Kings and the problem of the center.

Internet amigo Josh expressed revulsion ("ugh") at Ross Douthat's praise-of-monarchy post. If Douthat was really saying that we should have kings because, deep down, we like them so much, then "ugh" would be warranted.

But the assertion that "[i]n their hearts, most people want a king and queen" is not itself Douthat's defense of monarchy. It's the starting point for Douthat to explain (1) why we seem to want monarchs, and (2) why this is not a totally bad thing. The actual defense is Douthat's too-brief description of how a mostly powerless monarchy can be a helpful check on a modern democratic government.

Anyway, without committing myself to a position on the question of monarchs in the abstract, I'd like to post one of Robert Jenson's descriptions of "the problem of the center":

The problem is the problem of the center, of what joins you and me to be a unit other than either of us, within which each of us has a function for the other. If we are centered merely by a system or ideal, our society will be qualitatively old, and will reduce us to functions, for systems and ideals cannot love. Therefore, societies have regularly sought a person, a being who can love as the center: the King, the Führer, the theios aner of a state cult. But those who love and therefore die, and do not rise again, fail at love -- so that all societies so centered are at last distorted by the frenzied attempts of their centering persons to be immortal.

-Robert Jenson, “Eschatological Politics and Political Eschatology.” Essays in Theology of Culture. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995. (26)

Timid poets.

When we're told stories of the great modern stylistic changes in Western art—representational to abstract, tonal to dissonant, formal to free verse—we always hear about photography's effect on visual art and we sometimes hear about the effects of recording and amplification on music. Maybe there's a story to be told about recording, reproduction, and poetry, but the poets seem to be keeping it to themselves.

But think of it this way: if you're writing short sequences of words in hopes that people will understand, remember, and repeat them, you'll want your words to be memorable. In English, rhyme and rhythm was one tried-and-true technique. These days, you can store documents, podcasts, and songs on your phone. From this perspective, I wonder if our poets have largely given up on rhyme because the public no longer needs to memorize. A poet can't count on an audience eager to remember; the best he can ever hope for might be half a minute of a New Yorker reader's time.

"The scales begin to fall."

Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote a pair of posts about why he rejects the idea of the Civil War as tragedy. In short, he can't accept the moral equivalence (or near-equivalence) between North and South on which the brother-against-brother view relies:

It's really simple for me. One group of Americans attempted to raise a country on property in Negroes. Another group of Americans, many of them Negroes themselves, stopped them. As surely as we lack the ability to see tragedy in violently throwing off the yoke of the English, I lack the ability to see tragedy in violently throwing off the yoke of slaveholders.

J.L. Wall, writing at The League of Ordinary Gentlemen, agrees (as do I) that the Civil War is not properly understood a tragedy of avoidable violence. However, he does describe a different sort of tragedy, and he does so with eloquence:

By the end of Gettysburg, as I have mentioned, exhilaration has given way to frustration, disgust, and tragedy. Rather than a misguided quest for glory, Jeb Stuart’s meandering during the first days of that battle are depicted as a lost child’s desperate search for his father. The scales begin to fall and the South’s “great” men are revealed to be self-serving (Bragg; the Hills; Hood; Stuart; etc.), blindered (Lee), or brutalizers of questionable sanity (Forrest; Quantrill).

[...]

For all the narrator’s fascination with Lee’s and Jackson’s underdog role in the first volume, by the end of the second, the South has condemned itself, militarily and morally.

It's stuff like this that keeps a fellow sticking around on the internet. The tragic arc of the Confederacy: a cultural rot so deep as to be inextirpable, slowly revealed to people that saw themselves as good. Chilling.

Three about trees.

Still enjoying Colin Tudge's book The Tree: A Natural History of What Trees Are, How They Live, and Why They Matter. Three things I've learned:

1. When I went to New Zealand, I took a tour at the Christchurch Botanical Gardens. On that tour, the guide explained that many of New Zealand's native trees have distinct juvenile and adult phases. In other words, some trees there start out looking one way and then look totally different after they grew up. Tudge explains that these trees come from the family Proteaceae. (When I start a band, I think I'll call it “Proteaceae.” It's a sign of aging that this no longer seems like a serious plan.) Too bad there aren't any native Proteaceae species in North America. (Reference: pp. 156-7)
   
2. Tudge discusses a species he calls “plane trees,” explaining that in North America, plane trees are known as “sycamores” or “buttonwoods.” And he adds: “the ‘sycamore’ referred to in the Bible is a species of fig, in the genus Ficus.” This is good to know. I was always a little bit confused about how Zacchaeus climbed the sorts of gigantic, peely-barked trees I was familiar with, and was tempted to view that bit of the story as mytho-poetic. (Reference: p. 157)
   
3. Tree vengeance: “Limes [these, not these] put up with heavy pruning and thus are often butchered as street trees (though they get their own back by attracting aphids, which secrete gum, which in turn attracts fungi, and so coat the cars parked beneath with what seems like tacky soot)…” I like to think that if trees really were mad at us, they'd be tricky pranksters rather than The-Happening-style crazy murderers. (Reference: p. 212)
   

"A hunter of sacred shades upon the eternal hills."

I posted some links to the aphorisms of Nicolás Gómez Dávila a while back. Well, that website has run out of material, but not without leaving a link to a translation of "The Authentic Reactionary," a short essay Gómez Dávila wrote near the end of his life. In that essay, Gómez Dávila charts a course between Marxist historical determinism and philosophically liberal conceptions of human freedom.

History [...] is an assemblage of freedoms hardened in dialectical processes. The deeper the layer whence free action gushes forth, the more varied are the zones of activity that the process determines, and the greater its duration. The superficial, peripheral act is expended in biographical episodes, while the central, profound act can create an epoch for an entire society. History is articulated, thus, in instants and epochs: in free acts and in dialectical processes. Instants are its fleeting soul, epochs its tangible body. Epochs stretch out like distances between two instants: its seminal instant, and the instant when the inchoate act of a new life brings it to a close. Upon hinges of freedom swing gates of bronze. Epochs do not have an irrevocable duration: the encounter with processes looming up from a greater depth can interrupt them; inertia of the will can prolong them. Conversion is possible, passivity ordinary. History is a necessity that freedom produces and chance destroys.

-Nicolás Gómez Dávila, "The Authentic Reactionary." Trans. R.V. Young. Modern Age 52:1.

One does not have to be alienated from contemporary culture to enjoy or make use of this vivid depiction of liberty-in-dialectic. Indeed, the clarity of Gómez Dávila's exposition could probably help in understanding certain profound non-reactionary thinkers.

Worth watching.

This whole movie:



And this performance:


Wye Oak covers Danzig

Is there any reason to believe this is a bad way of thinking about the budget?

Like many people without much interest in economics, I tend toward the household-budget view of how the federal government should spend money. On some level, I get the macroeconomic argument that the government should spend more in a recession, but when one has no faith that the government will spend less in good times, it's hard to embrace that position.

So I read Jim Manzi's post on controlling the national debt with great interest. Unfortunately, the argument in the comments is almost completely about the Paul Ryan budget plan, rather than the general approach.

The ball we need to keep our eye on is not so much the theoretical ultimate cost, as how much time we have left before we crash. We should want a set of entitlement rules that we believe to be sustainable in perpetuity, but we need to push out the date at which we would have a crisis.

[...]

A real plan to address our debt problems, then, should focus on two key elements: (1) putting in place mechanisms for influencing future legislatures that we cannot command, and (2) enacting structural reforms that will simultaneously encourage general economic growth as they do this.

[...]

Like the FDR vision of the entitlement state that now appears to be in its death throes, whatever we put in place will eventually become antiquated and have to be replaced. Our job is to make sure that this happens 75 years from now, not 10 years from now.

Still thinking about this, but it seems more sensible (and more realistic about the sort of prudence that is possible in the political realm) than the household-budget approach.

We should know.

Amy Davidson writes in her New Yorker blog:

Here are some of the reasons we’ve held people at Guantánamo, according to files obtained by WikiLeaks and, then, by several news organizations: A sharecropper because he was familiar with mountain passes; an Afghan “because of his general knowledge of activities in the areas of Khost and Kabul based as a result of his frequent travels through the region as a taxi driver”; an Uzbek because he could talk about his country’s intelligence service, and a Bahraini about his country’s royal family (both of those nations are American allies); an eighty-nine year old man, who was suffering from dementia, to explain documents that he said were his son’s; an imam, to speculate on what worshippers at his mosque were up to; a cameraman for Al Jazeera, to detail its operations; a British man, who had been a captive of the Taliban, because “he was expected to have knowledge of Taliban treatment of prisoners and interrogation tactics”; Taliban conscripts, so they could explain Taliban conscription techniques; a fourteen-year-old named Naqib Ullah, described in his file as a “kidnap victim,” who might know about the Taliban men who kidnapped him. (Ullah spent a year in the prison.) Our reasons, in short, do not always really involve a belief that a prisoner is dangerous to us or has committed some crime; sometimes (and this is more debased) we mostly think we might find him useful.

From a New Statesman article on the corruption of the New Orleans city police:

On 17 March this year, the federal department of justice (DoJ) decided that enough was enough and it has made moves to have the New Orleans police department (NOPD) placed under the supervision of a federal judge. The New Orleans jail system will likely follow.

The department released a report covering only the past two years and ignoring several current federal investigations of police officers for murder. It says, more or less, that the NOPD is incapable on any level; that it is racist; that it systemically violates civil rights, routinely using "unnecessary and unreasonable force"; that it is "largely indifferent to widespread violations of law and policy by its police officers" and appears to have gone to great lengths to cover up its shootings of civilians. "NOPD's mishandling of officer-involved shooting investigations," the report says, "was so blatant and egregious that it appeared intentional in some respects."

Rich Mullins on musicians.

“What musicians do is they put together chords and rhythms and melodies. So if you want entertainment I suggest Christian entertainment because I think it's good. But if you want spiritual nourishment I suggest you go to church or read your bible or something. And let this [i.e., this performance] entertain you, but look beyond this for what you really need in life.”

-Rich Mullins, introducing the song “Elijah” in the “Live from Studio B” performance, which can be found on the Here in America DVD

Artists and critics who will say the Credo.

Sort of puzzled by the closing sentences of Jonathan Fitzgerald's latest post at Patrol:

“We need critics who are Christians, who understand the importance of religious content in art and who can see it as art and not simply a means to an end. Likewise, we need artists who are Christians to make art and release it not only into the shallow pool that is evangelicalism, but to the world at large. This will be ‘Christian Art,’ and it will be art. It will be something we can be proud of.”

Is Fitzgerald suggesting that such artists and critics don't exist? Or is he just wrapping up an off-the-cuff blog post with a quick burst of rhetoric? At any rate, he's taking a swipe at Relevant Magazine here, which is almost certainly not where he's going to find what he's looking for.

I'd suggest Books and Culture as a place where Christian critics — evangelicals, even! — are doing good work right now. There's almost too much Christian blogging about the visual arts: see Dan Siedell, Matthew Milliner, and Curator, for starters. I'll admit I'm not sure where to go for music criticism; there used to be a magazine in New York that pressed hard on questions of faith in music, but I think they changed their focus. I'd like to give my friend Dave Zahl some attention, though with the warning that his writing on music is part of a much bigger blog. Also, Calvin College's Festival of Faith and Music just happened.

So much for the critics. As for the artists: do I really need to write another paean to Marilyn Robinson, Sufjan Stevens, Whit Stillman, or Terrence Malick? If the response to my praise would be another essay trying to explain why these mainliners are so much better at art than Evangelicals, I suppose I'd just have to break out my contrarian-hipster defense of Rich Mullins, Amy Grant, and Michael Card. And does anyone really want it to come to that?

Here's to shutting up.

When someone who's still immature as a thinker starts a blog of ideas (academic, cultural, political, etc.) she's going to think she has something to say to the world. For a while, she'll make her case. If she's lucky — if she finds the blogging world at its best — thoughtful people will see her posts and offer criticism. Or maybe they won't see her blog, but the minor disciplines of linking, following, and commenting will bring her to writers that have thought through her problems already. And she'll come to realize her intellectual immaturity, and see that she needs to rethink some things.

There might be some who would say that it's a virtue of the blogosphere that our young blogger can keep writing, and that she should now write in the mode of a certain famous blogger who likes to opine fiercely and then let his readers help him make up his mind. They might say, further, that this is the democratic process in action, and that this is how blogs function as part of our public sphere.

I'd say that this kind of public thinking isn't really thinking, and that when an intellectually immature blogger has begun to exhaust a position, it's better to keep quiet and read carefully than to keep chattering. For when you've got a good idea to work with, the process and responsibility of public elaboration is helpful, but there's a necessarily private element in the weighing and thinking through of rival theories that remains until a thinker reaches maturity. Or so I would imagine, being an not-yet-mature thinker myself.

Jenson on Calvinism.

"...Calvinism (unlike early Lutheranism) maintained the patristic and medieval doctrine of God unchanged. ... On the one hand, there is the metaphysical God, the final explanatory Ground of reality as we find it, who is reached by argumentative and mystical penetration back through reality as we find it. On the other hand, there is the proclaimed God, the Power of the future to differ from reality as we find it, who is known by words about Israel and Christ, addressed to historical and contingent hopes and fears.

[...]

"Thus the traditional doctrine of God shimmered with polarities between the two starting identifications of God, inside each, and crossways. In the system of medieval Christianity all these were reconciled and made religiously fruitful by the existence of the church. The church was a rationalized institution -- of miraculous grace. It was a public and political administration -- that administered inner power. It was a main structure of the standing order -- to make available eschatological transformation. It was the mediator between the distant exterior and public ground and the inner and private experience of Christ's presence. Remove this sort of church, leaving most else as it was, and you have classic Reformed theology.

"In Reformed tradition the two identifications of God, and the two appropriate relations to God, stand unmediated against each other. They are very nearly two different religions, united only by fiat."

-Robert Jenson, "The Kingdom of America's God." Essays in Theology of Culture. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995. (54-55)

This description of Calvinism as the traditional doctrine of God minus the mediating institution of the hierarchical church is both illuminating and, I think, basically fair. Illuminating because it explains the issue behind predestination and the other Calvinist sticking points. And, in my limited reading, the most interesting work in Reformed theology usually has to do with the attempt to elaborate a principle that overcomes precisely the tension described here. In other words, Reformed theologians seem aware that they need to find a way to escape what Jenson describes here, and Jenson's fair in leaving this as a possibility.

Later in the essay, Jenson asserts that Enlightenment Deism is simply the metaphysical side of Puritanism without the Biblical side. Though I haven't read much Karl Barth, I'm curious about whether it's accurate to say he did the opposite of what the Deists did.

Ah! A Wye Oak video.

I haven't gone to many rock shows in Baltimore, and when I do, it's because North Carolina bands are coming through. Of the various Baltimore bands that are blowing up the blogosphere, the only one I've listened to is Wye Oak. A friend pointed me to this new video for the song “Fish”:



Wye Oak - Fish (Official Video) from City Slang on Vimeo.

I've enjoyed Civilian so far. Everything people are saying about the band's remarkable musical growth since The Knot is true. I'm curious to see what they do next.

Also interesting is what lead singer Jenn Wasner has to say about being in a popular indie band:

“I don't want to sound ungrateful, because I do realize I have the best job in the world, but there's no other job I can really think of that when you are working as hard as you have ever worked in your entire life, everyone pretty much assumes you're at a party or on vacation, you know?”

Corals avoid the International Style.

Stumbled on a good aesthetic/ethical urbanism blog this week. Updates aren't frequent, but there's some good stuff. E.g., this:

“The main thing is that both humans and corals have evolved the capacity to build their own permanent residences, and in so doing to change the nature of the land or sea around them.

“The humans, who are an argumentative lot (one of the many ways they might appear to be inferior to the corals), might point out that corals build by blind instinct, whereas humans have an innate sense of beauty and order. Yet the corals consistently produce works that are breathtakingly beautiful to humans, whereas humans—by our own admission—more often produce breathtakingly ugly architectural excrescences that you’d never catch a self-respecting coral living in.

“One of the ironies of human nature is that we tend to turn out ugly cities when we put the most thought into them. Left to grow by itself, a city may have ugly sections, but the city as a whole is almost invariably beautiful. Subjected to the whims of urban planners, the city suddenly finds itself shot full of holes, empty spots where the urban planner has decreed a pedestrian mall or ample free parking.”

Milliner on friendship and education.

Public Discourse has a new essay by Matthew Milliner, one section of which I'd like to endorse:

Christopher Olaf Blum’s essay “Newman’s Collegiate Ideal” explains that Newman’s focus on friendship enabled the university to be “not a chance collection of individuals building their careers, but a kind of fellowship, even a friendship, whose characteristic activity was to ‘rejoice in the truth’ (gaudium de veritate).” Common meals were the soil where acquaintanceship grew into friendship, which Aristotle understood to be among the highest of life’s rewards. Genuine learning without the “pure and clear atmosphere of thought” fostered by true friendship was difficult to achieve. Like Origen, Newman understood that “personal influence… was the means of propagating the truth.”

In an age of unmanageable class sizes and overworked (and out of work) professors, advocating such an intimate scale of virtue-based learning may seem naive. Yet such ideals are probably closer to most of our own learning histories than we might think. If a given class distilled more than mere information, but instead shaped our lives and futures, some kind of friendship probably played a role. Wherever our own education occurred, or is occurring, transformative learning continues to happen as it always has—through communities of friendships upheld by some measure of mutual virtue.

The best thing that ever happened to me, intellectually, was that my friends and I had to take the same classes and read the same books. Our discussions gave me a stake in my coursework, which touched off a cycle. Imagining higher education based on a principle of friendship — why, one might think that the striving for wisdom is the second paradise of world.

“Still the picture flips.”

Now that I've written this post, I don't feel like blogging on the Mountain Goats' new album All Eternals Deck anymore, which works well, since this is the last song on the album.

With “Liza Forever Minnelli,” we’ve got a song about someone wandering around Los Angeles, feeling stuck and lonely, and eventually lying down with his cheek to Liza Minnelli's walk-of-fame star because he or she feels some connection to the actress. It's a sweet and sad image, as fitting for the close of the album as the fury of “Damn These Vampires” was for the start.

And so that's the new album. I hope I've convinced someone to give it a listen or two, but if not, that's all right.

All Eternals Deck, part twelve of thirteen.

I'm blogging on The Mountain Goats' new album All Eternals Deck until I feel like stopping.

I feel weird writing about “Never Quite Free.” You see, this song is not for me. It's for survivors. So if this song sounds like a series of positive-thinking platitudes — “you'll sleep better when you think you've come back from the brink,” “it's so good to learn that from right here the view goes on forever” — I have to admit that maybe I should just let a comforting song be a comforting song.

But that reading doesn't quite hold. You've got the title of the song, and the ominous warnings: “when you see him, you'll know.” Life gets better, the careful listener hears, but the past will sneak up on you. This aspect of the song plays against the optimistic sentiment of the poppy arrangement, to moving effect. The music asks us to forget the darkness completely, but the lyrics tell us to think twice.

And, once again, there's something eschatological in all this.

Gifts of the internet.

Dr. Boli posts an advertisement from the borough police, who are selling some special services to the public as a way of making up their budget shortfall. Services include "Motorcades for Prom Night" and "Rivals Discouraged." Act now!

"For Charles Bronson"

I'm blogging on The Mountain Goats' new album All Eternals Deck until I feel like stopping.


ehrenfeld, pennsylvania, scratched into my face

It's a song for Charles Bronson. You either get the appeal or you don't, I suppose.

(The picture grabbed from the awesome blog "If we don't, remember me.")

...and please forgive me for adding this:

Weekend movies.

Your Highness

Out of a sense of loyalty to David Gordon Green that now appears to be quite misguided, I went to see Your Highness last Friday evening. I didn't find it boring, and parts of it were wild enough to be funny, but overall... well, star Danny McBride explains it pretty well.

“And then he's explaining Your Highness, as best he can. How it all started as a joke. How he and his old film-school buddy David Gordon Green [...] used to play this movie-nerd game years ago, where Green would throw out a title and McBride would start pitching him back 'f— retarded ideas for movies.'

“Green would say something like Face of Danger, and they'd come up with ‘some weird story about Steve Danger, who's a plastic surgeon and he solves mysteries.’ Your Highness was one of those. Green said it; McBride said, ‘What if I was in the Middle Ages fighting dragons and getting stoned all the time?’ ”

All the Real Girls was the first David Gordon Green film I saw, and along with Green's other early movies George Washington and Undertow it's part of an impressive trio of Southern films. McBride is in All the Real Girls, and he's great. But after getting in on Seth Rogan's Pineapple Express, it looks like Green and McBride jumped at the chance to have studios give them tons of money to put an old joke on the big screen. Surely it's fun to make this kind of movie -- coming up with the costumes, goofing off with James Franco, wandering up and down hills in Ireland, etc. -- but I wish Green would undo his regression. Looking at his next few projects, I'm not optimistic. From here on out, I guess I'm setting my hopes on Junebug director Phil Morrison's triumphant return to the big screen.

Certified Copy

I don't remember the last time I saw a movie twice in the theaters, but I'm definitely going back for another viewing of Certified Copy. At this point I can't say I have a solid theory on what's going on. I can tell you that a man and a woman wander around Tuscany talking about art, and eventually about more, but whether the movie should finally be judged as realism, pastiche, or something else, I can't yet say. Oh, and the woman is Juliette Binoche. I'll be writing more on this one after I see it again.