Are the Muppets funny again?

I sure hope this isn't a fluke.

Wow, Anthony Lane, that's harsh...

“Something similar happens when Vivian weeps on the subway, her grief endowed with a false intensity by the song ladled onto the soundtrack; do droning, off-key vocals and a picky guitar really make her less of a spoiled brat? Maybe that is what binds the inhabitants of the indie universe, here as elsewhere: they are like children, playing at adult life. Their bodies may have grown up, but their spirits, as shown in their tantrums and tiny attention spans, are still half formed, and I, for one, find it hard to summon much sympathy for their unimportant plights. Now and then, a director breaks through that carapace of immaturity and discovers a genuine ache of love in the sparring of boy-meets-girl, as Linklater, progressing from ‘Slacker,’ did with ‘Before Sunrise’ and ‘Before Sunset.’”

-Anthony Lane, review of “In Search of a Midnight Kiss,” in the August 4th New Yorker

As much as I love indie culture, I've got to admit that Anthony Lane has a point. Indie “culture” is sub-culture: it can't really go from generation to generation. In that sense it can only be a stopping point, a rest from “real life.” Say what you will about Juno: Jason Bateman's old indie guy was sad to see.

Nevertheless, the review is a recommendation, and I might try to see the movie if it plays around here.

Roger Scruton on the limits of the libertarians

“There are those—Milton Friedman, for example, or Murray Rothbard—who have powerfully argued that a genuinely free market will ensure the good government of human communities, through the self-restraining impulse that comes naturally to us. But their arguments, however sophisticated, are addressed to Americans, who live among abundant resources, free from external threat, surrounded by opportunities and in communities where the volunteer spirit survives. And they do not confront the central question, which is how communities renew themselves, and how fundamental flaws in the human constitution, such as resentment, envy and sexual predation, are to be overcome by something so abstract and neutral as consumer sovereignty and free economic choice.”

This comes from an essay on the economic views of Wilhelm Röpke, father of social market economics. Scruton believes that the common error of Marxists and social democrats is the assumption that social problems are rooted in economic disparities. It's worth reading, I think. More thoughts later, perhaps.

“The Parable of the Flamingo”, or, “What's the point?”

Let's say that there are some people in your neighborhood who are extremely fixated on something that you find quite trivial. For example, it could be that they insist on sitting in the yard and staring at a pink flamingo they have placed there for hours on end. It doesn't really matter what they do; what matters is that you find it utterly incomprehensible. You tell all your friends about your ridiculous neighbors, and you have a good laugh about their flamingo shenanigans. Your neighbors sometimes overhear you, and get very angry.

One day, you tell them that you are thinking about stealing their favorite flamingo. They tell you that they are going to straight up flip out if you do so, because they love their flamingo deeply. Of course this only confirms what you already believe: that these neighbors are dangerously insane.

At this point, everyone else in the neighborhood sees what is going on. We know that you think the flamingo fixation is weird and stupid. We also know that your neighbors love the flamingo. We know that stealing the flamingo will make them extremely angry. The situation is all extremely clear to all parties involved.

So, why on earth would you steal the flamingo? What could you possibly think you are proving?

(Should I be so crass as to suggest that every angry or even curious visitor to your ad-ridden blog makes money for you?)

Peregrination #3

There is a hollow in Virginia where a small creek meanders over mossy roots and old smooth stones. The sunlight comes in cool through the poplars, and the rich soil is soft underfoot.

Poulos on Big Government and Virtue

James Poulos posted today at Doublethink on the subject of what we usually call big-government conservatism. He asks a provocative question, at least for conservatives: what if nobody really cares about fiscal responsibility as such? If we can sustain an age of abundance, if the doom-sayers are wrong at every turn, if we can match our ever-increasing debt with ever-increasing wealth, why worry? As he puts it, we're rich enough to afford the luxury of bad government.

The point of the piece is not that the arguments against corruption and inefficiency aren't valid arguments, but rather that they don't inspire the sort of emotional commitment that comes from taking action against injustice. I mean, on the face of things, justice sounds much more important than efficiency. And true justice, of course, really is much more important than efficiency.

So the best remaining argument, Poulos tells us, is that we are on a path to destruction: that our experts, managers, and wizards will someday run out of tricks and will no longer be able to mend the whole messy machine. But we trust our experts, and we're too busy to determine whether or not that trust is well-founded. The few remaining doubters (e.g. traditionalist conservatives) can't do much besides live a virtuous life as best they know how.

At least, that's what I got from the article.

It is a strange time to be making arguments based on the USA's ability to afford things, as some pretty dire signals seem to be coming out of Wall Street right now. But the (mainstream) reactions I've heard so far seem to confirm Poulos's point. Can we fix this with a few regulations? Can we change the tax rules and get rid of the problem? Can we simply replace our “bad” goods with better, greener goods and go on just as we have before?

But if it becomes obvious that we can't afford bad government—and this prediction is being made on the left and on the right—maybe then we'll hear some different questions.

Grace and Greatness

“You're mistaken,” I said. “I wasn't thinking about monomachy—or dying either.”

In my ear, too softly, I think, even for Hildegrin to hear, Dorcas said, “Yes, you were. Your face was full of beauty, of a kind of nobility. When the world is horrible, then thoughts are high, full of grace and greatness.”

I looked at her, thinking she was mocking me, but she was not.

“The world is filled half with evil and half with good. We can tilt it forward so that more good runs into our minds, or back, so that more runs into this.” A movement of her eyes took in all the lake. “But the quantities are the same, we change only their proportion here or there.”

-Gene Wolfe. The Shadow of the Torturer: Volume One of the Book of the New Sun. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980. (211-212)

Peregrination #2

On the high rocky ridge, far above the tree-line, looking for the first time down the western slope of the great mountain. The jagged risings and fallings of the Sierra Nevada range flow off into the horizon. I have nearly reached the summit, where we will rest while the marmots play among the boulders.

Wednesday Poem: Luke Havergal

“Luke Havergal” caught the attention of Teddy Roosevelt, who, impressed by its evocative imagery and mournful rhythm, promptly gave its author a government job as a small sinecure.

Luke Havergal
Edwin Arlington Robinson

Go to the western gate, Luke Havergal,
There where the vines cling crimson on the wall,
And in the twilight wait for what will come.
The leaves will whisper there of her, and some,
Luke flying words, will strike you as they fall;
But go, and if you listen, she will call.
Go to the western gate, Luke Havergal—
Luke Havergal.

No, there is not a dawn in eastern skies
To rift the fiery night that's in your eyes;
But there, where western glooms are gathering,
The dark will end the dark, if anything:
God slays himself with every leaf that flies,
And hell is more than half of paradise.
No; there is not a dawn in eastern skies—
In eastern skies.

Out of a grave I come to tell you this,
Out of a grave I come to quench the kiss
That flames upon your forehead with a glow
That blinds you to the way that you must go.
Yes, there is yet one way to where she is,
Butter, but one that faith may never miss.
Out of a grave I come to tell you this—
To tell you this.

There is the western gate, Luke Havergal,
There are the crimson leaves upon the wall.
Go, for the winds are tearing them away,—
Nor think to riddle the dead words they say,
Nor any more to feel them as they fall;
But go, and if you trust her she will call.
There is the western gate, Luke Havergal—
Luke Havergal.

Mental Peregrination #1

A cliff overlooking a rocky beach, with the salt wind blowing against me as I watch the groups of sea-birds: now floating, now diving through to the calm side of a cresting wave.

Theological Aesthetics: Beautiful ≥ Good ≥ True

“Indeed, God's affirmations of the goodness of his creation in the first chapter of Genesis can be taken as indicating first and foremost an aesthetic evaluation rather than a simply moral one; it is only with sin that the goodness of creation must be conceptually separated into solitary transcendental categories, and only with sin that creation is seen to possess a distinct ethical axis. One might almost say that the separable category of the moral is an intrusion upon the aesthetic joy that is the upwelling source of creaturely existence, as is a separate category of truth once the paradisal experience of divine love in the blameless beauty of creation is lost.”

-David Bentley Hart. The Beauty of the Infinite. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdman's, 2003. (253)

In this section, Hart often draws on Augustine, with whom I (as a Protestant) am more familiar than I am with Hart's other sources. And Augustine's story of love, delight, and ordered desire does seem to be a wonderful paradigm for approaching theological aesthetics. The perfect Christian “morality” would be to love as God loves, and truth would be to see things through that love, undistorted.

(“When the last days come, we will see visions more vivid than sunsets and brighter than stars. We will recognize each other, and see ourselves for the first time, the way we really are.” - John Darnielle)

More Dark Knight

A Baylor professor, Thomas Hibbs, discusses the moral vision of the new Batman film at the First Things website:

“Dark quests for redemption, whether religious or secular, abound in contemporary culture. As Nolan’s films indicate, these quest films owe a great debt to classic film noir. Classic noir takes aim at some of the treasured assumptions and promises of modernity. In noir, the modern world, embodied in an urban setting, is hardly the world of light, happiness, and peace that utopian thinkers of the Enlightenment foretold. Modernity is about human beings exercising control over nature and thus taking control of their destinies; in our modern technological project, knowledge and power are one. The postmodern turn in noir is about the loss of control, the absence of intelligibility, and the threat of powerlessness. But the quest has something pre-modern about it—a sense of human limitations, of the dependence of human beings on one another and on events not in their control. In this world, the outcome of the quest is tenuous and uncertain.”

A Wretched Hot Day

Some of the days down here, the heat smothers the sweating people, pushes them down with heavy sunlight, paints them with a soggy shine, saps their spirits, makes everything flat and distant.

Today was that sort of day: the sort of day where a long walk can only make things worse. But naps still help.

Joseph Bottum on religion and the American experiment

“Think of the American experiment as a three-legged stool, its stability found in each leg's relation to the other legs. Democracy grants some participation in national identity, an outlet for the anxious desire of citizens to take part in history, but it always leans toward vulgarity and short-sightedness. Capitalism gives us other freedoms and outlets for ambition, but it, too, always threatens to topple over, eroding the virtues it needed for its own flourishing. Meanwhile, religion provides meaning and narrative, a channel for the hunger of human beings to reach beyond the vanities of the world, but it tilts, in turn, toward hegemony and conformity.”

So says Joseph Bottum in “The Death of Protestant America,” a very nice essay that you can find in the current issue of First Things. I'll post one or two other sections that jumped out at me later in the week, but you should read the whole thing now, for the total effect of a Bottum essay is always more than the sum of its parts: he usually writes as if he's composing music rather than mere nonfiction prose.

If I can indulge in a bit of clumsy paraphrasing, Bottum warns that the democracy tends toward demagoguery, capitalism toward amoral individualism, and religion toward ideology, yet when these things can be properly balanced, the hold against each other in a more or less uneasy equilibrium.

Bottum goes on to argue that the special feature of mainline American Protestantism was its combination of countless theological divisions with a nearly univocal set moral teaching. They could never agree on the precise nature of God's relation to man, but they all agreed on how men (and women) should relate to each other. Out of this agreement sprang a rich vocabulary of moral appreciation for and criticism of the American experiment: the Christian civil religion. Yet by 1975 the mainline churches were irrevocably in decline. The strangest part is that they were complicit in their own expulsion from the public square.

Questions: Is Bottum right in his characterization of democracy? Could Evangelicals or Catholics (or Evangelicals and Catholics Together) conceivably step into the role of the old mainline churches? How can a political regime be seen as legitimate without a theological grounding?

Why so serious?

All your friends have probably told you already: The Dark Knight is everything you hoped it would be. Big and flashy, dark and epic. And, as you've no doubt heard: the Joker will not be soon forgotten. Although I wonder if it might be a tad difficult for those who don't know the mythos to sort out on the first viewing.

Also, Matthew Milliner has a good nice little point about The Dark Knight and No Country for Old Men. (See the Batman movie first if you really don't want to know any spoilers, even minor ones. Although if you care that much about spoilers, you would have seen it by now anyway.)

For other secret nerds...

Normally, I'd keep this to myself, but I hear it's only free through the end of Sunday.



At the beginning, it's bad-campy. Then it's good-campy. If you liked Firefly, you should like this too.

So it's definitely going to look like Watchmen...

...but will it really be Watchmen? The original is so good; it's just hard to get my hopes up for a two-hour version of something that should be at least a miniseries, or maybe should just stay as it is.

Neuhaus on Pluralism

“One enters the democratic arena, then, as a moral actor. This must be insisted upon against those who view compromise as the antithesis of moral behavior. It must also be insisted upon against those who claim that moral judgment must be set aside before entering the public square. The first error is more common among Christians and others of high moral purpose. The second error is implicit, and sometimes explicit, in pervasive attitudes about ours being a secular society. In this second error, people are thought of as anonymous, deracinated ciphers seeking their own interests and striking a deal where it is in their interest to accommodate their interests to the interests of others. In this view, the assertion of a moral claim is an intrusion upon public space, a violation of the democratic rules. . . .

“. . . The conflict in American public life today, then, is not a conflict between morality and secularism. It is a conflict of moralities in which one moral system calls itself secular and insists that the other do likewise as the price of admission to the public arena. That insistence is in fact a demand that the other side capitulate. By divesting ourselves of authoritative moral referents that are external to ourselves, such as religion proposes, we have acquiesced in the judgment that there is no moral appeal beyond the individualistic pursuit of interests.”

-Richard John Neuhaus. The Naked Public Square. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdman's, 1984. (125-6)

A few observations:

1. The Naked Public Square really is a remarkable book. It was a genuine attempt to start a conversation about religion and political philosophy, and so Neuhaus was at his most diplomatic in almost every passage. (Have you ever seen the inclusive she in the pages of First Things? Because it's in the book.) But one also gets the feeling that too few people were interested in the project, and that the moment for compromise passed on by.

2. Halden's post today at Inhabitatio Dei called into question the entire idea of “translating” the Christian message into public language. His post is worth reading. I'm not sure that it is a direct contradiction: Neuhaus is speaking of practical compromise in a spirit of humility, not necessarily casting the Christian message in secular terminology. Or is that the secret point of natural law?

3. That Christians cannot simply set aside their identity for the sake of liberalism and the state is perhaps one of the reasons cultural theorists such as Zizek and Eagleton are turning their attention to theology. Tell me if I'm wrong on this.

4. Many liberalisms and all libertarianism come down to “the individualistic pursuit of interest,” and that is why we should at least carefully reexamine the republican strains of American political thought. Not the GOP, of course: rather, the Founders' ideas of republican virtue. Sandel goes into this at length, and I'll try to cover it briefly tomorrow.

Wednesday Poem: Work Without Hope

Samuel Taylor Coleridge is a fascinating man to read about; he always seems drawn to darkness yet struggles towards the light. Much of his life was a struggle to complete ambitious literary projects even while suffering from depression and opium addiction. And as you would expect, Coleridge can plumb depths of darkness and fevered imagery that I've never come across in, say, Wordsworth or Keats. But here's a somewhat calmer one, though it does touch on futility and struggle.

Work Without Hope
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

All nature seems at work. Slugs leave their lair--
The bees are stirring--birds are on the wing--
And winter slumbering in the open air,
Wears on his smiling face a dream of Spring!
And I the while, the sole unbusy thing,
Nor honey make, nor pair, nor build, nor sing.

Yet well I ken the banks where amaranths blow,
Have traced the fount whence streams of nectar flow.
Bloom, O ye amaranths! bloom for whom ye may,
For me ye bloom not! Glide, rich streams, away!
With lips unbrightened, wreathless brow, I stroll:
And would you learn the spells that drowse my soul?
Work without hope draws nectar in a sieve,
And hope without an object cannot live.

Liberalism, Equality, and Prudence

By John McGowan's definition, I am not a full liberal. He says of the founders:

“By calling the founders ‘liberal,’ I mean to direct attention to their suspicion of concentrated governmental power, their fierce attachment to liberty, and their emergent commitment to equality. Their ‘republicanism’ was both antidemocratic and not yet full liberalism to the extent that they resisted full social, political, and economic equality and that they focused on the ‘general welfare’ and not the prosperity of isolated individuals as government's responsibility.”

-John McGowan. American Liberalism: An Interpretation for Our Time. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2007.

The first reason to be suspicious of equality is prudentially conservative. Not all change is good, and plans can go awry in unexpected ways. But this is to say nothing insightful: all endeavors need both dreamers and planners. It is not difficult to combine this prudential conservatism with a commitment to the liberal democratic project: Amitai Etzioni's communitarianism seems to me to do just that, in that it cares deeply for the integrity both of communities and of the individuals that compose them.

But McGowan sees conservatism not as a tactical disagreement over how to safely move towards egalitarianism, but as an elevation of other ends over equality. And looking back over the conservative movement even in my lifetime, I would be foolish to deny that some very illiberal views have worn the guise of prudential conservatism while in the public square. Contemporary movement conservatism should always remember and be ashamed of its affinity for segregation; to their credit, major figures such as Buckley and Falwell were deeply repentant later in life.

But is inclusion perhaps a better paradigm than equality? There is a type of social conservatism espoused by Richard John Neuhaus which argues that the greatest achievements of liberalism involved expanding the circle of inclusion: these expansions usually did tend increase equality, but they are also capable of embracing those who are irreducible different: the mentally handicapped, the very old, the unborn. (Neuhaus's opponents might see the inclusion argument as a veil drawn over real oppression.)

And now I speak as a Christian: over the last two thousand years, Christians have slowly—sometimes very slowly—unfolded the logic of Genesis 1:27 (“So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them”), Galatians 3:28 (“There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you all one in Christ Jesus”), and other verses. Now, I am no theologian, but it seems to me that the American experiment showed the world new things about the imago dei and human equality. Of course, it was an notably flawed demonstration, considering the evils of slavery and the racism that has persisted far too long after it and the shamefully dishonest and violent treatment of so many groups of Native American, but we can be glad that the United States was at least in some ways pressed to deliver what it had promised.

So Christians can affirm equality, but only insofar as it reflects this expanding logic of the image of God stamped on human beings. We cannot make ourselves into something that we are not.

~~~~~

This attempt at a longer series on a single theme is new to me. How do you think it is going so far?