Pop Quiz

1. How many children does John McCain have?

2. How many of them have served in the military?

3. Does McCain have a son in Iraq?

I didn't know the answers to any of these questions until I read this article in the Jerusalem Post (via First Things). There is so much to admire about John McCain, even if one disagrees with him on policy.

Zoo Day gets “Pun”-ful.

Went to the North Carolina Zoo today with some good friends. Some of us took on the task of coming up with puns for every major animal exhibit. New idea: someone should start a blog called “Daily Animal Puns,” where each new day brings another awful animal pun. It's all right if some of them are “ostrich”: the dedicated reader, after much mental huffin' and “puffin,” will see what we're getting at. I want this thing to be around long enough to celebrate a “bison”-tennial.

Real posts resume tomorrow.

A math joke?

One might think that it would be best if human societies were continuous: each part relating to those around it it a readily comprehensible way. But certain sorts of discontinuities are required if any part of a finite region is to approach the infinite.

Love that gigue.

Continuing my quest to become a Bach aficionado worthy of the name, I spent forty-five minutes or so comparing two recordings of the third Cello Suite in the library. It sounded to me as if Yo-Yo Ma played the pieces section by section, whereas Mstislav Rostropovich expressed and explored his way through each individual note.

Political pessimism was here before me; it will be here when I'm gone.

“The Constitution is a dead letter, except so far as it serves to prescribe the modes of election, the role of the majority, the distribution and tenure of offices, and the union and separation of the functions of government. Since 1828, it has been becoming in practice, and is now, substantially, a pure democracy, with no effective constitution but the will of the majority for the time being. Whether the change has been for the better or the worse, we need not stop to inquire. The change was inevitable, because men are more willing to advance themselves by flattering the people and perverting the Constitution, than they are by self-denial to serve their country. The change has been effected, and there is no return to the original theory of government. Any man who should plant himself on the Constitution, and attempt to arrest the democratic tendency,—no matter what his character, ability, virtues, services,—would be crushed and ground to powder. Your Calhouns must give way to your Polks and Van Burens, your Websters for your Harrisons and Tylers. No man, who is not prepared to play the demagogue, to stoop to flatter the people, and, in one direction or another, to exaggerate the democratic tendency, can receive the nomination for an important office, or have influence in public affairs. The reign of great men, of distinguished statesmen and firm patriots, is over, and that of the demagogues has begun. Your most important offices are hereafter to be filled by third and fourth-rate men,—men too insignificant to excite strong opposition, and too flexible in their principles not to be willing to take any direction the caprices of the mob—or the interests of the wire-pullers of the mob—may demand. Evil or no evil, such is the fact, and we must conform to it.”

-Orestes Brownson, “Catholicity Necessary to Sustain Popular Liberty” (1845). Essays and Reviews Chiefly on Theology, Politics, and Socialism. New York: D. & J. Sadlier & Co., 1852. (368-9)

Did you make it through all that? Good. The essay goes on to argue that although Protestantism might set a free government in place, only Catholicism can sustain it. The people manage the government, but only a truly authoritative religion can manage the people. Brownson, in this essay, never imagines the storm that will break two decades later, nor does he consider the possibility of a strong civil religion. Lincoln must have taken him by surprise.

It's interesting to see the famous names of Polk, Van Buren, Harrison, and Tyler disparaged in favor of Webster and Calhoun. Of course, the Speaker of the House was the most important figure in the government throughout much of the 19th century, especially under Henry Clay. But which of our buffoonish politicians will history choose to lift to the status of a featureless name in a list? In two hundred years, will the name “George W. Bush” be infamous, vindicated, or merely recited by bored schoolchildren? Brownson doesn't explain why Polk &co. are demagogues, but I certainly don't have the information at hand. (It is time, I suppose, that I read more U.S. History...)

By the way, did you see the date on that book? As best I could tell, it was part of the 1852 printing. I'm so happy that books predating the Civil War are in circulation in the UNC libraries. It's part of the magic of libraries.

Wednesday Poem: The Realists

I'm re-reading the Lord of the Rings again—a thousand apologies to those to whom I said that Tolkien was a poor stylist! It's his dialogue that occasionally gets clunky, not his description. This Yeats poem seems to get it right, the wonderful treasure of fairie-stories, and it's from 1916, so it falls in the public domain just outside of copyright land.

The Realists
W.B. Yeats

Hope that you may understand!
What can books of men that wive
In a dragon-guarded land,
Paintings of the dolphin-drawn
Sea-nymphs in their pearly waggons
Do, but awake a hope to live
That had gone
With the dragons?

Orestes Brownson: American Chesterton?

Orestes Brownson was quoted several times in Michael Sandel's Democracy's Discontent, always as a Jacksonian Democrat firebrand. And that he was—for a time. His intellectual journey had taken him from Presbyterianism to Universalism to Transcendentalism, but then he made a sudden turn to Roman Catholicism and repudiated the trajectory of much of his earlier thinking. He wrote voluminously throughout the middle of the nineteenth century. I hadn't previously heard of any American Catholic intellectuals in the nineteenth century, but it seems that he's well-remembered in certain Catholic circles, and, I suppose, among scholars of the Transcendentalist movement Brownson abandoned. Brownson laid out his political philosophy in his book The American Republic, through which I would love to browse someday.

At any rate, I did manage to thumb through a 1855 anthology of his Brownson's work, and stumbled upon his essay on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Evidently Brownson took Kant very seriously, and worried a great deal about the implications of Kantian reasoning. Here's an excerpt (and this is where today's post ties back to yesterday's):

Kant himself believed, many have since believed, that his Critic [sic] is a refutation of Hume; we regard it as the most masterful defense of Hume that man may be expected to produce. . . . The Critic of Pure Reason [sic], we all know, is confessedly atheistic; it leaves no space for faith in God, and Kant was obliged to write his Critic of the Practical Reason in order to restore the faith it had overthrown.

-Orestes Brownson. “Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.” The Brownson Reader, ed. Alvan Ryan. New York: P.J. Kennedy, 1955.

I don't have much more to say about Kant, but my question is this: do you detect a hint of that Chestertonian art of witty reversal in this passage? Is that just something that happens to people who spend time trying to explain scholastic philosophy to ordinary people? Unfortunately, I don't recall whether this particular passage was written before or after Brownson swam the Tiber...

OF COURSE I'm still reading The Beauty of the Infinite

I haven't posted anything from David Bentley Hart in a while, have I? I'm chugging along as best I can, nearing the halfway point. Here's something he wrote about Kant, which will relate to one of tomorrow's posts.

“In a sense, Kant's ‘Copernican revolution’ might better be called ‘Ptolemaic’: if Copernicus overthrew the commonsense geocentrism of ancient cosmology by advancing the heliocentric thesis, displacing the center from ‘here’ to ‘there,’ Kant (as an inheritor of the epistemological caesura such a revolution seems to introduce, more forcibly than Platonism, between sensibility and verifiable truth) enacted at the transcendental level an entirely contrary motion, reestablishing the order of knowledge by moving the axis of truth from the ‘sun of the good’ to the solid, imperturbable fundamentum inconcussum of the subjectum (substrate, substance, ground) transcendentale. Now the phenomena would revolve around the unyielding earth of apperception; again we would stand at the center. . . . And what was lost when the soul was forsaken for the self (however one interprets the move) is the world that the soul could at once dwell in and reflect within itself: the immediate impress of beauty, splendor, otherness both familiar and inviolably other, the desire this provokes, the overwhelming and strangely articulate address of its radiance, its inviting transcendence.”

-David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans) 2003. 137-8

If Hart is correct, then the Kantian revolution thrust us back into Plato's cave, back into our chains, where we contemplate what we can of our predicament. One of the arguments that underlies the whole first section of The Beauty of the Infinite is that Kant's system of thought very nearly discards beauty, and certainly considers the experience of the sublime to be much more important. Hart (apparently following Hans Urs von Balthasar) wants theologians to reverse this ordering, move us back to a contemplation of a good outside ourselves, and to take beauty rightly understood as our guide.

Now, I haven't yet read Kant, but I want to get to it someday. Frankly, I am intimidated by the German philosophers, but I know that I'll have to engage them before I can evaluate with any certainty what Hart says about them. But there's just so much to read...

Can someone find the court records for this?

The First Things blog has posted an item on Duke's decision to pull out of a contract to play an annual game of football against University of Louisville. The contract stipulated that a penalty was to be paid if Duke pulled out and a "team of similar stature" could not be found. Duke won the subsequent lawsuit, apparently arguing that their football team is so bad that there do not exist any teams of lower stature.

They've admitted it for football. Time to admit it for everything else.

(See what happens when I move back to Chapel Hill? Rampant partisanship, unreasonable bias.)

Unmasking and defacing

"Machiavelli belongs to that series of minds, and some of them much greater than himself, which through modern times have endeavored to unmask the human being. . . . Yet in unmasking the human being he maimed its very flesh and wounded its eyes. To have thoroughly rejected ethics, metaphysics and theology from the realm of political knowledge and political prudence is his very own accomplishment, and it is also the most violent mutilation suffered by the human practical intellect and the organism of practical wisdom."

-Jacques Maritain, "The End of Machiavellainsim." The Review of Politics IV (1942)

The Party of Reticence must make use of this one. In human affairs, an attempt to "unmask" is often practically the same as defacing.

Fun Fact

UNC gives its students copies of Mathematica. So, a new toy, with no extra cost for me.

In the future, I'm going to try to find ways to make arguments that require fancy graphs of sine functions or integrals or whatever.

Deeper than Conservation

“Indeed, in many important respects environmentalism is deeply conservative. It takes no great feat of logic to show that conservation is conservative, of course, but the conservatism of the environmental movement runs far deeper than that. The movement seeks to preserve a given balance which we did not create, are not capable of fully understanding, and should not delude ourselves into imagining we can much improve—in other words, its attitude toward nature is much like the attitude of conservatism toward society.”

-Yuval Levin, “Science and the Left” in the Winter 2008 issue of The New Atlantis

Hmm. Hadn't thought of it that way before.

Stop everything else when you read my blog.

Christine Rosen recently wrote in The New Atlantis about the myth of multitasking. Any internet junkie should recognize the phenomena she describes:

In the business world, where concerns about time-management are perennial, warnings about workplace distractions spawned by a multitasking culture are on the rise. In 2005, the BBC reported on a research study, funded by Hewlett-Packard and conducted by the Institute of Psychiatry at the University of London, that found, “Workers distracted by e-mail and phone calls suffer a fall in IQ more than twice that found in marijuana smokers.” The psychologist who led the study called this new “infomania” a serious threat to workplace productivity. One of the Harvard Business Review’s “Breakthrough Ideas” for 2007 was Linda Stone’s notion of “continuous partial attention,” which might be understood as a subspecies of multitasking: using mobile computing power and the Internet, we are “constantly scanning for opportunities and staying on top of contacts, events, and activities in an effort to miss nothing.”

Ahh, continuous partial attention. So that's what it's called: the hour spent clicking about on Facebook, periodically checking Gmail, Blogspot, and university e-mail, just in case. On a purely anecdotal level, I feel a much greater sense of accomplishment after several hours at one task (or even an uninterrupted series of tasks) than I do if I've been flitting from site to site in the process.

(Walter Kirn covered similar territory at the Atlantic almost a year ago. Nicholas Carr provided further musings on technology and the brain in a more recent issue.)

Gene Wolfe on Tolkien

Having become impatient at the prospect of waiting for Gene Wolfe's Shadow and Claw to show up in a library somewhere near me, I grabbed a collection of his short stories, and I've been reading it all morning. As I bounced around a little bit on the Internet, I found an essay that Wolfe wrote about J.R.R. Tolkien. It starts off like this:

There is one very real sense in which the Dark Ages were the brightest of times, and it is this: that they were times of defined and definite duties and freedoms. The king might rule badly, but everyone agreed as to what good rule was. Not only every earl and baron but every carl and churl knew what an ideal king would say and do. The peasant might behave badly; but the peasant did not expect praise for it, even his own praise. These assertions can be quibbled over endlessly, of course; there are always exceptional persons and exceptional circumstances. Nevertheless they represent a broad truth about Christianized barbarian society as a whole, and arguments that focus on exceptions provide a picture that is fundamentally false, even when the instances on which they are based are real and honestly presented. At a time when few others knew this, and very few others understood its implications, J. R. R. Tolkien both knew and understood, and was able to express that understanding in art, and in time in great art.

That, I believe, was what drew me to him so strongly when I first encountered The Lord of the Rings. As a child I had been taught a code of conduct: I was to be courteous and considerate, and most courteous and most considerate of those less strong than I -- of girls and women, and of old people especially. Less educated men might hold inferior positions, but that did not mean that they themselves were inferior; they might be (and often would be) wiser, braver, and more honest than I was. They were entitled to respect, and were to be thanked when they befriended me, even in minor matters. Legitimate authority was to be obeyed without shirking and without question. Mere strength (the corrupt coercion Washington calls power and Chicago clout) was to be defied. It might be better to be a slave than to die, but it was better to die than to be a slave who acquiesced in his own slavery. Above all, I was to be honest with everyone. Debts were to be paid, and my word was to be as good as I could make it.

And, later in the essay:

Philology led [Tolkein] to the study of the largely illiterate societies of Northern Europe between the fall of Rome and the beginning of the true Middle Ages (roughly AD 400 to 1000). There he found a quality -- let us call it Folk Law -- that has almost disappeared from his world and ours. It is the neighbour-love and settled customary goodness of the Shire. Frodo is "rich" in comparison to Sam, though no dragon would call Frodo rich; Sam is poor in comparison to Frodo, though Sam is far richer than Gollum, who has been devoured by the tyranny and corruption of the One Ring. Frodo does not despise Sam for his poverty, he employs him; and Sam does not detest Frodo for his wealth, but is grateful for the job. Most central of all, the difference in their positions does not prevent their friendship. And in the end, poor Sam rises in the estimation of the Shire because of his association with Frodo, and rich Frodo sacrifices himself for the good of all the Sams.

Read the rest of the essay here. It's convinced me that I need to re-read Tolkien's trilogy before school starts in the fall.

Hasty Generalization from Insufficient Literary Evidence

Conjecture: “The California novelist writes about freedom. The Southern novelist writes about redemption.”

Discussion: It could certainly be that Joan Didion and Philip K. Dick are not representative of California novelists in general. But, supposing that they do represent the Spirit of California, we might reasonably conclude that California exists somewhere between image and reality, but always in the present moment. The various protagonists struggle to find a place for themselves in a fluid reality: people are always moving, changing, planning, making promises. And, of course, what everyone wants is freedom, but, because there is such a stark divide between Individual and Society, freedom is far out of reach. On the other hand, Southern writers, such as Walker Percy and Thomas Wolfe, write of encumbered selves: people who do not try to shed or forget their compromised roles, but rather to redeem their dark inheritances, to find a way to accept their given identities in good conscience.

Caveat: This could be way, way off the mark.

Further Questions: What about Northerners? Midwesterners? Canadians?

Election again... ehh...

James Poulos, whose writing can be almost impossibly opaque, has written a long and lucid article for the Guardian called “What John McCain Should Do.” In essence, he argues that McCain should focus on managing the costs of war, addressing issues of immigration and citizenship, and restoring “subsidiary federalism.” I can't express how wonderful it would be if the election turns into a serious and sustained national discussion on these issues (“solvency, citizenship, and subsidiarity”).

But we'll probably just end up calling each other names until November.

I would love to know what the folks who drop by here think of Poulos's essay. Leave a comment or two.

Dr. Esolen in the Land of the Corralled Geldings

I'm trying to type out a rough taxonomy of traditionalist conservatism for a new friend, but I haven't read enough to do the job right. I'm trying to cover Burke and De Tocqueville broadly, then Russell Kirk, Leo Strauss (&co.), Alasdair MacIntyre, and perhaps John Finnis and Robert George. I wish I had more to say about Voegelin and Oakeshott than I do.

At any rate, Anthony Esolen has come up with a way to distinguish between the sort of conservatives I like and the ones I can't stand. Here's the whole paragraph, because I just love it when Dr. Esolen goes off on our culture:

“…I've been on a few radio shows to talk about The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization. Naturally, most of the shows are what is called conservative, meaning that the hosts believe that there is something they ought to conserve: traditional morality, American sovereignty, some shreds and patches of civic liberty in our nation. I have enjoyed these interviews, yet I have wanted to cry out, ‘Don't be fooled! Detach yourselves from the flies of the day! Read Kirk, read Eliot, read something written by men of letters before last week, something written by people whose long view of history included Thucydides and Tacitus.’ That might not make me too popular a guest -- though I do try to pepper the interview with what my students would recognize as typical lines, as for instance that a man has more freedom of speech in the bar across the street from the college than in the college itself. Still, I'm beset by that disjunction between keeping one's eyes on those Permanent Things, the truths of human nature that do not change, and following, wide-eyed and gaga and breathless (hey, we are all blondes now) the latest chatter of the latest political nonentity. Back in the day, when a William McKinley blathered, though he was a regular Edward Gibbon compared with our ‘orators’ now, he at least blathered in the style of a responsible man of the world, who had read a lot, fought in a terrible war (the Civil War, wherein he attained the rank of Major), ran a business or was the child or neighbor or friend of dozens of people who owned farms or ran businesses, and was old enough to know what people were like, and religious enough to know what to think of it. Now we blather like spoiled and ignorant children; our political discourse is below the juvenile. And ‘conservatives’ take part in it, too.”

In other words, there are those who have some impulse to conserve the past, and there are those who have taken the time to find out what parts of the past are truly worth conserving. I could do without the first group.

Wednesday Poem: Alone

The strange thing about melancholy: amid all its torments, unexpected blessings.

Alone
Edgar Allen Poe

From childhood's hour I have not been
As others were—I have not seen
As others saw—I could not bring
My passions from a common spring—
From the same source I have not taken
My sorrow—I could not awaken
My heart to joy at the same tone—
And all I loved—I loved alone.
Then—in my childhood—in the dawn
Of a most stormy life—was drawn
From ev'ry depth of good and ill
The mystery which binds me still—
From the torrnet, or the fountain—
From the red cliff of the mountain—
From the sun that round me rolled
In its autumn tint of gold—
From the lightening in the sky
As it passed me flying by—
From the thunder, and the storm—
And the cloud that took the form
(When the rest of heaven was blue)
Of a demon in my view.

More laffs from Dr. Boli.

Probably already happened.

Campaign coverage for people who hate campaign coverage.

I don't know about you, but I'm going to be reading a lot of Matt Taibbi this election season.

As someone with zero ability to deal with the Monday-Night-Football strategy-analysis approach of the cable channels that has bled into all the other media outlets, I'm tempted to sequester myself with my math books and MacIntyre until November rolls around and I can cast my single-issue, pro-life vote, then try to forget about the whole thing again. But that's not responsible, is it?

So I'm glad Matt Taibbi's around. Who is he? Well, he became infamous as an editor of the sociopathic Moscow alternative weekly The Exile (which is, unfortunately, getting shut down by the Russian government), but came back to the US and ended up working as Rolling Stone's political writer in the 2004 election. A quick glance through his writing will prove that he is absolutely tasteless. After all, he's the guy who compiled the list of the funny things about John Paul II's death and got fired from the New York Press because of it. Frequently scatological and obscene, he's semi-renowned for his vicious descriptions of politicians' personal appearances. It seems clear to me that he would like Obama to be the next president, and he's pretty soft on the guy, even while he writes withering invective about McCain and Clinton. So what's to like?

I suppose that, in a perverse way, I trust the guy. His goal is to achieve this perverse sort of trustworthiness. He explained it to Salon:

…I try to have a narrative voice where people see exactly who I am and what kind of person I am. That makes it easier for them to digest the information that they're getting. If they decide that they trust me, they're going to trust the information that they read, and even if they disagree with me, they at least know where I'm coming from, and that's always a positive. The negative of that is that sometimes you do have language that turns people off.

Beneath the incendiary offensiveness, he's got a simple question: why can't we just talk about things like normal people? The Great Derangement is the title of Taibbi's latest book, which I have not read, as well as his term for the current political climate in the United States. People are turning to the crazy extremes (religion on the right, 9/11 Truth on the left), and politicians take advantage of the people's intense desire for something different by feeding them rhetoric that only makes the situation worse. And, although I'm sure he's well-compensated for his efforts, Taibbi has to listen to this stultifying rhetoric day after day on the campaign trail, then filter it out for us.

If there's a weakness in his writing, it's that he's still reporting on the reporters, on the strategies, and on the procedures of the election. He won't be the fastest to take into account any big changes in economics or geopolitics. Would I trust him on policy issues? Never. But for a ground view of the absurdities of our electoral system, I can't find anyone better.