Why I like Wirkman Netizen.

Wirkman Netizen has posted his top and bottom five presidents, with Andrew Jackson on both lists. There's more there, but I love that he concluded with this:

“Let me conclude by stating just how radical I will go in talking about American politics. Before the Civil War, I would have been a Garrisonian, advocating the secession of the Northern States. ‘No union with slaveholders!’ The South was filled with evil scum, and a slave rebellion, spurred on by northern instigators and open borders all along the north, would have led the south finally to wise up and phase out slavery before the 20th century dawned. I’m pretty sure of that. If only the North would have loved liberty more than The Union.

“But isn’t that the usual problem, people loving government more than freedom?”

I'll have to accept the “evil scum” remark because it's true.

I need to do some more reading about pre-Civil War intellectual movements to decide what I would have been attracted to. Where would someone with my temperament have landed in the late 1840s and early 1850s? It's hard for me to say. I think I would have subscribed to Brownson's Quarterly Review (assuming that I was not a dirt-poor farmer in western Virginia), although perhaps that would not have been appropriate for a Presbyterian of the time.

Bacevich and the traditionalist syllogism.

A stray thought.

I'm finally getting around to Andrew Bacevich's The Limits of Power, only half a year after everybody else read it. I think that Bacevich's biggest virtue might be the degree to which he eschews “metaphysical” speculation in his Niebuhr-inspired realism. His case for self-restraint doesn't rest on a natural law argument. You can take his arguments to be entirely consequentialist if you want. Global power projection isn't going to work because we can't afford it. Massive consumer and government debt isn't going to work because it will ruin us in the future.

Take the traditionalist syllogism from the other day:

• Premise 1: Democratic values displace the older virtues of self-restraint and self-government.
• Premise 2: The older virtues of self-restraint and self-government are necessary to human flourishing.
• Conclusion: Therefore a democratic culture is inimical to human flourishing.

You can find this argument in any number of non-liberal conservatives, but it doesn't have much to do with Bacevich's main point. For Bacevich, it doesn't really matter whether it's democracy, liberalism, or modernity that should bear the blame for our cultural self-indulgence. It seems that Bacevich would love it for the United States to have a democratic/liberal/modern culture that can restrain itself from invading other countries or ramping up trillions in debt in a quixotic quest for invulnerability. The intensity of his rhetoric should, I think, be taken as citizen's democratic exhortation.

What's important is that we take a clear view of the consequences of our actions and decide what kind of freedom is worth the price that we won't be able to escape paying when the creditors come calling.

Pop Darwinism follow-up.

Last month I wrote a clumsy post on “pop Darwinism,” where I asked a few questions about the trendy application of evolutionary psychology to modern ethical problems:

“My question: how does knowing the biological origins of our desires help us decide how whether to act on them? I don't see how this knowledge can do anything to help me order my own life, though I suppose it could help you if you were trying to control other people. From my subjective perspective, how can I know whether a particular desire is maladaptive? Trust the scientists? And even if it is maladaptive, what if I decide to do something with my life besides doing my utmost to ensure the continued existence of my own genetic material?

[…]

“The problem I have with pop-Darwinism, then, is that it takes a worthwhile field of human knowledge—the study of our genes and how they came to be—and tells us that understanding the origins of our desires is enough to make good decisions about them. But this understanding isn't enough.”

Confused? I know I am. But Will Wilkinson posted some good stuff from T.H. Huxley on the very same problem:

“The propounders of what are called the ‘ethics of evolution,’ when the ‘evolution of ethics’ would usually better express the object of their speculations, adduce a number of more or less interesting facts and more or less sound arguments, in favour of the origin of the moral sentiments, in the same way as other natural phenomena, by a process of evolution. I have little doubt, for my own part, that they are on the right track; but as the immoral sentiments have no less been evolved, th’ere is, so far, as much natural sanction for the one as the other. The thief and the murderer follow nature just as much as the philanthropist. Cosmic evolution may teach us how the good and the evil tendencies of man may have come about; but, in itself, it is incompetent to furnish any better reason why what we call good is preferable to what we call evil than we had before.

[…]

“As I have already urged, the practice of that which is ethically best—what we call goodness or virtue—involves a course of conduct which, in all respects, is opposed to that which leads to success in the cosmic struggle for existence. In place of ruthless self-assertion it demands self-restraint; in place of thrusting aside, or treading down, all competitors, it requires that the individual shall not merely respect, but shall help his fellows; its influence is directed, not so much to the survival of the fittest, as to the fitting of as many as possible to survive. It repudiates the gladiatorial theory of existence. It demands that each man who enters into the enjoyment of the advantages of a polity shall be mindful of his debt to those who have laboriously constructed it; and shall take heed that no act of his weakens the fabric in which he has been permitted to live. Laws and moral precepts are directed to the end of curbing the cosmic process and reminding the individual of his duty to the community, to the protection and influence of which he owes, if not existence itself, at least the life of something better than a brutal savage.”

Here's Wilkinson himself, bringing things up to date:

“One thing I think some ev psych fans have a hard time getting their heads around is that morality–the system of norms that regulates individual behavior and enables social coordination–is variable by ‘design,’ and that our evolved moral capacities are largely norm-acquisition devices which must wait to be calibrated by enculturation. We’re ‘fill-in-the-blanks slates’ not blank slates. There are what you might consider ‘factory default’ settings. (Which involves a lot of out-group slaughter, I’m afraid.) So, yes, certain configurations of moral sentiments, certain systems of norms, are more ‘natural’ than others. But they lead to relatively terrible societies–nasty, brutish, short, etc. The norms that undergird the peaceful liberal order of impersonal, extended, massively positive-sum exchange are the result of generations of often self-conscious resistance to the ‘factory defaults.’ Which is just to say, T.H. Huxley knew what he was talking about.”

It seems so obvious when Huxley and Wilkinson say it.

Daily Disch.

“She addressed the roaches with the same desperate intensity with which she sometimes (though not often in recent years) addressed prayers to the Almighty. Once she had prayed all night long to get rid of her acne, but in the morning it was worse than ever. People in intolerable circumstances will pray to anything. Truly, there are no atheists in foxholes: the men there pray to the bombs that they may land somewhere else.”

-Thomas Disch, “The Roaches,” in Fun With Your New Head. New York: Doubleday, 1968. (7-8)

“ ‘It's just as well that God is dead at last. He was such a prig. Some scholars have professed to find it odd that Milton's sympathies were with his fiend and not with God, but there's nothing remarkable in that. Even the Evangelist more often purloins his fires from hell than heaven. He certainly gives it much closer attention. It's simply so much more interesting, not to say relevant. Hell is closer to the facts that we know.

“ ‘Let's carry our honesty even a little further. Hell is not merely preferable to heaven—it's the only clear notion of an afterlife—of a goal worth striving toward—that human imagination has been able to devise. The Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans originated our civilization, populated it with their gods, and formed, in their chthonic wisdom, a heaven underfoot. Some heretical Jews inherited that civilization, changed its gods to demons, and called heaven hell. Oh, they tried to pretend there was a new heaven somewhere up in the attic, but it was a most unconvincing deceit. Now that we've found the stairs to the attic, now that we can zoom about anywhere we choose in that unpopulated and infinite void, the game is up, absolutely, for heaven. I doubt the Vatican will survive to the end of the century, though one should never underestimate the power of ignorance. Oh, not the Vatican's ignorance, for heaven's sake! They've always known which way the deck was stacked.’

[…]

“They left the room together, followed by the guards, but Skilliman couldn't resist coming back for yet one more Parthian shot. ‘Don't be downcast, Louis. I was bound to get the better of you. Because, you know, I have the universe on my side.’

“Schipansky was not there to be made distraught, and I allowed myself a riposte. ‘That's just what I find so vulgar.’ ”

-Thomas Disch, Camp Concentration. New York: Carroll & Graf, 1988. (152-5)

Blogging and overreach.

Yesterday I posted on why I thought Damon Linker's arguments against posts from Patrick Deneen and Andrew Bacevich were misguided, to put it mildly.

As a follow-up, Linker has commendably decided to rethink his position:

“On Tuesday of this week, I posted an item in which I drew connections between an essay by Andrew Bacevich and political authoritarianism. Two days later, I posted a follow-up in which I expanded on the argument. In retrospect -- and in light of some online reaction to the posts -- I've concluded that the connections I made in the original item were overdrawn, and that I made things even worse in the second post. Ideas and arguments can take on a logic of their own, and I foolishly followed the logic of mine into a position several steps more radical than one I really want to defend. I trust that future online disputation and debate will provide many opportunities for me to address these and related issues again -- and so also to stake out and develop a more moderate, nuanced, and genuinely liberal position.”

I'm glad to see this, because I think it's great for people like Bacevich to have moderate, nuanced, and genuinely liberal conversation partners. And I certainly understand how easy it is to overreach when blogging, though I doubt that I'm likely to get called out by Daniel Larison or the Atlantic bloggers for my mistakes.

Conservative movies.

Daniel Larison describes perfectly the problem with lists (or books) of “conservative movies”:

“For quite a while I have raised objections to trying to read specific political messages into film and TV, and more generally I have always been skeptical of the sub-set of conservative arguments dedicated to appropriating elements of pop culture. On the whole, I think the exercise is mostly futile, and to the extent that these assessments of pop culture products are at all accurate they tend to dissuade conservatives from their own non-kitschy cultural production. “We don’t need to go into cinema or television–look at all the conservative movies and shows we already have!” These efforts tend to reinforce the “this is a center-right nation” complacency that assumes that some core cultural conservatism exists as a given in America and does not need to be actively cultivated. Worse than that, it causes conservatives to start to define what makes a film or television show ‘conservative’ largely by how much it is loathed or criticized by their opponents, such that 24 receives embarrassing praise when it depicts a near-omnicompetent security state that breaks the law at will so long as the targets of its violence and lawlessness are terrorists.”

The posts I've looked at in the series tell their readers how they should go about interpreting the films so as to get a specific conservative moral at the end. They do this by ignoring thematic complexity where it exists and often praising banality where complexity is absent.

Larison's right about the frightening militarism of the list.

I'd rather watch good movies than conservative ones.

UPDATE: How could I not post this comment whole?

“The Dark Knight deserves to be considered a political film in the broader sense of what politics is, but I wouldn’t say it falls under the severely constricted political understanding portrayed by NRO. Through the movie I couldn’t help but see the major themes of Alasdair Macintyre’s After Virtue come to light on the screen. The Neitzschean (the Joker) has come to demonstrate the ineptitude of the Weberian bureaucrats (Commissioner Gordon, the prosecutor) with his will to power. In fact the Joker’s Neitzschean power is strong enough to turn some Weberians like the prosecutor into a Neitzschean Two-face. The only tangible response to the Neitzschean is the Aristotlean citizen who seeks to live a life of virtue and engagement in the polis (the Dark Knight, who makes a decent hero as one who struggles with virtue). So, The Dark Knight deserves the label as a political movie, however, it is not ‘conservative’ but Macintyrian.”

Well done, Casey Khan. Well done. I'll definitely watch MacIntyrean movies.

I'm doing my best to exercise self-restraint right now.

I shouldn't read Damon Linker, and you shouldn't either, but he's been trying to go back and forth with Andrew Bacevich and Patrick Deneen, who have good and interesting things to say.

In his short article, at The New Republic, Bacevich argues that any conservatism with a future will have to address the inability of Americans to restrain themselves, saying:

“When it comes to the culture, conservatives should promote an awareness of the costs of unchecked individual autonomy, while challenging conceptions of freedom that deny the need for self-restraint and self-denial.”

So Bacevich believes that unchecked autonomy can have costs and that some measure self-restraint and self-denial are components of any true freedom. This is not exactly a new idea. But because Bacevich uses the phrase “culture of choice,” Linker reads his argument as—I am not kidding—a call for theocracy, a call for “fixed limits on human choice are set by absolute political, spiritual, and moral authorities.” Linker concludes with this:

“Does a culture founded on choice lead to problems of its own? Of course it does. But an authoritarian culture is no solution to those problems, which flow from the depravity of human nature itself. And that's why the paleocon critique of modern America is so troubling and radical: The object of its enmity is not this or that aspect of our society or culture but rather the human condition itself. ”

Patrick Deneen tries to sort out the difference between Republican self-restraint and masochistic slavish servitude to religious authority, but it is to no avail.

“A culture that would seek to reign in our propensity to depravity would not rest either on private liberation nor "authoritarianism," but the inculcation of the faculties and abilities of self-government. Only one who seeks private liberty in all respects would regard such cultivation of self-government as oppressive, and would ultimately have to face the reality that such thoroughgoing private liberty is purchased by means of the expansion of public power and a truly frightening prospect of authoritarianism. Already we can see that much of the American public would be willing to sacrifice liberties in the name of sustaining a growth economy that encourages near-infinite, but never fulfilled, personal satiation. This, however, is not liberty.”

Deneen's definition of freedom, by the way, is “self-government resulting in freedom from the self-destructive slavery to appetite.”

Linker comes back with this:

“…let's begin by returning to Bacevich's first criticism of the United States, which Deneen tacitly endorses. Among their many other sins, Americans affirm the ‘right to choose’ above all other social and moral principles, producing a nation in which individuals freely ‘fornicate, marry, breed, abort, divorce, and abandon.’ To take the first item on this list, Bacevich and Deneen would clearly prefer that their fellow citizens not "fornicate" as much as they currently do. How might this goal be achieved? One possibility is that we pass and enforce laws upholding sexual chastity. That sounds pretty authoritarian to me. But of course, Bacevich and Deneen deny that they're advocating any such thing. Okay, then, let's take them at their word: What they want is for Americans to restrain themselves, to resist their sexual appetites, to repress their desires, to rein them in. And that's not authoritarianism; it's ‘self-government.’

“Except for one thing: It now appears that Bacevich and Deneen aren't really opposed to a ‘culture of choice’ at all. Rather, they're opposed to a culture in which people make the wrong choices -- in this case, the choice to fornicate instead of the choice to resist their sexual appetites. But here's what I don't understand: Why would a free man or woman choose to resist rather than act on his or her sexual appetites? I mean, we've invented birth control. Sex is very pleasurable. It's a way to enjoy emotional and physical intimacy with another human being. Why not choose for fornication? Why, in other words, is it wrong, in itself, to fornicate? Can we even imagine a response to this question that does not make reference to the authoritative teachings of an orthodox religious tradition?” [emphasis mine - wbr]

I guess Plato's Republic doesn't count as imaginable? Nor the Nicomachean Ethics? It's not like those works have had a major influence on Western thought or anything. Or was Plato a secret Catholic or something?

Now that I'm in the last chapter of Jeffrey Stout's Democracy and Tradition, I'm pretty sure that Stout's pragmatism can justify a culture of self-restraint. In fact, it's instructive to see how Stout and Linker differ in their responses to traditionalist critics. The traditionalists (Milbank, MacIntyre, and Hauerwas, in Stout's case) challenge modern democracy with a syllogism:

• Premise 1: Democratic values displace the older virtues of self-restraint and self-government.
• Premise 2: The older virtues of self-restraint and self-government are necessary to human flourishing.
• Conclusion: Therefore a democratic culture is inimical to human flourishing.

Stout denies the first premise, and I think he accepts the second. He believes that a democratic culture ought to develop social practices of self restraint for the common good. Linker seems to accept the first premise and deny the second, and thereby renders any ethical reasoning both private and meaningless.

To sum up: Read Andrew Bacevich. Read Patrick Deneen. Read Jeffrey Stout.

Exercise democratic self-restraint, and don't read Damon Linker.

UPDATE: Somehow I missed John Schwenkler's post, which goes into more detail on why Linker's reading of Bacevich is so misguided. Read that one too.

Economy and grammar.

Once I get stuck on something, it takes me a while to stop.

Julian Sanchez has an interesting quick history of the phrase “grow the economy.” Turns out that Clinton introduced the phrase to our political parlance. Think it's inconsequential whether “grow” is transitive or intransitive? Think again:

“This is subtly but importantly different from arguing about whether a particular piece of legislation will, say, ‘promote economic growth.’ In the one case, ‘growth’ is fundamentally something economies do (or don’t do), and policy can be seen as helping or hindering matters. In the other, the economy is basically cast as inert—growth is something governments do to them.”

I'm with my dictionary on this one: grow should be transitive only in the context of hair and farm crops, e.g., “grow a beard” or “grow some corn.” And I'm a little bit iffy on the farming use. Claiming to “grow” the economy, or church membership, or a business's profits, implies that one is claiming to be the principle of growth for that thing. In the case of facial hair, this is very nearly true, and with crops the farmer works so closely with the land that it's a great metaphor.

But when the representatives of the government say they are “growing the economy,” such a claim isn't just hubris. It's simply false.

Economy again, quickly.

One more on the economy.

Jack Betts blogs that North Carolina voters are split on the big economy bill, mostly by party lines. Quoting Tom Jensen:

“The demographics that launched Barack Obama to a surprise victory in North Carolina last fall- African Americans, young voters, and women- are all in strong support of the bill. The ones that almost allowed John McCain to keep the state Republican- white voters and men- are considerably less supportive.

“What does that all add up to? Public opinion on the stimulus in North Carolina is probably more a referendum on the President than anything else.”

If this is true, it has to be the worst way of making a decision that could very well define the nation's domestic stability for the next few generations.

Manzi on the trillions.

Jim Manzi's got some stuff on the “stimulus package” at the American Scene:

“When I hear politicians say that ‘we’re borrowing this money from our kids’ or whatever, this can seem abstract. It turns out that it’s not a metaphor. If we enact the stimulus legislation, there will people from Beijing to Dubuque who will hold pieces of paper saying, roughly, that on a specified date they can show up at the door of the United States government and demand trillions of dollars.

[…]

“…We are making decisions in a sea of ignorance, and shouldn’t kid ourselves about this.

“The strongest argument for the stimulus (and the one that I think, in their heart-of-hearts, most supporters actually hold) is what could be called the Costanza-Hoover Principle: do the opposite of whatever Herbert Hoover did. In a world of limited knowledge, this isn’t as crazy as it might seem, at least as a starting point. It sure seems like Hoover screwed up; and hopefully we can avoid his mistakes. This pretty much boils down to: avoid a tariff war; don’t try to balance the budget right now; don’t restrict the money supply (that gold standard thing is right out); and, most importantly, prevent a collapse of the banking system.”

It's times like these that make me glad I'm not a politician who has to make decisions. $1.1 trillion is an unfathomable amount of “stimulus, ”and just as much, if not more, debt. Personally, I'd be willing to try to ride out a severe recession with the skills I've gathered, but I've got a weird relationship with my own mortality and a yen for post-apocalyptic scenarios. But I wouldn't want to choose that for anyone else.

So it appears that my generation is going to have to take one for the team. As Manzi puts it:

“This makes the incredible support of this age cohort for Obama seem pretty ironic, at least on this issue. You know all those rallies you went to, and how excited you were on election night? It turns out that the most important result of that, so far at least, is that you get work much, much harder over the next 40 years so that the overweight guy in the khaki pants down the hall from you at work who does nothing of much observable value doesn’t have to move to a smaller house or trade in his car.”

Maybe we like being asked to make a sacrifice? Ever think of that? But it's not exactly noble, since I'm sure we'll do everything in our power to pass whatever debt we can on to our kids.

Besides, if we don't take the stimulus money drugs and things go really badly, we'll have to endure the pain longer than our parents will.

Anyhow, I feel really weird talking about spending more money than I can imagine, and what's done is probably done.

PS: I cannot stand the word “stimulus” for much longer.

Orchestral music in small rooms.

Yesterday I got to see the student orchestra from the North Carolina School of Science and Math perform Beethoven's Fifth Symphony in a not-very-large church sanctuary in Durham. They did a very good job, as far as I could tell, and the room made it magical. A sixty-person orchestra taking up at least a sixth of the floor space—that's a wonderful sound. Having never before listened to the whole symphony at once, I found it deeply moving.

Even better, the relatively small audience gave the performance the same kind of intimacy that I love to find at the barely-attended rock shows I see every now and then, where the performers and the audience create some kind of actual relationship during the performance. With the symphony, I think it came between the movements—the musicians were attuned to the special qualities of the audience's silence, and played their next movement accordingly. So that's why you don't clap between movements…

Beauty absorbing sublimity.

Eve Tushnet has an article up at Inside Catholic on beauty and sublimity. It's well worth reading, but her definitions of beauty and sublimity are not quite the same as mine (which I have poached more or less whole from David Bentley Hart's The Beauty of the Infinite).

Tushnet wants to start with Burke:

“It's just about impossible to talk about the sublime without reference to Edmund Burke's rakish essay, ‘A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful,’ although we shouldn't end there . . . Beauty, in this understanding, is found in those objects and people we can cherish; and therefore in those we can master. The sublime, by contrast, inheres in what masters us.”

She rightly goes on to distinguish the Christian sublime from the Burkean sublime. For Tushnet, the most important difference is that, for the Christian with eyes to see, sublimity is to be found in what is humble, even ridiculous. Saintly foolishness is sublime.

But is this really the best way to parse out beauty and sublimity? Well, David Bentley Hart managed to write a whole book about beauty, with a large section on various postmodern sublimities, without mentioning Burke, except perhaps by including him in a broad allusion:

“As it happens, beauty has fallen into considerable disfavor in modern philosophical discourse, having all but disappeared as a term in philosophical aesthetics. In part this is attributable to the eighteenth-century infatuation with Longinus's distinction between the beautiful and the sublime, one of whose unfortunate effects was to reduce the scope of the beautiful to that of the pretty, the merely decorative, or the inoffensively pleasant; in the climate of postmodern thought, whose humors are congenial to the sublime but generally corrosive of the beautiful, beauty's estate has diminished to one of mere negation, a spasm of illusory calm in the midst of being's sublimity, its ‘infinite speed.’ ” (15)

It could be that that Hart and Tushnet don't have much more than a terminological disagreement; they may be working within roughly the same conceptual scheme. For Hart, “beauty is the true form of distance,” (18) which means that it includes what we master and what masters us as part of the same right order of creation.

I can't help but think of Sam Gamgee and the Elves in Tolkien: the Elves mastered the hobbits and were therefore Burkean-sublime to Sam, whereas the simplicity and courage of the hobbits was Burkean-beautiful to the Elves. Yet Sam's Burkean-beautiful dedication to Frodo becomes nothing if not Christian-sublime by the time they arrive in Mordor. For Hart, this would all be Christian beauty, all covered in this single term.

I have to admit that I have a preference for Hart's definitions. Take the music of Bach (whom Hart terms “the greatest of Christian theologians” (282) ). In the biggest works, there is plenty that is pretty and comforting, but there is also much that is awesome in the old sense. Or in the fugues, where the “beautiful” upper voices are so often set in play with the strong, even fearsome bass counterpoints. These sorts of beauty and sublimity do not seem to me to be ultimately separable.

But not all that is sublime is beautiful in this sense. For Kant, Hart says, sublimity was a rupture in the scheme of beauty, and contains within itself a violence. European philosophers developed this sublimity of violence and rupture in four relevant ways. I'll attempt to sum them up based on my reading of Hart, but I'm far out of my depth here. We have the differential sublime, as described by Derrida, in which difference continually escapes from metaphysics; the cosmological sublime of Deleuze, where a chaotic violence is the order of things and representation is but another manifestation of that violence; a Heideggerian ontological sublime, which I simply don't understand at all; and the ethical sublime of Levinas, in which duty and obligation to the Other take on a staggering, stupefying dimension. These sublimities—they clearly are not beauties—oppose theological beauty.

I wonder where Tushnet and Hart would really disagree. Hart seems to be much more committed to Christian beauty as an expression of the primordial peace of the Christian creation and the inner peace and harmony of the Trinity. And Hart argues for the ancient doctrine of divine apatheia, which holds that God does not suffer in his divine nature because the Trinity is, has always been, always will be, infinitely peaceful and infinitely complete. I wouldn't presume to read a position on apatheia into Tushnet's article. (Lee from A Thinking Reed had an informative post on apatheia last week.)

I suppose my basic point is this: isn't the “Christian sublime” just the sublime that is covered by a robust Christian definition of beauty? Failed beauty—saccharine kitsch, for example—is just not beautiful enough. It would be better if it were more deeply beautiful. But human cruelty can be as fully sublime and incomprehensible as any frozen waterfall: no additional amount of sublimity will fix the problem. Indeed, it seems to me that no true beauty is without a place in Christian thinking, whereas many kinds of sublimes fail to make the cut. Can I go so far as to say “Christian sublimity” is only Christian insofar as it is also beautiful?

UPDATE: Eve asks, “Can there be a peaceful rapture?”

Which is a great question, and I'm going to leave it at that for the time being.

Graduate degrees and value, continued.

I linked to an article a few days ago about the downside of pursuing a PhD. in the humanities. Freddie DeBoer and John Schwenkler have some more on that theme. (Bonus: Michael Bérubé shows up in the comments on Freddie's post.)

John connects education debt with the wave of foreclosures by tracing them to the same root: the desire to get easy money now and figure out how to pay it back later—with interest, of course. Freddie emphasizes again the degree to which universities depend on the cheap labor of the graduate students who are stuck in and depend on the system. He says:

“In a perfect world, more potential grad students would self-select themselves out of the grad school chase. But the fact that it takes so long to get your doctorate acts as a kind of buffer for looking at the reality; I think a lot of people just say ‘I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.’ And they are following their passion, after all. People really do care about contemporary Portugeuse novelists and the effect of absentee fathers on child literacy rates and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s politics and allelic variation as evidence of sexual reproduction in the opportunistic human parasite ‘Candida Albicans’. God bless them for it. I think academic interest is a wonderful thing. The problem is that often the passion for those things seems like a small solace when people have emerged from six or seven years of school and work and can’t get employed. And now they’ve got a wife and kids, and they’re behind on the mortgage, and contemplating getting a job at the mall….”

I've got a pile of interests; I picked mathematics out of the bunch because it had a certain practical value that I was looking for. I'm thankful that something I'm interested in has that kind of value.

I've heard it said that, if you choose not to take the grad school route, it might take more than a decade longer to read the stuff you would have to read in grad school (or at least the part of it that you want to read), so it's a better value to pursue it on the side if you're not absolutely dedicated to the career or absolutely assured of your own talent. But then there's the fear that you won't really be able to test your ideas without fellow students and teachers.

So you become a blogger instead. (But it's just not the same.)

I'd like to know whether the university system ate up independent or amateur scholarship after the big post-WWII college boom. I know that most “professional poets” are teachers in creative writing programs, and that many novelists support themselves in the same way. Before widespread college attendance, was this even possible? That is, was there a time when intellectual culture was not so closely tied to institutions of higher education as it is now?

Validated, sort of.

Should I feel bad about liking Talledega Nights as much as I do?

Not anymore, because I'm not alone. A closing sentence from Millinerd led to a quick Google search, which yielded this from George Weigel:

“Yet [Richard John Neuhaus] could spend the late evenings howling with laughter over DVDs of Talladega Nights, Best in Show, or A Mighty Wind.”

-George Weigel

I would not have guessed that Neuhaus liked Apatow comedies. I wonder what he thought of Pineapple Express…

Mensa calendar.

I was given a Mensa page-a-day calendar for Christmas. Today's “puzzle” was along these lines: find a nine-letter word for person seeking elected office that can be divided into a six-letter word for honest and a three-letter word for consumed.

I had it before I had torn off the previous page, without even really thinking. Is this puzzle Mensa-worthy? I thought Mensa was for extremely smart people. Which leaves me with three possible conclusions:

1. Mensans are not as smart as they think they are.
2. Mensans are trying to lull us into a false feeling of intellectual adequacy… and then they strike.
3. Mensans don't write their own calendars.
   

What do you think?

(Also: Candidate = candid + ate? THEY HAVE THE SAME ROOT! Interrobang.)

Athiests and ordinary gentlemen.

I never wrote about The Atheism like I said I would. And now I don't have my notes. In part, I just lost interest. But I read through the Ordinary Gentlemen's series on The Atheism and have decided to say something. To try to sum it up:

• Freddie questioned the efficacy of The Atheism's methods, asking why The Atheists are so often unwilling to have good-faith discussions with believers, resorting instead to mockery and ridicule.
• Scott wants to situate both science and religion as methods of personal inquiry that give meaning to individual lives, while relying more on social critiques of institutional religion than metaphysical arguments.
• Chris says that both sides in the current debate usually miss the point, since the Christian God is not some kind of chap. Besides: you've got to serve somebody. And questions of divine existence aren't the right questions anyway.
• E.D. Kain also argues that the existence of God is the wrong question. Try some empathy and humility instead.
• Mark tells us that the non-decidability of the God hypothesis should lead to separation of church and state.

Needless to say, the comments are piling up. There are few things that The Internet loves more than a good, sloppy, angry argument about The Atheism. Most of the expected points have been made (although, surprisingly, the C.S. Lewis mimic hasn't made his appearance yet).

To Freddie, I would say that much of the audience for the work of The Atheists gobbles up their polemical work for one of two reasons. First, there is a kind of pleasure that comes from seeing someone who is smarter or more clever than you eviscerate (or appear to eviscerate) arguments you despise. Michelle Malkin and Ann Coulter appeal to their political readers for the same reasons. Second, there's a slightly more perverse pleasure to be had for believers in reading polemics you disagree with, slapping your head, and saying, “Dear me! This fellow is stupid!”

But there is another group of readers that finds intellectual liberation in reading these books. They find that their doubts can be expressed out loud and forcefully, and even supported by arguments, even if the arguments are not precisely original. They finally have something to say to their pushy religious friends. Testemonials to this experience are not hard to find. I think that The Atheists very much hope to reach such people, and to help them be happier. I have known people who found in Dawkins' work a key to a larger, richer world than they ever imagined possible. That they no longer needed the key after passing through the portal does not diminish the key's value.

That's what I have to say to Freddie. As to the claim from the others that the proper response to the question of God is Who cares?…

Well, that's certainly the right response when the question comes up on The Internet. But in real life, I care, and so do many others, and we care deeply. It is an article of faith for Christians that God exists and that He acts in history. If this is not true—if the only justification for Christianity is psychological-instrumental—if we Christians are just fowarding chain mail ad infinitum—then I would prefer not to be a Christian. The pure-reason undecidability of the question of God does not reduce its import.

What is needed for this discussion—more than a neuroscience of belief or a biology of belief—is a human psychology of belief. And until someone shows me a better starting point, I will begin with William James's essay “The Will to Believe”. If there are real truths that cannot be objectively decided—and the entire point of the avian fettuccine avatar is that science has nothing to say about such putative truths—then we can either cut ourselves off from such truths and remain secure in the fully justifiable, or we can leave safety behind, daring to know. James's contribution is the idea of the live option: that for any particular person, some ideas will be plausable and some ideas will not. The avian fettucine avatar is not a live option for anyone, as far as I know. For cultural and historical reasons, the Christian God is much more likely to be one in our place and time.

This language, of course, does not even begin to resolve things in one way or another, but I think it gives us a better vocabulary for why we believe than the language of logic and justification alone, which implicitly assumes that the best decision is to decline to take a chance on undecidable truths.

A final maxim: A person's fundamental beliefs have less to do with the questions she can answer and much more to do with the questions she can afford to leave unanswered.

Americans, rally to his side!

Tom Daschle's taxation trouble is threatening his chance to direct the White House Office of Health Reform. He needs us now more than ever.

Remember, this is the man who led his party—the opposition party—in the United States Senate during the instigation of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. For his noble work during that time, we need to forgive and forget his “failure to pay $128,000 in federal taxes.”

Do you remember how nobly he led his party? How he gently laid down his own considerable reputation in order to challenge the Bush administration's plans—not to sabotage them, but to make sure that they were as sound as could be? How he carefully pored over the now-infamous PATRIOT act to make sure that the party in power was not stepping out of its constitutional bounds? In short, how he served as a sterling example of what an opposition leader should be: a man who did not waver in the winds of public opinion?

Let us look upon his time-worn South Dakotan visage with a civilized admixture of pity, love, and honor, as is due to a leading statesman of a great republic, and forgive him his pecuniary indiscretions, secure in the knowledge that Tom Daschle probably just has too much money to keep track of.

More Disch.

I read three Thomas Disch novels last weekend, but they were packed into one volume so I think it counts as one. Echo Round His Bones and The Puppies of Terra were both a lot of fun on a first read—but both of them subtly undercut their happy endings. In fact, a passage early in Echo Round His Bones describes just the sort of happy ending Disch likes to give:

“At those rare moments when the skin of the world is peeled away and its substance laid bare before us, the world may assume either of two aspects—benign or malignant. There are the sublime, Wordsworthian moments when Nature apparels herself in celestial light; but there are other moments, too, when with the same trembling sensibility and the same incontrovertible sureness, we see that the fair surface of things—all flesh, these white and scentless blossoms, the rippled surface of the reflecting pool, even the proud sun itself—are but the whiting on the sepulchre within which . . . it were best not to look.”

Nietzschean, I suppose.

In The Genocides, which is Joseph Bottum's favorite Disch novel, Disch peeks into the sepulchre. It's a dark, dark book, and I'm glad that the editors put it between the lighter novels. The only hope that Disch allows in The Genocides is that the more human kinds of evil may be overcome—but not other, deeper darknesses.

Here's the thing, though: all the Disch I've read so far—all from his early period—is solidly and recognizably twentieth-century science fiction in plot and basic style, even though he stretches it. Which is to say: I love it, but you might not.

Pessimistic professor: don't try a PhD. in the humanities.

“Thomas Benton” writes in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

“It can be painful, but it is better that undergraduates considering graduate school in the humanities should know the truth now, instead of when they are 30 and unemployed, or worse, working as adjuncts at less than the minimum wage under the misguided belief that more teaching experience and more glowing recommendations will somehow open the door to a real position.

“Most undergraduates don't realize that there is a shrinking percentage of positions in the humanities that offer job security, benefits, and a livable salary (though it is generally much lower than salaries in other fields requiring as many years of training). They don't know that you probably will have to accept living almost anywhere, and that you must also go through a six-year probationary period at the end of which you may be fired for any number of reasons and find yourself exiled from the profession. They seem to think becoming a humanities professor is a reliable prospect — a more responsible and secure choice than, say, attempting to make it as a freelance writer, or an actor, or a professional athlete — and, as a result, they don't make any fallback plans until it is too late.”

[…]

“…during the three years that I searched for positions outside of academe, I found that humanities Ph.D.'s, without relevant experience or technical skills, generally compete at a moderate disadvantage against undergraduates, and at a serious disadvantage against people with professional degrees. If you take that path, you will be starting at the bottom in your 30s, a decade behind your age cohort, with no savings (and probably a lot of debt).”

Oh, the poor humanites. I wonder if these disciplines should start doing everything in their power to be less insular—to encourage lateral movement between academia and the outside world. I hate to think that large groups of PhD candidates are just grist for the academic labor mill, but that conclusion is hard to avoid, considering the amount of extra work the grad students usually put in for their schools and how few of them will end up in tenured positions. On the other hand, if the system is stable, why shouldn't it just keep going the way it is?

(via The Gadfly)

Someone take the baton, please.

So Culture11 is done, though I don't know when the site will go down. I'm sad that it didn't work out, but I'm sure the bloggers will find new haunts or return to their old ones in due time. (John Schwenkler's got some links for you.) What I'll miss is the articles: the range and energy of the young writers they found, some on their first commissions, exploring weird corners of the world. I was pretty sold on Conor Friedersdorf's take on journalism, and it was great to see him put it into practice.

With some tweaking, I think the formula could work again. Maybe a better site design, maybe a less explicit commitment to conservatism. Then again, maybe I'm just wishing again that everyone on the planet had the same taste as me.

Joshua Treviño has written an analysis of why the business model didn't work, etc. It seems pretty smart to me.