Newt Gingrich wants to destroy all adolescents.

By which I mean that he wants to change the culture so that kids become adults without this weird in-between stage that so many of us get trapped in. It's worth a read, just to exercise the brain.

EDIT: It occurs to me that the entertainment industry would embrace Creative Commons before it would let anyone seriously disrupt the cultural construction of the “teenage.”

(Via Freddie.)

Gay marriage will keep happening.

I’ve been hearing people talk about Proposition 8 failing to pass passing in California. I have a few scattered thoughts on the matter. I will put them here, since that is what a blog is for.

To put it simply, I don’t think there are enough arguments against gay marriage to keep it from becoming mostly legal in this country during my lifetime.

I have read some well-written natural law arguments against gay marriage, but I am pretty sure that they were secret theology, of the sort that would not be convincing to the irreligious. If these arguments are correct, the conclusion would have to be imposed.

I’m not aware of any modern philosophy that offers an argument against gay marriage as such.

That leaves us with the well-being of the children. You know, the sociological argument for the traditional definition of marriage: that, by tinkering with such a delicate institution, we will end up damaging it, which will hurt the children more than it hurts us. But will people wait for thirty or forty years while social scientists carefully observe what happens when children grow up with two parents of the same sex? And could sociologists on either side of the issue be objective? I am somehow doubtful.

On the other side of the question, you have a pretty straightforward argument based on consent, commitment, stability, and justice. (See, e.g., Jonathan Rauch.)

So if the natural law argument is secretly theological, modern philosophy offers little or no resistance, the sociological argument just takes too long, and straight people in younger generations have more and more gay friends, I don’t see how the traditional-marriage folks can hold out much longer.

For the sake of the Constitution and political culture, I hope that gay marriage comes by way of legislatures, not courts.

As for me, I sort of want to give in to my libertarian side and downgrade everyone to civil unions, at least as far as the government is concerned.

EDIT: Just realized I got Proposition 8 exactly backwards in the first sentence. Oops.

Conor Friedersdorf is the change he wants to see in the world.

Culture11 has been posting some interesting journalism along with its many editorials and essays. Today brought an article on state licensing and barbershops in New Jersey. Requiring aspiring barbers to learn how to do manicures is precisely the sort of bureaucratic ridiculousness that a healthy populism should be opposing.

It seems to me that C11 is publishing more of these articles than they did when they started. Back in August, features editor Conor Friedersdorf announced his vision for conservative journalism (a plane full of “Tom Wolfe clones”), and apparently this is what it looks like in practice. Say what you will: it's far better than more tired screeds about socialism or whatever.

In conclusion, you should support your local barbershop. Don't know where it is? Try this barbershop locator.

EDIT: Also, watch The Man Who Wasn't There, if you like films with barbershops, minimalistic acting, downmarket nihilism, and murder.

Anathallo returns Nov. 18th.

I was sad to miss Anathallo in Chapel Hill last week. But their website says a new album is coming. It will be called “Canopy Glow.” My friend Stephanie tells me the new songs are good.

I listened to their Holiday at the Sea EP in the car this weekend. It brought back some great memories. That album in particular catches some of the weird beauty of an Evangelical upbringing, with everything all shot through with salvation, desire, grace, and forgiveness. For example:

“The preacher wore a suit, I knew he would.
The tiny print rice paper books,
I hated how they saw me so transparently.
This heart, my thread, I tried so hard.
The best that I could sew was death,
No matter how I covered it with deeds.”

I interpreted the next album (“Floating World”) as a story of the freedom that comes from taking faith across cultural boundaries—in that case, to Japan. I can't wait to see where they'll go next.

Bullet points.

What is going on:

• I am all tied up with math homework today. Posting resumes after tomorrow's midterm and the walk through the autumn forest that I've been meaning to take.
• The end of election season makes it harder to find a focus for these entries. For the past year or so, questions about government, philosophy, religion, and culture just hung there like delicious apples. But now the harvest has come, and I'm out in the woods searching for berries and (if I'm lucky) truffles.
• I'll be guest-blogging at John Schwenkler's Upturned Earth, starting on Wednesday. Should be fun, as I already like the other co-guest-bloggers.
• John Derbyshire's Prime Obsession is the best book-about-math-for-people-who-are-not-mathematicians that I've ever read.
• You guys should see the leaves down here. Really.

OK, that's it. Back to math.

What happened in North Carolina.

First, Carter Wrenn, a longtime Republican campaign manager in North Carolina, has this to say about the election:

“What went wrong for Republicans here in North Carolina? What didn’t go wrong is happier to contemplate: Half the voters didn’t troop down to the Board of Elections and suddenly change their registration from Democrat to Republican. We didn’t wake up this morning as liberal as New York or as ‘blue’ as Massachusetts.

“Instead, voters asked themselves a simple question: Do I think Republicans deserve to be reelected? Then they looked at the last eight years and gave a pretty emphatic answer.

[...]

“All the pundits and talking heads in TV land are pontificating about how Republicans revive themselves politically. Do we move to the middle? Do we turn somersaults and stand on our heads? The better question for Republicans to ask ourselves is how did we do such a disastrous job of running the country for eight years? That, not politics, is the root of our problem.”

Wrenn also expresses strong skepticism toward the idea that the politics of race will be going away any time soon, and I'll defer to his years of experience with the electorate in North Carolina.

As for state races, the Democratic candidates pretty much swept the field down here, except for the Commissioners of Labor and Agriculture and some U.S. House incumbents. In fact, all the House incumbents in North Carolina won, except for Robin Hayes, who claimed at a Palin rally that “liberals hate the real America.” David Price won in my district. (I previously expressed opinions on Hayes and Price, in larger contexts.) And the Labor Commissioner, Cherie Berry of the GOP, probably owes her victory to name recognition: on every single slow elevator ride in the state, you get a chance to study her signature on the safety certificate.

Carter Wrenn's blogging partner, longtime N.C. Democratic campaign manager Gary Pearce, has his own rundown of the results of state races.

I'm not a “politics junkie,” so I don't understand exactly why the Democratic candidates won pretty handily in the races for Senate and Governor, but Obama just barely edged out McCain. (And Bob Barr swung the race!) But North Carolina has a long history of split-ticket voting for Democratic governors and Republican presidents, so maybe that explains it. I wish I knew more about this sort of thing.

Election: done.

I don't have much to say about the election. It's not that I think there are no important things to be said; it's just that everyone else is already saying them, and I don't have much to add. I feel basically good about Barack Obama's victory—if McCain had pulled it out, that would have seemed so weird to me—and I'm curious about what happens next. And now I can enjoy the year or so of peace and quiet before the 2012 race begins.

The virtue of piety.

Since nothing of any interest is happening anywhere in the United States right now, I'll keep at it on the religion front. It's just another fragment, but I hope it ends up as part of something bigger.

"[Riemann] was very pious, in the German Protestant style. . . . His opinion was that the essence of religion is, to translate literally from Dedekind's German, 'Daily self-examination before the face of God.'"

-John Derbyshire. Prime Obsession: Bernhard Riemann and the Greatest Unsolved Problem in Mathematics. Washington, D.C.: Joseph Henry Press, 2003.

This is as good a descriptive definition of piety as I have seen. "Daily self-examination" is, of course, not specific to religion, so I don't have much trouble conceiving of a secular ethical piety.

Every religious group I have ever personally encountered does something to encourage this virtue. And it is piety, combined with love, that does much to counter the excesses of zeal. Better, I say, to be staunch and pious than to be zealous.

"Avoid the movement."

Austin Bramwell, the conservative who seems to despise all other living conservatives, has yet another excoriation of the conservative movement up at The American Conservative. Among the many quotable segments:

"Movement conservatives have in fact produced few of the conservative ideas in general circulation. Even the movement’s intellectual founders—men like James Burnham, Richard Weaver, and Whitaker Chambers—did their best work before they decided to pool their energies into a movement. Take any movement conservative position: the original insights usually came from someone with little initial interest in building a conservative movement."

And right at the end:

"My advice to young conservatives: avoid the movement, eschew its enticements. Above all, ignore debates as to the true meaning of conservatism. Heed instead the words of Ezra Pound: Make it new!"

Sounds good to me, and fully in keeping with my innovate-on-the-genre idea, which is nothing special, but is nevertheless helping me get through election season.

I'm starting to see the twentieth century as a tragedy of split rationality. The liberal mainstream pushed back too hard against criticisms of its programs, many of them valid, from market thinkers and conservative skeptics, thereby creating the context for an institutional conservatism. How different would the political scene be if Friedrich Hayek's critique had been initially absorbed into the national conversation, rather than pushed into opposition? And now there's this strange split where young movement conservatives read a whole roster of reactive writers without engaging the very serious thinkers against whom their heroes were reacting.

I've not done much better myself, but at least I know something of what I need to learn.

(Via The Confabulum.)

In support of Godless Americans.

Does early voting make it easier for candidates to use cheap, deplorable tactics in the closing days of a campaign?

I've no idea how to answer that question, but it occurred to me as I wondered just what Elizabeth Dole thinks she's doing with her now notorious “Godless American” ads against Kay Hagan in their race for the U.S. Senate. Maybe she ran the numbers and thought it would help, or something. If so, that's a shameful comment on my home state.

Sure, there's an legitimate voting issue buried in all of this—“Kay Hagan will vote for wall-0f-separation judges”—but these ads don't get it across. And they back up one of my least favorite aspects of the what I would call the mainstream philosophy of the Republican Party: the idea that atheists aren't “real Americans.” (See also Mitt Romney's otherwise inspiring speech on religion.)

To be straightforward: I'm a Christian, and I believe that religion has a place in public life. But this notion that theism is a prerequisite for responsible citizenship needs to go. Atheists register for the draft (the fellows, at least), serve in our wars, vote, and contribute to the nation. To be associated with atheists is not a scary thing, and I hope North Carolina's voters make it clear to Dole that these tactics aren't acceptable, by sternly worded letter or angry phone call if not by vote.

Side note: I would rather drop the Pledge of Allegiance entirely than remove just the phrase “under God.” Christians are barred from pledging their highest allegiance to a nation; they already owe it to the Church Universal. And given the tradition of rights in the USA, any pledge of loyalty to the nation needs a freedom of conscience proviso. So let's just drop the thing altogether.

Holy Land and Heritage.

“Like most post-industrial New England towns, Waterbury, Connecticut has clearly seen better days. Likewise with the sprawling, 17-acre Christian-themed theme park that put Waterbury on the map. The gate stands ajar, the paths are overgrown, drug paraphernalia and junk heaps stand in ironic contrast with plaques exhorting liberation from worldly temptations, and what little maintenance gets done is performed by a mysterious order of nuns. Welcome to Holy Land, U.S.A., an apocalyptic nightmare vision of American culture worthy of John of Patmos.”

-Will Wilson's article “This Hollow Ground” (photo from same site)

I'm a sucker for deteriorating Americana, so I'll have to make a point of visiting this place the next time I pass through Connecticut. (More pictures here.)

At least Holy Land U.S.A. seems to have been devotional in its intent. Pardon me for indulging in childhood reminiscence for two days in a row, but I remember going to Heritage USA as a child. It was a waterpark and a resort center, and also a big part of televangelist Jim Bakker's giant money-making fraud that eventually landed him in jail. All of this happened before I was six years old, so I mainly remember the waterslides, the wave pool, and the pastel storefronts of the shopping center in the half-finished hotel. I've heard that the waterpark has been pretty much removed, though I haven't seen it for myself. It was abandoned for years and years. Maybe I should drive out to see what it's like out there, next time I'm home. (More pictures.)

These days, Jim Bakker is back on television. I don't know how he got that to fly.

It strikes me the whole Jim Bakker saga is a farcical, condensed version of the Reformation (or at least the classic Protestant perspective on it), with The Charlotte Observer in the role of Luther, and timeshares in a gaudy hotel rather than indulgences. And, if I may overstretch the comparison for the sake of a joke, this would put Jim Bakker's son Jay and his Revolution Church in the role of Vatican II.

Music redeems election season.

I'm typing this while enjoying this lineup, outdoors on a beautiful morning, for free. I love Chapel Hill's music supporters, and it's neat to see them so excited for music and politics. (I remember how crushed and depressed people around here were after the 2004 election. I think it's a good thing that Obama has energized people who thought they would never escape cynicism again.)

October 31: Happy Reformation Day!

To Protestants readers, and others who wish to join in the fun: Happy Reformation Day!

I grew up in Christian churches and schools that were always careful to avoid the secular aspects of holidays. Do you remember that graffiti on the bathroom stall in the movie Saved? “SANTA = SATAN”? It wasn't quite that bad, but that's the idea.

Usually, churches had “Fall Festivals” rather than Halloween parties. There were more cowboys and crosses than skeletons and jack-o-lanterns, but they weren't anything special. One year, however, sticks out in my mind as a favorite: the year my school had a big Reformation Day party. (On October 31st, 1517, Martin Luther posted the Ninety-Five Theses, his first public challenge to the authority of the Catholic Church.) I must have been in first or second grade, and I recall the event only as a memory of a memory.

My favorite detail is one that may or may not be a collaboration of time and an active imagination. I hope that it happened, but I can't be sure.

I seem to remember that, instead of trying to pin a paper tail on a donkey poster while blindfolded, we played “pin-the-95-Theses-to-the-Wittenberg-door.”

If I ever have young children, they will get to play this game.

(To think that people say Christians don't know how to have fun…)

EDIT: One year, I dressed up as Moses for a church event, and just added a little fake blood and talcum powder to the same outfit to be an old man zombie (?) for trick-or-treating in the neighborhood.

A note on Hitchens, rationality, and sin.

I'm flipping through Christopher Hitchens's God is not Great, and I want to make one quick observation. On page 8, Hitchens says:

“Past and present religious atrocities have occurred not because we are evil, but because it is a fact of nature that the human species is, biologically, only partly rational.”

This means that we're only partly rational, not just intellectually, but practically, meaning that we often make the wrong inferences from our moral premises and the situations in which we find ourselves. Simply put, we make bad choices.

Hitchens's statement here actually puts him very, very close to the Reformed conception of sin, theologically speaking. In my tradition, at least, “sin” isn't the mere breaking of rules, but rather the systematic condition of insufficient (fallen) rationality.

I've many more thoughts, but they'll have to wait.

EDIT: Minor grammar fix.

Dawkins vs. Fantasy

I was wondering if my forthcoming, more-or-less randomly timed foray into The Atheism would be pointless without some newsworthy action on the part of The Atheists.

Fortunately, Richard Dawkins has helped me out by picking this week to announce that he will be devoting his attention henceforth to warning children “against believing in ‘anti-scientific’ fairytales.” Yes, he's going to investigate Harry Potter.

(See Alan Jacobs on the American Scene for fuller reflections.)

(EDIT: Read the American Scene comment by Christopher M. for the best possible interpretation of Dawkins's new project. If Dawkins himself can make his case in those terms, he'll have a book on religion worth reading.)

Thundersticks.

Dara Lind has a fun piece up at Culture11 about thundersticks. Specifically, it's about how the thundersticks migrated from sporting events to political rallies.

I hereby recommend Dara's piece for inclusion in the yet-to-be-created anthology that tells the story of how American politics became a team sporting event.

Now I'm waiting for the essay on how Monday Night Football and Sportscenter provided the template for election coverage. (Please! I really want someone to write it! Or, if it's been written, just tell me where I can find it.)

Return to sender.

So I've been trying to get some thoughts together on The Atheism, and I decided to pick up a few books by The Atheists, for quotes and context and such.

I just read Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris. The phrase that kept popping into my mind was this:

Sam Harris, you stupid idiot.

I'm not particularly proud of this reaction, and I know he's not a stupid idiot, but that's the how it was.

I had to keep reminding myself of some other essay Harris wrote, the name of which escapes me, where he displayed a capacity for nuance and reflection. He's a smart man. But there is no nuance in Letter to a Christian Nation. It's as bluntly reductive as any fundamentalist tract. It seemed like I could hardly turn a page without finding a gross oversimplification. This isn't by itself a problem. What else can you expect from an eighty-page polemic? Of course it would take a longer book to present these arguments more seriously.

What was really disappointing is that it's not even a good polemic, by the standards of the genre. Where are the devastating aphorisms? The sharply calibrated witticisms? The splendidly grotesque literary caricatures? I only smiled when he quoted abler stylists. All we get here is earnest moralizing.

Say what you will about Christopher Hitchens; at least he knows how to deploy properly an anecdote.

"Conservative" is a genre!

All my labeling problems just disappeared in a burst of literary theory. Conservative, liberal, progressive, libertarian: these are just genres.

"Just genres?" you ask. "What does that even mean?"

Well, a genre is a more or less complete set of signals to guide interpretation. If we know the genre, we know how to interpret the story. To be sure, philosophers and critics have spent entire centuries trying to locate and enforce essential aspects of genres, with their famous attempts to lay down the rules for the best kind of tragedy. But the greatest authors were always playing with the codes they inherited, and genres always escaped their quarantines.

If biological evolution is an intricate branching tree, generic evolution is a tree that branches and rejoins itself. So too with political philosophies. There are no rules against any syntheses, though many crossings will have little to no survival value. The narrower the genre--reformist conservative, New Deal Democrat, anarcho-syndicalist, Objectivist--the greater its explanatory power. The word "conservative," free of any modifiers, is as broad a label as "tragic," and is helpful in the same degree.

Conservatism, broadly construed, is dedicated to a certain kind of story about our political life, just as the liberalism is dedicated to its own story. To say "I am a conservative" or "I am a liberal" is to endorse a story. And the mainstream of the conservative movement, right now, is advancing a certain interpretation of that story.

So what do you do when the genre turns ugly? You don't stay silent; you tell a better story. You take the various codes and tropes, and you learn how to make them compelling again*.

You reclaim the word** by reclaiming the genre.

Is there a breaking point? After some thought, I'm not sure how much it matters. At some point, you just have to tell your better story, and let other people worry about the name.

(Caveat: Genre certainly isn't everything. The Republican Party is a definite human institution, with membership and hierarchy and order and power. You reclaim a political party, or an institution of government, through the old messy work of politics, which involves both persuasion and compromise. And policies are policies; we can try to agree on some common empirical ground when we argue about them. With this weird crisis behind me, let's get back to it.)

(Question: Does this turn Scott Payne's "very complicated and intricate coin" into the two masks of drama?)

*Like Die Hard did for action movies after the ultra-muscular '80s. See also: Christopher Nolan's reclamation of the Batman series after the Schumacher debacles.

**Yes. That's my paragraph on the Daily Dish. Surreal.

Obama's foreign policy: not enough change.

"Several decades after Vietnam, in the aftermath of a century filled to overflowing with evidence pointing to the limited utility of armed force and the dangers inherent in relying excessively on military power, the American people have persuaded themselves that their best prospect for safety and salvation lies with the sword. Told that despite all of their past martial exertions, treasure expended, and lives sacrificed, the world they inhabit is today more dangerous than ever and that they must redouble those exertions, they dutifully assent. Much as dumping raw sewage into American lakes and streams was once deemed unremarkable, so today 'global power projection'--a phrase whose sharp edges we have worn down through casual use, but which implies military activism without apparent limit--has become standard practice, a normal condition, one to which no plausible alternatives seem to exist. All of this Americans have come to take for granted: it's who we are and what we do.

"Such a definition of normalcy cries out for a close and critical reexamination. Surely, the surprises, disappointments, painful losses, and woeful, even shameful failures of the Iraq War make clear the need to rethink the fundamentals of U.S. military policy. Yet a meaningful reexamination will require first a change of consciousness, seeing war and America's relationship to war in a fundamentally different way."

-Andrew Bacevich. The New American Militarism. New York: Oxford UP, 2005.

I've tried to convince several of my friends that neither presidential candidate is offering such a reexamination, though we need it more than ever. The obnoxious hatchet/scalpel trope from the debates transfers directly from spending cuts to "global power projection": McCain wants to chop away at global problems with shows of strength, Obama wants to cut them up with more diplomacy (albeit quite aggressively in Afghanistan). But nobody is questioning the need for the operation.

Obama has praised Samantha Power's A Problem from Hell. It's a good book, and it makes a strong case that genocide is often horrific enough to justify military interventions (to speak plainly: invasions). I would emphasize only that the United States should err on the side of the most cautious assessment of its capacity for positive action, while making the most of its ability to bring global attention to atrocities through diplomatic condemnations, &c.

But if this interventionist inclination is coupled with an aggressive stance on Pakistan and Afghanistan, we'll just be back in Bill Clinton territory (although I sincerely hope Obama as President would not fling bombs and missiles about the globe with such reckless abandon). Which is to say: this is technically change, insofar as it is different from the Bush administration, but it's not really new.

As I continue to think through the Price-Lawson race, it seems more and more important to me that Congress-persons question not only a now-unpopular war, but the whole direction of U.S. foreign policy.

How do other voters feel about militarism? Check out this back-and-forth between John Schwenkler and James Poulos on Culture11.

The Seventh Season of Firefly

Add "a world where FOX didn't drop the ball on Firefly" to the list of alternate universes I wish I could visit. Here's a counterfactual review of the seventh season. (Via Galley Slaves.)