Noah Berlatsky has written a fine article on C.S. Lewis's Space Trilogy for Culture11. It's been quite a while since I've read them, but I've always thought Perelandra was Lewis's best work of fiction. Out of the Silent Planet seemed cold to me, and That Hideous Strength was too much a shift in tone for me to handle.
“The future does not create the sci-fi writer; rather it is the sci-fi writer who creates, in his or her own image, the future.
“Lewis created The Space Trilogy too, of course. But it’s not a romantic or agonistic creation; it’s an imaginative extension of truths which, for Lewis, apply to man, but don’t originate with him. The future doesn’t have to be about us; we don’t have to be there to make it matter. Science fiction is just a dream, after all; the twisted gothic face it sees in time’s mirror is just a phantom. […] Lewis waves his hand, and the whole genre dissolves, leaving instead the universe.”
Yet another signal that appreciation of Lewis is shifting away from his apologetics and towards his hope of revitalizing the Christian imagination, which is where the best stuff is. Although I'm not sure it's the genre that's disappearing when Lewis waves his hand: the greatest thing about science fiction is its imaginative malleability, its ability to play out all kinds of human beliefs on a mythological level.
31 December 2008
Religious, not spiritual.
Finished Walker Percy's Love in the Ruins yesterday, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. The Percy chapters in Peter Augustine Lawler's Postmodernism Rightly Understood made sense of everything, so I didn't feel slightly lost like I did with The Last Gentleman.
Down to business: this short passage gets at something I've been thinking about for a while now. Sometimes you will ask someone whether she is religious, and she will say, “I'm not religious, but I'm spiritual.” Which is fine, and probably true for many people these days. But I'm more the other way around: religious, not spiritual, for reasons something like these (in the context of taking communion in some small church miles away from the major road):
“What she didn't understand, she being spiritual and seeing religion as spirit, was that it took religion to save me from the spirit world, from orbiting the earth like Lucifer and the angels, that it took nothing less than touching the thread off the misty interstates and eating Christ himself to make me mortal man again and let me inhabit my own flesh and love her in the morning.”
Religion protects me from the kind of spirituality that my brain would process into abstract nothingness. The history and weight of the Presbyterian church and, more broadly and better, the Church universal—this is an anchor to people and places that keeps people like me from floating off into abstraction.
Down to business: this short passage gets at something I've been thinking about for a while now. Sometimes you will ask someone whether she is religious, and she will say, “I'm not religious, but I'm spiritual.” Which is fine, and probably true for many people these days. But I'm more the other way around: religious, not spiritual, for reasons something like these (in the context of taking communion in some small church miles away from the major road):
“What she didn't understand, she being spiritual and seeing religion as spirit, was that it took religion to save me from the spirit world, from orbiting the earth like Lucifer and the angels, that it took nothing less than touching the thread off the misty interstates and eating Christ himself to make me mortal man again and let me inhabit my own flesh and love her in the morning.”
Religion protects me from the kind of spirituality that my brain would process into abstract nothingness. The history and weight of the Presbyterian church and, more broadly and better, the Church universal—this is an anchor to people and places that keeps people like me from floating off into abstraction.
27 December 2008
Why I am bad at blogging.
Slate's got a short guide to blogging, with tips from the experts, that lets me know pretty much what I am doing wrong here.
Here's the headings, and my thoughts:
Set a schedule. Blog often. - I've been aiming for a monthly average of a post a day since June, with one or two longer (i.e. sort of substantial) bits each week. Since I can get compulsive about this kind of thing, this can mean frivolous posts at the end of the month. But I'll try to resist, and just go short if I have to, like I did in August.
Don't worry if your posts suck a little. - I assume that they do. I can't sustain rants. I try to err on the side of brevity, hoping that I can clear things up in the comments if I need to. Some folks can churn out the big rants, but I don't have that skill. I get tired after a few hundred words.
Write casually but clearly. - Been working on this. I've found two clear benefits from trying to keep this blog going. One is that it seems to have helped my writing, but I'm not the best judge of that. The other is that I've new got a searchable list of articles and quotes that I found interesting during the past year.
Add something new. - Ah, here's the big trouble. I just can't maintain my interest in the news cycle. I'm hoping that in the next year I can point to interesting North Carolina happenings that may be new to the rest of the world. But I lack that stock of opinions that the best bloggers draw on; I'm undecided on too many big issues. I've got two or three things that I've resolved never to write about here, and there's a number of others where I just don't have anything to say. Sorry about that.
Join the bloggy conversation. And link! - I am not a very good commenter. I like to ask questions, but my normal reaction to things I disagree with is not, “here's twenty reasons why you're wrong,” but rather, “hmm, that's interesting.” But linking—that's fun to do.
Don't expect instant fame. - I sure don't. The best I can hope for is to find a few interesting people who like things that I like. I've really enjoyed following J.L. Wall's musings on Walker Percy and on religion, and Josh/Moff is fantastic on science fiction and on McLuhan. I'm also glad that Helen's starting things back up on her old blog.
Anyway, to those who read me, thanks for reading. To those I read, thanks for doing a good job, even if you don't read me back, and thereby miss out on seeing my gratitude.
Here's the headings, and my thoughts:
Set a schedule. Blog often. - I've been aiming for a monthly average of a post a day since June, with one or two longer (i.e. sort of substantial) bits each week. Since I can get compulsive about this kind of thing, this can mean frivolous posts at the end of the month. But I'll try to resist, and just go short if I have to, like I did in August.
Don't worry if your posts suck a little. - I assume that they do. I can't sustain rants. I try to err on the side of brevity, hoping that I can clear things up in the comments if I need to. Some folks can churn out the big rants, but I don't have that skill. I get tired after a few hundred words.
Write casually but clearly. - Been working on this. I've found two clear benefits from trying to keep this blog going. One is that it seems to have helped my writing, but I'm not the best judge of that. The other is that I've new got a searchable list of articles and quotes that I found interesting during the past year.
Add something new. - Ah, here's the big trouble. I just can't maintain my interest in the news cycle. I'm hoping that in the next year I can point to interesting North Carolina happenings that may be new to the rest of the world. But I lack that stock of opinions that the best bloggers draw on; I'm undecided on too many big issues. I've got two or three things that I've resolved never to write about here, and there's a number of others where I just don't have anything to say. Sorry about that.
Join the bloggy conversation. And link! - I am not a very good commenter. I like to ask questions, but my normal reaction to things I disagree with is not, “here's twenty reasons why you're wrong,” but rather, “hmm, that's interesting.” But linking—that's fun to do.
Don't expect instant fame. - I sure don't. The best I can hope for is to find a few interesting people who like things that I like. I've really enjoyed following J.L. Wall's musings on Walker Percy and on religion, and Josh/Moff is fantastic on science fiction and on McLuhan. I'm also glad that Helen's starting things back up on her old blog.
Anyway, to those who read me, thanks for reading. To those I read, thanks for doing a good job, even if you don't read me back, and thereby miss out on seeing my gratitude.
26 December 2008
Charlotte, hot dogs, and baseball.
The next time you're hanging out in Uptown Charlotte, you should get a hot dog with chili and cheese at Green's Lunch on Fourth and Poplar. It's been there for decades. Enjoy it while you can: if the city has its way, there will be a baseball stadium there soon.
Why can't the city have its way? An attorney named Jerry Reese is filing lawsuits to block the development. And here's where it's funny: he's not blocking it because he thinks the city shouldn't be pursuing this kind of project with taxpayer money—after all, the Panthers managed to build their stadium with private funds—but because he thinks a triple-A team is too small time. He wants major leagues or bust. Apparently the legal wrangling can't be over before next summer.
I have zero interest in baseball, and I'd love to see Green's stick around for another seven decades. While I'm sorry that so much tax money is going to fighting these court battles, I'm glad that I'll get to keep meeting my dad for lunch at Green's on the next few trips home.
Charlotte's a funny town.
Why can't the city have its way? An attorney named Jerry Reese is filing lawsuits to block the development. And here's where it's funny: he's not blocking it because he thinks the city shouldn't be pursuing this kind of project with taxpayer money—after all, the Panthers managed to build their stadium with private funds—but because he thinks a triple-A team is too small time. He wants major leagues or bust. Apparently the legal wrangling can't be over before next summer.
I have zero interest in baseball, and I'd love to see Green's stick around for another seven decades. While I'm sorry that so much tax money is going to fighting these court battles, I'm glad that I'll get to keep meeting my dad for lunch at Green's on the next few trips home.
Charlotte's a funny town.
24 December 2008
Merry Christmas to all.
Merry Christmas!
I'll try to get things rolling again here before the end of December. But it's felt good to take things easy.
(It's far too warm for the season down here in the Piedmont of North Carolina.)
(May I recommend this article about the decline of Detroit, as well as this photoblog? Although you should probably wait if you don't want to be sad on Christmas.)
I'll try to get things rolling again here before the end of December. But it's felt good to take things easy.
(It's far too warm for the season down here in the Piedmont of North Carolina.)
(May I recommend this article about the decline of Detroit, as well as this photoblog? Although you should probably wait if you don't want to be sad on Christmas.)
18 December 2008
Misunderstood sentimentalists? Nah.
Maybe, just maybe, Joe Carter is correct that Frank Capra gets less attention than he deserves because of the sentimentality in his films. I've seen that critique of his work. But it seems to me that Capra's legacy is in fine condition these days, as It's a Wonderful Life and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington are firmly embedded in American pop culture, and Mr. Deeds Goes to Town and It Happened One Night are hardly forgotten. I saw these films long before I chased down anything by Howard Hawks, John Huston, or Billy Wilder.
To suggest that Ayn Rand is a misunderstood “master of sentimentality” is weirder. Yes, she hoped to evoke a passionate emotional response from her audience rather than some ironic appreciation of her wordplay. I suppose that's the sentimentality. But it's what she wants us to respond to that puts off so many people, and that she's so direct in telling us how to respond to it. Carter admits in the comments that he never made it through Atlas Shrugged. Well, I did, and John Galt's twenty-something-page lecture is not the work of a master novelist.
I say this as a great admirer of Tolkien, who wrote a masterful, world-unto-itself heroic epic that contains its share of sentimental moments, and some lecturing on the part of its heroes, but doesn't kick the reader in the face with ham-handed philosophy like Rand does. I dare say a great portion of Tolkien's fan-base would have no sympathy with his strictly conservative Catholicism. Can you count many anti-libertarians/anti-Objectivists among Rand's admirers? And if Dickens was a sentimentalist, at least the man could write spellbinding prose. You can't read Atlas Shrugged for its literary merit because it doesn't have any.
Carter criticizes Rand in the rest of the post, and I'm not going to argue with him there.
For laffs, check out McSweeney's up-to-date rendition of Atlas Shrugged, which gets the theory a bit wrong but the weirdness of Dagney Taggart right. (Via Freddie.)
To suggest that Ayn Rand is a misunderstood “master of sentimentality” is weirder. Yes, she hoped to evoke a passionate emotional response from her audience rather than some ironic appreciation of her wordplay. I suppose that's the sentimentality. But it's what she wants us to respond to that puts off so many people, and that she's so direct in telling us how to respond to it. Carter admits in the comments that he never made it through Atlas Shrugged. Well, I did, and John Galt's twenty-something-page lecture is not the work of a master novelist.
I say this as a great admirer of Tolkien, who wrote a masterful, world-unto-itself heroic epic that contains its share of sentimental moments, and some lecturing on the part of its heroes, but doesn't kick the reader in the face with ham-handed philosophy like Rand does. I dare say a great portion of Tolkien's fan-base would have no sympathy with his strictly conservative Catholicism. Can you count many anti-libertarians/anti-Objectivists among Rand's admirers? And if Dickens was a sentimentalist, at least the man could write spellbinding prose. You can't read Atlas Shrugged for its literary merit because it doesn't have any.
Carter criticizes Rand in the rest of the post, and I'm not going to argue with him there.
For laffs, check out McSweeney's up-to-date rendition of Atlas Shrugged, which gets the theory a bit wrong but the weirdness of Dagney Taggart right. (Via Freddie.)
“Piety! Hope! Generosity! WOW!!”
It's gray and misty outside, and the campus trees—pines aside—are knobby and naked. It's the kind of day where you don't want to walk through the woods by yourself at dusk because you will almost certainly be eaten by werewolves.
~~~~~
I'm out of the thick part of Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, which is great because I'm mowing through the rest. The section on Hutcheson really slowed me down; I set the book aside for at least a month on account of it. But then I read everything on Hume yesterday, which got really interesting. And now I'm in the section on liberalism and tradition, so MacIntyre's delivering the goods again:
“The evidence for the failures of Kant's heirs in these constructive enterprises [i.e. morality for tradition-free individuals—wrb] is contained in the reviews of the books expounding them in the professional philosophical journals. The book review pages of these journals are the graveyards of constructive academic philosophy, and any doubts as to whether rational consensus might be not after all be achievable in modern academic moral philosophy can be put to rest by reading them through regularly.”
~~~~~
I don't comment much on JL Wall's blog Phaidimoi Logoi, but I love reading it. Like many book lovers—myself included—he's working through his suspicion of this new-fangled “Kindle” reading machine. One of his objection is that you can't write in the margins:
“The biggest impediment — let’s set aside all aesthetic for a moment — has to be the inability to scribble something in the margins. I can’t imagine reading much of anything without jotting down beside a passage, ‘cf. such-and-such’ — whatever it happens to remind me of. Or not having a blank page at the start of ‘The Waste Land’ on which to hastily put down a verse from Leonard Cohen’s ‘Take This Waltz’ because both talk about hyacinths. My marginalia in Absalom, Absalom! has become almost organically integrated to my reading of the book. Faulkner in particular makes me feel compelled to enter into some sort of margin-conversation with the text and its author. Not having a pencil in hand is what makes reading on the screen so distinct from reading on the page for me.”
Which is a good point. I probably should do more writing in the novels I read. Or at least the ones I own. I read a lot of library books when I was younger, so sometimes it's hard for me to bring myself to mar the page. University libraries are a constant reminder that not everyone feels the same way. For example, a previous reader of one of UNC's copies of Jeffrey Stout's Democracy and Tradition was evidently enthusiastic about the introduction:
This reader's inclination to circle key words and names two or three times makes the text quite hard to read in places. And I bet this isn't even too bad an example of an over-active writer. So my question is this: what's the proper protocol for writing in the margins of university library books? I'm thinking that if you want to do more than lightly underline and make notes in pencil, you should copy the pages you need.
~~~~~
Please read Mark Thompson's Culture11 piece on how CPSIA will ruin small-scale toy manufacturers. It's a really well-done bit of reporting and explanation.
~~~~~
I'm out of the thick part of Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, which is great because I'm mowing through the rest. The section on Hutcheson really slowed me down; I set the book aside for at least a month on account of it. But then I read everything on Hume yesterday, which got really interesting. And now I'm in the section on liberalism and tradition, so MacIntyre's delivering the goods again:
“The evidence for the failures of Kant's heirs in these constructive enterprises [i.e. morality for tradition-free individuals—wrb] is contained in the reviews of the books expounding them in the professional philosophical journals. The book review pages of these journals are the graveyards of constructive academic philosophy, and any doubts as to whether rational consensus might be not after all be achievable in modern academic moral philosophy can be put to rest by reading them through regularly.”
~~~~~
I don't comment much on JL Wall's blog Phaidimoi Logoi, but I love reading it. Like many book lovers—myself included—he's working through his suspicion of this new-fangled “Kindle” reading machine. One of his objection is that you can't write in the margins:
“The biggest impediment — let’s set aside all aesthetic for a moment — has to be the inability to scribble something in the margins. I can’t imagine reading much of anything without jotting down beside a passage, ‘cf. such-and-such’ — whatever it happens to remind me of. Or not having a blank page at the start of ‘The Waste Land’ on which to hastily put down a verse from Leonard Cohen’s ‘Take This Waltz’ because both talk about hyacinths. My marginalia in Absalom, Absalom! has become almost organically integrated to my reading of the book. Faulkner in particular makes me feel compelled to enter into some sort of margin-conversation with the text and its author. Not having a pencil in hand is what makes reading on the screen so distinct from reading on the page for me.”
Which is a good point. I probably should do more writing in the novels I read. Or at least the ones I own. I read a lot of library books when I was younger, so sometimes it's hard for me to bring myself to mar the page. University libraries are a constant reminder that not everyone feels the same way. For example, a previous reader of one of UNC's copies of Jeffrey Stout's Democracy and Tradition was evidently enthusiastic about the introduction:
This reader's inclination to circle key words and names two or three times makes the text quite hard to read in places. And I bet this isn't even too bad an example of an over-active writer. So my question is this: what's the proper protocol for writing in the margins of university library books? I'm thinking that if you want to do more than lightly underline and make notes in pencil, you should copy the pages you need.
~~~~~
Please read Mark Thompson's Culture11 piece on how CPSIA will ruin small-scale toy manufacturers. It's a really well-done bit of reporting and explanation.
17 December 2008
Bad baby names.
So a Holocaust denier named one of his children Adolf Hitler. And now he's mad that a store won't personalize his kid's birthday cake. It really makes you wonder. I hope you won't blame me for concluding that this is banally evil first, then stupid.
(Via Galley Slaves, where Jonathan points out that if you were trying to come up with a unique name, don't use this one.)
(Via Galley Slaves, where Jonathan points out that if you were trying to come up with a unique name, don't use this one.)
More Socrates at the Gadfly.
At the Gadfly, Brendan keeps going with the anti-Socratism (and then brings in Aldous Huxley):
“Particularly against the backdrop of the Euthyphro, we cannot doubt that he indeed called much of the religious traditions of Athens into question. Considering how interwoven such traditions were into the fabric of everyday life, it’s not unreasonable to think that the hemlock was simply self-defense. Such an evaluation is no defense of Athenian culture; it merely highlights the fact that, for Socrates, there seems to be no such thing as culture, nothing sacred to preserve: Truth is all.”
Socrates was no conservative!
(Comments off for this post; feel free to discuss through the link.)
“Particularly against the backdrop of the Euthyphro, we cannot doubt that he indeed called much of the religious traditions of Athens into question. Considering how interwoven such traditions were into the fabric of everyday life, it’s not unreasonable to think that the hemlock was simply self-defense. Such an evaluation is no defense of Athenian culture; it merely highlights the fact that, for Socrates, there seems to be no such thing as culture, nothing sacred to preserve: Truth is all.”
Socrates was no conservative!
(Comments off for this post; feel free to discuss through the link.)
16 December 2008
Anti-Socratism: I don't quite have it yet.
I've tried once again to pin down my anti-Socratism over at The Gadfly. I've got a little bit more up my sleeve, but pursuing this track is always a little bit frustrating because I have this persistent feeling that the argument I want to make is just out of reach.
I picked up Peter Lawler's Postmodernism Rightly Understood from the UNC library, and it exacerbates this frustration, because I think I could easily lay out the argument I want to make if only I knew as much as Dr. Lawler. But, of course, I have to read books like this if I'm every going to get there.
(Also: I think I now understand completely what the “postmodern” in “postmodern conservative” means, even though I'm not going to use the word that way if I can help it.)
I picked up Peter Lawler's Postmodernism Rightly Understood from the UNC library, and it exacerbates this frustration, because I think I could easily lay out the argument I want to make if only I knew as much as Dr. Lawler. But, of course, I have to read books like this if I'm every going to get there.
(Also: I think I now understand completely what the “postmodern” in “postmodern conservative” means, even though I'm not going to use the word that way if I can help it.)
14 December 2008
Songs I have loved in 2008.
Just for fun, here's the tracklist for a mix CD I made and called “Songs I have loved in 2008.” Only a few of the songs (2, 4, 5, 8, and 13) are actually from 2008; it wasn't a big CD-buying year.
1. Wilco - Hotel Arizona
2. Lambchop - Slipped, Dissolved, and Loosed
3. The Flaming Lips - Waitin' for a Superman (Remix)
4. Anathallo - Red Plastic Globe
5. The Mountin Goats - Gojam Province 1968
6. Bonnie Prince Billy - Raining in Darling
7. Emmylou Harris - Pancho and Lefty
8. Megafaun - Lazy Suicide
9. Pearl Jam - Smile
10. Archers of Loaf - Underdogs of Nipomo
11. Guided by Voices - Learning to Hunt
12. Bruce Springsteen - Human Touch
13. The Prayers and Tears of Arthur Digby Sellers - Christmas Card to a Hooker in Minneapolis
1. Wilco - Hotel Arizona
2. Lambchop - Slipped, Dissolved, and Loosed
3. The Flaming Lips - Waitin' for a Superman (Remix)
4. Anathallo - Red Plastic Globe
5. The Mountin Goats - Gojam Province 1968
6. Bonnie Prince Billy - Raining in Darling
7. Emmylou Harris - Pancho and Lefty
8. Megafaun - Lazy Suicide
9. Pearl Jam - Smile
10. Archers of Loaf - Underdogs of Nipomo
11. Guided by Voices - Learning to Hunt
12. Bruce Springsteen - Human Touch
13. The Prayers and Tears of Arthur Digby Sellers - Christmas Card to a Hooker in Minneapolis
13 December 2008
Because kidney stores would remind us of death.
Elizabeth Nolan Brown concludes a long post on prostitution, sex, and money by wondering about why people remain so fixated on altruistic transactions:
“Wanna donate a kidney? Yes, please! But sell it? You are desecrating the holy arrangement that is kidney sharing! Or something. For a country that proclaims to love capitalism so much, we sure have a lot of funny and rigid ideas about what money can and cannot be exchange for.”
I think I can explain why so many people are averse to these ideas about transactions related to body parts or sex (i.e. mortality and reproduction, birth and death).
First, it’s probably better to say that we have a lot of funny and rigid ideas about what should not be brought into the marketplace, where value is assigned only as a function of utility.
Is it so strange to believe that turning kidneys into commodities puts us on the path to seeing our own bodies only as chunks of meat and blood and bone? Or that pricing sex edges out the mystical (or, if you like, deeply psychological) quality of the strange animal impulse that does so much to order our very identities? And that such views are very unsettling to many people?
In this, as in so many other things, tearing off the mask mars the face of what lies beneath.
“Wanna donate a kidney? Yes, please! But sell it? You are desecrating the holy arrangement that is kidney sharing! Or something. For a country that proclaims to love capitalism so much, we sure have a lot of funny and rigid ideas about what money can and cannot be exchange for.”
I think I can explain why so many people are averse to these ideas about transactions related to body parts or sex (i.e. mortality and reproduction, birth and death).
First, it’s probably better to say that we have a lot of funny and rigid ideas about what should not be brought into the marketplace, where value is assigned only as a function of utility.
Is it so strange to believe that turning kidneys into commodities puts us on the path to seeing our own bodies only as chunks of meat and blood and bone? Or that pricing sex edges out the mystical (or, if you like, deeply psychological) quality of the strange animal impulse that does so much to order our very identities? And that such views are very unsettling to many people?
In this, as in so many other things, tearing off the mask mars the face of what lies beneath.
12 December 2008
Madness!
Kim Fabricius's post on William Blake is worth clicking through to, if only for the image of a good Blake painting, but what really got me thinking was this paragraph:
“Chesterton declared: ‘Critics say his [Blake’s] visions were false because he was mad. I say he was mad because his visions were true.’ Absolutely! ‘Mad’ in the way St. John the Divine was mad… ‘Mad’ in a way that neither the legalism of conservative Christians, nor the reasonableness of the liberals, can comprehend. Such is the impoverishment of the contemporary Christian imagination for which the Bible is either an inerrant rulebook or a religious resource book, but not, as it was for Blake, an inspired and inspiring narrative for re-configuring the world.”
A semester of math and logic that ends with an effort to guest-write for a blog with really smart readers will make one into a reasonable person indeed. I look at my recent writing and it's all I see. Sure, I took a class on critical theory, but the professor was a pragmatist, so I kept my distance…
Reasonableness—what a virtue! The reasonable personality, the one that always discusses, that looks at things from all angles, that never lets things get out of hand, that declines to speak of what it doesn't know, that plans for every contingency… But there are few figures more pitiable (or comic, depending on the context) than the reasonable man treading beyond his depth: the professor in the haunted house, the psychoanalyst who has been left by his wife, the man who thinks he is going to shoot Liberty Valence. Here, reasonableness is profoundly, utterly irrational.
Madness—vision—imagination—this is how you respond to the full splendor and terror of the world!
“Chesterton declared: ‘Critics say his [Blake’s] visions were false because he was mad. I say he was mad because his visions were true.’ Absolutely! ‘Mad’ in the way St. John the Divine was mad… ‘Mad’ in a way that neither the legalism of conservative Christians, nor the reasonableness of the liberals, can comprehend. Such is the impoverishment of the contemporary Christian imagination for which the Bible is either an inerrant rulebook or a religious resource book, but not, as it was for Blake, an inspired and inspiring narrative for re-configuring the world.”
A semester of math and logic that ends with an effort to guest-write for a blog with really smart readers will make one into a reasonable person indeed. I look at my recent writing and it's all I see. Sure, I took a class on critical theory, but the professor was a pragmatist, so I kept my distance…
Reasonableness—what a virtue! The reasonable personality, the one that always discusses, that looks at things from all angles, that never lets things get out of hand, that declines to speak of what it doesn't know, that plans for every contingency… But there are few figures more pitiable (or comic, depending on the context) than the reasonable man treading beyond his depth: the professor in the haunted house, the psychoanalyst who has been left by his wife, the man who thinks he is going to shoot Liberty Valence. Here, reasonableness is profoundly, utterly irrational.
Madness—vision—imagination—this is how you respond to the full splendor and terror of the world!
Avery Cardinal Dulles, R.I.P.
Avery Cardinal Dulles died today. I saw him once, across the room, at a lecture in New York, and that's the closest I ever came to him, but his essays are marvels of careful thinking and generous intellectual engagement. There's a big list of them over at First Things, where I'm sure we'll be finding out about how Cardinal Dulles chose to live his life.
I highly recommend his essay “Saving Ecumenism from Itself,” from 2007.
I highly recommend his essay “Saving Ecumenism from Itself,” from 2007.
How is he so good at this?
Sometimes Alan Jacobs is such a good writer that it almost makes me angry. This happens when I've tried to say something, and then he comes along and says it the right way. For example, my convoluted mess on Christianity, secularism, and public reason is supposed to mean the same thing as this single paragraph from The American Scene:
“If your primary concern is to influence public policy, then of course you should use the arguments that are most likely to persuade people whose support you need, which may mean keeping some of your own distinctive convictions in the background. But some Christians believe that something is more important that influencing public policy, and that is bearing public witness to Christian faith and practice. And if that’s your primary goal, then coming up with ‘adequate secular reasons’ for your beliefs is pretty much the last thing you’ll want to do. But then of course you shouldn’t complain if people find your arguments puzzling or even repulsive.”
I mean, that's pretty much it. All you can add is that the Republican Party is an organization hoping to persuade in a secular environment, and therefore should (and almost always does) take the first path.
EDIT: Looking over my other post, I did have some stuff in there about political honesty, so maybe my words weren't a complete waste.
“If your primary concern is to influence public policy, then of course you should use the arguments that are most likely to persuade people whose support you need, which may mean keeping some of your own distinctive convictions in the background. But some Christians believe that something is more important that influencing public policy, and that is bearing public witness to Christian faith and practice. And if that’s your primary goal, then coming up with ‘adequate secular reasons’ for your beliefs is pretty much the last thing you’ll want to do. But then of course you shouldn’t complain if people find your arguments puzzling or even repulsive.”
I mean, that's pretty much it. All you can add is that the Republican Party is an organization hoping to persuade in a secular environment, and therefore should (and almost always does) take the first path.
EDIT: Looking over my other post, I did have some stuff in there about political honesty, so maybe my words weren't a complete waste.
11 December 2008
Oh, what the harry. Let's do some democracy.
John Schwenkler, Mark from Publius Endures, and Scott Payne are trying to spread the word about CPSIA (Consumer Protection Safety Improvement Act). Basically, we've got a situation where the law that Congress wrote to try to make sure imported toys aren't toxic and deadly will probably force pretty much all small-scale toymakers out of business. Since I see independent toymakers as counterparts to independent record labels (which I love), I'm in on this one. For starters, here's the links:
It really looks to me like the law needs a big exemption, or at least a different set of standards, for small toymakers. (And I think this all applies to clothing manufacturers too!) This is, in fact, what the Handmade Toy Alliance is proposing.
One danger of getting involved in something like this is that I've only been able to read advocacy websites. If you can show me that small toymakers and clothing manufacturers present a real danger to children, I'll think twice. And if you can show me that the costs imposed on these smaller businesses will be equal to or less than those that the big groups get stuck with, I'll think twice. But, from everything I've read, it looks pretty clear this legislation is going to turn a bunch of innocent artisans into either unemployed persons or criminals.
I'm going to come back to this again after I've had a chance to look into it some more.
I've got some letters to write this weekend.
- Got to give Robert Stacy McCain credit for writing about it last week. (And again today.)
- John Schwenkler summarizes: “The bill, which passed both chambers of Congress earlier this year with almost no opposition from anyone not named Ron Paul, requires that all toys be submitted to third-party testing and certification, and that toy makers permanently label each toy with a date and batch number to ensure easy enforcement… In any case, even if such smaller producers do manage to remain in business there can be no real doubt that such regulations would raise the cost of their products lead naturally to securing an even greater market share for those toy manufacturers that operate at a larger scale and can spread the cost of testing out over the huge volumes of toys that they make.”
- Mark sounds the call: “Fortunately, there is time to at the very least pass some form of remedial legislation or seek the scaling back of the proposed regulations. For that reason, and because this issue unites the common interests of principled liberals, conservatives, and libertarians, I can't think of many issues better suited for an non-partisan, non-ideological activist campaign.”
- The Handmade Toy Alliance believes the consequences for their business will be dire.
- Tons of information here and here.
It really looks to me like the law needs a big exemption, or at least a different set of standards, for small toymakers. (And I think this all applies to clothing manufacturers too!) This is, in fact, what the Handmade Toy Alliance is proposing.
One danger of getting involved in something like this is that I've only been able to read advocacy websites. If you can show me that small toymakers and clothing manufacturers present a real danger to children, I'll think twice. And if you can show me that the costs imposed on these smaller businesses will be equal to or less than those that the big groups get stuck with, I'll think twice. But, from everything I've read, it looks pretty clear this legislation is going to turn a bunch of innocent artisans into either unemployed persons or criminals.
I'm going to come back to this again after I've had a chance to look into it some more.
I've got some letters to write this weekend.
10 December 2008
Advent in space.
And I probably ought to share The Hubble Space Telescope Advent Calendar 2008, since I've been enjoying it so much. A new space picture every day. You know, the Hubble project might be the neatest thing that human beings have ever done. Thanks, science!
(I found the link on A Thinking Reed.)
(I found the link on A Thinking Reed.)
The gadfly.
Some of my buddies up in New York City have started a magazine called “The Gadfly.” They're students at The King's College—where I myself spent two years—so some of the material on the website has to do with the internal politics of a small startup evangelical Christian college in Manhattan, but there should be some good stuff coming for general audiences in the theology, philosophy, politics, and economics categories. I should mention here that I will be contributing from a distance.
Try my friend John's article “Free Market Theology”:
Perfect freedom is not the exercise of choice, but the service of a holy God. For thousands of years such an assertion would be uncontroversial for Christians. Today, however, American evangelicalism has developed a hybrid strand of Christian political thought.
Evangelicals have bred a pseudo-theology revolving around the concept of “culture wars.” They seek to wed God to the state and intertwine the beauty of grace with the bureaucracy of the nation state. Certain political positions become an assumed part of orthodoxy. It seems as if these Christians think that belief in the market was adopted into Nicene dogma. Consequently, the language used to describe the market increasingly is applied to the divine.
[…]
The market is an efficient way of allocating resources, but it is not an ethic. When we act as if morality and the market are interchangeable, we force ourselves into blind, sophistical defenses of pure exploitation. Christians may harness the power of the market to benefit society, but followers of Jesus must not allow the scales we use in the market place to weigh justice.
Also, for some reason, there's an array of fine shirts and sweatshirts. (Not my doing.)
Try my friend John's article “Free Market Theology”:
Perfect freedom is not the exercise of choice, but the service of a holy God. For thousands of years such an assertion would be uncontroversial for Christians. Today, however, American evangelicalism has developed a hybrid strand of Christian political thought.
Evangelicals have bred a pseudo-theology revolving around the concept of “culture wars.” They seek to wed God to the state and intertwine the beauty of grace with the bureaucracy of the nation state. Certain political positions become an assumed part of orthodoxy. It seems as if these Christians think that belief in the market was adopted into Nicene dogma. Consequently, the language used to describe the market increasingly is applied to the divine.
[…]
The market is an efficient way of allocating resources, but it is not an ethic. When we act as if morality and the market are interchangeable, we force ourselves into blind, sophistical defenses of pure exploitation. Christians may harness the power of the market to benefit society, but followers of Jesus must not allow the scales we use in the market place to weigh justice.
Also, for some reason, there's an array of fine shirts and sweatshirts. (Not my doing.)
Robertson Davies has been there before us.
I had to let go of a post that I typed comparing Helen Rittlemeyer to Robertson Davies when I looked up some books of interviews with Davies and found that he considers himself a disciple of Jung. I had thought of him as a heterodox Christian with Jungian influences, but it turns out that he saw himself as the real Jungian deal, and not much of a doctrinal Christian at all. So the comparison I had in mind fell apart. But I don't want to just let the quotes go away. These two are from The Lyre of Orpheus, the third book in the Cornish Trilogy. (I'm telling myself that when I re-read all of Davies, I'm going to make a quote book and organize it by topic.)
The first passage reminded me of Helen's “politics of manners.” It's a scene where Anglican scholar-priest Simon Darcourt is comforting his friend Arthur, who suspects that his wife has cheated on him:
“The cuckoo in the nest is often the best friend. Powell loves you, as a friend may very well love you. I love you, Arthur, though I don't make a song and dance about it.”
“That kind of love. You have to because you're a priest. Like God, it's your métier.”
“You don't know anything about priests. I know we are supposed to love mankind indiscriminately, but I don't. That's why I gave up practical priesthood and became a professor. My faith charges me to love my neighbor but I can't and won't fake it, in the greasy way professional lovers-of-mankind do—the professionally charitable, the newspaper sob-sisters, the politicians. I'm not Christ, Arthur, and I can't love like Him, so I settle for courtesy, consideration, decent manners, and whatever I can do for the people I really do love. And you are one of those. I can't help you by weeping with you, though I respect your tears. The best I can do is bring a clear head and an open eye to your trouble.”
The second one reminded me of the way Helen compares her traditionalism to theatrical illusion. Davies does not give us precisely the same idea, but there's a slight connection. This is from a scene where Darcourt is speaking to the Maria, the wife that may have cheated:
“Arthur said that it had always troubled him in the old plays when somebody puts on a cloak and hat and is accepted by the others as somebody he isn't. Disguise is impossible, he said. You recognize people by their walk, the way they hold their heads, by a thousand things that we aren't aware of. How do you disguise your back, he said; none of us can see our backs, but everybody else does, and when you see somebody from the back you may know them much more readily than if you see them face to face. Do you remember what Powell said?”
“Something about people wishing to be deceived?”
“Yes. That you will the deception, just as you will your own deception when you watch a conjuror. He said that he had once taken part in a show put on in an asylum for the insane, where a very clever conjuror worked like a dog, and didn't get any applause whatever. Why? Because the insane were not his partners in his deceits. For them a rabbit might just as well come out of an empty hat as not. But the sane, the doctors and nurses, who were living and watching in the same world of assumptions as the conjuror, were delighted. And it was just the same with disguise. On the stage, people accepted somebody in a very transparent disguise because the real deception was brought about by their own will. Show Lancelot and Guenevere a witch, and they accept her as a witch because their situation makes a witch much more acceptable than Morgan Le Fay in a ragged cloak.”
“Yes, I remember. I thought it was a rather thin argument at the time.”
“But don't you remember what he said afterward? We are deceived because we will our own deception. It is somehow necessary to us. It is an aspect of fate.”
“I think I remember. Powell does talk a lot of fascinating Celtic moonshine, doesn't he?”
The first passage reminded me of Helen's “politics of manners.” It's a scene where Anglican scholar-priest Simon Darcourt is comforting his friend Arthur, who suspects that his wife has cheated on him:
“The cuckoo in the nest is often the best friend. Powell loves you, as a friend may very well love you. I love you, Arthur, though I don't make a song and dance about it.”
“That kind of love. You have to because you're a priest. Like God, it's your métier.”
“You don't know anything about priests. I know we are supposed to love mankind indiscriminately, but I don't. That's why I gave up practical priesthood and became a professor. My faith charges me to love my neighbor but I can't and won't fake it, in the greasy way professional lovers-of-mankind do—the professionally charitable, the newspaper sob-sisters, the politicians. I'm not Christ, Arthur, and I can't love like Him, so I settle for courtesy, consideration, decent manners, and whatever I can do for the people I really do love. And you are one of those. I can't help you by weeping with you, though I respect your tears. The best I can do is bring a clear head and an open eye to your trouble.”
The second one reminded me of the way Helen compares her traditionalism to theatrical illusion. Davies does not give us precisely the same idea, but there's a slight connection. This is from a scene where Darcourt is speaking to the Maria, the wife that may have cheated:
“Arthur said that it had always troubled him in the old plays when somebody puts on a cloak and hat and is accepted by the others as somebody he isn't. Disguise is impossible, he said. You recognize people by their walk, the way they hold their heads, by a thousand things that we aren't aware of. How do you disguise your back, he said; none of us can see our backs, but everybody else does, and when you see somebody from the back you may know them much more readily than if you see them face to face. Do you remember what Powell said?”
“Something about people wishing to be deceived?”
“Yes. That you will the deception, just as you will your own deception when you watch a conjuror. He said that he had once taken part in a show put on in an asylum for the insane, where a very clever conjuror worked like a dog, and didn't get any applause whatever. Why? Because the insane were not his partners in his deceits. For them a rabbit might just as well come out of an empty hat as not. But the sane, the doctors and nurses, who were living and watching in the same world of assumptions as the conjuror, were delighted. And it was just the same with disguise. On the stage, people accepted somebody in a very transparent disguise because the real deception was brought about by their own will. Show Lancelot and Guenevere a witch, and they accept her as a witch because their situation makes a witch much more acceptable than Morgan Le Fay in a ragged cloak.”
“Yes, I remember. I thought it was a rather thin argument at the time.”
“But don't you remember what he said afterward? We are deceived because we will our own deception. It is somehow necessary to us. It is an aspect of fate.”
“I think I remember. Powell does talk a lot of fascinating Celtic moonshine, doesn't he?”
09 December 2008
Why I like Canada so much.
This might be crazy, but I think I like the mythic concept of Canada because, insofar as it resists Yankee imperialism, it's like an angelic reversal of the Confederacy. In terms of history, this is hogwash, but maybe it fits conceptually, somehow.
Canadian politics: now I get it.
Between me being busy with the end of the semester and the American media not caring, I haven't been able to keep up the shallow familiarity with Canadian politics that I'd like to have. However, Dr. Boli comes to my rescue yet again:
“Canada is a constitutional monarchy. The real power rests with the Queen of Canada, who at any moment could squash her government like a bug…
“To understand why the Queen is so inactive in the daily affairs of her government, we need only recall that the Queen of Canada is also the Queen of fifteen other realms around the world. Canada does not have her undivided attention. While the Canadians are having their adorable little parliamentary crisis, Her Majesty’s other subjects have equally pressing demands on her time. Her British subjects expect her to review a number of local cheeses over the next few days. Her Australian subjects are once again threatening to pitch her over the rail and declare a republic. The Church of Scotland wants her, as head of the Kirk, to declare Anglicanism a satanic heresy. Her subjects in Tuvalu are opening their nation’s first strip mall and wonder whether she can spare a second cousin once removed for this auspicious occasion. Her subjects in Belize have sent her an electronic musical Christmas card and want to know how she liked it.
“The Queen, in other words, leads a busy life, and she has little time for squashing governments.”
It all makes so much more sense now. (Follow the link; there's more.)
“Canada is a constitutional monarchy. The real power rests with the Queen of Canada, who at any moment could squash her government like a bug…
“To understand why the Queen is so inactive in the daily affairs of her government, we need only recall that the Queen of Canada is also the Queen of fifteen other realms around the world. Canada does not have her undivided attention. While the Canadians are having their adorable little parliamentary crisis, Her Majesty’s other subjects have equally pressing demands on her time. Her British subjects expect her to review a number of local cheeses over the next few days. Her Australian subjects are once again threatening to pitch her over the rail and declare a republic. The Church of Scotland wants her, as head of the Kirk, to declare Anglicanism a satanic heresy. Her subjects in Tuvalu are opening their nation’s first strip mall and wonder whether she can spare a second cousin once removed for this auspicious occasion. Her subjects in Belize have sent her an electronic musical Christmas card and want to know how she liked it.
“The Queen, in other words, leads a busy life, and she has little time for squashing governments.”
It all makes so much more sense now. (Follow the link; there's more.)
08 December 2008
Are there selkies?
Having read Alice Thomas Ellis's The Inn at the Edge of the World over the weekend, I'm going to say that Sally Thomas's recommendations seem to be good ones. How to describe the book? It's about people who are variously depressed or lost in the world, and how they interact when they try to avoid Christmas at an inn in far north Scotland, and it's a ghost story. If you're quick, you can read it in an evening.
Even my dad's a pomocon now.
James Poulos posts someone else's description of “postmodern conservative,” but it's the kind of definition that makes a whole group of premodern Christian theologians into pomocons, so I'm inclined to think it's not quite narrow enough. And the chart accompanying the original source seems a little bit, umm, reductive?
07 December 2008
Christian SF.
Aside from a few Gene Wolfe stories, I can't think of much good science fiction (or “speculative fiction,” as the cool uncool kids say) that is about religion in a devotional sense. But I bet I could find more of it, if I just knew where to look.
My mind isn't totally made up about two stories at Third Order Magazine, except to say that both of them seem like they'll be haunting me for a while. Eve Tushnet's “Love” is set in a universe where people have been infected with a disease that becomes contagious only when they do something self-sacrificing. Tushnet has as much insight into different kinds and qualities of love as any living writer I can think of, and so I'm inclined to think of this story as a keeper. Also interesting is “A Believer's Guide to Azagarth,” which imagines interplanetary missionaries to a shapeshifting species that may or may not have souls. It started off medium, got intensely weird, and ended in spiritual revelation.
I guess what's weird to me about these stories, on first read, is that I'm used to SF that is more interested in social dynamics than personal spiritual musings.
Anybody have any thoughts on these stories?
My mind isn't totally made up about two stories at Third Order Magazine, except to say that both of them seem like they'll be haunting me for a while. Eve Tushnet's “Love” is set in a universe where people have been infected with a disease that becomes contagious only when they do something self-sacrificing. Tushnet has as much insight into different kinds and qualities of love as any living writer I can think of, and so I'm inclined to think of this story as a keeper. Also interesting is “A Believer's Guide to Azagarth,” which imagines interplanetary missionaries to a shapeshifting species that may or may not have souls. It started off medium, got intensely weird, and ended in spiritual revelation.
I guess what's weird to me about these stories, on first read, is that I'm used to SF that is more interested in social dynamics than personal spiritual musings.
Anybody have any thoughts on these stories?
05 December 2008
A further note on secularism and politics.
I guess her anti-Palinism wasn't enough: Kathleen Parker is still trying her best to get kicked out of the conservative club:
“How about social conservatives make their arguments without bringing God into it? By all means, let faith inform one's values, but let reason inform one's public arguments.
“That was and remains my point. It isn't so much God causing the GOP problems; it's his fan club.
“How about social conservatives make their arguments without bringing God into it? By all means, let faith inform one's values, but let reason inform one's public arguments.
“That was and remains my point. It isn't so much God causing the GOP problems; it's his fan club.
“The broad perception among centrists, moderates, conservative Democrats, renegade Republicans, etc., is that the GOP is the party of white Christians to the exclusion of others, some of whom might also be social conservatives.
“One can believe this or not. But as the gazillions who have written me to say either that ‘God Is Here To Stay’ or that ‘Conservatives Won't Be Silenced’ ought best to know: Just because you don't believe something doesn't make it untrue.”
So here's the first problem with Parker's argument: it invites mostly the responses of the “gazillions” of people who are angered by it, which convinces her even further that this wing needs to go, so she writes another diatribe, gets more responses, and the calm and collected continue to sit things out. Again, the ugly cycle.
The second problem is that she doesn't distinguish between different types of invocations of religion. This is, for me, the problem that kills her essay.
Here's a reason that it's actually good for Christians to make their religious motivations explicit: the history of Christian theology is open to the world. If I hold that some religious premise P implies some political conclusion Q, then you can hit the books in hopes of finding an argument either that my premise P is theologically wrong or that it does not in fact lead to Q. If you're a secularist against the death penalty, I imagine you could actually convince a fair number of your Christian friends to agree with you if you can invoke the right theologians.
On the other hand, if I know that you do not accept my religious premise P, then it would be a waste of time to try to convince you of the conclusion Q for that reason; in order to persuade you, I should try to find a secular argument that you will accept. This is just how arguing works.
Now, in a climate where people are hostile to my religious premises, I can't just go flinging them about and expect to find wide agreement. In such a situation, I should do what I can to find supplementary arguments that will be persuasive. But “leaving God out of it” and pretending like these supplementary arguments are the only ones that matter to me just makes things unnecessarily complex. In fact, it makes public discourse into a liar's game.
(Via Larison, whose discussion of the matter is worth reading.)
04 December 2008
Get yr Xmas indie.
It's Hard to Find a Friend has another Christmas compilation this year, this time including Anathallo, Karl Blau, and Pattern is Movement. Cheap and for charity: what are you waiting for? Highlight so far: The Prayers and Tears of Arthur Digby Sellers reply to Tom Waits's “Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis” with “Christmas Card to a Hooker in Minneapolis.” Great stuff!
The secular right.
So there's a hot new blog out there called “Secular Right.” Here's their mission statement:
“We believe that conservative principles and policies need not be grounded in a specific set of supernatural claims. Rather, conservatism serves the ends of ‘Human Flourishing,’ what the Greeks termed Eudaimonia. Secular conservatism takes the empirical world for what it is, and accepts that the making of it the best that it can be is only possible through our faculties of reason.”
Daniel Larison's take:
“If the point is to say that non-believers and secular people can be conservatives, too, that seems to be something in no need of demonstration or argument. . . . If the point of the project is to say that modern conservatism has become too religious, or too wedded to Christianity, and therefore a specifically secular conservative resistance to this trend is necessary, I will have to laugh, because here our secular friends will have then embraced a popular myth that does not have much in the way of evidence to support it. If it is simply to argue for inclusion among other conservatives, I haven’t seen many efforts to cast them or keep them out.”
There's some good stuff in the comments of Larison's post, and in the comments section of the SR post that links to it. (There's also some dreck from people who are too convinced that they know the deep essence of what it means to be conservative.) But let's take Larison's guesses about the purpose of the SR blog one at a time:
1.) “Non-believers and secular people can be conservatives too.”
Larison's absolutely right: this should be obvious. Conservatism as a political movement is fundamentally about a set of policy goals. SR contributor Heather Mac Donald, in particular, has made her career by being very, very good at constructing social-science based arguments for conservative policies. Take vouchers, for example. You can want them because you think they'll get kids into Christian schools and thereby save their little souls, but you can also want them because you think the empirical evidence shows that more choice leads to better education. (Or you can go the other way. Doesn't matter to me.)
What about conservatism as a political philosophy? This one's harder, because conservatism isn't a single political philosophy; it's a bunch of variations on a theme—but the theme only exists in its variations! And, yes, I do think you can easily transpose deep skepticism about human potential, disdain for faddish multiculturalism, opposition to big government, original-intent constitutional interpretation, etc., into a non-religious key. It's not even hard to find examples of this. Just look at the SR contributors' pen names. Strike that; look at the contributors themselves. Derbyshire, Mac Donald, and Olson have conservative bona fides I couldn't dream of. (And Razib's on his way to the top.)
2.) “Modern conservatism has become too religious, or too wedded to Christianity, and therefore a specifically secular conservative resistance to this trend is necessary.”
Now we have to look at landscape of American conservatism. John Derbyshire is firmly embedded at National Review, and Heather Mac Donald and Walter Olson seem to get plenty of space in City Journal. So there's plenty of space for secularists at the top, where the policies are put together.
On the other hand, John Derbyshire gives away the game by mentioning Damon Linker's book on “theo-conservatism,” which is basically supposed to be Catholic neo-conservatism à la First Things. So that's the faction that SR is jostling against. It's not the movement as a whole that they want to resist, but rather a particular faction that they want to counter-balance. And if there really is going to be soul-searching in the conservative movement, this faction at least deserves a blog, since most other factions have their own journals and glossy magazines.
3.) “To argue for inclusion among other conservatives.”
Maybe if you're good enough to write for City Journal, nobody's going to kick you out, but I imagine it's kind of tough to be a secular conservative in certain parts of the country (just as it's tough to be a certain kind of religious conservative in others). Think of how much attention the stupid “Holiday Wars” seem to get every year, and how frustrating it would be to be seen as on the same team as Christmas Warriors if you're not even religious. I mean, I'm a Christian, and these controversies drive me crazy when I pay attention to them.
I imagine that SR is going to have a faithful contingent of readers that are just glad to find a place where they can read smart secular conservatives who are not primarily libertarians. So maybe a function of the blog is to provide secular conservatives in less secular regions with a haven. Maybe this isn't a huge group of people, but, hey! It's the Internet! And they certainly get more comments than I do…
EDIT: But are they right? What does WILLIAM think about non-religiosity? Just wait for the big Hitchens report that I want to write after exams are done…
“We believe that conservative principles and policies need not be grounded in a specific set of supernatural claims. Rather, conservatism serves the ends of ‘Human Flourishing,’ what the Greeks termed Eudaimonia. Secular conservatism takes the empirical world for what it is, and accepts that the making of it the best that it can be is only possible through our faculties of reason.”
Daniel Larison's take:
“If the point is to say that non-believers and secular people can be conservatives, too, that seems to be something in no need of demonstration or argument. . . . If the point of the project is to say that modern conservatism has become too religious, or too wedded to Christianity, and therefore a specifically secular conservative resistance to this trend is necessary, I will have to laugh, because here our secular friends will have then embraced a popular myth that does not have much in the way of evidence to support it. If it is simply to argue for inclusion among other conservatives, I haven’t seen many efforts to cast them or keep them out.”
There's some good stuff in the comments of Larison's post, and in the comments section of the SR post that links to it. (There's also some dreck from people who are too convinced that they know the deep essence of what it means to be conservative.) But let's take Larison's guesses about the purpose of the SR blog one at a time:
1.) “Non-believers and secular people can be conservatives too.”
Larison's absolutely right: this should be obvious. Conservatism as a political movement is fundamentally about a set of policy goals. SR contributor Heather Mac Donald, in particular, has made her career by being very, very good at constructing social-science based arguments for conservative policies. Take vouchers, for example. You can want them because you think they'll get kids into Christian schools and thereby save their little souls, but you can also want them because you think the empirical evidence shows that more choice leads to better education. (Or you can go the other way. Doesn't matter to me.)
What about conservatism as a political philosophy? This one's harder, because conservatism isn't a single political philosophy; it's a bunch of variations on a theme—but the theme only exists in its variations! And, yes, I do think you can easily transpose deep skepticism about human potential, disdain for faddish multiculturalism, opposition to big government, original-intent constitutional interpretation, etc., into a non-religious key. It's not even hard to find examples of this. Just look at the SR contributors' pen names. Strike that; look at the contributors themselves. Derbyshire, Mac Donald, and Olson have conservative bona fides I couldn't dream of. (And Razib's on his way to the top.)
2.) “Modern conservatism has become too religious, or too wedded to Christianity, and therefore a specifically secular conservative resistance to this trend is necessary.”
Now we have to look at landscape of American conservatism. John Derbyshire is firmly embedded at National Review, and Heather Mac Donald and Walter Olson seem to get plenty of space in City Journal. So there's plenty of space for secularists at the top, where the policies are put together.
On the other hand, John Derbyshire gives away the game by mentioning Damon Linker's book on “theo-conservatism,” which is basically supposed to be Catholic neo-conservatism à la First Things. So that's the faction that SR is jostling against. It's not the movement as a whole that they want to resist, but rather a particular faction that they want to counter-balance. And if there really is going to be soul-searching in the conservative movement, this faction at least deserves a blog, since most other factions have their own journals and glossy magazines.
3.) “To argue for inclusion among other conservatives.”
Maybe if you're good enough to write for City Journal, nobody's going to kick you out, but I imagine it's kind of tough to be a secular conservative in certain parts of the country (just as it's tough to be a certain kind of religious conservative in others). Think of how much attention the stupid “Holiday Wars” seem to get every year, and how frustrating it would be to be seen as on the same team as Christmas Warriors if you're not even religious. I mean, I'm a Christian, and these controversies drive me crazy when I pay attention to them.
I imagine that SR is going to have a faithful contingent of readers that are just glad to find a place where they can read smart secular conservatives who are not primarily libertarians. So maybe a function of the blog is to provide secular conservatives in less secular regions with a haven. Maybe this isn't a huge group of people, but, hey! It's the Internet! And they certainly get more comments than I do…
EDIT: But are they right? What does WILLIAM think about non-religiosity? Just wait for the big Hitchens report that I want to write after exams are done…
02 December 2008
A dream of life.
I let myself fall into Synecdoche, New York. Maybe nine other people in the theater and nothing to worry about for tomorrow: that's a good combination for getting absorbed. The film is certainly more ambitious than any “big” movie I've seen in a while; at this scale, success and flawlessness are a little bit beside the point. In a month, I'm sure I'll have an opinion; in fact, it will probably be a very strong opinion in one direction or the other. Right now, I'm just enjoying the way that lights and people look so different—and never the same again—after you find your way out of the depths of a film.
(I remember when I saw The Silence Before Bach in Greenwich Village, and while Bach's music was still in my bones I came outside and found that snowflakes were spinning to the Cello Suites.)
(I remember when I saw The Silence Before Bach in Greenwich Village, and while Bach's music was still in my bones I came outside and found that snowflakes were spinning to the Cello Suites.)
Modern conservatism and instability.
A few weeks ago, I mentioned that I was trying to avoid talking about The Future of Conservatism. Scott Payne called me out on it. But now I’ve finally found an article that has what looks like a good angle on the whole thing.
R.R. Reno posted an article called “The Challenge Facing Conservatism” at First Things yesterday, in which he flips around all the labels in a really good way. Modern American conservatism, in Reno’s reading, is anything but a Burkean defense of some big-business status quo. Deregulation has been radically destabilizing. There are opportunities to get fantastically rich; it’s just as easy to lose everything. In foreign policy, too, we’ve seen an idealism that doesn’t hesitate to “destabilize” (or rather, destroy) an entire region in hopes of building something new and better.
The result of this instability is an anxious feeling of vulnerability. Reno argues that Obama won because he addressed this kind of worry: “Obama’s election signals a collective American desire for stability.” Conservatives since Reagan have been enamored of creative destruction, but “freedom to fail” scares even the successful. Thus:
“So, conservatives need to face this singular political fact squarely: The people who have benefited the most from free-market policies were the ones who led the charge against the Republican party. And if my analysis is correct, they did so because of a deeply felt insecurity—an insecurity that we can trace back to our collective experience with something conservatives fought to achieve: a raucously creative, productive, and invariably unpredictable economic system.
[…]
“Voters are reading the ideological situation accurately. And they are pushing back against the instabilities that arise from conservative economic philosophy and foreign policy.”
This explains, I think, what is going on with most Obamacons, and with the so-called centrism that drives the further-left segments of the Democratic Party absolutely crazy. And it implies that the liberal (“classical liberal”) strain of American conservatism has been much more effective than the traditionalist one. John McCain campaigned as an outsider (I refuse to use that M-word here), after all, trying to convince people that he would shake things up in Washington, to break up the old system. Obama’s promises of change, on the other hand, were not fundamentally about any sort of socialist utopia: they were about a turning away from the politics of destabilization.
If deregulation is meant to unleash latent energy in an economy, re-regulation clamps down on it. If the voters start to see the economy as a runaway train, it’s only natural for them to support the person who promises to hit the brakes. In this analogy, conservatives who pushed for further free-market reforms sound like they’re arguing that a runaway train just gets you to your destination faster. (Unless it crashes…)
I hope it’s clear that I see the problem of stability and dynamism as one of balance, of figuring out where to set limits. And here Reno asserts that it is most important for conservatism to set its sights on creating cultural stability through “a convincing public philosophy of cultural authority.” (I’m surprised that James Poulos hasn’t commented on this part yet.) One could see this as just another attempt to get some attention for the social conservative agenda, but I’m inclined to take it as a philosophical point. If we don’t attend to our culture, we won’t be able to handle instability that would be otherwise salutary. And I don’t mean attending to culture through government; I mean working through cultural institutions.
That’s the part of conservatism I’m most interested in. So many of my most talented peers are confused, rootless, and often depressed. Extra instability doesn’t help: it just makes the future look bleaker. I hate to have to come back to MacIntyre again, but Stanley Hauerwas draws on him to make this point in his inimitable (i.e. hyperbolic) style:
“Alasdair MacIntyre, a philosopher, has suggested that one of the worst things our society does to the young is to tell them they ought to be happy. MacIntyre thinks if you are happy, particularly when you are young, you are probably deeply self-deceived. Your appropriate stance is to be miserable. What a terrible time to be young. Shorn of any clear account for what it means to grow up, you are forced to make up your own lives. But you know that any life you make up is not a life you will want to live.”
This is what is at stake in questions of cultural authority. And I’m by no means convinced that conservatives have the best side of the argument. But I think conservatives have to recognize that in the absence of a public philosophy of cultural authority, an obsession with tax cuts and aggressive foreign policy is going to keep losing. The trick is that cultural authority can’t be primarily created through politics.
I have to add: Reno only talks about what instability does to economic winners. I hope that he writes about the other side sometime soon. Even if you can make the argument that the material standard of living has been rising, the less tangible consequences of economic inequality can be crushing.
So that's my “The Future of Conservatism” post. You can see why I was so reluctant to write it…
R.R. Reno posted an article called “The Challenge Facing Conservatism” at First Things yesterday, in which he flips around all the labels in a really good way. Modern American conservatism, in Reno’s reading, is anything but a Burkean defense of some big-business status quo. Deregulation has been radically destabilizing. There are opportunities to get fantastically rich; it’s just as easy to lose everything. In foreign policy, too, we’ve seen an idealism that doesn’t hesitate to “destabilize” (or rather, destroy) an entire region in hopes of building something new and better.
The result of this instability is an anxious feeling of vulnerability. Reno argues that Obama won because he addressed this kind of worry: “Obama’s election signals a collective American desire for stability.” Conservatives since Reagan have been enamored of creative destruction, but “freedom to fail” scares even the successful. Thus:
“So, conservatives need to face this singular political fact squarely: The people who have benefited the most from free-market policies were the ones who led the charge against the Republican party. And if my analysis is correct, they did so because of a deeply felt insecurity—an insecurity that we can trace back to our collective experience with something conservatives fought to achieve: a raucously creative, productive, and invariably unpredictable economic system.
[…]
“Voters are reading the ideological situation accurately. And they are pushing back against the instabilities that arise from conservative economic philosophy and foreign policy.”
This explains, I think, what is going on with most Obamacons, and with the so-called centrism that drives the further-left segments of the Democratic Party absolutely crazy. And it implies that the liberal (“classical liberal”) strain of American conservatism has been much more effective than the traditionalist one. John McCain campaigned as an outsider (I refuse to use that M-word here), after all, trying to convince people that he would shake things up in Washington, to break up the old system. Obama’s promises of change, on the other hand, were not fundamentally about any sort of socialist utopia: they were about a turning away from the politics of destabilization.
If deregulation is meant to unleash latent energy in an economy, re-regulation clamps down on it. If the voters start to see the economy as a runaway train, it’s only natural for them to support the person who promises to hit the brakes. In this analogy, conservatives who pushed for further free-market reforms sound like they’re arguing that a runaway train just gets you to your destination faster. (Unless it crashes…)
I hope it’s clear that I see the problem of stability and dynamism as one of balance, of figuring out where to set limits. And here Reno asserts that it is most important for conservatism to set its sights on creating cultural stability through “a convincing public philosophy of cultural authority.” (I’m surprised that James Poulos hasn’t commented on this part yet.) One could see this as just another attempt to get some attention for the social conservative agenda, but I’m inclined to take it as a philosophical point. If we don’t attend to our culture, we won’t be able to handle instability that would be otherwise salutary. And I don’t mean attending to culture through government; I mean working through cultural institutions.
That’s the part of conservatism I’m most interested in. So many of my most talented peers are confused, rootless, and often depressed. Extra instability doesn’t help: it just makes the future look bleaker. I hate to have to come back to MacIntyre again, but Stanley Hauerwas draws on him to make this point in his inimitable (i.e. hyperbolic) style:
“Alasdair MacIntyre, a philosopher, has suggested that one of the worst things our society does to the young is to tell them they ought to be happy. MacIntyre thinks if you are happy, particularly when you are young, you are probably deeply self-deceived. Your appropriate stance is to be miserable. What a terrible time to be young. Shorn of any clear account for what it means to grow up, you are forced to make up your own lives. But you know that any life you make up is not a life you will want to live.”
This is what is at stake in questions of cultural authority. And I’m by no means convinced that conservatives have the best side of the argument. But I think conservatives have to recognize that in the absence of a public philosophy of cultural authority, an obsession with tax cuts and aggressive foreign policy is going to keep losing. The trick is that cultural authority can’t be primarily created through politics.
I have to add: Reno only talks about what instability does to economic winners. I hope that he writes about the other side sometime soon. Even if you can make the argument that the material standard of living has been rising, the less tangible consequences of economic inequality can be crushing.
So that's my “The Future of Conservatism” post. You can see why I was so reluctant to write it…
30 November 2008
Market value and deconstruction.
Probably should have caught this earlier, but it was buried in the stacks. From the Nov. 10 New Yorker, John Lanchester writes:
“If the invention of derivatives was the financial world’s modernist dawn, the current crisis is unsettlingly like the birth of postmodernism. For anyone who studied literature in college in the past few decades, there is a weird familiarity about the current crisis: value, in the realm of finance capital, evokes the elusive nature of meaning in deconstructionism. According to Jacques Derrida, the doyen of the school, meaning can never be precisely located; instead, it is always ‘deferred,’ moved elsewhere, located in other meanings, which refer and defer to other meanings—a snake permanently and necessarily eating its own tail. This process is fluid and constant, but at moments the perpetual process of deferral stalls and collapses in on itself. Derrida called this moment an ‘aporia,’ from a Greek term meaning ‘impasse.’ There is something both amusing and appalling about seeing his theories acted out in the world markets to such cataclysmic effect. Anyone invited to attend a meeting of the G-8 financial ministers would be well advised not to draw their attention to this.”
You know, not too long ago I might have scoffed at anyone who tried seriously to compare Warren Buffet and Jacques Derrida. In light of current events, it seems to make sense.
(Is the gold standard the transcendent signifier?)
“If the invention of derivatives was the financial world’s modernist dawn, the current crisis is unsettlingly like the birth of postmodernism. For anyone who studied literature in college in the past few decades, there is a weird familiarity about the current crisis: value, in the realm of finance capital, evokes the elusive nature of meaning in deconstructionism. According to Jacques Derrida, the doyen of the school, meaning can never be precisely located; instead, it is always ‘deferred,’ moved elsewhere, located in other meanings, which refer and defer to other meanings—a snake permanently and necessarily eating its own tail. This process is fluid and constant, but at moments the perpetual process of deferral stalls and collapses in on itself. Derrida called this moment an ‘aporia,’ from a Greek term meaning ‘impasse.’ There is something both amusing and appalling about seeing his theories acted out in the world markets to such cataclysmic effect. Anyone invited to attend a meeting of the G-8 financial ministers would be well advised not to draw their attention to this.”
You know, not too long ago I might have scoffed at anyone who tried seriously to compare Warren Buffet and Jacques Derrida. In light of current events, it seems to make sense.
(Is the gold standard the transcendent signifier?)
25 November 2008
NC Libertarians and the straight ticket.
Information from NC political columnist Jack Betts's blog:
Fewer than 3,700 of North Carolina's voters are registered with the Libertarian Party. But there were about 19,000 straight Libertarian ticket voters. I honestly don't remember seeing that option. (Wouldn't have taken it if I had.)
This compares to 1,283,486 straight Democratic tickets and 881,856 straight Republican tickets. So it's not a lot, but it's something: straight tickets far in excess of party membership.
I'm going to try to keep an eye on the progress of libertarians in North Carolina; if they make a real break with the Republicans I'm sure we'll start to see public discussion along the liberty/security axis rather than we do now. Left-libertarian alliance and all that.
Fewer than 3,700 of North Carolina's voters are registered with the Libertarian Party. But there were about 19,000 straight Libertarian ticket voters. I honestly don't remember seeing that option. (Wouldn't have taken it if I had.)
This compares to 1,283,486 straight Democratic tickets and 881,856 straight Republican tickets. So it's not a lot, but it's something: straight tickets far in excess of party membership.
I'm going to try to keep an eye on the progress of libertarians in North Carolina; if they make a real break with the Republicans I'm sure we'll start to see public discussion along the liberty/security axis rather than we do now. Left-libertarian alliance and all that.
23 November 2008
I know what I want for Christmas; too bad it's not going to happen.
Merge Records is doing something amazing for their 20th anniversary, and I just wish it cost something less than $200.
It's called SCORE. If you send Merge the money, they'll send you sweet stuff through all of 2009, totaling up to:
I'm such a shill when I get excited about things.
It's called SCORE. If you send Merge the money, they'll send you sweet stuff through all of 2009, totaling up to:
- 14 compilation CDs, put together by persons of varying (sub)cultural prominence, including David Byrne, Amy Poehler, and Jonathan Lethem.
- A CD of remixes of Merge songs.
- A CD of covers of Merge songs from musicians of varying (sub)cultural prominence, including Broken Social Scene, Bill Callahan, and The Mountain Goats.
- A book of Merge's CD cover art.
- A CD from Scharpling & Wurster that is sure to be laff-inducing.
- A box for everything.
- Possibly some other stuff.
I'm such a shill when I get excited about things.
Clark Kent and the decline of the print media.
Ever wondered how the Daily Planet is likely to be effected by changes in the news industry? I09 columnist Jive Tarkin (AKA Moff, who does his own good stuff at Another D—ed Blog) has what you're looking for:
Yes, newspapers are dying, and even if flying backwards around the earth to reverse time really worked, it would only delay the inevitable: The Internet would just get invented again, revenue from classified ads would drop sharply, Franklin Stern would be forced to conclude that pay-to-view was a flawed model and abandon the PlanetSelect program, and where would that leave Metropolis’s favorite couple?
The long and short of it: Clark Kent, professional blogger.
Yes, newspapers are dying, and even if flying backwards around the earth to reverse time really worked, it would only delay the inevitable: The Internet would just get invented again, revenue from classified ads would drop sharply, Franklin Stern would be forced to conclude that pay-to-view was a flawed model and abandon the PlanetSelect program, and where would that leave Metropolis’s favorite couple?
The long and short of it: Clark Kent, professional blogger.
22 November 2008
First principles: the easy way out.
While bouncing around a site that linked to an entry on Patrick Deneen's blog, I found a well-written post in which the author explains how he believes it is possible to be a Christian and to be “deeply suspicious of arguments from first principles.” The title is Why Jesus of Nazareth. It's been up for a while and there's no comments, so I'm gong to post a long excerpt in hopes of getting people to read the original post.
“[L]anguage is insufficient to adequately describe the world -- it is a shorthand -- and therefore that any attempt to reason from categorical propositions will necessarily not account for those distinctions language fails to make. Language is of course the best tool that we have, and it is a damn good tool, but it is important not to confuse the description with the object described.
“I draw analogy in the law. Roughly, Congress passes a statute saying ‘don't do X.’ The statute may be plain on its face. Nevertheless, there will always be marginal cases in which we are unsure whether some activity is X or not, even when we have all the facts. To make matters worse, we may not ever have all the facts.
“It seems to me that there are two possible responses to this problem: we can demand that Congress, when it drafts statutes, write an exhaustive description of X in all its dimensions, contexts, and durations. Or, we can accept that X is a shorthand, and institute a body of persons to determine whether a particular act is X in a particular case, whenever it seems particularly pressing to make that determination.
“I contend that the first possibility is not only wasteful of time and resources, but indeed impossible at the outset. There can never be a precise, exhaustive, self-interpreting proposition or set of propositions that describes the world. Not even purely formal systems, which need refer only to themselves, can be both exhaustive and self-interpreting. Language is, as I said at the outset, all shorthand. There will always be marginal cases.
“Thus, the prudent course is to apply pragmatic judgment to each case under consideration. This does not of course mean that we disregard what information we may have about previous applications of pragmatic judgment. It merely means that we bear the burden of making these
determinations. Very often, we will find that we are not dealing with a marginal case, but that does not allow us to abdicate our responsibility to make that determination.
“Very often also, previous applications of pragmatic judgment will guide our answers for the wiser. Nevertheless, these previous applications, hallowed by time and usage though they may be, are still contingent: there is no reason to believe that they are always true in all times and places. The presumption that they are true is ultimately rebuttable. It seems to me that reliance on first principles takes the easy way out by allowing us to accept the description without examining the thing described. This will often lead to grave error.”
There second half of the post is about how foundationalism does most of the work of nihilism, and why a sort of on-balance human flourishing argument is preferable to arguments from first principles.
One thing I have always liked about Kierkegaard is his emphasis that there are truths we can only know relationally, the way we know a person. For this reason, a Christian can claim to know the Truth without claiming to have the Truth in the sense of possession. That's why the Gospel is rhetorical proclamation, not dialectical proof. Along these lines, I really like the conclusion of the post:
“[M]y attraction to Christianity, if attraction is the right word, is not something that seems to me to conflict with the epistemological method I describe above. It does not seem to me that we may argue and reason our way to the foot of the Cross; indeed, all such arguments are in bad taste when confronted with suffering Savior, or the human suffering He came to relieve.
“In other words, I am not a Christian because Christian doctrine presents an unproblematic whole-cloth description of the world I inhabit, but for reasons much more autobiographical and, I daresay, more human. I am a Christian because I was born, I suffer, and I will die, and the God who Himself was born, suffered, and died speaks to me in a way that I cannot resist.”
But does this give away too much?
“[L]anguage is insufficient to adequately describe the world -- it is a shorthand -- and therefore that any attempt to reason from categorical propositions will necessarily not account for those distinctions language fails to make. Language is of course the best tool that we have, and it is a damn good tool, but it is important not to confuse the description with the object described.
“I draw analogy in the law. Roughly, Congress passes a statute saying ‘don't do X.’ The statute may be plain on its face. Nevertheless, there will always be marginal cases in which we are unsure whether some activity is X or not, even when we have all the facts. To make matters worse, we may not ever have all the facts.
“It seems to me that there are two possible responses to this problem: we can demand that Congress, when it drafts statutes, write an exhaustive description of X in all its dimensions, contexts, and durations. Or, we can accept that X is a shorthand, and institute a body of persons to determine whether a particular act is X in a particular case, whenever it seems particularly pressing to make that determination.
“I contend that the first possibility is not only wasteful of time and resources, but indeed impossible at the outset. There can never be a precise, exhaustive, self-interpreting proposition or set of propositions that describes the world. Not even purely formal systems, which need refer only to themselves, can be both exhaustive and self-interpreting. Language is, as I said at the outset, all shorthand. There will always be marginal cases.
“Thus, the prudent course is to apply pragmatic judgment to each case under consideration. This does not of course mean that we disregard what information we may have about previous applications of pragmatic judgment. It merely means that we bear the burden of making these
determinations. Very often, we will find that we are not dealing with a marginal case, but that does not allow us to abdicate our responsibility to make that determination.
“Very often also, previous applications of pragmatic judgment will guide our answers for the wiser. Nevertheless, these previous applications, hallowed by time and usage though they may be, are still contingent: there is no reason to believe that they are always true in all times and places. The presumption that they are true is ultimately rebuttable. It seems to me that reliance on first principles takes the easy way out by allowing us to accept the description without examining the thing described. This will often lead to grave error.”
There second half of the post is about how foundationalism does most of the work of nihilism, and why a sort of on-balance human flourishing argument is preferable to arguments from first principles.
One thing I have always liked about Kierkegaard is his emphasis that there are truths we can only know relationally, the way we know a person. For this reason, a Christian can claim to know the Truth without claiming to have the Truth in the sense of possession. That's why the Gospel is rhetorical proclamation, not dialectical proof. Along these lines, I really like the conclusion of the post:
“[M]y attraction to Christianity, if attraction is the right word, is not something that seems to me to conflict with the epistemological method I describe above. It does not seem to me that we may argue and reason our way to the foot of the Cross; indeed, all such arguments are in bad taste when confronted with suffering Savior, or the human suffering He came to relieve.
“In other words, I am not a Christian because Christian doctrine presents an unproblematic whole-cloth description of the world I inhabit, but for reasons much more autobiographical and, I daresay, more human. I am a Christian because I was born, I suffer, and I will die, and the God who Himself was born, suffered, and died speaks to me in a way that I cannot resist.”
But does this give away too much?
21 November 2008
Sort of a genius after all.
“Certainly we'll probably invite criticism for doing this too, but at least this was fun.”
-Sarah Palin, being interviewed while a turkeys are being slaughtered off behind her right shoulder
You have to admit that Sarah Palin has turned out to be some kind of culture-war J.E.B. Stuart or George Patton or something.
With this weird turkey incident, her detractors predictably lash out at her apparent total lack of awareness or any sense of irony, and her implicit endorsement of slaughterhouses. Her defenders, who know that food has to come from somewhere, will rightly sense that this second criticism is ridiculous and hypocritical coming from anyone who is not a strict vegetarian.
But just look at how the shot is framed. Fewer people will point out that Governor Palin must know exactly what she is doing.
-Sarah Palin, being interviewed while a turkeys are being slaughtered off behind her right shoulder
You have to admit that Sarah Palin has turned out to be some kind of culture-war J.E.B. Stuart or George Patton or something.
With this weird turkey incident, her detractors predictably lash out at her apparent total lack of awareness or any sense of irony, and her implicit endorsement of slaughterhouses. Her defenders, who know that food has to come from somewhere, will rightly sense that this second criticism is ridiculous and hypocritical coming from anyone who is not a strict vegetarian.
But just look at how the shot is framed. Fewer people will point out that Governor Palin must know exactly what she is doing.
Fact, interpretation, and talk radio.
I generally ignore talk-radio/FOX News conservatives, but for some reason I'm fascinated by the John Ziegler / Zogby poll. Ziegler is a former AM radio personality in the Limbaugh mold who wanted “to try and identify which news stories broke through the clutter and reached the average Obama voter.”
The relevant links:
If I put forward an assertion as a fact, I am assuming that a generalized conversation partner will accept it and its epistemological baggage into the conversation, or that if it is challenged I can easily support it with resources that will be accepted by my conversation partners. When I put forward an assertion as an interpretation is one, I anticipate resistance, or realize that I don't have the resources for a conclusive proof at hand but want to persuade anyway.
My categorization of a particular assertion can change in the course of a conversation. When challenged, I may find that something I took to be a fact does not hold up in other valid epistemological frameworks, and perhaps doesn't really hold up in my own. (I suppose the problem could be a refusal to admit that other valid epistemological frameworks even exist, but that admission seems pretty crucial to democracy, pluralism, and basic human decency.) On the other hand, in the course of attempting to persuade someone of an interpretation, I may stumble upon evidence that moves my guess into the realm of fact, or simply discover that my interpretation is so widely shared that it can be taken for granted.
What is important here is a certain flexibility in classification. Needless to say, this sort of flexibility would spell doom for Ziegler-style talk-radio pseudo-populism.
¹INTERROBANG.
The relevant links:
- HowObamaGotElected.com, the site Ziegler created to promote the results.
- Nate Silver's original attack on Ziegler's method, in which he overstates the case by calling Ziegler's survey a “push poll.”
- The transcript of Nate Silver's interview with Ziegler, in which Ziegler flips out as Silver asks him simple questions for context. Silver created the transcript, so it's possible that he's deliberately making himself look calmer than he was, but given the persona that each man tries to project—Ziegler the outraged populast, Silver the levelheaded numbers guy—this doesn't seem very likely.
- The Wall Street Journal's Numbers Guy blog's critique of Ziegler's questions. (Verdict: Ziegler's interpretation of his results is by no means unassailable.)
- Ziegler's aggressive response to the challenges, in which he maintains that “[t]here was ABSOLUTELY ZERO DOUBT as to who the answer any of the questions [sic].”
- Nate Silver's reflections on his encounter with Ziegler, which end in media criticism: “Invariably, the times when Ziegler became really, really angry with me during the interview was when I was not permitting him to be stimulating, but instead asking him specific, banal questions that required specific, banal answers. Those questions would have made for terrible radio! And Ziegler had no idea how to answer them.”
- The 2005 David Foster Wallace article¹, from which Silver quotes extensively, and which is the key to the whole brouhaha, and which, despite its length, is well worth reading.
If I put forward an assertion as a fact, I am assuming that a generalized conversation partner will accept it and its epistemological baggage into the conversation, or that if it is challenged I can easily support it with resources that will be accepted by my conversation partners. When I put forward an assertion as an interpretation is one, I anticipate resistance, or realize that I don't have the resources for a conclusive proof at hand but want to persuade anyway.
My categorization of a particular assertion can change in the course of a conversation. When challenged, I may find that something I took to be a fact does not hold up in other valid epistemological frameworks, and perhaps doesn't really hold up in my own. (I suppose the problem could be a refusal to admit that other valid epistemological frameworks even exist, but that admission seems pretty crucial to democracy, pluralism, and basic human decency.) On the other hand, in the course of attempting to persuade someone of an interpretation, I may stumble upon evidence that moves my guess into the realm of fact, or simply discover that my interpretation is so widely shared that it can be taken for granted.
What is important here is a certain flexibility in classification. Needless to say, this sort of flexibility would spell doom for Ziegler-style talk-radio pseudo-populism.
¹INTERROBANG.
Interrobang. (‽)
Chasing down something that John Hodgman once said somewhere, I finally Wikipedia'd the interrobang. It looks like this:
‽
Although I think Hodgman realized that the symbol doesn't take up enough space to get across the sense of astonished wonder conveyed by the a string of ?'s and !'s, or by the word “interrobang” all by itself in a footnote, in capital letters.
P.S. I think Hodgman did pick this use of the interrobang from David Foster Wallace, who used the footnoted “?!” in several essays.
‽
Although I think Hodgman realized that the symbol doesn't take up enough space to get across the sense of astonished wonder conveyed by the a string of ?'s and !'s, or by the word “interrobang” all by itself in a footnote, in capital letters.
P.S. I think Hodgman did pick this use of the interrobang from David Foster Wallace, who used the footnoted “?!” in several essays.
Tonight: The Physics of Meaning / Butterflies.
Do I have any Triangle* readers? The Physics of Meaning are playing at Duke Coffeehouse, along with Butterflies. This will be good music.
(As far as I'm concerned, the goodness of music in North Carolina is sufficient proof that there lives the dearest freshness deep down things. On the other hand, the difficulty that TPoM has had in getting someone to release their album proves that we labor under the dominion of principalities and powers.)
Here's a Physics of Meaning video:
*If you're not “in the know,” I should explain that the vertices of said triangle are Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill.
(As far as I'm concerned, the goodness of music in North Carolina is sufficient proof that there lives the dearest freshness deep down things. On the other hand, the difficulty that TPoM has had in getting someone to release their album proves that we labor under the dominion of principalities and powers.)
Here's a Physics of Meaning video:
*If you're not “in the know,” I should explain that the vertices of said triangle are Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill.
20 November 2008
Carter Wrenn makes sense again.
Part of me feels like I should know better than to keep linking to Carter Wrenn, associated as he is with Jesse Helms, but I can't help it if he keeps making good, straightforward points. Here he is on conservative infighting:
“But the phrase that keeps running through my mind is ‘two wars and an economic meltdown’ – as in seven years after 9/11 we’re still fighting two wars and how did we miss avoiding an economic train wreck that has left everyone from Wachovia to General Motors gasping for air? I’d like to meet the political genius who’s clever enough to explain that away and win the subsequent election.
“Here’s the debate Republicans need to have: How was it possible for the Republican Party to embrace policies that led to two unending wars and an economic meltdown? Once we have figured that out then maybe we can risk worrying about politics.”
I've been trying to avoid this future-of-conservatism stuff for two reasons. First, I have exactly zero influence on the conservative movement, and my allegiance to it is highly contingent. Second, the biggest problem was with the actual governance from the Bush administration and Congress when it was Republican. It was practice, not theory, that ruined everything.
Also, Wrenn wrote on N.C. Governor-elect Perdue's plan to create an endowment for future campaigns that pledge to forego negative campaigning. He calls it an “incumbent protection scheme,” and I'm inclined to agree. (Although I wondered for a second whether Wrenn, who pioneered negative television ads in North Carolina in the campaigns he managed, was seeking to protect his legacy… No, he's right: as annoying as TV ads can be, they're part of the process.)
EDIT: You know what? Allegiance is definitely the wrong word. Affiliation, perhaps?
EDIT 2: Scott from Politics of Scrabble points out that my paragraph implies that affiliation and influence are prerequisites for commentary. He's right, and I didn't mean to say this. I only meant that a lack of affiliation and influence makes commentary entirely optional.
“But the phrase that keeps running through my mind is ‘two wars and an economic meltdown’ – as in seven years after 9/11 we’re still fighting two wars and how did we miss avoiding an economic train wreck that has left everyone from Wachovia to General Motors gasping for air? I’d like to meet the political genius who’s clever enough to explain that away and win the subsequent election.
“Here’s the debate Republicans need to have: How was it possible for the Republican Party to embrace policies that led to two unending wars and an economic meltdown? Once we have figured that out then maybe we can risk worrying about politics.”
I've been trying to avoid this future-of-conservatism stuff for two reasons. First, I have exactly zero influence on the conservative movement, and my allegiance to it is highly contingent. Second, the biggest problem was with the actual governance from the Bush administration and Congress when it was Republican. It was practice, not theory, that ruined everything.
Also, Wrenn wrote on N.C. Governor-elect Perdue's plan to create an endowment for future campaigns that pledge to forego negative campaigning. He calls it an “incumbent protection scheme,” and I'm inclined to agree. (Although I wondered for a second whether Wrenn, who pioneered negative television ads in North Carolina in the campaigns he managed, was seeking to protect his legacy… No, he's right: as annoying as TV ads can be, they're part of the process.)
EDIT: You know what? Allegiance is definitely the wrong word. Affiliation, perhaps?
EDIT 2: Scott from Politics of Scrabble points out that my paragraph implies that affiliation and influence are prerequisites for commentary. He's right, and I didn't mean to say this. I only meant that a lack of affiliation and influence makes commentary entirely optional.
Three interpretations of a Rittelmeyer sentence.
“Camille Paglia’s public crucifixion at the hands of liberal feminists is legendary.”
-Helen Rittelmeyer, in “Jezebels with a Cause”
INTERPRETATION 1: To say that liberal feminists harshly criticized Paglia is an understatement.
INTERPRETATION 2: A group of liberal feminists actually kidnapped Paglia and crucified her out on the quad, and though Paglia somehow survived, it's still a well-known event.
INTERPRETATION 3: Many people believe that a group of liberal feminists actually crucified Paglia, but this is just another wild apocryphal story out of academia.
(I've got absolutely no idea what to do with the article's thesis. As someone who ignores the hook-up culture, I guess I can afford to leave it alone.)
-Helen Rittelmeyer, in “Jezebels with a Cause”
INTERPRETATION 1: To say that liberal feminists harshly criticized Paglia is an understatement.
INTERPRETATION 2: A group of liberal feminists actually kidnapped Paglia and crucified her out on the quad, and though Paglia somehow survived, it's still a well-known event.
INTERPRETATION 3: Many people believe that a group of liberal feminists actually crucified Paglia, but this is just another wild apocryphal story out of academia.
(I've got absolutely no idea what to do with the article's thesis. As someone who ignores the hook-up culture, I guess I can afford to leave it alone.)
I'll drink to that.
“You may not know it, but Brooklyn used to be the beer-brewing capital of North America. Williamsburg alone was home to some thirty-four breweries, including the Schaefer Brewing Company, the Brooklyn Brewery, Old Milwaukee of Brooklyn, and Hipster Brothers Brewing ‘Company’—the first sarcastic-style beer to be brewed in the United States (thought it was preceded by Canada's ‘Meta-Lager’).”
-John Hodgman, in More Information than You Require
-John Hodgman, in More Information than You Require
19 November 2008
“Obama and orthodoxy,” summed up.
My last post was a little bit meandering. Bullet points:
- There are two common objections to defining Christian orthodoxy. First, it is said that any definition includes doctrines that the early Christians didn't hold. Second, it is said that most Christians in the pews don't know enough doctrine to agree with everything in, say, the Nicene Creed.
- I think you can get around both of these objections pretty easily by tying orthodoxy to institutions. Then it's easy to argue that what is considered orthodox can change or develop over time, and that people can belong to an orthodox denomination without understand all its doctrine. “Small-o orthodox” ends up being a perfectly good descriptive term.
- On the other hand, this approach does separate the question of orthodoxy from the question of Real Christianity. Alan Jacobs does a great job explaining why the question of “how much fit there is between someone’s profession of faith and the state of his heart and mind is a mug’s game.”
- But if there were an easy way to figure out who is a Real Christian and who is not, it wouldn't be at all surprising to find that many who proclaim orthodoxy are out, and many who don't are in. (It occurs to me that if you are a Roman Catholic, a Real Christian might just be an RC. Get it?)
17 November 2008
Obama and orthodoxy.
Joe Carter wrote “Obama is not a orthodox Christian.” Freddie wrote “what, exactly, constitutes Christian faith is immensely complicated and incredibly divisive.” And then Joe Carter writes “on the essential issues of the faith we have always been largely in agreement.”
There's more to it, of course, but the interesting part for me is the range of comments on each post about how to use the label “Christian.” If someone says he is a Christian, what would make it possible for me to say that he is not?
It's important to note that Joe Carter is talking about small-o orthodox (from the Greek for “right opinion”) Christianity. Because orthodoxy has to do with doctrine, it must be related to the history of religious institutions. I'm sort of amazed that so many of the commenters on all these posts want to make individual understanding of or adherence to particular doctrines the standard for orthodoxy. The average Christian doesn't understand the Nicene Creed, they say, so how could it be the standard?
Christian doctrine didn't just land all at once. It took centuries for it to develop even a doctrine of the Trinity, and it's still in process now. This process takes place in the Church, which is to say within the various churches and denominations that make up the church. Joe Carter is right to say that most Christians in the world are affiliated with denominations that affirm the Nicene Creed. On the rosters, there are 1.1 billion Roman Catholics, 225 million Eastern Orthodox, 77 million Anglicans, and millions more in other Protestant denominations.
With denominations that don't regularly recite the creed—such as Southern Baptists, apparently—there is a history to the objection. With certain ancient denominations, some of these objections date back to the times of the councils, which is kind of wild. But most importantly, there is an understanding on the part of the larger denominations that there is a theological validity to the argument for rejecting some part of the creed. Many various dissenting groups are part of the conversation.
The same understanding doesn't really exist for Mormons or Jehovah's Witnesses. If I had to venture a guess, I would say that this because these movements didn't emerge from the theological arguments of the time. (I know almost nothing about Jehovah's Witnesses; for some interesting information on the theology of Mormonism, see the recent exchange on that subject in First Things.)
To put it simply, your denomination's relationship to the Nicene Creed will tell you a great deal about the sense in which you can call yourself an orthodox Christian. If your denomination rejects it entirely, then you probably can't claim orthodoxy. This is not necessarily a matter of eternal salvation, just a matter of the sensible application of a label. Take Abraham Lincoln, for example. He attended church, but he never joined one as an adult. So I think it's safe to say that there's not much of a positive case for calling him an orthodox Christian. Am I “casting him out”? Not at all. I really have no way of knowing whether or not Lincoln was “actually a Christian,” and it's probably fruitless to try and pin it down.
Unfortunately, and as usual, there is grey area. One can be a member of an orthodox denomination and yet be publically heterodox in one's beliefs, or one can adhere to a different theological tradition than that of one's church.
Here I must admit that I don't have much to say about President-Elect Obama's orthodoxy, and that my title was a bit of a gimmick. His fuzzy answers in the 2004 interview sound like those of a politician who is going to run as a more-or-less secular pluralist, and I don't really blame him for them. It's obvious that Obama identifies with 20th-century mainline Protestantism à la the Niehbur brothers. Anyone who knows the history of the mainlines in the 20th century knows that some of their leaders have openly and self-consciously challenged Christian orthodoxy, and that other leaders have defended it. And among the defenders, there are various understandings of what orthodoxy entails. It would take a thorough reading of Jeremiah Wright's sermons to make any sort of judgment about the range that Obama's former church occupies on the spectrum. (And not just the excerpts—the small amount of time I spent looking into this led me to believe that the average sermon at Trinity UCC was not at all what Fox News would have you think!)
But, in conclusion, just because orthodoxy is a complicated doesn't mean we can't have rational discussions about the application of the term.
(Cross-posted at Upturned Earth.)
There's more to it, of course, but the interesting part for me is the range of comments on each post about how to use the label “Christian.” If someone says he is a Christian, what would make it possible for me to say that he is not?
It's important to note that Joe Carter is talking about small-o orthodox (from the Greek for “right opinion”) Christianity. Because orthodoxy has to do with doctrine, it must be related to the history of religious institutions. I'm sort of amazed that so many of the commenters on all these posts want to make individual understanding of or adherence to particular doctrines the standard for orthodoxy. The average Christian doesn't understand the Nicene Creed, they say, so how could it be the standard?
Christian doctrine didn't just land all at once. It took centuries for it to develop even a doctrine of the Trinity, and it's still in process now. This process takes place in the Church, which is to say within the various churches and denominations that make up the church. Joe Carter is right to say that most Christians in the world are affiliated with denominations that affirm the Nicene Creed. On the rosters, there are 1.1 billion Roman Catholics, 225 million Eastern Orthodox, 77 million Anglicans, and millions more in other Protestant denominations.
With denominations that don't regularly recite the creed—such as Southern Baptists, apparently—there is a history to the objection. With certain ancient denominations, some of these objections date back to the times of the councils, which is kind of wild. But most importantly, there is an understanding on the part of the larger denominations that there is a theological validity to the argument for rejecting some part of the creed. Many various dissenting groups are part of the conversation.
The same understanding doesn't really exist for Mormons or Jehovah's Witnesses. If I had to venture a guess, I would say that this because these movements didn't emerge from the theological arguments of the time. (I know almost nothing about Jehovah's Witnesses; for some interesting information on the theology of Mormonism, see the recent exchange on that subject in First Things.)
To put it simply, your denomination's relationship to the Nicene Creed will tell you a great deal about the sense in which you can call yourself an orthodox Christian. If your denomination rejects it entirely, then you probably can't claim orthodoxy. This is not necessarily a matter of eternal salvation, just a matter of the sensible application of a label. Take Abraham Lincoln, for example. He attended church, but he never joined one as an adult. So I think it's safe to say that there's not much of a positive case for calling him an orthodox Christian. Am I “casting him out”? Not at all. I really have no way of knowing whether or not Lincoln was “actually a Christian,” and it's probably fruitless to try and pin it down.
Unfortunately, and as usual, there is grey area. One can be a member of an orthodox denomination and yet be publically heterodox in one's beliefs, or one can adhere to a different theological tradition than that of one's church.
Here I must admit that I don't have much to say about President-Elect Obama's orthodoxy, and that my title was a bit of a gimmick. His fuzzy answers in the 2004 interview sound like those of a politician who is going to run as a more-or-less secular pluralist, and I don't really blame him for them. It's obvious that Obama identifies with 20th-century mainline Protestantism à la the Niehbur brothers. Anyone who knows the history of the mainlines in the 20th century knows that some of their leaders have openly and self-consciously challenged Christian orthodoxy, and that other leaders have defended it. And among the defenders, there are various understandings of what orthodoxy entails. It would take a thorough reading of Jeremiah Wright's sermons to make any sort of judgment about the range that Obama's former church occupies on the spectrum. (And not just the excerpts—the small amount of time I spent looking into this led me to believe that the average sermon at Trinity UCC was not at all what Fox News would have you think!)
But, in conclusion, just because orthodoxy is a complicated doesn't mean we can't have rational discussions about the application of the term.
(Cross-posted at Upturned Earth.)
16 November 2008
The state on the sideline.
I've been enjoying the stuff that's coming up on Cato Unbound on libertarianism and corporatism. Roderick long's lead article argues:
“In a free market, firms would be smaller and less hierarchical, more local and more numerous (and many would probably be employee-owned); prices would be lower and wages higher; and corporate power would be in shambles. Small wonder that big business, despite often paying lip service to free market ideals, tends to systematically oppose them in practice.”
Matt Yglesias has what seems to me to be one correct response:
“Thinkers affiliated with the libertarian movement have had many smart things to say on individual topics, but the overall concept of a state apparatus that simply sits on the sideline watching the free market roll along is impossibly utopian. People are going to try to manipulate the state to advance their own ends.
“…libertarianism, even at its very best, tends to suffer from an impoverished set of ideas about how corporate domination of the public policy space might be prevented. The political left has, by contrast, the tradition of community organizing, a set of public interest advocacy organizations, allies in the trade union movement, efforts to improve the quality and independence of the civil service, and various notions about changing the methods by which campaigns are financed in the United States. This is hardly a perfect toolkit, and it can be enhanced in some ways by drawing on libertarian insights, but it’s something. And libertarians tend to be either indifferent or hostile to it, campaigning against public financing, strong labor unions, and the civil service.”
I guess I'll go ahead and deploy the example I use in conversation. For a truly local business, there can be all sorts of social consequences for overly aggressive pricing or bad treatment of workers. You can have your Mr. Potters in Bedford Falls, but they won't have many friends. But even at a small scale, such men find can find cronies…
Now jump to the national scale. The direct social consequences disappear when the owners of corporations can get through the year without ever having to face their employees or even their customers on terms not of their own choosing. Bad behavior scales up to bad behavior. What replaces social consequences? It seems to me that social retribution scales up to political retribution.
Add to this the fact that those with economic power will always have an incentive to try to game the system from their end, and the government becomes the battleground for a clash of interests. This is, of course, what sophisticated libertarians (those who don't forget the enduring realities of politics) understand the government to be.
I only want to add that I hope there is some room for anti-militarist possibly-secretly-liberal fuzzy traditionalist-ish conservatives when the resistors of the Corporate State get rolling.
“In a free market, firms would be smaller and less hierarchical, more local and more numerous (and many would probably be employee-owned); prices would be lower and wages higher; and corporate power would be in shambles. Small wonder that big business, despite often paying lip service to free market ideals, tends to systematically oppose them in practice.”
Matt Yglesias has what seems to me to be one correct response:
“Thinkers affiliated with the libertarian movement have had many smart things to say on individual topics, but the overall concept of a state apparatus that simply sits on the sideline watching the free market roll along is impossibly utopian. People are going to try to manipulate the state to advance their own ends.
“…libertarianism, even at its very best, tends to suffer from an impoverished set of ideas about how corporate domination of the public policy space might be prevented. The political left has, by contrast, the tradition of community organizing, a set of public interest advocacy organizations, allies in the trade union movement, efforts to improve the quality and independence of the civil service, and various notions about changing the methods by which campaigns are financed in the United States. This is hardly a perfect toolkit, and it can be enhanced in some ways by drawing on libertarian insights, but it’s something. And libertarians tend to be either indifferent or hostile to it, campaigning against public financing, strong labor unions, and the civil service.”
I guess I'll go ahead and deploy the example I use in conversation. For a truly local business, there can be all sorts of social consequences for overly aggressive pricing or bad treatment of workers. You can have your Mr. Potters in Bedford Falls, but they won't have many friends. But even at a small scale, such men find can find cronies…
Now jump to the national scale. The direct social consequences disappear when the owners of corporations can get through the year without ever having to face their employees or even their customers on terms not of their own choosing. Bad behavior scales up to bad behavior. What replaces social consequences? It seems to me that social retribution scales up to political retribution.
Add to this the fact that those with economic power will always have an incentive to try to game the system from their end, and the government becomes the battleground for a clash of interests. This is, of course, what sophisticated libertarians (those who don't forget the enduring realities of politics) understand the government to be.
I only want to add that I hope there is some room for anti-militarist possibly-secretly-liberal fuzzy traditionalist-ish conservatives when the resistors of the Corporate State get rolling.
14 November 2008
Meltdown tales, big and small.
One time, when I lived in New York City, I was complaining to a business-minded friend of mine about the difficulty I had in getting through the financial pages of the Wall Street Journal. The trick, he told me, is to look for the human story. It turns out that major corporations are just as personality-driven as the academic debates I love to follow. Now that I'm back in North Carolina, I haven't even tried to follow the financial news, but I'm always glad when someone else goes out and finds the human story, particularly when it's in something as complicated as an economic meltdown. It's equally great when someone can tell the big story, fitting things into a grand scheme.
Michael Lewis's article from Condé Nast Portfolio is told on the human scale: it's the story of a cynical financial analyist named Steve Eisman worked his way through the crazy moral and social tangles of the investment banking world in order to figure out what was going on with subprime lending, and was one of the few people to anticipate (and perhaps help precipitate) the September/October meltdown.
Niall Ferguson, on the other hand, takes the long view of Western civilization's financial systems in light of humanity's propensity for wishful thinking and herd panic. His analysis of the mathematical mistakes of the “quants” (basically, the superhero analysts) is tantalyzing, and I'd love to find a bit more in a similar vein.
(Lewis via Suderman; Ferguson via Hancock.)
Michael Lewis's article from Condé Nast Portfolio is told on the human scale: it's the story of a cynical financial analyist named Steve Eisman worked his way through the crazy moral and social tangles of the investment banking world in order to figure out what was going on with subprime lending, and was one of the few people to anticipate (and perhaps help precipitate) the September/October meltdown.
Niall Ferguson, on the other hand, takes the long view of Western civilization's financial systems in light of humanity's propensity for wishful thinking and herd panic. His analysis of the mathematical mistakes of the “quants” (basically, the superhero analysts) is tantalyzing, and I'd love to find a bit more in a similar vein.
(Lewis via Suderman; Ferguson via Hancock.)
13 November 2008
The mutual dependence of dismal science and human decency.
Megan McArdle on bailouts, dying industries, and dying towns:
“I love western New York, which may be the most beautiful place on earth. I love the old cities, the Victorian shells that whisper of much happier days, and the broad, rolling hills, and the broad flat accents of the people who live on them. I love waterfalls softly falling downtown and the Buffalo City Hall. I love the place as you can only love somewhere that your family has been living for 200 years. I would save it if I could.
“I love western New York, which may be the most beautiful place on earth. I love the old cities, the Victorian shells that whisper of much happier days, and the broad, rolling hills, and the broad flat accents of the people who live on them. I love waterfalls softly falling downtown and the Buffalo City Hall. I love the place as you can only love somewhere that your family has been living for 200 years. I would save it if I could.
“But I can't save it. Pouring government money in has been tried . . . and tried, and tried, and tried. It props up the local construction business, or some company, for a few more years, and then slowly drains away. Western New York has been the lucky recipient of largesse from a generous federal government, a flush state government, and not a few self-made men with happy memories of a childhood there. And still, it dies.
“Moreover, it wouldn't be right to save it by destroying someone else's business, killing someone else's town. That's the choice we are facing. At its heart, economics is not about money; it is about resources. Every dollar sent to Detroit buys a yard of steel, a reel of copper wire, an hour of labor that now cannot be consumed by a business that actually produces a profitable, desireable [sic] product. It's not right to strangle those businesses in order to steal some air for the dying giants of an earlier day.”
I can't say anything about this particular Detroit bailout, since I haven't had time to look into it, but I like this bit of McArdle's writing. Should we call it Stoic? Probably not: the economically inclined chase after that ever-shifting Pareto optimal which will keep society in the black, whereas the Stoic lives justly while peacefully awaiting the coming conflagration. But there is a kind of rational pessimism in each. Neither the Stoic nor the dismal scientist fully yields to that very human cry for justice in the face of an indifferent world. But the best of them never forget it, either.
The tragic situation is this: there exist awful problems that cannot be solved without creating new awful problems. To do nothing is wrong, for it's quite clear that we humans have alleviated much of our misery. To try anything is also wrong, for it's equally we can't ignore or wish away concrete organizational problems, in the manner of so many optimistic mid-century socialists. What is required is a clear view of both the problems we face and the difficulties that stand in the way of their resolution.
With regard to nearly any particular problem, we'll end up with a dialectic—in the Greek sense of a process of reasoning, not the Hegelian world-historical sense—between those who assess differently the costs of maintaining the status quo and the costs of aiming for improvement. Where you land in this dialectic is, I think, an unpredictable combination of temperament, rational reflection, and self-interest. The conversation runs into trouble when a group of its participants denies that there is a problem of balance, and maintains that one side represents an unqualified good, the other an unqualified evil.
It's easy to get to this point when you're trying to win an argument. What I like about McArdle's piece is that she manages to make her point while taking seriously the problem of the collapse of an industry that a whole region depends on.
See Jim Manzi at The American Scene for another thoughtful (though less literary and more forceful) take on the possibility of a Detroit Bailout.
12 November 2008
Me elsewhere.
Here's my first guest-post at Upturned Earth. Maybe this is interesting:
“This one time, I had a bad run-in with hardcore Austrian economics, and for a while it tainted my view of libertarianism. I’ve been coming around to the reality-based part of the movement, but I’m not nearly at the point where I would give myself the label. My biggest obstacle is that I haven’t been able to find a plausible comprehensive narrative of American history, including the bad parts, from a libertarian perspective. As a Southerner, I can’t help but be concerned about the Civil War. My basic take? The South ruined Federalism for everyone by positively indulging in evil, and there was no choice but to replace the original idea of the United States with something new. This is why I am skeptical of a direct return to the republic of the Founding Fathers; I am more partial to the idea of a second Founding, one that took place in 1865, as described by Mark Noll.”
“This one time, I had a bad run-in with hardcore Austrian economics, and for a while it tainted my view of libertarianism. I’ve been coming around to the reality-based part of the movement, but I’m not nearly at the point where I would give myself the label. My biggest obstacle is that I haven’t been able to find a plausible comprehensive narrative of American history, including the bad parts, from a libertarian perspective. As a Southerner, I can’t help but be concerned about the Civil War. My basic take? The South ruined Federalism for everyone by positively indulging in evil, and there was no choice but to replace the original idea of the United States with something new. This is why I am skeptical of a direct return to the republic of the Founding Fathers; I am more partial to the idea of a second Founding, one that took place in 1865, as described by Mark Noll.”
11 November 2008
Psychology and demonology.
Something always strikes me as a little bit off when I read articles on society-level psychology. See, for example, “happiness studies,” or levels of niceness. This is largely because that sort of thing seems to be completely inapplicable to the actual decisions I have to make. Say I have a bundle of research that tells me what makes most people happy: how in the world to I apply it? Straining for objectivity might work for policymakers, but it’s never rung true for me. (Perhaps some people find that clinical descriptions of their psychological situations give them a sense of control; if so, these people are clearly neurotic.) And, really, what could we find that hasn’t been somehow observed before? I mean, we couldn’t see cells before the microscope, but we’ve always had some kind of access to our own thoughts.
I can’t even think about this topic without recalling Reverend Darcourt’s drunken rant near the beginning of Robertson Davies’s novel What’s Bred in the Bone. Darcourt, a theologian and Anglican priest, has loosened up after an evening of wine and conversation with two dear friends, and he becomes voluble:
“Well, science is the theology of our time, and like the old theology it’s a muddle of conflicting assertions. What gripes my gut is that it has such a miserable vocabulary and such a pallid pack of images to offer to us—to the humble laity—for our edification and our faith. The old priest in his black robe gave us things that seemed to have concrete existence; you prayed to the Mother of God and somebody had given you an image that looked just right for the Mother of God. The new priest in his whitish lab-coat gives you nothing at all except a constantly changing vocabulary which he—because he usually doesn’t know any Greek—can’t pronounce, and you are expected to trust him implicitly because he knows what you are too dumb to comprehend. It’s the most overweening, pompous priesthood mankind has ever endured in all its recorded history, and its lack of symbol and metaphor and its zeal for abstraction drive mankind to a barren land of starved imagination. But you, Maria, speak the old language that strikes upon the heart. You talk about the Recording Angel and you talk about his lesser angels, and we both know exactly what you mean. You give comprehensible and attractive names to psychological facts, and God—another effectively named psychological fact—bless you for it.”
Now, I obviously can’t endorse the statement that God is an effectively named psychological fact, but it does give one something to think about. But I think I can go most of the way there with demons. Why should vain moderns mock Martin Luther for writing that he was tormented by demons? That’s exactly how clinical depression can feel. Calling it a demon gives you something to fight—and a way to disassociate your soul from its disease.
Is it all right to read the New Age movement as an attempt to re-name some of these “psychological facts” in an apprehensible way? Would New Age writers disagree with that characterization? More importantly, how do we deal with the dissonances of the metaphorical perspective? If you know your depression is not really a strange small fellow whispering in your ear, can you sustain the image? Or are you be better off viewing yourself as in the cold light of the laboratory?
C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien set for themselves the goal of reinvigorating the Christian imagination. They’ve certainly helped, although the section of any bookstore for “Christian literature”—that abomination!—makes it clear that we still have a ways to go. In the end, the task is to keep searching for “language that strikes upon the heart,” but to make sure that it strikes truly.
N.B.: I’m not against psychiatric medication. Not entirely, anyway.
I can’t even think about this topic without recalling Reverend Darcourt’s drunken rant near the beginning of Robertson Davies’s novel What’s Bred in the Bone. Darcourt, a theologian and Anglican priest, has loosened up after an evening of wine and conversation with two dear friends, and he becomes voluble:
“Well, science is the theology of our time, and like the old theology it’s a muddle of conflicting assertions. What gripes my gut is that it has such a miserable vocabulary and such a pallid pack of images to offer to us—to the humble laity—for our edification and our faith. The old priest in his black robe gave us things that seemed to have concrete existence; you prayed to the Mother of God and somebody had given you an image that looked just right for the Mother of God. The new priest in his whitish lab-coat gives you nothing at all except a constantly changing vocabulary which he—because he usually doesn’t know any Greek—can’t pronounce, and you are expected to trust him implicitly because he knows what you are too dumb to comprehend. It’s the most overweening, pompous priesthood mankind has ever endured in all its recorded history, and its lack of symbol and metaphor and its zeal for abstraction drive mankind to a barren land of starved imagination. But you, Maria, speak the old language that strikes upon the heart. You talk about the Recording Angel and you talk about his lesser angels, and we both know exactly what you mean. You give comprehensible and attractive names to psychological facts, and God—another effectively named psychological fact—bless you for it.”
Now, I obviously can’t endorse the statement that God is an effectively named psychological fact, but it does give one something to think about. But I think I can go most of the way there with demons. Why should vain moderns mock Martin Luther for writing that he was tormented by demons? That’s exactly how clinical depression can feel. Calling it a demon gives you something to fight—and a way to disassociate your soul from its disease.
Is it all right to read the New Age movement as an attempt to re-name some of these “psychological facts” in an apprehensible way? Would New Age writers disagree with that characterization? More importantly, how do we deal with the dissonances of the metaphorical perspective? If you know your depression is not really a strange small fellow whispering in your ear, can you sustain the image? Or are you be better off viewing yourself as in the cold light of the laboratory?
C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien set for themselves the goal of reinvigorating the Christian imagination. They’ve certainly helped, although the section of any bookstore for “Christian literature”—that abomination!—makes it clear that we still have a ways to go. In the end, the task is to keep searching for “language that strikes upon the heart,” but to make sure that it strikes truly.
N.B.: I’m not against psychiatric medication. Not entirely, anyway.
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