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Jews, Christians, and the American Political Tradition
Thursday, January 15, 2009, 1:35 PM

 Over coffee this morning, I found that Razib Khan and Ross Douthat have started a lively little debate about the use and abuse of the term "Judeo-Christian". Khan argues that it’s little more than political correctness. In fact,  the dominant form of Judaism between about 500 and 1800 AD was closer to Islam than Christianity. Douthat counters that "the Christian decision to swallow the Hebrew Bible whole into its scripture – and to preserve, rather than elide, Jesus’ own obvious self-understanding as a Jew – ultimately creates deeper grounds for dialogue than does Islam’s insistence that the narrative of the Hebrew scriptures was deliberately corrupted and required correction from Muhammed." According to Douthat, affinity concerning revelation is more significant than the quarrel about  Law. 

As a matter of doctrine, I’m more sympathetic to Khan. Although I appreciate efforts to make Jews feel at home in a largely Christian society, we shouldn’t allow politeness to obscure the distance between rabbinical Judaism, which is essentially communal and theonomistic, and the emphasis on personal faith that characterizes many forms of Christianity. But there is a truly Judeo-Christian current of the highest importance for modern life. The political Hebraism that emerged in the 17th century is a major and often unacknowledged source for American principles and institutions. 

This is not the right setting for a scholarly account, which I’m anyway ill-equipped to provide. As a general sketch, it’s enough to say that the renewed emphasis on Scripture by the reformers, especially Calvin, encouraged the view that the regime established by the covenant at Sinai remained pleasing to God. This regime, however, was neither a monarchy nor a feudal-style aristocracy. Instead, it appeared to be a kind of democratic republic, constituted by the decision of the whole people to accept to the Mosaic code.

The Biblical priority of republicanism generated a whole new genre of arguments in favor of popular sovereignty and representative government. Traces of these arguments can be found not only in thinkers like Hobbes, Grotius, and Milton, but right into 18th century debates surrounding the American War of Independence and associated attempts at constitution writing. Many such arguments were "secularized" along the way–and in some cases were chosen for their secularizing potential ("paging Benedict Spinoza"). Yet there’s a case to be made that the most meaningful Judeo-Christian synthesis is neither ethical nor theological, but occurs on the level of politics and concerns the relation of the people to its government.


Down With Neutrality – One Last (it may be hoped) Time
Wednesday, January 14, 2009, 8:28 PM
 
Does anyone out there really believe in “metaphysical neutrality” in the political realm, or, for that matter, in a purely “political” liberalism (later Rawls) that would be neutral with respect to understandings of the meaning of life, or of “the whole”? I can’t believe Damon Linker does (see his quite anodyne, non-committal suggestion linked by Mr. Poulos below – “The Quest for Metaphysical Neutrality”). Can we be rid of this non-starter of an argument once and for all? Is politics not the realm of collective human choice and action? Does not every action aim at some end(s)? Now, can we make sense of any proximate end without taking into account, as best we can, the larger circumstances and interests of the individuals and community whose ends are in question? Hobbes of course suggests we rigorously exclude the question of purpose and just agree that we all want to avoid violent death. But such an agreement obviously involves, not neutrality with respect to ends held by some to be higher than mere life, but a clear and deliberate depreciation of such ends. The same structure of argument repeats itself time and time again in liberal thought, from Locke through Mill to Rawls: what is presented as a non-partisan or “metaphysically neutral” privatization of ends in fact proves to be a privileging of certain ends – certain liberal or liberationist ends – over others. 
 
A perfect little example of the inevitable collapse of the strategy of neutrality is provided (if I may go back a few weeks – actually quite a short lag time for me) in a blog post against Proposition 8 by Andrew Sullivan. Our only hope in a modern, secular, pluralistic society, he argues, is “to agree that our civil order will mean less; that it will be a weaker set of more procedural agreements that try to avoid as much as possible deep statements about human nature.” The conflict over issues such as same-sex marriage can be set aside, Sullivan thinks, if only we accept that we live in a “disenchanted polis,” a political community with no substantive moral content. Our public space, he assures us, can be simply legal and procedural, and thus morally neutral.
 
However, we have only to raise the question “why?” in order to begin to see through this (no doubt completely sincere) protestation of neutrality. Why would such a neutral society be good — perhaps only because it manages to keep the peace among morally incompatible groups? But will this “peace” not be constituted by one or another set of public priorities, and thus one or another dominant vision of a good human life? Mr. Sullivan does not keep us waiting long for a peek at his answer to such a question. Only a few lines after celebrating the new, purely modern, procedural, and disenchanted polis, he yields to a lyrical impulse in expressing his underlying moral vision: “We live in a new world, and we can and should create meaning where we can, in civil society, in private, through free expression and self-empowerment.” Clearly Sullivan’s privatized and neutral public sphere is grounded in a moral ontology that he is comfortable proclaiming as publicly authoritative, an ontology that locates ultimate meaning in the individual creation of meaning, and in the empowerment of the “self” to express its meanings without bounds.
 
Mr. Sullivan sees no contradiction between his posture of neutrality and his confession of faith in the ultimacy of self-expression, and we would not expect him to. He holds his fundamental moral beliefs so dogmatically that he does not even see that they are anything but neutral.
 
But the cry immediately arises: we cannot forsake the ideal of neutrality, for then we are left in a war of all against all with no rational standard to which to appeal, abandoned to a cacophony of fanaticisms that can only portend unfettered violence. But, please: this bête noire is conjured precisely to steer us back to some spurious neutrality. (Although we must concede to the founders of liberalism that the wars of religion gave good reason to despair of substantive reasoning.) Liberals are compelled to raise this bogey in order to drive us back to the dream of “neutrality”; with them, it’s always either Rawls or Carl Schmitt, either relativism and utter privatization, or absolutism and the Taliban. 
 
But, if not neutrality, the specious neutralizers ask, then alternative theory is there, what general theory of political justification will guide us? Now try this on for size: there is no such theory. The essential mistake is to demand an a priori general theory of what counts as reasonable in the first place. This is one way of stating the postmodernism of our conservatism: we are not anti-foundationalist in the hypermodern sense (a disguised, radicalized neutrality), but rather postmodern in the authentically political sense: we claim no neutral, a priori “foundation,” but advance our substantive reasons in the political forum to be weighed according to their worth.  Bring your reasons, we say, as they address both the political facts on the ground and your best understanding of connections with larger purposes (no a priori exclusion of religious insights, of course, or of arguments from inherited experience), and we’ll bring ours. And then we’ll talk, and we’ll mobilize interests and claims. That’s why they call it politics. And it’s never “neutral.” 

Humility Postscript
Wednesday, January 14, 2009, 5:06 PM

Bouncing off the point I make in that last post, I’ll present a conundrum: Why is it that the most humble people I know also tend to be the most violent (sometimes physically, more often intellectually)? Those friends of mine who are most skeptical of dogmatism (especially rationalism, the absolutist’s absolutism), the ones most willing to entertain the other side’s arguments in good faith, are also the ones most disposed to instigate long political brawls by making provocative statements, or get into bar-fights. Why? I would have thought that humility was a virtue of the dispositionally meek or, at the very least, non-confrontational.

Is it because these friends of mine have faith, not in themselves, but in the fight? "I am willing to slug it out with you, not because I am sure I’ll win, but because I’m sure the right man will?" Something to keep in mind when illustrating your own copy of A Field Guide to the Virtues of North America.


Dazz, Dazz, Discourse Jazz
Wednesday, January 14, 2009, 4:03 PM

Scott Payne has noticed something interesting:

In listening to the audio of Freddie, John and I,. . . I was struck by a certain admiration for both of them in their ability to stand firm on certain precepts and yet still have a healthy respect and willingness to engage other perspectives. I realize that I am much more inclined to hold back my own views and explore where others are coming from, to understand their reasoning and try to find points of convergence that forward the discussion in meaningful ways.

It concerns me somewhat that this approach may come off as a bit wishy-washy, perhaps as overly pragmatic and not housing of enough in the way of “first principles” that buoy a coherent worldview. In worrying about the perception, I suppose I am also worrying about how real that perception is. I don’t feel that way when I’m engaging, but the question arises: at what point does one stop inquiring and start proposing?

What Scott has noticed about his own blogging holds true for political conversation more generally: We all ought to be humble about our arguments, given how many smart people disagree with us completely, but a man whose claims are always tentative will (a) never make any progress against, toward, or with his opponents, and (b) bore everyone. Rather than offer the commonsense advice that an off-the-cuff medium like blogging should be handled with humility, I’ll read that advice against the grain and say that, the more humble a blogger is, the less tentative he will be.

Having a realistic estimation of one’s talents is a virtue, and having enough self-respect to be willing to suffer humiliation is, too. These two virtues yield utterly opposite styles of argumentation and I can’t imagine why they are both called "humility." I am more interested in the latter kind. In the same way that every man will eventually die, every man will eventually be wrong. The dogmatist never accepts this; the pragmatist accepts this before he begins; the humble blogger knows his humiliation is coming, but argues assertively until it arrives, secure in his confidence that, when it does, it won’t be that bad. This illogical confidence is an important rule of engagement, and one of the best things Wilson has ever written explains why:

Let’s start with intellectual street-fights. . . There’s a particular process at work here—something sublime and yet irremediably soiled—in which we let ideas and concepts boil up from the subconscious faster than we can control them. I am talking about the process of creation, something as akin to "divine madness" as anything I’ve ever experienced. Whether it be as music, prose, poetry, improv acting, or visual art; we vomit forth the spinning and shifting patterns from within. Most of what comes out is garbage, but the occasional gem sparkles amidst the rubbish.

. . . intellectual street-fighting is not about analysis, it is about creation.

. . . To take a different example, the Cardinal Rule of improv comedy is "never say no!" One of the participants of the scene saying "no" destroys the rhythm, blocks the flow of ideas, and jolts everybody present back into a thoroughly pedestrian frame of mind. Similarly, when engaged in intellectual street-fighting, the thrust, jab, parry, and block are all legitimate. What is entirely illegitimate, however, is a meta-block which denies the terms and validity of the art form itself.

To refuse to speak before one’s own ideas are fully-formed is just such a "meta-block," which is why blogging’s pace is a blessing in disguise. Scott doesn’t want to appear more confident in his ideas than he actually feels, but the flipside of his kind of humility is this: While it may be a kind of pride to argue as if you were certainly right, it is more prideful still to nurse an unwillingness ever to be wrong. It takes the sin of pride to be wrong, but it takes the virtue of humility to be revealed to be wrong. Slug it out.


Zizek and Meta-Jewry
Wednesday, January 14, 2009, 1:07 PM

I brought up Adam Kirsch vs. Slavoj Zizek once before, wisely dropping the matter after one post, but now they’re back, and anyone interested should check out their (surely final) exchange at The New Republic. I don’t know if it’s worth the time to make heads or tails of Zizek’s compressed defense of himself, but I do know this jumped out:

all I do in the passage from which Mr. Kirsch has torn out a couple of words ("fidelity to the Messianic impulse," etc.) is to point out the debt of political and theoretical universalism (of what Kant praised as the "public use of reason") to the Jewish experience, claiming that the conflict between the defenders of and skeptics about the State of Israel is inherent to the Jewish identity.

In another ‘couple of words’, Zizek calls these Spinozan Jews "Jews of Jews." It sure seems like this means, perversely, ‘meta-Jews’ — Jews whose position with regard to Jewry is like that of Jews to Christendom. And it sure seems like that means Jews who have rejected Judaism…but, even more specifically, who then view themselves as being in the same relationship with Judaism as an observant Jew and bad old Christianity. But this of course would be an artifice, a projection into Jewishness of something Christians imposed over it. It would also be an attempt to bill Jews repudiating Judaism — that is, the Jewish God — as "more Jewish than Jewish." This would be a fundamental, violent transgression against what it is to be Jewish — at least on a reading such as that of Philip Rieff, who seems to suggest that anti-Jewish Jews of this kind did much throughout modern history to instruct Christian gentiles in how to become anti-Jewish and anti-Christian. Just from the quote above, it still sounds to me like Zizek wants, like I alleged in the prior post, the power to decide what a Jew is — the power to put the word Jew in scare quotes. Perhaps Kirsch is actually missing something when he says "Zizek’s attitude towards Judaism is not the major problem with his thought."


Sticking It
Tuesday, January 13, 2009, 5:14 PM

 

Not to revisit a debate that, by internet standards, is now ancient history – having taken place as a result of my posting last week in criticism of the modern conservative commitment to profoundly anti-conservative philosophy of liberalism – but looking over what Peter wrote and others posted as comments, I think it is interesting to draw out some of the implicit problems of a “stuck with virtue” conservatism.

 There is, on the one hand, a kind of end-of-history resignation to the fact of liberalism’s necessary and irreversible triumph.  There is the suggestion that a political liberalism and free market capitalism is the most natural regime and economy for human beings, as if there were not great struggle and contrivance that had to take place for its success.  Peter suggests – passingly – that markets succeed naturally because they accord best with our nature as acquistive creatures.  This is, at best, itself an exaggeration of the supposed inevitable march of free markets in the world.  Even surveying American history, there was considerable effort exerted by pro-liberal, pro-market forces on different aspects of American culture that were resistant (I won’t mention the problematic case of the American South; one can think, instead, of efforts by Midwest farmers to resist the coming of proto-globalization during the Populist movement.  The fact that they resisted its advance certainly can’t be chalked up to false consciousness, can it?).  

Peter suggests that it is because of the very success of modern liberalism that virtue is more necessary than ever.  Because of the inevitable inability for humans to conquer nature in all respects – the fact that we are still the creature that is conscious of its own death, above all, no matter our ability to conquer ever more of nature – means that we must necessarily rely upon the classical and Christian virtues.  Yet, because we are also ever more successful in the technological ability to govern even the inevitable anxieties that remain amid our progress (one thinks here of Prozac, everpresent distractions of popular culture, and the like), our ability and inclination to cultivate and practice those virtues is more difficult than ever.  Lawler suggests that we simultaneously need, and have the opportunity to avoid, those virtues more than ever.

There is a kind of resignation to this tragedy of liberalism’s success, but also a sense that those who do practice a kind of virtue are more virtuous than ever.  Virtue came relatively easier to a pre-modern people who did not have to confront the liberating force and success of modern liberalism and its attendant prosperity and mastery of nature.  Those who are able to live with their modern misery – even live well – are more virtuous than any Aristotleian Greek or mendicant monk.  Virtue is a greater accomplishment than ever.

More than that, virtue is precisely more virtuous than ever because it, too, has been liberated from necessity.  Naturally it is far easier to be virtuous where there are fewer choices, fewer temptations, fewer options.  Precisely by making virtue itself a choice – perhaps the ultimate choice, given that it consists in part in the choice not to choose (e.g., not to take Prozac, to wallow in the truth of our misery), virtue becomes truer and purer than ever before. 

Yet, this very argument begins to resemble a kind of Kantian ethical heroism, whereby we eschew some aspects of a hedonistic modernity through the herculean exercise of human will.  The practice of virtue itself becomes a form of “the triumph of the will”:  it rests in the power of individuals to achieve an extraordinary self-willed, conscious exercise of increasingly difficult forms of virtue.

 But perhaps this is the wrong way to proceed, and misunderstands virtue:  perhaps virtue was not supposed to be this hard or this willed, but rather was an accomplishment not of individuals, but of cultures.  After all, it is Aristotle who begins in the Nicomachean Ethics to speak of virtue as a form of habituation, a pre-conscious set of practices that we learn before we are necessarily conscious of them as virtues.  One can compare the habituated acquisition of pre-modern virtue to the learning of table manners:  children are taught gradually the proper way of eating in a civilized manner before they have any awareness of the grounds for such practice.  Indeed, it is seldom the case that even parents know the deeper cultural and even philosophic grounds for the practice of table manners:  it is something into which they were likewise habituated when they were children.  There is a strong suggestion in Aristotle that most of the virtues of humans begin, and are ultimately successful, due to successful habituation, and not the heroic philosophic and willed capacity to act with virtue in spite of the structure and assumptions of the wider society.

 What we need perhaps to entertain is the non-liberal idea that virtue can be the achievement of a culture – the capacity to habituate generation upon generation into the practice of various civilized virtues.  Rather than drawing on a liberal, individualistic paradigm in which we understand such people to have fallen short of heroic self-willed forms of virtue, we can rather understand that the capacity to continuously and successfully transmit certain forms of habituated virtue is a signal accomplishment of a culture.  In some senses, it is actually such people who are “stuck with virtue,” or for whom virtue is stuck to them from a very young age.

 What I attempted to convey in my last post is the idea that what liberalism does exceedingly well is break the transmission of culture.  By displacing the authority of the past – in the form of tradition, custom, and ancestral – it is produces a culture of anti-culture.  The virtuous person in such an environment is simply the lastest manifestation of the self-made man:  someone who pulls himself up by his moral bootstraps in spite of the challenges that the age presents.  This is simply a reification of the voluntarism and the valorization of the naked human will that marks the trajectory of modern liberalism. 

 Such virtue has the unvirtuous effect of undermining the inculcation of virtue.  The rendering of all things into choice is not to establish a neutral ground in which we freely choose among all options, including option C, virtue.  Choice in all things generates its own logic, above all the tendency to choose those outcomes that increase choice.  A “culture” of choice is not neutral about choice itself.  Thus, while virtue is available to the few counter-cultural heroes of a liberal society, the anti-culture of liberalism has the effect of “habituating” its young toward the embrace of ever greater multiplication of choices.  I find very little virtue in resignation to such an outcome – rather, I see a deep reneging of the responsibility of an older generation in providing guidance to the young about choices that are better and worse, based upon the experience of history, past, and tradition.  One example of such avoidance of responsibility (drawn from my own vocational experience) is the movement in universities away from any fixed requirements in the curriculum.  We leave it to our students to figure out what will constitute a good education, reneging the hard responsibility of providing guidance.  Within a liberal context we can congratulate ourselves in providing ever more liberty to the young (perhaps including providing them the possibility of exercising virtue), but in so doing, perhaps we have in fact avoided the most fundamental virtue that an older generation owes a younger generation:  responsibility and care.  Liberal emancipation ultimately takes the form of not caring enough to send the very best.  It’s watchwords are, "not that there’s anything wrong with that" – no matter what "that" is.  One is hard pressed to imagine a worse philosophy of parenting, or, by extension, a worse attitude of an older generation to a younger.  Perhaps we should consider whether a “culture” of choice means that we are stuck with virtue, or whether in fostering such a “culture”  we are sticking it – but decidedly not virtue that we ourselves avoid – to our children.


The Quest for Metaphysical Neutrality in Politics
Monday, January 12, 2009, 6:58 PM

…goes on. I unpack Damon Linker’s vision quest over at the Confab.


Are you experienced?
Monday, January 12, 2009, 6:22 PM

For much of the last century, "experience" has been a central category in the philosophy of religion. Rather than treating religious beliefs as attitudes toward propositions ("God created the world in seven days, yes of no"), experientialist approaches understand religion as an articulation of extraordinary feeling or happenings that, in one way or another, disrupt our everyday existence. Charles Taylor’s enormous new book opens with a report by the Benedictine monk Bede Griffiths. Griffiths recalls:

"A lark rose suddenly from the ground behind the tree where I was standing and poured out its song above my head, and then sank still singing to rest. Everything then grew still as the sunset faded and the veil of dusk began to cover the earth. I remember now the feeling of awe which came over me. I felt inclined to kneel on the ground, as though I had been standing in the presence of an angel; and I hardly dared to look on the face of the sky, because it seemed as through it was but a veil before the face of God."

The advantages of a religious phenomenology are obvious. As Taylor argues, it provides a pretty compelling rebuttal to the argument that religion has been exposed or refuted by modern natural science. Transcendent experience can be negated by a reductionist account of causation. But they’re very difficult to deny as such: literature provides ample proof that many people have had, and continue to have such experiences. The problems, however, are equally clear. If experience is prior to articulation, what is the relation between "faith" and doctrine? Is experience historically variable? Is it available, at least in principle, to everyone?

Questions like these have been lately giving some me trouble in my own work, which is not in the philosophy of religion, but rather the history of political thought. Although it’s easy enough to report what others have said, I’ve found certain arguments difficult of access because I’ve never had anything comparable to the epiphany described above. Neither has anybody I’ve talked to here in godless Cambridge–or at least they haven’t admitted it to me.

So I thought I’d solicit some information from the readers and contributors to this blog. To quote Jimi Hendrix: are you experienced? How does felt transcendence relate to your sectarian/institutional religious commitments? The bigger issue, of course, is whether reliance on an experiential warrant undermines traditional claims that religious teachings are true. Although there’s surely more to faith than propositional attitudes, it was not without reason that radical critics of religion in the 17th and 18th centuries directed their attack against the external, physical claims of revelation rather than the subjective grounds on which they are maintained. 


Positivism is Poison?
Monday, January 12, 2009, 4:55 PM

David Deutsch, controversial quantum physicist extraordinaire, lays into modern science in a big way (H/t: WGL3):

I don’t know. I suspect it is related to a more general anti-rational phenomenon that was present in nearly all 20th-century philosophies, especially logical positivism, and reverberated into other fields. This was intended to be a retreat from metaphysics, which many philosophers considered meaningless, but really it was a retreat from reality and explanation. In physics, it took the form of deciding as a matter of principle that science is not about discovering how the world really is, but instead must confine itself to predicting the outcomes of observations. When quantum mechanics came along it required a drastic revision of people’s conception of the world. Many physicists responded by denying that physics is about the world at all, only about what we see.

Logical positivism is a form of solipsism. If you say physics is only about predicting the outcomes of experiments, you can only really say it’s about experiments that you personally do, because to you any other person is just another thing you’re observing. But solipsism is a dead-end philosophy and when it comes to science it’s a poison. It doesn’t allow further progress from existing theories, and that’s why I think applications of quantum theory, particularly quantum computation, were overlooked for decades. You could say people didn’t really think the theory was true because they had rejected the idea of truth in science. Truth in science must mean correspondence to reality, or it means nothing.

Logical positivism is a dead end, and in science it’s a poison.

Read the whole thing, as they say.


Obama, Idealism, and Realpolitik
Monday, January 12, 2009, 3:26 PM

An international speaking tour aside, it’s hard to argue that the President Elect brings a wealth of real foreign policy experience with him to the Oval Office. Nevetheless, the activity of intimately directing a war can have a dramatic and transformative effect on one’s world view. Woodrow Wilson is a good examle of this — he originally worked hard to maintain American neutrality in WWI but once engaged became increasingly angered over American casualties (especially in late 1918), increasingly hostile to the Germans over their gamesmanship and insincerity regarding the diplomatic process, and absolutely horrified over the sinking of the Leinster, an Irish civilian ferry, maybe a week or so after the Germans has requested an armistice.

Although Wilson would actually become more enthusiastic about the prospects of a League of Nations than he was originally, he learned firsthand the limitations of international diplomacy and the need, in certain circumstances, for overwhelming and unapologetic military might. It might be worthwhile to note that in many other regards Obama resembles Wilson: his Ivy League education, his academic and literary background and sensibiliities, his rhetoric of a seismic shift in the nature of American domestic politics, his aggressively progressive agenda (and the advantage of a Democratic controlled legislature in both chambers) are other relevant parallels. Might it be, for example, that the great frustration he will inevitably encounter trying to negotiate with Iran will sour him to the prospects of a diplomatic rapproachment?

One could argue that, all experience aside, the presidency is a diffcult position to be fully prepared for and one variable in predicting a new executive’s success or failure is the nature of this unpredictable learning curve.

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