left this in Münster two weeks ago and came home to Minneapolis, to this:
No patriotism can combat three full months more of fall, and an early spring. Until Europe begins persecuting academics, Germany and Austria are safe from the siren song of Minneapolis. We won't be doing Viking raids on the universities.
And yet: many of my conversations with scholars young and old made clear how often local advantages appear: Austrian writers need help from people with specialized English editing skills; the public discourse in Minnesota needs an accurate, up-to-date European perspective. The philological emphasis on history of ideas corrects the American impulse to pretend that philosophy was invented yesterday. And always, particular scholars in the midst of big projects need to meet, because publication is slow, lives are short, and projects converge.
So, the most qualified person to fill in for an undergraduate survey of 19th Century philosophy at Gustavus in St. Peter happens to live in Münster, in circumstances that make travel difficult. A fine adviser on initiating dialogue with Muslim youth about ISIS is doing good work in Vienna, work about which Minneapolis folks (faced with similar problems) know nothing.
The solution is surely not to move mammals and enrich the airlines. The citizens of Münster should continue to enjoy their foggy fall, and Minnesotans should should maintain their conditioning and their illusions (it's pretty, in it's own special way) as the deep cold comes ever closer. But something should be done, soon, technically and institutionally, to let the intellectual marketplace do its work to some limited extent.
There are magic times: 1 to 3 pm in Minnesota is 8 to 10 in Germany and Austria. A seminar or a reading group at those times can be trans-Atlantic, if the technology can be made to really work, not just sort-of work. That's a problem for experimenters.
The bigger problems are institutional: how to embed visiting people as raisins in the overall course muffin -- and pay the raisins. How do university departments and institutes get out of the habit of spending $2,000 for tired speaker rather than $200 for a rested speaker, ten times?
As usual, the problem is ethical as much as it is technical or social. Higher education has produced a lot of under-used minds, and the world needs that energy, that insight. Institutions far and wide have to look beyond their immediate needs (what can we get by with) and take responsibility for the intellectual health of the world. To those administrators who want to solve just simpler problems, I'd suggest that such problems are, quite simply, beneath their dignity.
