It worked for Czesław Miłosz, who entered the pantheon of Polish poets thanks to works he wrote mostly in Berkeley.

The poet’s story—told by humanities scholar Cynthia L. Haven in a surprising and thought-provoking recent book, Czesław Miłosz: A California Life—reminds us how our state allows people to move both further from and closer to home, often at the same time.

Miłosz, while famous in Poland and in poetry circles (Joseph Brodsky called him the greatest poet of our times), is a name unfamiliar to most Californians. But he remains the only affiliate of the University of California system, where he taught Slavic languages and literature, to win a Nobel Prize in the humanities.

“The irony,” writes Haven, “is that the greatest California poet—and certainly one of America’s greatest poets too—could well be a Pole who wrote a single poem in English.”

Born in Lithuania in 1911 to Polish-speaking gentry, Miłosz pursued a literary career in Warsaw. There he witnessed some of the worst bombing and violence of World War II—an experience that was foundational to his work and worldview. He served as a diplomat for Poland’s Stalinist government, before defecting in Paris in 1951. In 1960, he accepted a teaching post at Berkeley.

He would stay for 40 years, living in and writing from a cottage on Grizzly Peak, looking down over the whole Bay Area.

At first, California seemed irrelevant to his work. The state stood apart from history. His students didn’t understand good and evil, or the horrors of even the recent past. He was ambivalent about California, and horrified by a visit to Los Angeles. Even the beautiful landscapes seemed too immense and unforgiving.

“If California is not a separate planet, it is at least a separate colony of planet Earth,” one of Miłosz’s friends recalls him saying, according to Haven.

But it was the 1960s, and history and social turmoil soon arrived in California—and especially in Berkeley. This time, Miłosz engaged with it, and other changes that came through the state, including the arrival of Silicon Valley. He learned California’s history (he seemed particularly interested in the Donner Party).

Soon, the state seeped into him and his work.  His autobiographic Native Realm: A Search for Self-Definition often compares Eastern Europe and the Bay Area. So too did his 1969 poem, “Reading the Japanese Poet Issa (1762-1826),” which moves in just a few lines from the West Coast…

The invisible ocean,
fog until noon
dripping in a heavy rain from the boughs of the redwoods,
sirens droning below on the bay.

to southern Poland:

…whether this is the village of Szlembark
above which we used to find salamanders,
garishly colored like the dresses of Teresa Roszkowska

California, Haven shows, broadened the poet’s perspective, and allowed him to put the horrors of his earlier life in Lithuania and Poland in a global context. His experiences here “transfigured him from a poet writing from one corner of the world to a poet who could speak for all if it, from a poet focused on history to a poet concerned with modernity and who always had his eyes fixed on forever.”

Haven recounts that Bells in Winter, the collection of poems that effectively earned Miłosz the Nobel in 1980, was originally supposed to be called Berkeley Poems. In that book, he imagines his spinster sisters (“two parakeets from Samogitia,” a region in Lithuania) visiting him in the desert, amidst the Joshua trees.

“The majestic expanse of the Pacific Seacoast has imperceptibly worked its way into my dreams, remaking me, stripping me down, and perhaps thereby liberating me,” Miłosz would write.

Miłosz never would have become the great poet of Poland if he hadn’t come to California. If he had stayed in Soviet Poland, he might have been censored or persecuted. Without exile in such a faraway and thought-provoking place, could he have “explored the margins of loneliness, alienation and abandonment?” Haven asks.

Miłosz eventually did go back to Poland, with his second wife, an American university administrator. He died in Krakow in 2004.

His work remains relevant today, in a time of catastrophes, political and environmental. Haven suggests that Californians in particular have much to learn from Miłosz, through his “twinning of vision and historical consciousness.”

In Bells in Winter, Miłosz wrote:

For me, therefore, everything has a double existence
Both in time and when time shall be no more.

Miłosz was both European and Californian. He was both a man of the past and the future. Like so many Californians, he struggled with the dualities of place and identity and home.

In his one English poem, “To Raja Rao,” Miłosz wrote:

For years I could not accept
the place I was in.
I felt I should be somewhere else….

I learned at last to say: this is my home
Here
Before the glowing coal of ocean sunsets
On the shore which faces the shores of your Asia,
In a great republic, moderately corrupt

The post How California Made a Polish Poet Great appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

If we want our civic life to be more positive, we might need to vote in the negative.

That’s the compelling case that Sam Chang, a retired banker who lives in Taipei, was making as I rode BART with him between meetings with California election experts. Chang is the improbable leader of a global effort to establish what is called “the negative vote” or “the balanced ballot.” And he has started with concurrent ballot initiative campaigns to add the “negative vote” to the election system in Taiwan and the city charter in Berkeley.

In this transnational campaign, Chang, a mild-mannered 67-year-old who holds both Taiwanese and U.S. citizenship, is in the vanguard. California and its communities, who are famously open to new ideas advanced by initiative, are likely to become proving grounds for coordinated initiative campaigns that advance democratic reforms internationally. Over recent decades, direct democracy—which refers to the initiative, referendum, and other tools that allow voters to make laws directly—has spread to 113 nations.

California, which has soured on America’s faltering political system, is in a position to build a new kind of democracy that combines U.S. traditions with international ideas.

I met Chang last year at an international direct democracy conference in Rome—another place where his idea has traction. One day earlier this month, as Chang set up a campaign operation in the East Bay, he got news that a court in Taiwan had turned aside a major legal challenge to his initiative.

“This idea is something the whole world needs,” says Chang. “The right to vote no is a fundamental human right.”

His concept of “the negative vote” is straightforward. Today, in elections, we are allowed to vote for one candidate in each race. Chang proposes to give voters in Berkeley, and ultimately all over the world, the ability to use that one vote to cast a ballot against the candidate instead. In such a system, each candidate’s tally of votes would be a net—between her number of positive and negative votes.

Chang offers several reasons to make this change. First, the current system is wrong in encouraging us to vote for a candidate in each race, even when we don’t support any candidate. Furthermore, the option of a negative vote would boost voter participation. One reason people give for not voting is that they don’t like any of the candidates; the negative vote would give such naysayers the option to vote against the candidate they dislike most. Chang’s organization commissioned a survey from the RAND Corporation suggesting that, in a U.S. presidential election, offering the negative vote would draw 16 million more people to the polls.

More broadly, Chang argues that the negative vote would create an incentive for politicians to collaborate and to behave more responsively, for fear of drawing negative votes against them.

The idea also has a feature that could be helpful in local races, where there is so little interest in politics that often only one candidate appears on the ballot. “Should I only have the option to vote for the one candidate on the ballot, but not against?” Chang asks rhetorically. “The answer is obvious: I should have the right to say ‘No!’ If I am only allowed to vote ‘Yes!’ you would think I am living in North Korea.”

The “balanced ballot” is how a negative vote would appear to voters. Courtesy of the Negative Vote Association.

Chang admits he is an unlikely champion for a California democratic reform. Raised in Taipei, he was sent to Massachusetts for high school and went on to Harvard for college and Wharton for his MBA. But while his siblings and their kids would settle in the U.S., Chang moved back to Taiwan because his parents were there and he wanted his own children to have a Chinese education.

As he traveled the world during his banking work, he grew more concerned with signs of weakening democracy in many different countries. The inspiration for the negative vote came on a 2010 trip to Israel, when he learned about that country’s complicated government and its problems.

By 2012, Chang had begun working on the negative vote project. The idea was not new: the Venetian Republic, the Venice polity that ran from the end of the Roman empire to Napoleon’s conquest in 1797, had negative voting. Today, the negative vote is used in the selection of the United Nations Secretary General, with nations permitted to vote against a candidate as well as for one. (Chang notes that Brazil and India also permit “none of the above” votes, but that is not the same as negative vote).

Chang has slowly built support across the political spectrum in Taiwan; his prominent endorsements include three former premiers, Taipei’s current mayor, and Shih Ming-teh, known as “Taiwan’s Nelson Mandela” for having served longer in prison than any other opposition figure under the Kuomintang party’s nearly five decades of rule. The negative vote addresses two Taiwan-specific issues. First, since Taiwan gives political parties NT$50 and candidates NT$30 in public funding per vote received, the idea is pitched as a way for voters to cast a ballot without helping fund political entities they don’t much like. Second, the idea is seen as one antidote to Taiwan’s problems with illegal vote-buying.

In the U.S., Chang has seized on Berkeley because it’s the closest thing he has to an American hometown; his son lived there for many years. Berkeley is a small city with a charter, which allows it to enact new election ideas that don’t conform with state laws. Qualifying an initiative for the ballot there is also relatively cheap—about $50,000. But the city is also famous globally, and Chang is eager to connect with its university’s scholars in the hopes they will spread his idea around the country and the world.

Chang has been making regular visits to the city from Taipei, attending parties thrown by activists and chatting up city officials. I met up with him at Berkeley’s city hall, where he was talking with former city councilman Kriss Worthington, now an advisor to the mayor, about the best process to draft an initiative.

In the Bay Area, Chang hasn’t gotten much traction with his argument that the negative vote would discourage extremism; most people are partisans and not so fond of compromise, he says. But in conversations I witnessed, people were intrigued by the idea that it would boost voter turnout. And Bay Area folks love it when Chang explains how, if the 2016 presidential election had been run with negative votes, Donald Trump would have lost because of all the votes against him.

Berkeley offers one distinct challenge. It no longer has the American system of voting for just one candidate; voters actually rank candidates in order of preference—1, 2, 3. Chang says that he proposes to keep those rankings, but allow Berkeley voters to negatively rank candidates—as well (-1, -2, -3, etc.)

That would offer voters a choice—who do you dislike most?—that fits our time.

There are efforts to adopt negative voting in Afghanistan, Argentina, Denmark, and Poland, and Chang is also beginning to organize in Honolulu, where another of his children lives. In 2020, Chang hopes, Berkeley and Taiwan will vote for the negative vote.

Then, he hopes the whole world will become more positive, by going negative.

The post Why Democracies Need the Right to Vote “No” appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Thank you, Berkeley.

Recent headlines should remind Californians of yet another way we are lucky. Our state has the world’s best scapegoat: you.

You—our most distinguished public university and all the people, institutions, and neighborhoods surrounding it—do far more than research and educate. You serve the vital social purpose of being a convenient punching bag for angry people of all manner of ideological preoccupations.

The right and the center can pin all of California’s liberal sins, real and imagined, on you. And the left sees a reactionary threat in everything, from your fundraising, to police action on or near campus, to the presence of law professor John Yoo, who defended torture under President George W. Bush. Sometimes you’re denounced as dangerously permissive, and other times you’re frighteningly authoritarian.

And when it comes to higher education’s struggles, legislators on both sides of the aisle blame you for everything: You’re too arrogant, and you charge too much and you let in too many out-of-state students—even though the need to pocket that higher out-of-state tuition is the direct result of the legislature’s systematic disinvestment in you and your sister university campuses across California.

Yes, California as a whole takes a lot of critical blows. But can you imagine how more bloodied the rest of our state would be if we didn’t have you around to absorb so much abuse?

In recent months, as a furious world chokes on its own populist vomit, it’s been deeply reassuring to see you play your familiar role as California’s sacrificial lamb with your practiced aplomb.

First, you suffered widespread condemnation from President Trump and the media—both for your decision to cancel a speech by the Breitbart News provocateur Milo Yiannopoulous, and for the anarchist, anti-fascist violence (from arson to window smashing) that prompted the cancellation. And you didn’t gloat or demand apologies—because no one is ever sorry for slurring you—when Yiannopoulous was subsequently disgraced for defending pedophilia.

You and the Berkeley police have patiently dealt with pro-Trump provocateurs who hold rallies near campus to start fights—as well as the anti-Trump counter-protesters who took the bait recently. And most recently, you’ve taken incoming from the left for permitting the right-wing diva Ann Coulter to speak on campus, before you got roasted by the right for canceling her appearance because you couldn’t guarantee her safety.

You can’t win in any of these fights, of course, which is why you’re such an easy target. And yet you endure—which is precisely what makes you so valuable to California. And I want you to know that, while Californians are unlikely to thank you publicly, many of us are quietly grateful to you for keeping so many cranks and extremists focused on you, and away from our own neighborhoods and campuses.

What I marvel at is your ability to relish your role as whipping post, without complaint or counter-attack. I know folks in working-class places like Bakersfield think they’re the most hardened Californians, but the truth is they’re not even half as tough as you, California’s leading scapegoat.

When I think of you, I can’t help but recall the work of the late Rene Girard, one of the 20th century’s greatest philosophers and a professor at your rival Stanford (so I’ll understand if you take him with a grain of salt). Girard wrote that modern society has become addicted to scapegoating; we take our anger out on sacrificial lambs just as cruelly as ancient societies did, most famously in a certain Crucifixion. (Yes, Jesus really loves you, Berkeley, and not just because you’re home to the Graduate Theological Union.)

Most pointedly, Girard said, this scapegoating has value—in bringing people together and reducing the scale and damage of violence. He wrote: “When human groups divide and become fragmented, during a period of malaise and conflicts, they may come to a point where they are reconciled again at the expense of a victim.”

Indeed, you, as scapegoat, are a protector of many vulnerable people. Just look at the rest of the country and the world, where elected leaders and voting publics are scapegoating whole classes of people—migrants, Muslims, Mexicans. We haven’t had the same level of scapegoating in California, and one reason for that is you take such a heavy helping of the racists’ rage.

You’re such a good scapegoat because you’ve had so much practice. You were the largest public university in the world by 1912, and your city has been a pioneer in everything from domestic partnerships to curbside recycling to Alice Waters’ cooking—and leaders always take heavy fire.

Politicians love to hate you. Ronald Reagan built the most successful American political career of the last half-century on scapegoating you; he ran for governor declaring he would clean up “the mess at Berkeley” and made you a leading symbol of “a leadership gap and a morality and decency gap” in the country. In 1969, he made great show of sending the National Guard into People’s Park.

Of course, his successor, Jerry Brown, liked to poke you, too, even though he was a graduate. Things were so bad between you two during his first tenure that his gubernatorial papers ended up at USC. Pretty much every governor since then has taken swipes, both rhetorical and budgetary, at you.

If I were you, on the business end of so much blame-shifting, I’d be tempted to point to the reality: that Berkeley itself is not so different from the rest of California. The city has a mix of the beautiful and the gritty, and for all its supposed radicalism, it contains the regular chains—Starbucks, McDonald’s—of every university town. And your university is mostly just a collection of kids from all over our state and our world.

But you won’t make this argument because you know that perception is reality, and there’s no use in fighting a stubborn perception. After all, that was a central insight of Bishop George Berkeley, the Irish philosopher for whom you are named. Berkeley suggested that the objects we see in the world are really just ideas, made real only by the minds of those who perceive them.

Since the scapegoating of Berkeley isn’t really about you, there’s not much you can do about it. Except steel yourself for more.

Girard, the Stanford philosopher, argued that as humans experience more conflict and identity-based backlash, scapegoating increases. “We easily see now that scapegoats multiply wherever human groups seek to lock themselves into a given identity—communal, local, national, ideological, racial, religious, and so on,” he wrote.

I’m sorry, Berkeley. Times being how they are, California is going to need you to shoulder even more of the blame.

The post Go Ahead and Blame Berkeley. Everyone Else Does. appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.