Week 10: The End
Hej everybody!
Welcome to week 10 of my blog here at International IDEA. We made it, gang!
Against my will, my internship is coming to a close. Yet again, I got to enjoy another enriching, fulfilling summer through the law school, filled with incredible work, people, and opportunities to learn. And yet again, it’s time to move on to the next chapter.
There are so many thoughts I can include here. In the interest of everyone’s time and sanity, it’s probably best to keep this a little on the shorter side! As I wrote at the outset of this blog, I never studied abroad in college. My first 18 years were spent in Dallas, Texas. Most of my last ten years have been in Virginia or DC. I admittedly haven’t spent much time outside of the U.S. Prior to this, I had only ever visited a tourist trap in Mexico, spent two weeks in a jungle in Nicaragua, and spent a week traipsing around London. All great times, but they pale in comparison.
I’ve tried and failed to learn Swedish. I’ve tried and failed to cook Swedish meatballs. I’ve tried and failed to pronounce each street name correctly on my walk to work. I’ve tried and failed to integrate into Swedish culture (though I refuse to believe my Texan charm hasn’t worked on occasion). And so, I go for the seventh year to try and fail to act like a true Williamsburgite and learn something from this place I’ve come to call home.
Independent of all of the learning, the work experience, and the professional development, this often feels like the most ephemeral and special part of law school: living. It’s important to remember that this isn’t just a “professional experience.” It of course is that at times, and work is an integral part of life; it’s our way of interacting with and changing the world, and growing through that dimension is incredibly important. However, it’s just as important to remember that not every 27-year-old from Waxahachie, Texas gets to go across the ocean, drink an excess of Aperol Spritzes, read book after book about international democracy, and meet incredibly interesting, kind, and intelligent people on a tiny island with a clear, dreamy view of the Baltic Sea stretching for miles in front of me. Law school’s hard, but it’s not all bad.
Which brings me to the best part of the summer — the people. The best part of the summer was the team here at International IDEA. Every single one of them — of you, Julian, Therese, Antonio, Daniela, Daniella, Isabel, Julia, Omar — made this an unforgettable summer, and I could not be more grateful for what I have learned. I got to sit in the office with incredibly intelligent people who care so deeply about the world, the people in it, and the way we run it. People who have dedicated their careers to helping everyday people, no different than myself or you reading this, try to live a slightly better and more independent, self-directed, and fulfilled life. A life of decency, curiosity, and happiness, wherever they are on the Earth’s crust.
Perhaps, given everything going on right now, that’s all we can really hope for. I’ve done my best (worst) to avoid the state of the world in most of these blog posts, but it becomes Sisyphean to avoid it after a point. Should we not call out bad things when we see them? As we have seen, history does not always slowly march towards progress, and the moral arc of the universe does not always bend towards justice. It can feel grandiose and exciting to think that some of the work I did this summer helped contribute to fixing that, and maybe it did. It also seems that the scales are tipping the other way.
But, what’s the use in being so cynical about everything right now? It’s not even fun to sit and be myopic about the state of the world anymore. It’s boring. As the fall semester approaches, once again I’ll be lucky enough to work as a teaching assistant for a professor I had here as an undergrad. Once again, I’ll have impressionable young 18 to 22-year-olds sitting across from me in office hours, expecting me to give them easy answers about what Plato really means when he talks about justice1, and whether we really are all doomed to suffer the choices of the idiots and frauds around us. And so, I will have a choice: I can be cynical, look them in the eye, say “yes,” and remain 100% correct based on a globally shared experience of fatigue, dread, and uncertainty about the world. Or, I can actively remember that we are not special — that many people, dumber and smarter and better and worse than us, have been through times where the skies have turned red, famines came and went, and glaciers rose and fell and come out the other side — and look them in the eye and say “I don’t know.”
Because that’s the truth of it. I don’t know. And no one else does, either. Plato struggled with these questions roughly 2,600 years ago. And roughly 2,600 years later, the jury is still out. He watched as an Athenian jury — publicly, democratically, and emphatically — sentenced Socrates to death for crimes he didn’t commit. 2,600 years ago, he saw the worst of a democratic system laid bare, and saw just how brutal, vicious, and wrong it could be towards those he cared about. Ignoring the differences in systems, administration, and bureaucracy — the central concern remains the same. Is this really what democracy gets us? Is the system perverted, or are we seeing its true face laid bare?
I don’t know. And, despite how much he might’ve acted otherwise, Plato didn’t either. Kallipolis in Republic is built on a lie — he says so himself. After spending years constructing his philosophical view of the world, he knocks it all down in Parmenides as he questions everything he’s ever thought. And don’t get me started on Laws — a cruel exercise in sadism that should be reserved for remedial students, worst enemies, or a post-graduation reading group during COVID while sheltering at one's parents’ home in Texas, wondering what the hell was going on in the world, trying to learn how to keep one's first job while not contracting or infecting someone with a killer virus.
Plato asked these questions when he was in his late twenties (when he saw Socrates die), all the way into in his eighties (when he himself died). I asked these questions when I was 19 (when I first met that professor and first read Plato), and I still get to ask these in my late twenties (and I'll actually have the ability to represent my professor in front of a jury — should've gone to law school, Plato...).
But the fact remains: Plato asked his questions, and he gave his answer: democracy wasn’t worth it. I still very much believe — and hope — that he was wrong.
And so, maybe the way out of this is through asking these questions. Or, asking better questions. Rather than getting my students to simply ask, “What is Plato’s definition of justice?” maybe I need to work harder at getting them to ask, “Is what Plato wants what we should want? Is what anybody else wants, what I should want? What we should want?” I can certainly say I’ve tried to do this before. Do I try harder? Just more often and more explicitly? Where do I bring this back to my own mentality in law school? When I'm thinking about the cases, the work, the point of it all, where do I need to make sure I'm asking the right questions?
And so, again, I loudly exclaim every student’s least favorite response from their teacher(’s assistant): I don’t know! And I’m not going to anytime soon. Which means, I’m probably not going to write a great philosophical magnum opus — much less thirty — where I decide to place the entirety of democracy on trial and declare that my view of the law, or judicial systems, or politics will lead to a well-ordered, harmonious system.2 For the sake of my family, friends, and professional reputation, that’s likely for the best.
All I know how to do is go back to Williamsburg. A dreamy, quiet town that has been a constant source of stability, comfort, and challenge, from age 18 to (hopefully) 80. A place that, while far from insulated against the terrors of the world, has continued to provide me a space to think and try to understand what’s going on right now.
And, as I always try to, I get to go back to Williamsburg changed. I, like many others this summer, was lucky enough to experience so much positive growth and development. And I, like many others this summer, am still ultimately and completely clueless about where we go from here. And so I continue to ask the same questions: is this what we want, and do we even like how we’re doing it? Whether I’m asking that about America, democracy, or the godforsaken Dallas Cowboys, I take comfort in knowing that I’m not the only one asking these questions.3 I only hope whoever’s asking these questions in 2,600 years has slightly better home teams to root for — or that the Mavericks finally got Luka back.
Wishing you all well, and wish me luck for my seventh year at this great university. I'll need it!!
Hank Blackburn
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1 (This footnote is address to my Fall 2025 political theory students) To those who of you who have finally found this blog post after searching around for Evie's and my cyber footprint after our first-day introductions: hello from the future (or past? I'm not entirely sure)! There's a hint about Plato's idea of justice in here for your first quiz! :)
2 To my students (again): breadcrumbs!
3 But feel free to join in, Jerry.