2009’s music.

Here’s the tracklist for my annual end-of-the-year mix CD. It’s songs that I listened to this year, not songs that were released this year.

1. Arvo Pärt - Ludus (from Tabula Rasa)
2. The Wu-Tang Clan - Protect Ya Neck
3. Crooked Fingers - New Drink for the Old Drunk
4. The Mountain Goats - Hebrews 11:40
5. Megafaun - The Process
6. Radiohead - Black Star
7. The Avett Brothers - Pretty Girl at the Airport
8. Superchunk - Misfits and Mistakes
9. Tor/Sufjan Stevens - Star of Wonder/None Shall Pass (feat. Aesop Rock)
10. Hi Ho Silver Oh - Perjury
11. Bonnie “Prince” Billy - Missing One
12. Mount Eerie - Between Two Mysteries
13. The Busy World - Idaho

I'm driving from Charlotte to Orlando in a few days, and then back to Charlotte a few days after that, so I've got some good music-listening days ahead of me.

Breaking some of my rules.

The rules in question: “don't use a blog to vent” and “don't metablog.”

Briefly, though, I take it as pretty basic that hostile argument in comment boxes never works. If you actually want someone to change her mind, friendly questions might do it. Long posts on your own blog might do it. Chances aren't good, but I've seen people adjust position after such exchanges. The shadowy facsimiles of friendship that comprise most of our online “relationships” aren't good for much, but you need at least that much if you want even a ghost of a chance of changing someone's mind. Why should I even bother with terse, aggressive comments from total strangers?

So I think my new rule should be never to respond to someone who hasn't already demonstrated good faith.

Or maybe I should implement Zeke's rule: “Remember to pre-emptively disavow every conceivable inference that you don’t intend next time!”

Funny.

From Dr. Boli: “Eternal Damnation by Chocolate.”

Reverence.

I really have no clue whether the David Foster Wallace short story in the New Yorker was intended as a stand-alone piece or if it's part of that novel he was working on, but I was glad I got to read it anyway. It includes this line, which satisfies my yen for Rudolph-Otto-style typographies of the numinous:

“This was the year, at five or six, that I learned the meaning of ‘reverence,’ which, as I understand it, is the natural attitude to take toward magical, unverifiable phenomena, the same way that ‘respect’ and ‘obedience’ describe the attitude one takes toward observable physical phenomena, such as gravity or money.”

-from “All That” by David Foster Wallace, at The New Yorker

Two quick thoughts.

1.) Two of my favorite songwriters are John Darnielle of The Mountain Goats and Phil Elverum of Mount Eerie. Neither of them are Christians. Yet Darnielle is surely the most Christian non-Christian songwriter on the planet. Obviously, he just released an album about the Bible, but his entire catalog is suffused with a yearning for redemption and an eschatological hope that comports very well with my understanding of the Gospel. I don't know whether Darnielle believes in souls that can be redeemed, but his art (giving eloquent expression to the emotions of characters who would lack such words in real life) seems to presuppose such a notion. With Elverum, on the other hand, it's like Christianity doesn't exist. I don't recall a single instance of him borrowing a Christian term or theological concept to use in his rich mappings of his quest for insight.

2.) Regarding those Bud Light “The Difference is Drinkability” ads, I'm not sure that “drinkable” even admits of degree. No beer is any less drinkable than Bud Light unless it's frozen or something. However, I do have to admit that “drinkability” is a difference between Bud Light and, say, hamburgers.

Semi-anti-Dylan, but still mostly pro-.

Fellow Ordinary Gentleman Will posted a link to the Weekly Standard's anti-Dylanism piece. The argument goes that Dylan fans get so into Dylan that they throw songwriting standards out the window, or something like that. Anyway, I was a little late to the party and nobody responded to my comment. So, I'll repost it here.

I am surprised to say that I agree with the Weekly Standard on this one. I’m surprised because I don’t think of myself as anti-Dylan, and I had a lengthy Dylan phase in high school, and I remember having some kind of wildly intense aesthetic experience when I saw Dylan live during that phase. But I think the reason I agree with the Weekly Standard is that I’ve definitely seen this thing happen where dedicated Dylan fans let Bob’s music determine their scale of judgment. Things like melodic complexity, rise and fall, and the craft of arranging just drop off the list of things that the greatest songwriter ever would have to have a grasp on.

There’s something to be said for trusting an artist to the point where you suspend your judgment. This is what I will do with anything by The Mountain Goats or Lambchop. But then I have to keep myself aware that when other people hear recent stuff by TMG, they might just hear a guy with a nasal voice and an affinity for adult contemporary production, and Lambchop might just sound like lazy lounge music. That is to say: it can be a worthwhile trade to ignore an artist’s shortcomings in order to appreciate what they do well, but outsiders are going to find it incomprehensible when you start insisting that the shortcomings are in fact strengths. And this shortcomings-to-strengths thing is what the Weekly Standard guy is complaining about.

Sometimes I try to imagine what kind of music Bob Dylan would have written if he’d never had to wrestle with fame.

George H. White's final speech.

I've been reading up on local history: one book on politics in North Carolina and another on residential patterns in Charlotte. The decade that really grabs me is the 1890s, when a Republican-Populist coalition, representing small farmers, mill workers, and African-Americans actually managed to beat the Democrats, who represented the state's large farmers and businessmen. By broadening voting laws, the coalition made it possible for a good number of African-Americans to be elected as officials. At the high tide of this movement — 1896 — George H. White won a congressional election and became the only African-American in the House of Representatives. He won reelection in 1898.

But 1898 was also the year that the Democrats orchestrated a massive white supremacy campaign and recaptured the machinery of North Carolina politics. Determined to hamstring the opposing party, they followed the rest of the south in deliberately disenfranchising black voters by means of a the poll tax and the literacy test. Representative White realized he couldn't win after this law passed and declined to run for reelection in 1900.

I found his final speech to Congress in UNC's Documenting the American South online collection. It's a remarkable and moving speech. The most quoted section is the closing:

This, Mr. Chairman, is perhaps the negroes' temporary farewell to the American Congress; but let me say, Phoenix-like he will rise up some day and come again. These parting words are in behalf of an outraged, heart-broken, bruised, and bleeding, but God-fearing people, faithful, industrious, loyal people--rising people, full of potential force.

Mr. Chairman, in the trial of Lord Bacon, when the court disturbed the counsel for the defendant, Sir Walter Raleigh raised himself up to his full height and, addressing the court, said:

“Sir, I am pleading for the life of a human being.”

The only apology that I have to make for the earnestness with which I have spoken is that I am pleading for the life, the liberty, the future happiness, and manhood suffrage for one-eighth of the entire population of the United States.

Dear FLG

From your open letter:

“I agree that taste is relative, but was wondering what you want out of music? And further what you think I want out of music?”

I can answer with some authority on what I want out of music. I've got a couple of priorities. Speaking really roughly, you could put the albums I really like into three groups: albums by songwriters I like, albums by composers/performers that I like, and albums by rock bands that I like.

I like songwriters who develop conceptual worlds across their albums and careers. (Not that they'd describe their own work this way.) Phil Elverum from The Microphones and Mount Eerie basically has a whole personal mythology set up at this point, and I dig that. Jason Molina from Magnolia Electric Company writes album after album about lonely wanderers guided by the north star and seeking the blues, and I always love it. I can let albums from guys like this really get into my head; I'll pore over the lyrics or just lie back and do nothing but listen to the album.

I'm pretty into mathematics, and I think that has something to do with why I like counterpoint so much. If I want pure music, I will often go for English Renaissance or for Bach. Sometimes Handel, but I don't feel Handel's music as deeply as I do Bach's. And I'm no jazz-head, but I get something good out of the interplay in Miles Davis's modal stuff. I know enough about music theory to get the barest intuition of what goes on in really great music, and sometimes it's really frustrating when I can tell that I'm missing something important. At some point, I want to study up and get better at interpreting art music. Basically, I like art music that pushes the interplay of melodic and/or harmonic lines.

While I'm rather comfortable with my taste in lyricists and in art music, I'm a little bit at odds with myself on what I want out of a rock band. It's a bit Dionysian, I guess, but I like bands that I can really get caught up in: Springsteen (oh, Springsteen!), punk-rock bands like Superchunk, a whole bunch of local bands in Chapel Hill or Durham… For a time, I was really into local music, and I've come to get a big kick out of seeing a good band in a small room — like, 400 people or less. But a big draw here is catharsis and community, even more than aesthetic merit.

I could go on and on here, talking about exceptions and outliers, but it would probably just be for me. As for what I think you (that is, FLG) want out of music, all I have to go on is your “currently listening” postings and your comment that you'd take Journey over Radiohead. I am guessing — and I could be totally wrong in this — that you go for strong melody and solid rhythm. Do you usually listen to music while doing other things? Do you tend to like songs that have some presence in pop culture, or is it more that those are the videos that are easy to find on YouTube? My hypothesis is that strong melody (or “hook”) and competent-to-exceptional performance are key to your taste in music. Don't be mad at me if I'm wrong, please.

By the way, I'd pick Radiohead over Journey ninety-nine times out of a hundred because the only Journey song I know is “Don't Stop Believing,” whereas I've really come to like a bunch of Radiohead songs.

Yours,

-wrb

PS Here are some videos.

The story of Charlotte, and the Charlotte Museum of History.

I need to start out by saying that the Charlotte Museum of History is a local treasure. It's a wonderful place to spend a few hours: exploring the museum, seeing the preserved colonial house, or just wandering the small network of wooded paths. But I out there looking for the story of the city of Charlotte, and, for the most part, I had to tease it out of smaller details.

Driving up the museum feels like finding an oasis. The beautiful flowers and fountain welcome you to the grounds, and the grounds are wooded enough that the parking lot seems to be way out in a forest, even though you can still see Shamrock Drive. It's a peaceful place. You walk into the atrium and pay your six dollars for an adult ticket, and you're off to the exhibits.

Off to the right, there are two rooms, one dedicated to the founding of Charlotte and another to its growth. The Eighteenth Century room has a model of what the Trade and Tryon intersection looked like in the late 1700s — two dirt roads and a small group of houses and cabins. You'll find the story of how Thomas Polk got Charlotte to be named the seat of Mecklenburg County, and where our local emphasis on hornets came from. The other room is for the Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries, with a nice display for the gold rush of the 1830s and cases full of artifacts from America's wars.

Between these two rooms, you've covered the broad outline of American History. Colonial times, American revolution, agriculture, gold rush, slavery, Civil War, reconstruction and industry, World War I, World War II. And I can see how this is probably the best way to draw people into Charlotte's history. But it doesn't seem like Charlotte's own story. If you want to figure out how Charlotte became the most populous city in North Carolina, you have to read between the lines.

For example, one placard showed that before the Civil War, almost a third of Mecklenburg County's population was enslaved. It also says that about 6,000 African-Americans were emancipated after the war. If I'm thinking about this correctly, that puts the population of Mecklenburg County at about 18,000 people. Which is to say: not that many, compared to now. In fact, Charlotte's population boom didn't start until the early 1900s, when a streetcar network and a “Watch Charlotte Grow” campaign created a ring of suburbs and an industry boom. There is basically one panel on this growth in the downstairs rooms, although elsewhere there is a map that shows the sequence of Charlotte's annexations over time. What's rather startling is that in 1899, the city limits were roughly where the inner beltway is now. It was in the decade that followed that Charlotte's population eclipsed that of Wilmington, which was to that point North Carolina's largest city. All of which reinforces my hunch that Charlotte wasn't very important prior to the last few decades of the 1800s, and makes me wonder what advantages Charlotte had over other cities. One of the clues to Charlotte's rise can be found in the railroad maps, which shows Charlotte at the intersection of the line running from Wilmington to the mountains and the line running from Raleigh down to Columbia, South Carolina.

While I felt the two permanent rooms were trying to tell America's story through Charlotte's eyes, one of the upstairs exhibits told a particular Charlotte story more along the lines of what I was looking for. North Charlotte was a company town that was built in Charlotte's crucial decades of early growth, and for a time functioned as a self-contained mill community. The neighborhood weathered the Great Depression only to decline when the mills closed after the second World War. North Charlotte languished under high crime rates until a group of new artists and old locals restyled the area as NoDa, or North Davidson. It was an excellent display, evoking the lost world of Piedmont mill towns, despite a somewhat goofy use of the same photograph of one mill in full color to illustrate good times and menacingly grayed out to represent bad times.

Another room downstairs was devoted to the photographs of Margaret Morley, a writer and biologist who moved to the North Carolina mountains and distilled a decade of observation into her 1913 book The Carolina Mountains. The photographs and captions are beautiful, and it's worth six dollars just for that if you love the Blue Ridge as much as I do.

Out behind the museum, you find the Hezekiah Alexander house. This carefully restored building dates to colonial times. I didn't have time to take the tour, so I won't say much about it except that it's really nice to walk around to the herb garden, and to see the old trees in the yard. The woods are tranquil and verdant, and worth stopping in. Wander too far, and you'll end up on the grounds of a Methodist retirement community called Aldersgate.

I realize that it's a bit unreasonable for me to walk into a museum demanding a particular narrative, especially when there's a whole other museum dedicated to the rise of Charlotte as a New South City. And the Charlotte Museum of History recommends some interesting books in its display and has a great website. But I was surprised that the question “Why did Charlotte grow?” wasn't addressed more explicitly, as it's perhaps the crucial question for rooting our aspirations to world-class status in our own history.

Still, don't let any of this stop you from visiting. They're doing good work over there.

Margaret Morley

Below a photograph of a mountain cabin:

“Because the Northern Mountains are so cold and barren, the people live down below and look up to them. Here the people live among the mountains themselves. They love them, and are afraid to go down to the country that lies level below, because, they say, if you go out of the mountains you die. And truth to tell most likely you do.”

Below a photograph of a road in the woods:

“Whether alone or companioned, you must never walk right on. You must linger along and listen attentively, and sniff the air for news, and you must look, not only at the clouds and the blue of the sky, at the distant landscape and the colors of the near slopes, but you must look at the ground. For there also you will find things to remember when the doors are shut on the wander-life.”

Below a photograph of the Blue Ridge Mountains:

“The Blue Ridge! What mountains ever offered themselves to the sun so enchantingly as the long curve of the Appalachian chain.… This battlement of heaven was not named by accident. It was named Blue because there was no other name for it. It is blue; tremendously, thrillingly blue; tenderly, evasively blue. And the sky that contains it is also entrancingly blue.”

Culled from placards at the Charlotte Museum of History's exhibit “Photographs of Margaret Morley.” Quotations are presumably from Morley's 1913 book, The Carolina Mountains, though perhaps they are from letters or some other such source.

Here are some pictures of the exhibit.

Method's killin'.

I'm at a time in life when my mopey indie rock isn't doing much for me. Fortunately, there's YouTube videos and Method Man. Language warning, which should go without saying for this genre.







So that's what I've been listening to.

Acorns, etc.

I wrote up something at the League on the ACORN tempest. I can't help thinking two things: first, the videos imply something's wrong, but the makers are content to just imply widespread corruption without attempting to pin down the extent. With some amount of taxpayer money at stake, a low-level congressional hearing and further investigation by professional reporters is appropriate. Second, ACORN's a big organization, and yet the conservative media is interested in the story because (only because?) of ties to Obama and other Democrats. What I'm curious about is whether and to what degree ACORN's internal problems hurt the people that they're trying to help, because it's not yet clear that they do.

The new media vs. old media angle on this story-of-the-week is the main reason I'm writing about it rather than just reading. I don't want James O'Keefe to be the standard for citizen journalism. That is, he got the scoop but I'm still waiting for real journalists to tell the story.

(Also, my friend Hope told me to check out the videos well before they got to the point in the news cycle where I would have seen them otherwise. Not being a watcher of cable news or a reader of Breitbart's blogs, I normally wouldn't have caught something like this until it crossed over. It was interesting to watch the whole process.)

A problem with rejecting natural theology.

Some time ago, I decided that natural theology was a dead end. I take natural theology to be something like the practice of looking at creation to deduce information about God. I'm not sure when I did this consciously, but I think I had two reasons. First, I became interested in theology that suggested to me a God who is way transcendent, except for the Incarnation, when He became way immanent. Second, I learned enough math and science to see that nothing in nature really jumps out as special creation — everything seems to run on laws, and we've described enough of those laws that we've got a general picture of how things work, though I have to acknowledge that picture gets really weird when you look at very big or very small things. (Weird in a good way, I think.)

At first, this made things simpler, as it avoided all the conundrums of creationism or ID theory. No conflict with science!

But recently I've been wondering if I made a mistake somewhere. I wrote a rather mopey post at the League on this theme. As I see it, dropping natural theology entirely leaves you with philosophical arguments, personal experience, and revelation handed down. Philosophical arguments can be nice, but there's also a counterclaim for almost every claim that's been made: I don't take leaning on philosophy to be easy. Personal experience… it's difficult for me to rely on my interpretations of my own interior life. And revelation — ah, revelation. More on that another time?

At any rate, as I think threw my view of nature, I'll take these ideas into consideration. Lee at A Thinking Reed:

“What we can and should do as Christians is offer a way of integrating the findings of the sciences with a richer picture of reality that takes account of all our experience (moral, aesthetic, religious, etc.). Reality is a many-layered thing.

“It also strikes me that Kenneth Miller’s statement that human beings are “an afterthought, a minor detail, a happenstance in a history that might just as well have left us out” is a salutary and properly humbling one. Christian theology has been entirely too anthropocentric, and a more theocentric and creation-centric perspective is urgently needed.”

And Matthew Milliner, a.k.a. Millinerd, quoting Jonathan Edwards:

“There is some impropriety in saying that a disposition in God to communicate himself to the creature, moved him to create the world. For though the diffusive disposition in the nature of God, that moved him to create the world, doubtless inclines him to communicate himself to the creature when the creature exists; yet this can't be all: because an inclination in God to communicate himself to an object, seems to presuppose the existence of the object, at least in idea. But the diffusive disposition that excited God to give creatures existence was rather a communicative disposition in general, or a disposition in the fullness of the divinity to flow out and diffuse itself.”

Final thought: it'd be so much easier to give up on this stuff if it weren't for beauty.

David Bazan news.

Via Mockingbird, I find that David Bazan, formerly of Pedro the Lion, has a new album coming out next week. A couple years ago I'd heard he no longer identified as a Christian; looks like the album's going to be the story of that. For more, there's an article in the Chicago Reader and an interview with Paste. I'm guessing it's going to be a return to form. I'll have more thoughts when I get a chance to listen to it.

Anathem and personal resolve.

I read Neal Stephenson's Anathem over the weekend, and I describe the experience over at the League. Not to get too personal, but it got me psyched up about writing and blogging again.

Yr humble correspondent isn't really cut out to be a political blogger — the news cycle stuff is more depressing than inspiring to me. Anathem sort of fueled my gut feeling that while it's great for some people to stare into the flux, maybe I'm the kind of guy that does better looking at old books nobody else is reading, even if they're not relevant to much of anything.

I mean, I'm sort of jealous of Stephenson's scholar-monks, only having to interact with the outside world for ten days at a time…

Cousin, bidness is a-boomin'.

Cautious praise for Inglourious Basterds. It worked for me structurally and stylistically. I'm still trying to decide where I land on Tarantino's distance from history — am I with the New Yorker's David Denby, who called the movie “a Louisville Slugger applied to the head of anyone who has ever taken the Nazis, the war, or the Resistance seriously”? Or do I put this aside in favor of sharp and interesting critical readings?

Clearly, there's a few high-order issues to clear up before I can settle on a valuation for Basterds. History, evil, violence, entertainment, irony, escape: it all swirls around in Tarantino's latest opus, and there's a lot I could try to sort out. Of course, a southerner's got to work these things out anyway, and it's a process. So the best verdict I can give right now is a kind of deferral that affirms Basterds as a movie worth coming back to once I've made some progress.

The story of my job search?

"He who undervalues himself is justly undervalued by others." - William Hazlitt

(Quoted in Alan Jacob's review of a Hazlitt biography.)

Home Alone / Saw.

Today my brother messed up some childhood memories by observing that the first two Home Alone movies should be thought of as prequels to the Saw films.

Honestly, in the second one, Kevin McAllister is pretty much a Jigsaw in training.

Caring about health care.

Everybody's talking about health care at the League, but I'm so ignorant in this area I don't want to post my insubstantial, probably obvious opinions over there. On the other hand, I'd like to put them somewhere for the record, so here they are:

1. There's something wrong. You need insurance if you don't want long-term treatment for sickness to be impossibly expensive, but insurance itself is complicated and expensive, and (according to what I've picked up from the news) tens of millions of people either don't have it or don't have enough. This is a very bad situation.
   
2. The system in place now is an enormously complicated regulated market. The government's already involved to the point where it makes no sense to call the medical treatment system a free market system.
3. If something has to change, it could happen in three ways, broadly speaking. First, the government could make definite steps reducing regulation and letting health care be more of a market system. Second, the government could remain committed to something like our current level of regulation while trying new regulatory schemes. Third, the government could become more active, whether that means a public option or something more ambitious.
4. There's no way we're going the free-market route. It's cynical to say so, but I'd anticipate that the only “free-market” reforms that could get through our sluggish system would be the ones that insurance or pharmaceutical companies find to be to their advantage. Furthermore, free-market health care exists only in theory as far as I can tell. And under this administration, it's immaterial anyway, unless some super-Reagan appears before the next election. So from this citizen's perspective, a free-market health care system isn't politically possible, nobody in power really wants to do it, and we don't know for sure that it would even work in reality. In short, you can't get there from here.
   
5. If the Republicans have their way, we'll probably stay with some version of the status quo: some comparable kind of regulation that doesn't address the very real problem of people being un- or under-insured. Gingrich and company will, as usual, come up with some interesting ideas that could do something about the people that our system leaves out, but since the base is apparently frightened of changes in their health care policies, will the Republicans ever make health care reform a major priority?
6. And so I'd actually like to see the third option: the government gets more involved. It seems like this is the kind of thing that should be happening when it's a major goal of the party that controls both houses and the Presidency. I guess it's the parliamentarian in me that thinks that when the people vote for a party, that should be expected to get its way in policy until the next election. Alas, we've got these mechanisms for obstruction.
7. If the government's obliged to ensure that citizens have a basic level of education, it doesn't seem unreasonable to think the government's obliged to ensure that citizens can get medicine and treatment for injuries and sickness. Now, I reserve some suspicions about the education-obligation on a theoretical level, but it seems like we basically buy that a democracy is better off if the citizens are educated, and that the government has some role in providing that education. It seems like a pretty simple extension to say that a democracy is better off if the citizens are healthy, and that the government has some role in ensuring the availability of treatment and medicine. (One could question the validity of this extension in that education is provided for children — i.e., proto-citizens — whereas adults should be expected to manage their own health insurance.)
8. During the election, I noticed that President Obama sells his style of government action as structures of regulation within which market forces are harnessed so that the government has direction over the range of outcomes while avoiding as many Soviet-style inefficiencies as possible. As I said, I'm way ignorant here and I haven't even tried to assess whether the plans really do this. If any of them really take this approach, I'd love to see it work out, as it would confirm some of Etzioni's arguments in The Moral Dimension.
9. It's not an article of faith for me that government is necessarily worse than private enterprise in every arena of activity. But even if I did believe that, it wouldn't follow that a stronger government/market hybrid is necessarily worse than a weaker government/market hybrid. In this case, I'm inclined to believe that the stronger government/market hybrid is better than the weak one.

All this is to say that this citizen hopes the Democrats can find a way to get a functioning health-care reform bill in line with their general goals through the mire of our political system. The problems they're trying to solve are so serious that sometimes I think there's some saner parallel universe where the policies the Democrats are pursuing are considered cautious and incrementalist in comparison to the radical overhaul that some sizeable minority of citizens are demanding…

As I said, though, I'm not up-to-date or well-informed on anything that's going on right now. The real world keeping me busy and all that. You know.

Goats go to heaven?

There's now a tracklist for the new Mountain Goats album, the title of which will be The Life of the World to Come. The song titles are scripture references. According the website, it's songs about “twelve hard lessons the Bible taught me, kind of.” As a public service, here's the verses (KJV) to go along with the references:

1. 1 Samuel 15:23 — “For rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft, and stubbornness is as iniquity and idolatry. Because thou hast rejected the word of the LORD, he hath also rejected thee from being king.”
2. Psalms 40:2 — “He brought me up also out of an horrible pit, out of the miry clay, and set my feet upon a rock, and established my goings.”
3. Genesis 3:23 — “Therefore the LORD God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken.”
4. Philippians 3:20-21 — “For our conversation is in heaven; from whence also we look for the Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ: Who shall change our vile body, that it may be fashioned like unto his glorious body, according to the working whereby he is able even to subdue all things unto himself.”
5. Hebrews 11:40 — “God having provided some better thing for us, that they without us should not be made perfect.”
6. Genesis 30:3 — “And she said, Behold my maid Bilhah, go in unto her; and she shall bear upon my knees, that I may also have children by her.”
7. Romans 10:9 — “That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved.”
8. 1 John 4:16 — “And we have known and believed the love that God hath to us. God is love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him.”
9. Matthew 25:21 — “His lord said unto him, Well done, thou good and faithful servant: thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things: enter thou into the joy of thy lord.”
10. Deuteronomy 2:10 — “The Emims dwelt therein in times past, a people great, and many, and tall, as the Anakims…”
11. Isaiah 45:23 — “I have sworn by myself, the word is gone out of my mouth in righteousness, and shall not return, That unto me every knee shall bow, every tongue shall swear.”
12. Ezekiel 7 and the Permanent Efficacy of Grace — I'm not going to copy the whole chapter here, but Ezekiel 7 is a judgment scene.

I could hardly be more eager to hear this album. John Darnielle wields scriptural allusions with more dexterity than just about any other songwriter I can think of, and especially more than Christian songwriters. His chorus for “Against Pollution” (“When the last days come, we will see visions more vivid than sunsets and brighter than stars. We will recognize each other, and see ourselves for the first time the way we really are.”) is basically my own heart's eschatological hope. His characters can be desperate believers or proud heretics.

And will he do something with the Anakim on track 10? I've wanted to hear a song about the Anakim ever since I read Frank Peretti's The Tombs of Anak in elementary school…

Maybe, come October, I'll do a post for each song on the album.

Bill Kauffman is on to Charlotte's trickery.

Bill Kauffman recently traveled through my hometown's airport and saw some kind of ad campaign for “Charlotte, USA.” In The American Conservative, he muses on why they left out the “NC”:

“So N.C. is gone, ostensibly because Charlotte is no mere city but is instead a 16-county two-state blob that absorbs all the little communities within devouring distance, chewing them up into one masticated bolus flavorless enough to be swallowed by savvy global investors put off by states with directional adjectives in their names.”

He calls for impromptu citizen repair of these posters; if I were in Charlotte now, I'd be tempted to take him up on it.

But, yes, this is an ongoing problem with Charlotte, whose lurching efforts to become a World Class City provided the backdrop to my childhood. He's kind of got it pegged: Charlotte's explosive growth during my lifetime — at least 275,000 people since 1990, if the census is to be believed, which is approaching a 70 percent increase over a period of 17 years — has a lot to do with people who came for Charlotte, USA, rather than Charlotte, NC. It's Charlotte, USA gets the yuppies and the corporations. It's banks, not basketball or barbecue, though I should admit now that Charlotte wasn't particularly known for its barbecue, and, in my opinion, the Davidson / UNCC rivalry isn't much compared to what we've got going on in the Triangle. Anyway, banks: could it be a coincidence that Charlotte's business leader, Hugh McColl, changed his bank's name from North Carolina National Bank (NCNB) to NationsBank, and later Bank of America?

Much of the city feels soulless to me, although there's a strange comfort in that our efforts to become World Class are paying off in the form of a NASCAR hall of fame right next to the convention center. I suppose that this keeps Charlotte somehow tied to the North Carolina tradition of running moonshine — Wilkes County, Junior Johnson, and all that. (The apparently complicated issues of localism and corporatism in the world of NASCAR I will leave to the side, not being a racing fan myself.) Another bit of history that we try to keep in mind is that James K. Polk was born in Mecklenburg County — but do we really want to celebrate that? I'm going to have to think on how to find history in Charlotte, NC.

Chapel Hill, on the other hand, drips history, as old university towns tend to do. Might I again remind you that UNC was the first public university in the nation to open its doors?

My mind is filled with radio cures.

“There is something wrong with me…”

The way Jeff Tweedy sings that line. How does he do it.

(I have been listening to a whole bunch of Wilco because their new album just came out, and suffice to say it brings back many memories and feelings and little nostalgias and such. It is interesting which songs keep their force, which ones seem to lose it for a time, and which ones gain force, perhaps when a line or harmony or something hits you in a different way, perhaps because you're listening on a different set of headphones or speakers. You know one argument for record players is that the needle physically wears down the vinyl very slowly so that what you hear is something different every time you play it, whereas with CDs if the equipment stays the same then the sound should stay the same too. So maybe switching out headphones or buying a new stereo or putting the CD away for a while until you live in a room with totally different acoustic properties is the best way to carry that through to the digital age, though I bet everybody else figured this out in the 80s or 90s when people listened to a lot of CDs. With mp3s — I doubt it matters because you've compressed so much of the interesting stuff out of the recording already.)

Etymology Break: “Bunkum”

I did not know until today that “bunk,” “bunkum,” and “debunk” were among North Carolina's many contributions to Western Civilization. Imagine Brave New World without Ford's “History is bunk”—it wouldn't work. And where would anti-spiritualist literature be without “debunk”?

It turns out that “bunkum” actually comes from Buncombe County, location of Asheville and birthplace of Thomas Wolfe. You may have known this already. But I learned it today.

“[The Jeffersonian Republicans] were determined to get Missouri admitted without restrictions on slavery. After the Sixteenth Congress convened in December 1819, the debate over Missouri resumed. The speeches seemed interminable as well as intemperate. When Felix Walker of North Carolina was urged to sit down, he replied that he had to give his speech for the folks back home, ‘for Buncombe County.’ Ever since, Americans have called a certain kind of inflated political oratory ‘buncombe’ — or ‘bunk’ for short.”

-Daniel Walker Howe. What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848. New York: Oxford UP, 2007. (151)

I've spent non-negligible amounts of time in Buncombe County on many occasions… but I never knew.

Explanation.

Dear The Internet,

I haven't been around much these last few weeks. I wish I could say that I'm sorry, but really, I'm not. I definitely don't feel like I owe you an explanation, but I suppose I can give you an explanation, as a gift or something. Basically, these last few weeks have been a sort of perfect storm of (1) interesting things happening in the physical world (e.g. a spate of weddings), (2) concentrating on things that I find too complicated for posting, (3) and disinterest in the various “brouhahas” and “kerfuffles” that are going on right now.

I anticipate that once I've sorted through some of the complicated things referenced in (2), I'll start posting more on the various sites with which I'm affiliated.

-wrb

Selfishly convenient.

David Foster Wallace’s penchant for footnoting makes him a little bit hard to excerpt, but I’m going to use an asterisk to represent what is a numbered footnote in the text:

Is it possible that future generations will regard our present agribusiness and eating practices in much the same way we now view Nero’s entertainments or Mengele’s experiments? My own initial reaction is that such a comparison is hysterical, extreme — and yet the reason it seems extreme to me appears to be that I believe animals are less morally important than human beings;* and when it comes to defending such a belief, even to myself, I have to acknowledge that (a) I have obvious selfish interest in this belief, since I like to eat certain kinds of animals and want to be able to keep doing it, and (b) I haven’t succeeded in working out any kind of personal ethical system in which the belief is truly defensible instead of just selfishly convenient.

* Meaning a lot less important, apparently, since the moral comparison here is not the value of one human’s life vs. the value of one animal’s life, but rather the value of one animal’s life vs. the value of one human’s taste for a particular kind of protein. Even the most diehard carniphile will acknowledge that it’s possible to live and eat well without consuming animals.

-David Foster Wallace, “Consider the Lobster.” Consider the Lobster. New York: Little, Brown, and Company, 2006. (253)

Yeah… pretty much. I am so far from a moral example on this one.

UPDATE: Bought myself some couscous. Felt no guilt when I ate it. (Couscous isn't made from animals, right?)

DFW's cultural pessimism.

Infinite Jest was the first thing I read by David Foster Wallace. I think it was back in the summer of 2004. It was only years later that I got around to any of his other work. Flipping through Consider the Lobster today made me realize that DFW really earned his take on American culture. He went on the cruise, he interviewed the right-wing radio jock, he sat through the porn awards, he got out there and mixed it up. (Although perhaps he only got this kind of access after he'd written his big book…) At any rate, I think a second trip through Infinite Jest will be pretty rewarding once I've read a bit more of the non-fiction.

I'm usually inclined to speculate from the comfort of a comfy chair whenever I can. But there's a good case to be made that comfy-chair critics should be ignored whenever possible.

Kant on blogging.

Well, not really. But that's what this makes me think of:

“But it is quite absurd to try for popularity in the first inquiry, upon which depends the total correctness of the principles. Not only can such a procedure never lay claim to the very rare merit of a true philosophical popularity, inasmuch as there is really no art involved at all in being generally intelligible if one thereby renounces all basic insight, but such a procedure turns out a disgusting mishmash of patchwork observations and half-reasoned principles in which shallowpates revel because all this is something quite useful for the chitchat of everyday life.”

-Immanuel Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysic of Morals, trans. James W. Ellington

It's lines like this that make me wish I could read it in the German. How on earth did the translator pick “shallowpates”?

Maybe I should change my blog's subheading from “the world around William includes…” to “a disgusting mishmash of patchwork observations and half-reasoned principles.”

“Su-per-chunk.”

Mac says:

“it's just strange hearing the news-y voice of Charles Gibson saying the word ‘Superchunk.’”

He's right. It is pretty weird. Anyways, there's a new Superchunk EP out. It's got “Misfits and Mistakes,” which is, in my opinion, a fantastic song.

Commitment.

Sort of really loving this song, by my friend Casey. Think Roy Orbison crossed with Bon Iver.

Stress solution.

Few things can alleviate the stress of the end of a busy semester like singing your throat out to Vee Vee on the back roads of the Piedmont.

“Protesting.”

Embarrassing again.



What's the point of college if it leaves you on this level of engagement?

UPDATE: The people who got arrested weren't UNC students. Don't know about others in the room.

Weird news.

While walking to my apartment two days ago, I saw like six police cars and a dude in handcuffs. It was twilight, so I couldn't tell what was going on, but it seemed pretty big.

Turns out it probably had something to do with the date. It was 4-20, and it seems the guy was having a bad trip on shrooms.

Decay.

I know I've linked before, and I don't want to be too pushy, but some of detroitfunk's recent posts are among the best I've seen so far. Particularly the one on Joy Middle School and its piles of rotting textbooks, and also the one on Interurban Station, which discusses how the auto industry killed mass transit in Detroit.

Who was Spengler?

I can't remember how I first found Spengler, but it was sometime in the fall of 2007 when I was tentatively trying to figure out how to run this blog thing. Then as now, stumbling across obviously intelligent writers with highly idiosyncratic, often repulsive, and yet sometimes weirdly compelling takes on the world was a pleasure that seemed unique to the internet. My tastes may be weird in this respect, but I prefer a little bit of mystery in my blog-reading. Trying to figure out Spengler's background was as frustrating/rewarding as, say, trying to figure out why James Poulos hates “a sense of.” It's the blogosphere's equivalent of long-plot shows like LOST, where hints and clues are leaked out slowly and issued remain unresolved over the course of years, not posts/episodes. Not for everybody, but I dig it.

Well, Spengler is David P. Goldman, and he's the new associate editor of First Things.

First Things was an immensely important magazine for me, even though I'm drifting away from certain parts of the editors' general outlook (e.g., on economics and war). It will be interesting to see where they go from here.

Shameful.

Not to put too fine a point on it: some subset of UNC's students appears to be comprised of incredibly stupid people.

This semester a small chapter (just eight members) of a student group called Youth For Western Civilization formed on campus, with a visibility of almost zero. I'm not going to link to them; their website makes them look like unsophisticated nativists looking to provoke.

And provoke they did.

I never would have heard of them—almost no one would have heard of them—had not some other student group blanketed the campus with posters accusing Youth For Western Civilization of white supremacy. In announcing their protest, this group did all the publicity work that Youth for Western Civilization could have hoped for.

So when Tom Tancredo showed up, it seems he got an audience of about 150 listeners (not necessarily supporters!). I'd be very curious to know how many of them only heard about the event from protesters.

And the protesters shut Tancredo down. They opened up a poster in front of him, they shouted him down, and they did whatever they could to keep him from talking. When the police cleared them out, they broke a window outside. Tancredo left without delivering his speech.

“No dialogue with hate”? What on this wide green earth do protesters think they're doing? Youth for Western Civilization could not have hoped for a better outcome. Speeches on immigration reform are almost always boring and forgettable. A group of angry students threatening a speaker with violence? That's going to show up in David Horowitz's books for years to come. To say it again: this is exactly what the right wing wanted. Hope you enjoyed your games, campus protesters, because you've done everything you could have possibly done to help the people you're trying to oppose.

For example, expect to see this line again and again and again:

“Fascists are fascists,” Tancredo said. “Their actions were probably the best speech I could ever give. They are what's wrong with America today. ... When all you can do is yell epithets, that means you are intellectually bankrupt.”

Daily Tar Heel's story here. This whole mess is a disgrace.

(Shaky handheld) Youtube 1 and Youtube 2.

UPDATE: In the comments on another DTH article, Christine Crowther explains that it wasn't everyone.

“I'm a new student here, just started this semester, and I have come to love UNC. Really love it. I love how involved the students are, and how passionate, and yes, how diverse our campus is. But I have honestly never been more thoroughly disappointed with the immature and counterproductive actions of a few students.

“I went to Bingham Hall to protest Tom Tancredo's ideas, and those of Youth for Western Civilization. I did not go to keep Tancredo from speaking. I, and many others in the audience, wore white ribbons to symbolize the fact that we wanted a peaceful demonstration, and were generally quiet and respectful. I dont know anything about what happened outside. What I do know is that as soon as someone got up to introduce the speaker, several individuals started yelling obscenities, shouting 'racist', and generally making it impossible for the person making the introduction to be heard. The fact that there was no sound system set up and the room was at capacity made the situation much worse.

“However, I would like to point out that the vast majority of the protesters in the room shushed these individuals, and called out 'let him speak'. When the banner reading "no dialogue with hate" was placed across the front of the room, the general sentiment in the room was that it ought to be moved, and Tancredo ought to be allowed to speak. On different occasions, representatives of the Hispanic students' organization, and others, appealed to people for respect.

“The crowd did finally calm down. Tancredo did begin to speak, everything was going well, and suddenly a window shattered inwards towards seated students, protesters, and the audience at large. We were stunned. I think I speak for most people in the room when I say that it felt like a major defeat, to have such a random, violent thing happen when everyone had been convinced to listen.

“I am deeply hurt and angered that such a minority was able to hijack what could have been a space for dialogue. I fail to understand how the liberal majority on this campus could be so threatened by the expression of radically conservative ideas that they would try to discourage free speech. I think we should let neofascists (or any other radical and unpopular group) talk all they like- their ideas do not stand up to reason. If Tancredo had been allowed to speak, he would have looked like the illogical xenophobe that he is. But since he wasnt, the story will now be about how hypocritical liberals shut down free speech. Good job guys.”

Don't trust “the obvious” any further than you can throw it.

The Internet continually reminds me just how subjective “the obvious” (or “nonsense”) can be. People see such different things in the swirling, seething data storm.

In other words, hold no truths to be self-evident.

Not entirely unrelated to this little bit of meta is the discussion about the recent David Brooks column, unfortunately titled “The End of Philosophy.” Given that so many of our beliefs and so much of our behavior has a basis outside that rational, what does philosophy actually do? Hilzoy's got an answer. In part:

“It's one thing (and a very interesting thing) to ask: how, exactly, do we make moral decisions on the fly? But while that's useful to moral philosophy in a number of ways, it is not directed at the questions moral philosophy tries to answer. Those questions include: which actions should we perform? What kinds of people should we try to be? What principles should we try to live by?”

John Schwenkler has some good words:

“…our understandings of space and time, of quantity and number, of matter and color and life and death, are ultimately shaped by our more basic modes of access to the world in very similar sorts of ways, but by no means does that entail the impossibility of using science and philosophy as tools to deepen and, at times, significantly refine those understandings in precisely the sorts of ways that Socrates envisioned. Philosophy can come in toward the end even if it’s not that relevant at the beginning, and so granting the emotions the first word in the human grasp of morality doesn’t require conceding that they also have the last.”

Razib responded, and John followed up. Good times were had by all.

Filling my yearly quota of sports blogging in one single post.

Go Tar Heels.

(P.S. I had an idea for a movie where Kurt Russell plays a one-eyed basketball coach whose team defeats Detroit's hometown favorites for the NCAA championship. The whole town goes crazy! And Coach Plissken spends the rest of the movie helping his team Escape from Detroit.)

UPDATE: So we won by a bunch. Time to go see the mob and the bonfires on Franklin Street.

Why?

Freddie asked, “Who writes anything for anyone but themselves, really?”

When I try to think about why I write things on the internet, I can only come up with a few justifications, which don't actually balance all that well against time invested:

1. The discipline of writing regularly in space which is accessible to anyone (though likely to be seen only by a few) will improve my style. This is good both for jobs that require written communication and because there are rewards internal to being able to do something kind of well.
2. Like-minded people who also write on the internet can recommend good books and articles that I would have otherwise missed.
3. Maybe, just maybe, just maybe, someone someday will pay me to write something. I had hoped that I could come up with something interesting enough for C11, but that's over and done.
4. It is very nice to have a searchable record of arguments I've made, as well as interesting quotes and articles. In theory, I could just create this on my hard drive or a private blog, but reason (1) makes it more likely that I actually keep the record.

I am more and more convinced that the pleasures of the site meter and the pleasures of the internet argument are seductive empty simulacra: virtual accomplishment that has exactly as much substance as all that virtual money that's disappeared into the ether.

I'm not posting this at the League, since the readers there might not know how much of a depressio I can be, and I want to break it to them slowly.

(To make any money at all off an independent blog, it seems like you have to load it up with ugly ads and then have some crazy amount of interesting opinions about everything, or, alternately, some combination of willful stupidity and shamelessness in linking.)

The future of William Writes.

So I've accepted an invitation to join the group blog The League of Ordinary Gentlemen. I won't be writing there more than once a week or so until after Easter, but I intend to let William Writes fade for the time being. These individual blogs tend to resurrect themselves unexpectedly, so you might want to keep the subscription if you're RSS'd.

I hope the League will be a good place for me to test ideas on culture and politics. I think it'll be a good place to explore the consequences of the social decline of Protestantism in the USA… but I'll be pursuing another project where I will try to write about being a part of a confused tradition in a modern world, for those of us who are engaged in the struggle. More on that when it comes together.

Anyhow, the other writers at the League are smart guys and always up for a debate, so check them out, leave some comments, and watch for my future contributions.

EDIT: Forgot to mention that Will Collins is also joining. So there's another reason to drop by.

Cheese.

In principle, I would love to be a Michael-Pollan-style eater of real food, but in practice I have trouble. I keep telling myself that someday I will do better.

So please don't be angry or upset when I tell you that I usually buy store-brand American cheese (not “cheese product,” though) for my sandwiches. It's just easier than understanding all the complicated varieties of real cheese, and now it's part of my routine.

I do like to change things up from time to time, so yesterday I bought the white kind of American cheese, like they have at Subway, rather than the yellow kind. I thought to myself, it will be good to have sandwiches that are basically the same, but taste slightly different.

But I hope I didn't have an ulterior motive.

Stotlebots.

This is not Lenten, but since it's already mostly written I thought I'd go ahead and post it. Excerpt from a paper I just turned in:

Consider the case of extremely advanced androids whose behavior is entirely determined by circuitry, yet whose behavior appears outwardly to be very much like our own. These androids have built-in subroutines that direct them to perform necessary and complicated maintenance, such as collecting energy and disposing of waste. These subroutines are analogous to our own bodily desires. They also have advanced defense routines, so that when they are in danger they alter their behavior in order to survive the situation. The defense routines can even be activated when nearby androids are in danger. These routines correspond to our own spiritedness and our biological fight-or-flight responses. Finally, the androids have a complicated unit that handles their long-term task management. The android has a database of long-term goals. Progress toward these goals proceeds according to a complicated rubric; no single goal takes precedence at all times. When the android has sufficient energy to do so and is not in danger, the long-term deciding-unit selects the top goal at the moment. Then it uses a randomizer based on something very subtle, like variations in atmospheric static, to generate a list of possible actions to achieve that goal. It runs an evolutionary algorithm through several generations, optimizing at each stage and generating several new options that are similar to the best option of the previous stage. What is important here is that the android can override some of its basic maintenance and defense routines, and even goals which are subsidiary at the moment, if its long-term planner decides that such an option would be the best way to achieve the long-term goal that is currently prioritized.

The behavior of such an android is completely determined by its physical capabilities, its programming, and the output of the randomizer that its long-term planner depends on. But, if the randomizer is good enough and the long-term planner can generate diverse options, the behavior of the android will be impossible to predict. We know that its behavior is determined by physical states—but knowing the input to the randomizer doesn’t tell us anything about the action that the robot ends up performing. That is to say, we know that the android’s behavior is ultimately caused by its physical state, but in describing its unexpected behavior it only makes sense to trace the cause back to the long-term planning unit. If we say the robot is responsible for an action, we can mean in a technical sense that the action came from the long-term planning unit.

This gave me an idea for a cartoon series called 'Stotlebots. The first series will be about the battle between the Aretebots, led by Sokraton Prime and his lieutenant Plator, and the Sophisticons, led by Gorgiastron. They battle it out in scratchy 80s anime, and later in sharper 90s animation. Then, after a while, we'll switch to CGI for the next series, in which the Essentiabots (including Aquinox and Dunobot Scotus) and and the Nominacons (Megoccamtron's team) crash-land on an abandoned planet (which turns out to be Earth, far in the past) and duke it out for a few seasons. Then the CGI gets smoother, and the Essentiabots finally go back to their homeworld, where everything changes.

In short: my new fake life mission is to reproduce the work of Alasdair MacIntyre via the genre of giant-fighting-robot Saturday-morning cartoons. The massive revenue I will get from merchandising, especially with awesome action figures, is just a side bonus.

Lent begins tomorrow.

Tomorrow is Ash Wednesday, which is the beginning of the Christian season of Lent. Churches that observe Lent do so as a way of preparing for Easter, the most important holiday in the Christian year, by taking extra time for reflection, devotion, and spiritual practices. Often, we “give something up,” the idea being that our deviation from the routine will remind us to reflect on the last weeks of Christ's life and their significance. Going further, our weakness in the presence of even small deprivations underscores the magnitude of what Jesus suffered. (I only explain this because Lent seems bizarre and ritualistic even to many Protestants I know, not to mention non-Christians.)

My Lenten commitments over the past few years have tended to involve reducing my use of some kind of technology. This year I'm going to cut back on blogging and reading blogs, in hopes of using the extra time to better purpose. If I post, I'll avoid my usual topics in favor of something appropriate to the season, probably theology. (Please don't say I'm “blogging my way through Lent”—nothing so gauche as that!)

Things will be back to normal here in forty days.

Communitarian Movies.

Via John's “linkage,” Russell Arben Fox has got a top-five list communitarian movies. The writer's obviously aware of the dangers of such a list and the flaws of NR's list, so he's specific: he wants movies that explicitly claim “that human beings do, and should, belong to (and thus are invariably somewhat defined and limited by) communities within which, and through which, traditions and associations and virtues are strengthened, examined, and made meaningful.” Check it out.

Listen to the gatekeepers, but make up your own mind.

Will at Dispatches asks about discursive authority:

“Internet triumphalists tend to discount the value of cultural and scientific gatekeepers, and there’s some truth to their criticisms of filtering public discourse. But in a fragmented media environment, I’m genuinely disconcerted by the lack of visible authority figures. To add to the confusion, fringe individuals and institutions have become very adept at copying the aesthetics of mainstream organizations - witness the Discovery Institute’s glossy website, which lends an air of plausibility and scholarship to arguments that fall well outside the mainstream. To take a more extreme example, sophisticated Holocaust denialists are also very good at trotting out convincing facts and figures, styling themselves as legitimate historical revisionists rather than fringe cranks.

“So what do I do? How do I choose sides? I don’t have the scientific background to evaluate the Discovery Institute’s claims. I don’t have the time or resources to investigate the scope of Nazi genocide. In both cases, I defer to expert opinion, but now I’m less certain of my ability to distinguish between trustworthy figures and talented impostors. Instead of absolute deference to authority figures, I now rely on a vague sense of where the boundaries of acceptable discourse lie. So far, I’m not very happy with the results.”

I've believed for a while now that even though we protect freedom of speech, what we really want is moderated discourse. That's the only way that you can get anywhere. Mainstream science comprises an institution, the purpose of which is to systematically extend human knowledge of the natural world by moderating discourse between proponents of different hypotheses. As far as I can tell, the community of scientists is exemplary in its self-moderation of its internal discourse, almost always striking the right balance between giving a hearing to new ideas and deferring to established ones. It may make mistakes—it has in the past—but that is a peril of self-government. The balance doesn't always carry over to the outside world, where complex findings have to be reduced to blunt statements.

One suggestion for getting your bearings in any field: see if you can find a book by someone who is writing for sheer love of the subject rather than out of some desire to make an ideological point. Everybody's got an agenda, sure, but I think that a "disinterested" book can be a good way to get a decent impression of the state of the whole field. I can imagine that you could go wrong here, but it's probably a better place to start than the polemics. I'm thinking specifically of Richard Fortey's "Earth," which is the first and only full book about rocks that I've ever read. Fortey wrote it not out of any desire to prove the age of the earth, but to try to pass on his obvious joy in the history and practice of paleontology and geology. Could someone give a similarly “disinterested” account of creationism? It seems to me that creationism always has an axe to grind.

That a book is aloof from controversy doesn't guarantee that it is correct, but I think it's a start—it shows you where the gatekeepers are standing. As for challengers, I think one should give them an occasional hearing but not an equal platform. A “fair debate” for the Discovery Institute should be a panel of at least a dozen scientists, with laptops and reference materials, to the single DI rhetorician.

Want to challenge the gatekeepers? Let's slip back into MacIntyre-speak. You've either got to join the tradition and subvert it, or you've got to build an alternate tradition of discourse. In other words, you have to challenge the science from within the boundaries of an established discipline or you have to create a new discipline that earns its standing as a science. The latter option takes a significant amount of time. Despite some fitful attempts, creationists and Intelligent Design proponents haven't done this (and my guess is that they can't).

Against inferential projects.

William, from William Writes, posted something yesterday about politics as a series of inferential projects. I get the feeling that he's free-associating his way through it, and he admits as much: “This, like so much of what I write, is so abstract as to be nearly meaningless.” Still, I think he's heading in the wrong direction for several reasons.

He wants to think about politics as a big discussion group or something. I think he gets this from Jeffrey Stout, though he doesn't mention Stout in the post. The way William puts it, politics is a logical/rational endeavor. It takes a career undergraduate to get into an idea like this one. Politics, in real life, is far messier. There's rationality involved, sometimes, but people usually engage with politics because they want something to happen or they don't want it to happen. When you vote, you don't talk about your motivations. You just hit “yes” or “no.”

Politics exists because citizens have clashing desires, and someone needs to adjudicate between them. “Inferential projects” imply some kind of intellectual distance from the proceedings. That's not politics. That's philosophy.

I'd have to suggest that William consider the role of interest in political movements. He'd do best to get beneath class analysis to the smaller groups that really have concrete goals in the political realm. They bargain and compromise, but they don't necessarily philosophize. Nor should they have to. This is politics, after all.

The sublimest word.

I usually walk by Silent Sam a few times a day, but today the Robert E. Lee reference on one of the plaques caught my attention. Here's what it says:

TO THE SONS OF THE UNIVERSITY
WHO ENTERED THE WAR OF 1861-65
IN ANSWER TO THE CALL OF THEIR
COUNTRY AND WHOSE LIVES
TAUGHT THEM THE LESSON OF
THEIR GREAT COMMANDER THAT
DUTY IS THE SUBLIMEST WORD
IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.

Does anyone know any sublimer words?

Inferential projects.

The observation I'm about to make isn't groundbreaking in any way, but I'm going to try to put it in terms that are sort of new to me.

Reihan writes about a function of political parties:

“To recognize that our two parties represent two broad worldviews isn’t to suggest that one of both have always been faithful to them. Rather, it is a way that we negotiate a landscape that in fact includes as many worldviews as there are individuals. Andrew and I both have highly idiosyncratic takes on the world, and so we both bristle at the excesses of partisanship. But in my case, I tend to think that being part of an extended conversation among like-minded people has some value. At the same time, I think it’s very valuable to also have conversations with people who don’t share the same premises, which is why I strive to be careful and fair-minded and empathetic. Having known Yuval for a while, I think he operates in much the same way, though perhaps he has a little more faith than I do in the Republican leadership.

“There is also, I stress, a place for clear-eyed loners. We’d all be far worse off with Christopher Hitchens and Andrew Sullivan and other writers and thinkers who adhere closely to Orwell’s vision of the public intellectual. But there is also a place for movements, and those who seek to repair them and guide them.”

What is the value in conversations with those who think like we do and in conversations with those who don't?

So let's say we're all usually engaged in making inferences from positions to which we're already committed. Sometimes we will have to examine some of those basic positions, but, short of a complete epistemological crisis, we'll have to do it on the basis of inferences from other basic positions.

People who reject your basic premises will help you by questioning your inferences at or near the root level. They don't usually have an interest in following your project to its outer bounds. On the other hand, people who share your commitment to some basic principle will be interested in those limits, though they will be much less likely to challenge you on a basic level. Engaging with both groups leaves you most likely to emerge from the process with only the strongest inferences left standing. If you stick with only one group, you'll end up with shoddy commitments.

That's how I would initially translate Reihan's paragraph. But then I have to move a little bit further, since I don't think all of our inferential projects should be individual endeavors (and Reihan isn't saying this either). A group with a common project—a tradition of enquiry, let's call it—should expect to see some returns from a division of labor. Furthermore, a tradition doesn't have to die like people do.

What am I talking about, anyway? This, like so much of what I write, is so abstract as to be nearly meaningless. I've wandered far from what Reihan was talking about. And I've slipped into MacIntyre-speak again. Alas, my fallen nature.

Anyhow, I guess I like the idea of “inferential projects” because they don't require anything but “secular reason,” whatever that is. You don't have to buy the premises to criticize or investigate someone else's arguments, though you might have to invest a good deal of time figuring out how those argument really work, particularly if the premises to which that person is committed are complex.

We'll see how all of this looks in the morning. If you know of a thinker who's been over all of this long before I have—and I'm sure there's tens of thousands—let me know in the comments.

And now, off to see Jandek.

Creedocide vs. Swedocide (getting rid of rats).

Please read Matthew Milliner's open letter to Demitri Martin, and decide for yourself whether religion or atheism makes a better rat poison.

Also: can someone please make a commercial for Milliner's product?

The problem with ignoring our limits.

The problem with ignoring our limits is not that it hurts us. At least not right away. We can find ingenious ways to pass the consequences of our actions on to other people. We have reached our limits when we become complicit in the unnecessary suffering of others.

…After half a pint of shandy, was particularly ill.

Lengthy “hat tip”: A Thinking Reed posted a link to a series called “Philosophy Bites,” which features brief interviews with philosophers and philosophically informed writers, on subjects related to philosophy. I listened to the interview with Richard Reeves on John Stuart Mill's On Liberty. Reeves had some good stuff to say, and Google quickly led me to the New Yorker's review of Reeves's biography of Mill.

It's not fair of me to quote from the review only the two good things Adam Gopnik says about conservatism to the exclusion of his criticisms of it, but since I've provided you with the link and I can't see how my action causes Gopnik any harm, I am going to go ahead and do it.

“[Mill's] love of poetry and music and art also led him toward conservative thought. Aesthetes always bend to the right, in part because the best music and the best buildings were made in the past, and become an argument for its qualities. Someone entering Chartres becomes, for a moment, a medieval Catholic, and a person looking at Bellini or Titian has to admit that an unequal society can make unequalled pictures. To love old art is to honor old arrangements. But even new and progressive art is, as Mill knew, a product of imagination and inspiration, not of fair dealing and transparent processes; the central concerns of liberalism—fairness, equity, individual rights—really don’t enter into it. Mozart, whom Mill loved, would have benefitted as a person had he lived in a world that gave him the right to vote for his congressman, collect an old-age pension, and write letters to the editor on general subjects, and that gave his older sister her chance at composing, too. But not a note of his music would have been any better. Art is a product of eccentric genius, which we can protect, but which no theory of utility can explain.”

And later:

“There is a non-stupid conservative reproach to Mill. It is that his great success at changing minds has made a world in which there is not much of a role for people like him. Mill and Harriet, to a degree that they could hardly recognize, flourished within a whole set of social assumptions and shared beliefs. Respect for the mind, space for argument, the dispersal of that respect throughout the population, even the existence of a rentier class who could spend their time with ideas—all of these things were possible only in a society that was far more hierarchical and élitist than the society they dreamed of and helped to bring about.

“You can also fault Mill for not grasping something that a crazy reactionary like his friend Carlyle recognized: the depths of violence and rage and hatred beneath the thin shell of civilization. Mill is like a man who has spent his life on one of those moving walkways you find in airports. He takes the forward movement so much for granted that he never makes it his subject. ‘Most of the great positive evils of the world are in themselves removable, and will, if human affairs continue to improve, be in the end reduced within narrow limits,’ he wrote, a little too assuredly.”

Want the other side of the story? I'd suggest reading the whole review, which is interesting and well-written.

The conservatism that liberalism needs and can't do well without is not a conservatism of tax cuts and militarism. Liberalism projects its hopes on the future; it needs the kind of conservatism that will not overlook the costs and the limits of progress. Whether conservatives with questions about liberalism should be content with playing this role in a liberal society is another question.

Dobrze.

An awesome bureaucratic mistake:

“The identity of one of Europe’s most notorious drivers, who racked up dozens of speeding and parking offences in a crime spree across Ireland while continuing to elude the courts, has been uncovered by police - with the help of a dictionary.

“Prawo Jazdy, presumed to be one of the hundreds of thousands of Poles lured to Ireland during its economic boom, was the Scarlet Pimpernel of motoring, leaving a trail of multiple identities and vehicles across the data base of the Republic’s Garda Siochana.

“With not a single conviction by 2007 and more than fifty offences recorded, the police decided to take a closer look at Mr Jazdy, according to the Irish Times and Irish Independent.

“The result was unexpected and embarrassing: in a letter that is now doing the rounds of Garda e-mail inboxes, a traffic division official wrote that it had come to his attention that officers inspecting Polish driving licences were recording Prawo Jazdy as the licence holder’s name. ‘Prawo Jazdy is actually Polish for 'driving licence' and not the first and surname on the licence,’ he wrote.

Who wants to bet that “Prawo Jazdy” starts showing up on fake IDs sometime soon?

Blue corpse.

So, I'm going to see Jandek on Sunday.

It should be… interesting.

Are Mormons Christians?

E.D. Kain asks: are Mormons Christians? It's a question worth discussing, but it takes a long time, since it hinges on what it "really means" to be a Christian, and it's hard to come to any agreement on exactly where to draw that line. Some Catholics still believe that Protestant churches are full of idolators, and you can still find Protestants who believe the reverse. You can't determine whether Mormons are "really Christians" until you know what it means really to be a Christian. There's a lot of self-interest in that question, since many people want to draw the real-Christian line so that a particular someone falls inside of it.

What's easier to determine, as a matter of history and institutional continuity, is the degree to which someone is an orthodox Christian. As I've argued before, orthodoxy has to do with the history of the church you're a part of, not the objective, eternal correctness of your beliefs:

"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."

Does anyone object to the claim that we can look at church history and figure out some loose boundaries for orthodox Christianity, and that Mormonism falls outside those boundaries?

For a fuller discussion of Mormon theology and its differences with orthodox Christian theology, see the articles by Bruce Porter and Gerald McDermott in the October 2008 First Things.

Stout on authority and authoritarianism.

Required reading for any discussion of religion and democracy:

“No ethical community could sustain a discursive practice without imposing on each of its members the necessity of keeping track of the normative attitudes and entitlements of their interlocutors, because without this there would be no communication—and therefore no exchange of reasons—among them. But, as we have seen, ethical communities have different ways of going about their discursive business. […] Where the default position in a given community is that the ethical judgments of those in ecclesial or political office are correct, we have a pattern of deference to one kind of authority. The authoritarian extreme is reached whenever such a position is treated as indefeasible and the authority is treated as self-interpreting. As one approaches this extreme, ethical truth is reduced in practice to what the highest authority says. When the reduction is total, it no longer makes sense to claim that the highest authority says P, but P might not be true.

“One should not assume, however, that all religious communities are huddled near the authoritarian extreme of the spectrum. Many religious traditions and movements have developed relatively flexible structures of authority, and even those best known for their official rigidity are rarely able in practice to stamp out critical questioning of allegedly indefeasible authorities. […] Many Protestants, Jews, and Muslims who begin by attributing indefeasible and unique authority to a revealed law end up interpreting that law in a highly flexible way. All of these traditions have been more pluralistic and less authoritarian in practice than some of their officials and intellectuals have wanted them to be.”

-Jeffrey Stout. Democracy and Tradition. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton UP, 2004. (280)

I ellipse'd out his brief discussion of the Roman Catholic church. Of course, “papal infallability” is one of the rare explicit cases in Christianity where a religious authority literally maintains that if the highest human authority “says” P, then it cannot be the case that P is false. But I've learned that what it means for the Pope to invoke the doctrine is kind of complicated. Furthermore, infallability is only invoked rarely. And I'm a Presbyterian, so I'm under no obligation to defend it Roman Catholic doctrine. So I think we can skip the RC wrinkles for now.

Now, I believe most Christians would hold that if God says P, then we shouldn't suspect that P is false. But we can always suspect that we didn't understand what God was saying. Interpretation is difficult. (But nothing worth doing is easy.)

I'm trying to imagine how you could plausibly level a charge of authoritarianism towards Presbyterians. We've got a General Assembly, so issues are decided by committees, representatives, and votes. Perhaps a current general assembly could start acting unilaterally—but it would only be a matter of time before their replacements arrived.

The same thing is true for denominations with stronger ecclesiologies. The turnaround just takes longer. The channels for change aren't as speedy (on paper, at least) as those of a democracy, but they exist. This keeps most religious traditions of any size from approaching the authoritarian extreme. A group that closes off these channels will eventually find itself an isolated sect, or even a cult.

To be authoritarian in Stout's sense requires the necessary force to stamp out opposition. And whatever power the Religious Right has in the United States, it doesn't have that. It's far from having it. And I suspect that almost nobody wants them to have it.