Category: Events

Friedrich Nietzsche intuited that the European Enlightenment would self-destruct, as reason would come to ignore truth and replace it with narratives and psychological self-fulfillment.  For Nietzsche, the ultimate driver of human experience is the will to power, which doesn’t subordinate itself to reality and transcendental idealisms.

Have we, in the U.S. and Europe, now come to the cultural condition of surrendering to the will to power?

Please join us at 9:00 am (CDT) on Thursday, October 23, for a Zoom round table discussion of this possibility.

The triumph of the will, as Nietzsche wrote, actually follows the second law of thermodynamics by letting loose in its victims the proclivities of entropy – the disordered disbursal of energies and the inability to accomplish work.  As the individual will collapses in on itself, an implosion of psychic energy and brain and muscle matter, the person separates from society and the sustaining ecosystem.

Narcissism, nihilism – “my” truth can be any truth – splinters and disintegrates society and culture, bringing about the Hobbesian order of nature, where our lives become “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”  Not civilized, but savage without moral nobility, excellence of thought, elegance of word or depth of heart.

If our age is, indeed, one of nihilism, what is to become of us?  What should we do – role over and play dead?

I considered his influence in my recent essay, “Friedrich Nietzsche: The Devil’s Advocate,” in August Pegasus, which you can read here.

To register, please email jed@cauxroundtable.net.

Event will last about an hour.

If you were the mayor of St. Paul, what would you do?  Raise taxes?  Revitalize downtown?

If you were a member of the city council, what would your “to do” be?

As a resident or bystander watching St. Paul seemingly give up on hope and ambition, overcome by inertia, rudderless, defining its expectations downward, resigned and fatalistic, giving into decline, what would you expect of its leaders – public and private?

Please join us and Mike Burbach, editor of the Pioneer Press, for an in-person round table over lunch at noon on Thursday, October 16, at Landmark Center.

Please bring your recommendations, insights, tactics and strategies.

Registration will begin at 11:30 am.

Cost to attend is $20, which you can pay at the door.

To register, please email jed@cauxroundtable.net.

Space is limited.

Event will last about an hour.

Loren Swanson, one of our regular participants, attended our Zoom round table on social media/AI earlier today and thought this Rotary program on AI would be of interest to many of you.

For those who can’t attend in person, you could participate via Zoom.

We will be drafting a statement of ethics for AI shortly.

Please join us at 9:00 am (CDT) on Thursday, August 28 on Zoom for a round table plunge into the emotive cacophony and the chaotic disarrangement of our personas brought to us by social media.

In the U.S., social media is being given culprit status for increasing depression among girls and young women and for driving young men into isolation and solitude.

Now what if social media posts become generated by AI to use images of exceptional emotional power and displacement and send us fixating stories supported by data on what best triggers depression?

A movement is emerging in the U.S. to ban the use of smartphones by students in public schools out of a belief that the companies that sell them and those that make money from their use are not able to minimize the negative externalities attached to social media products.

One reads that the cell phone/social media platform will be far more determinative of human life than was Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press – but not in a good way.  Printed books mostly increased knowledge and reasoned debate and made modern science and modern civilization possible – increasing human capitals and social capitals.  If social media is destructive of these capitals and contributes to atomization of communities, anomie, prejudices and antagonisms in politics and short-sightedness in personal decision-making, what great good can come of it?

Join us to share your stories about social media, your best experiences, your worries and your recommendations for throwing out the bath water, while keeping the baby hearty and healthy.

To register, please email jed@cauxroundtable.net.

The event will last about an hour.

Given the recent political assassinations and attempted assassinations here in Minnesota, we believe we need to do something about our political culture.

We’ve drafted a statement to be provided to local leaderships and the press.  We would like your help in improving the draft.  

Please join us for an in-person round table over lunch at noon on Thursday, July 24 (please note new date) at Landmark Center.

Cost to attend is $20, which you can pay at the door.

To register, please email jed@cauxroundtable.net.

Event will last between an hour and hour and a half.

Over the last few years, notably in time for Putin to wage territorial war against Ukraine, both Russia and China have proposed a new concept for international relations: the civilization state. The international community has ignored this new way of thinking about who is right and who is wrong.

When I brought it up recently with Archbishop Paul Gallagher, Secretary for Relations with States at the Vatican, he was keen to learn more.

I shared with him the important article on civilization states written by Ivan Timofeev in Moscow.  We included Ivan’s article in the November 2023 issue of Pegasus.

Here is George Will’s take on the failure of the American foreign policy elite to take notice of this new theory of international relations (Will is a columnist for the Washington Post):

Although there is no excuse for it, there is a reason for the failure of U.S. leaders to understand Putin.  He is an open book who has been reading himself to the world since long before he published his 2021 essay, “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians.”  This farrago of ethnic mysticisms and history seen through a pseudo-theological lens is Putin’s “Mein Kampf.” His resentments and revenge aspirations are all there.  But are largely ignored or disbelieved by the West’s statesmen and publics who complacently believe that the end of history meant the end of toxic nonsense such as this:

Putin believes Russia is a “civilization-state” with cultural-cum-religious significance, rights and responsibilities that justify the erasure of other nations.  Which is why the Economist correctly says that for Putin, “war has become an ideology.”

What Johns Hopkins University’s Hal Brands describes as Putin’s “quasi-genocidal barbarities” are committed in the name of a totalizing, uncompromisable objective: the political and cultural extinction of Ukraine.  Russia has kidnapped, for the purpose of “Russification,” uncountable thousands of Ukrainian children.  Their return is, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky says, Kyiv’s “number one” priority in negotiations.  Try explaining that to Steve Witkoff.

This real estate developer, Donald Trump’s designated war-ender, says he and Putin have developed a “friendship.”  Witkoff echoes Jimmy Carter’s secretary of state, Cyrus Vance, saying that Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev shares similar “dreams and aspirations.”  Witkoff wonders, “Why would Russia want to absorb Ukraine?”  Putin explained in his 2021 essay, which shows that peace is impossible.

Please join us at 9:00 am (CDT) on Monday, June 30 on Zoom to share your thoughts with us about the credibility of the “civilization state.”

To register, please email jed@cauxroundtable.net.

The event will last about an hour.

Please join us for a Zoom round table on tariffs and the future of our world economic order at 9:00 am (CDT) on Tuesday, May 13.

Here is a timely cartoon from the cover of the New Yorker, no fan of Donald Trump:

I also attach here a critique of Trump’s tariff proposals in the Wall Street Journal from the very conservative former U.S. Senator Phil Gramm.

To register, please email jed@cauxroundtable.net.

The event will last about an hour.

Are there limits to President Trump’s personal right to make decisions?

There are constitutional law cases on this point, the first of which might be Marbury v. Madison in 1803, a Supreme Court opinion by Chief Justice John Marshall (my hero) which is very, very long.

But in 1649, the Commons of England abolished the office of king.  Their legislation is here, setting forth their reasoning that prerogative is a danger.

Later, John Locke, in his “Second Treatise of Government,” took a more balanced view of prerogative:

A good monarch – one mindful of the trust put into his hands and careful about the good of his people – can’t have too much prerogative, i.e. power to do good.  Whereas a weak and poorly performing monarch – one who would claim that the power his predecessors exercised without the direction of the law is a prerogative belonging to him by the right of his position, a right that he may exercise as he wishes, to make or promote interests distinct from those of the public – causes the people to claim their right and to limit the power that they had been content to tacitly allow while it was exercised for their good.

On the matter of prerogative, there is an old question: Who is to judge whether this power is being used rightly?

If you were to judge whether Donald Trump’s use of prerogative is rightly done or not, what would you say?

Please join us for an in-person round table over lunch on prerogative at noon on Tuesday, April 29, at the Landmark Center, room 430, in St. Paul.

Registration will begin at 11:30 am.

Cost to attend is $20, which you can pay at the door.

To register, please email jed@cauxroundtable.net.

The event will last between an hour and hour and a half.

Has history given us any case where tariffs did more good than harm?

Adam Smith, as a matter of principle, thought no, never.

Donald Trump disagrees.  Or does he?  Will he stop short of a tariff war if he gets something he wants?

Is he just a dealmaker from Queens, New York, huffing and puffing and bluffing, ready to accept a deal after strutting and showing off to his fans?

On the issue of how to end the war in Ukraine, it seems that the Europeans, offended, are calling his bluff.  Now, he has to put up or shut up – either do the right thing or go your own way with Putin, just the two of you.

I doubt any person, even Trump himself, knows what he is going to do at the last minute.  After shaking the chess board, where will the pieces land?  Which ones will fall off the board and which will still be in positions to take down castles and knights?

As I wrote earlier, tariffs cannot be squared with the Caux Round Table Principles for Business.

Therefore, making a compelling public case for expanding markets, lowering prices and free trade is a duty for those who care about raising standards of living.

Economic nationalism, a form of social Darwinism ignoring the moral sense, has its defenders who think more in terms of we/they, them/us, than in terms of all of us interdependent and each with something to contribute to the whole or to us.  It is me first and the Devil take the hindmost?

What, then, is the best strategy for a people, a country, a community, to use in seeking prosperity and security?  What does game theory tell us – go win/win or win/lose?  Should cities shut themselves off from towns and small farms with entrance taxes and market fees?  Should farmers charge more for eggs, butter and chickens to those who live in cities?  Adam Smith answered those questions with a “Never!,” if you want to optimize your prosperity.

Please join us at 9:00 am (CDT) on Tuesday, March 11 for a Zoom round table on tariffs and what may lie ahead of our global community, thanks to Donald Trump.

To register, please email jed@cauxroundtable.net.

The event will last about an hour.

Looking at the United States at the present time and considering trends and decisions over the past four years, our times “seem out of joint”.

Executive orders in Washington, a Minnesota House of Representatives that cannot convene.

What was once in place for good civics to happen out of their own sense of right and fair seems to have gone missing.

It has been said these past few years, though more on the right than on the left, that politics is downstream of culture.  So, if politics is of concern, we should look first to culture.  Civics is shaped by culture, so maybe the pundits have it backwards – culture is downstream from politics.  Bad politics can make for bad civics.

Where then is the fulcrum on which the lever of good civics can rest to balance our needs and wants, our agreements and our disagreements, our gender agendas and our racial discontents, our communication of our truths and our use of law to overcome our insecurities?

Or rather, is it a fulcrum of civics – no longer taught much at all – that we need on which to rest the lever of politics, as it seeks to check extremes and balance passions with interests, ideologies with compromises?

A public statement of wise advice is needed to share with our politicians and educators.  Will you help us draft one?

Please join us for an in-person round table over lunch at noon on Tuesday, February 25, at Landmark Center, room 430, in St. Paul.  The topic on the table will be “is our politics at odds with our civics?”

Registration will begin at 11:30 am.

Cost to attend is $20, which you can pay at the door.

To register, please email jed@cauxroundtable.net.

The event will last between an hour and hour and a half.