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A Sprawling Debate
Saturday, March 20, 2010, 2:56 PM

In a recent post, Randal O’Toole of the Cato Institute takes on Austin Bramwell’s argument that suburban sprawl is the result of government planning. How can this be, O’Toole asks, when notorious sprawls like Houston don’t even have a zoning code? Bramwell responds by pointing out the litany of non-zoning regulations that discourage mixed-use neighborhoods scaled for pedestrians. He points out that in Houston buildings must be set back at least 25 feet from the street and provided with free parking–which pretty much guarantees a landscape of strip malls.

I can’t add anything to the debate on land-use law, although Bramwell’s case seems pretty convincing. But there is a broader issue that’s worth isolating from the specific details. That’s the meaning of “planning”. While O’Toole sees planning primarily in fiats concerning ends–what gets built where–Bramwell recognizes that government can exercises as much influence by determining the means of economic activity.

To use a popular example,  American cities and states rarely decree a price floor for residential real estate. But by imposing building codes that require the use of more expensive materials, they effectively set a minimum price for housing. Sometimes results like this are an unintended consequence. In other cases, governments use indirect regulation to influence behavior without being seen to do so. Consumer preference for detached houses with a scrap of yard is one factor contributing to sprawl. But “hidden” planning is evidently another, as documented by countless studies of the housing policies of the 1940s and ’50s, which included the physical destruction of hundreds of traditional neighborhoods in the name of urban renewal.

You’d expect libertarians to be sensitive to subtle forms of influence as well as obvious coercion. But they often fixate on gross  attempts to regulate citizens’ behavior, while ignoring “nudges” like the location and dimensions of highways and other roads, a tax code that favors home-owners over renters, and a political commitment  to keeping gasoline cheap. A reasonable case can be made for all these policies. But let’s not pretend that our built environment is exempt from planning just because it hasn’t been decreed by a dictatorial Secretary of Suburbanization.


Law and Marriage
Thursday, March 18, 2010, 1:56 PM

Marriage, in what is evidently its most popular version, is now on the one hand an intimate ‘relationship’ involving (ideally) two successful careerists in the same bed, and on the other hand a sort of private political system in which rights and interests must be constantly asserted and defended. Marriage, in other words, has now taken the form of divorce: a prolonged and impassioned negotiation as to how things shall be divided. — Wendell Berry

Wendell Berry. I’d be plenty happy to see more Wendell Berrys in the world. But, sometimes, apparently slam-dunk comments like these wend their way up from Berry’s Gutenberg printing press to approving corners of the internet, and I have to pause for a moment. Because, as is the case here, I feel a bit of a reflex to be vigilant — the big picture seems so right so fast that the temptation is to stipulate the seemingly little things.

The marriage-as-politics bit, here, for instance, seems like a little thing — a ready-made analogy to ring around the neck of a longtime cultural corruption indicator that many of us still haven’t tired of bemoaning, and for good enough reason. But, actually, treating contemporary marriage in the manifestation Berry wants to critique as a “sort of private political system” does quite a bit, on closer inspection, to send us down what I think is a very false critical path — one that might even play into the hands of the forces we wish to array ourselves sharply against.

The assertion and defense of rights and interests, I have to venture to say, isn’t politics — not necessarily. You can find it, for instance, in one of the least political places on earth, the room where contractually required arbitrations are performed. Divorce court, perhaps above all, stands as a living monument to how tirelessly (and at what cost) we’ve worked to export the assertion and defense of rights and interests out of politics and into law. Increasingly, I think, law is being set up as an opposite to politics, an antipolitics — again, not because people don’t fight over what they think they are entitled to want and what they think they need, but because the way in which they do is supervised and managed by a system of rules and regulations promulgated in a way that itself is divorced from actual political practice.

The contestations over relational power that Berry sees as characterizing marriage today must not be confused, I think, with the kinds of contestations you get under conditions of actual political practice. This sort of conflation seems to me roughly similar to that involved in calling gladiators warriors, and gladiator matches war.

UPDATE: Peter Suderman reminds me that I should link to this depressing item. “The Marriage Ref” is, as far as I can tell, pretty final proof that our model of acrimonial marital arbitrage is far from political.


New Grub Street
Tuesday, March 16, 2010, 1:38 PM

The Awl points out this interview with Tina Brown. At about 19:40, Brown asks: “Are we building this new sort of subculture frankly of impoverished, living in garret writers? Because the fact is writers can hardly make a living right now because they don’t get paid.” Leon Wieseltier made a similar observation last month when he described writers as “the new proles“.

I don’t write for a living, and I have mostly sympathy (and perhaps also a little envy) for those who do. But it’s worth recalling that the expectation that journalists, critics, and editors could expect a middle-class income and lifestyle has developed only quite recently.

Before about World War II, newspaper writing was little respected and worse paid, more trade than profession. National magazines offered better fees and more respect. But relatively few people actually supported themselves writing for them. And the scribbler’s existence before the 20th Century–and outside the United States–was notoriously poor and dissolute. There are many memorable portraits of life on both the literal and the figurative Grub Street. The most compelling is Balzac’s Illusions perdues.

But the pre- and proto-capitalist economies of the 17th, 18th, and and early 19th centuries offered a solution that we’ve since forgetten: patronage. Rather than trying to sell their wares on the open market, the men of letters of Paris and London tried to sell themselves to wealthy and influential patrons. Work as a hired polemicist, secretary, or a private tutor, wasn’t romantic. But it did provide a stable income not only to honest hacks, but also some very eminent minds. What would Burke have been without Rockingham? Hobbes without the Cavendishes?

It’s hard to imagine any modern magnate personally supporting a stable of bloggers. But why? It would be cheaper, and probably more amusing, than endowing a building at some pompous university. For one thing, buildings can’t tell you how wise you were to pay for them. For another, they can’t tell your enemies how stupid they are. As it happens, I’m looking for a job myself at the moment. Let the bidding begin!


How Technology Really Threatens Liberalism
Sunday, March 14, 2010, 12:50 PM

Courtesy of Alan Jacobs, I see some academics are starting to grapple with the issue. But how successfully? Danah Boyd tackles Google Buzz:

“Nothing that the Buzz team did was technologically wrong,” Ms. Boyd said. “Yet the service resulted in complete disaster.”

Google got into trouble, she said, by linking something that people associate with being inherently private — their e-mail accounts — with something that is very public — status updates on a social network. The result was “a series of social disruptions,” Ms. Boyd said.

The blunder, she said, reflected a broader muddying of the line between what is private and public online. The idea that information exists in a binary world — public or private — no longer applies, she said.

“Google assumed people wanted different parts of their contacts converging and collapsing,” she said. “But just because people put different parts of their lives online doesn’t mean they want them in one place.”

More troubling, she said, is what Google’s flub may portend for the future.

“I can’t help noticing that more and more technology companies are exposing people’s information publicly and then backpedaling a few weeks out,” she said.

Ms. Boyd pointed to the recent changes in Facebook’s privacy policy that made more of its members’ information public by default. “Just because something is publicly accessible doesn’t mean people want it to be publicized,” she said.

The results could be harmful and damaging if they were to expose people’s information in ways they were not expecting, she said, and these issues are only likely to get more convoluted in the future.

“Neither privacy nor publicity is dead, but technology will continue to make a mess of both,” she said.

Let’s be clear about the reason we are experiencing this convolution the way that we are: leading tech companies have a colossal financial interest in making people convolute public and private. Any interest in persuading people that it’s a good idea to deconstruct the public/private divide in their personal lives — or, really, to let them be deconstructed — is ancillary at best to that larger financial interest, and at worst antagonistic.

Excuses like those Boyd’s ominous remark seems to portend — “nothing we did was technologically wrong” — are easy enough of targets to aim at and hit. And I’m not one to pretend that a few big corporations are singlehandedly responsible for taking our precious public/private distinction and shattering it at the feet of a golden idol. The fact is, we democratic individuals have come to recognize that cultivating, maintaining, managing, and policing liberalism’s essential public/private distinction is a lot more and harder work than we might be willing to allocate our precious resources (time, energy) toward. What it requires in particular — at the porous frontier between what’s personal and what’s not — is, I think, a rather robust, regular, and adult form of citizen politics.

Unfortunately, we have a longing to escape from that sort of politics, even at the cost of a robust, regular, and paternalist form of state-administered law. The journey there, as I see it, is characterized by the awkward-turtle sort of line-drawing generated by decisions like Planned Parenthood v. Casey and Lawrence v. Texas – where concepts of publicity and privacy become increasingly meaningless under the pressure of putting the stamp of authoritative law upon a much different divide — between what I’ve called official and unofficial life.

The divide between official and unofficial puts some private and some public things in one basket, and others in another. Regardless of what a particular American citizen thinks about homosexuality, abortion, or exes lingering in electronic address books, this is a significant shift in our social and political order, and it ought to attract more attention, as such, than it has. The implications of a shift toward official/unofficial life, and away from public/private life, are profound. And they throw into stark relief, I think, some of the ways in which a more progressive life may quickly become less and less liberal.

I would point out that the essentially erotic interest Americans seem to have in abandoning the public/private distinction is a lot different from the essentially monetary interest some American corporations have in getting as many of us to do that as possible. Neither our changing mores nor our developing technology are making a mess of public and private so much as moving to replace them with new categories that leave the public/private distinction looking quaint, arbitrary, and incoherent. The trouble is that the Googles and Facebooks of the world are pushing in this direction without a clear enough understanding of how the ‘progressive’ aspect of our mores represents a contingent vanguard and not a historically destined popular movement.

Yet at the same time, our innovative geeks seem genuinely blindsided by the severity of the residual relationship problems that they have caused to come back and haunt Americans uncomfortably and improvisationally negotiating the space between disrupted public and private realms. This emotional tone-deafness seems to me all too typical of geekdom, a world in which the self-evident inherent goodness of new features blinds us to the disruptions they inflict on the human realities they depend on. As the least socially awkward among us have always already known, the ultimate stomping ground for those seeking the experience of new features is society itself, with its potential of endless relational couplings and decouplings. Historically, those of us looking to max out those kinds of experiences have been the bugs, not the features, of liberal society. Tech companies geeking out on the profitable possibilities of ever-more-social transactions, official and unofficial, fail to realize that they are working to crash liberal society. And because of this, backlash against their efforts to do so are met with an awkwardness and confusion almost as poignant as those of their customers who have suddenly been plunged back into relationships they thought had been safely quarantined, online no less than off, in the past.

UPDATE: For a sane debate among tech-education enthusiasts that might go at least one step outside the rut, see here (h/t PEG).

UPDATE 2: And for some further thoughts at a hopefully not too vertigo-inducing level of abstraction, see here.


Wild Hearts, Blue Jeans, and White T-Shirts
Saturday, March 13, 2010, 1:25 PM

As we continue our discussion of popular music and its discontents, I opened up the paper this morning to find a charming tribute to the place and milieu in which I grew up: the New Jersey hardcore scene. Although it’s partly a record review, the piece does a good job capturing the local vibe of being near, but not quite of the City. One of the groups featured, Titus Andronicus, are of a younger generation than I am, and don’t sound very good. But Ted Leo is a real eminence gris whom I remember from his days in the beloved neo-mod band  Chisel (Citizens Arrest were definitely before my time).

Chisel were based in D.C. But somehow they preserved that New Jersey sound, which evokes the experience of being pressed up against the plate glass window of a cool, expensive restaurant or lounge, watching the goings-on within from the cold street. Springsteen had that sound, of course. But so did punk bands like the Bouncing Souls, Lifetime,  and a dozen even more obscure, mostly short-lived outfits of kids with guitars.

None of this is great, or even good music by Roger Scruton standards. But pure aesthetic achievement isn’t the only thing we should, or do, value in music. The new Ted Leo record contains some terrific, thoughtful rock ‘n’ roll. What’s more important to me, though, is that it sounds like home.


‘Disney-Like Sensorial Interfaces’
Sunday, February 28, 2010, 7:47 AM

Don’t call it a simulacrum.


A New Political Theory Research Program For Today
Sunday, February 14, 2010, 11:32 AM

I want to sidestep the brief, silly article running in Esquire about the increasing number of “kaleidoscopically shifting arrangements” we honor with the name family, but I also want to use it to frame what I think ought to emerge as a new vein to be mined in the sometimes barren-feeling realm of political theory. As predictable and pat as the Esquire piece may be, there’s little doubt that the new consensus on family — “straight people blew up marriage a long time ago” — has powerful adherents quite a bit further up in the clouds than the average Esquire reader, or writer.

Political theory today is a friendly and welcoming place for scholars interested in blowing up — er, deconstructing — not only marriage but the authority of the family itself. Certain conservatives, meanwhile, have recently become able to carve out a space for the defense of the authority of the family on traditionalistic grounds, especially by way of natural law.

As instructive as it is to trace the logic of Sade, Emerson, Freud, and others into the post-Foucauldian territory we frequent today, and as worthy a task as it is to reemphasize the natural character of the traditional family, both these sides of the family debate seem to me to miss something essential: a special aspect or character of the family that is non-natural. Typically, those who defend the family on natural-law grounds are happy to further demonstrate the compatibility of the nature-based approach with a supernatural one, wherein the authority of the traditional family results from the imposition of sacred order upon the natural substrate or raw material of biological necessity on the one hand and possibility on the other. But the question of whether that imposition is soft or hard is an important one; at least some commentators, particularly on the left, will not tire of pointing out the potentialities, in Christianity, particularly, for a sacred order that imposes commanding truths against certain aspects of the traditional family. The pagan, republican, quintessentially Roman family — as Tocqueville took a moment to hint — runs fundamentally contrary to the typical sort of family lived and theorized by natural-law Christians.

There are a variety of ways in which this is so, but, at the same time, it’s clear that certain aspects of pagan familial virtue are not exactly incompatible with the Biblical sacred order that can check or overcome their excesses and pathologies — just as the Biblical order imposes powerful interdicts, not to be confused with taboos, against the kind of violent desires that, to the morbid fascination of the ancient Greeks, deconstructed and destroyed the identities of family-bound individuals. Above all, for individuals in families Biblical order interdicts two kinds of pride, which combine and culminate in aristocratic nobility: pride in the unity of bloodline and virtu. Nonetheless, Biblical order has been unable to destroy both pagan familial order and the residual pride in family identity and family accomplishment that persist, especially among ‘real Americans’, to this day. It is not too much to suggest that Biblical order, in practice, has been unwilling to destroy these things.

What is true in this respect about religion is, perhaps paradoxically, largely untrue about philosophy. Philosophers, as Nietzsche made powerfully clear, are some of the most anti-family people around. The practice of philosophy itself, Nietzsche posited, is virtually inimical to the practices required of family life, to say nothing of family creation or leadership. But it is strange and striking how little else Nietzsche has to say out loud about family, because the classical or pagan pursuit of what it means for a family to be great is perhaps the most significant and enduring example of noble values that a philosopher of noble values could hope to find. If Christianity is skittish at best about familial nobility and not just dignity, as a pridefully creative project of life-defining meaning, is it not remarkable that the most venomous and blatant of the anti-Christian philosophers is so circumspect and muted on the matter? Is there not an uncanny alliance between reason and revelation against familial nobility (and what nobility is not familial)? Is it not the case that religion and philosophy both urge individuals in families to fundamentally orient their souls away from their family as a foundational source of meaning?

Add to this the rise of psychotherapy, charismatic transgressivism, and the romantic notion that the experience of full individuality, not the knowledge of individual being, is the source of selfhood, and it’s no surprise that the authority of the family as a noble institution has been, if not ‘blown up’, significantly undermined. Yet, puzzlingly, the authority of the noble family stubbornly persists, in a way that cannot, I think, be chalked up to mere biology. More than a natural degree of loyalty, discipline, sacrifice, tenacity, and vision, I think, is required of anyone seeking to cultivate an authoritative family that presumes to offer its members a nobility beyond the simple dignity of a sentient animal, even a human animal. This ‘aristocratic’ ideal would seem to have been compromised or made ‘imperfect’ as it has been democratized. But perhaps its democratization, in conjunction with the persistence of Biblical faith among many of those who retain the ideal, actually points the way toward its further ennoblement. The lingering question is how this intriguing state of affairs should provoke us to view anew the past, present, and future of political thought. Assuming we are indeed stuck with virtue in a certain way, so too may we well also be stuck with a certain type of ‘noble values’…


On Bankruptcy
Sunday, December 20, 2009, 10:29 AM

I think America’s system of easy bankruptcy is one of the jewels of our economic and political institutions, because it allows people who genuinely cannot repay their bills to get a fresh start as quickly as possible. I think non-recourse mortgages are an excellent idea, which I would like to expand, not destroy. I think that America’s incredibly deep credit markets indisputably do a lot of harm to the minority of people who simply cannot control their spending as long as they have access to credit, or who ignorantly rely on high-cost credit to smooth their cash flows—but they are also the reason for our mobile labor markets and the dynamism of our entrepreneurial system, and on balance do much more good than harm.” — Megan McArdle

There is a reason for the altogether singular indulgence shown in the United States toward a trader who goes bankrupt. An accident like that leaves no stain on his honor. In this respect the Americans are different not only from the nations of Europe, but from all trading nations of our day; their position and needs are also unlike those of all the others. — Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Vol II, Ch. 18 (Concerning Honor in the United States and Democratic Societies, 622 Mayer ed.)


On Corruption
Sunday, December 20, 2009, 10:20 AM

I don’t usually say this — in fact, I’ve never said it — but go read Frank Rich: specifically, his long column on the Decade of Bamboozlement. Beneath the flash of the cons that characterized the past ten years, however, is a quieter and truer truth: corruption. It is, as even Machiavelli would admit, exceedingly difficult to avoid corruption in the course of a life devoted to seeming and not being. (Someone still needs to connect the dots between mass faux friendship and “actor’s faith” among democratic individuals.) Over the course of this decade, we have seen big cons revealed time and again to be the opposite of what they seemed. But the key to understanding how and why we are living in the age of the con is to rediscover the meaning of corruption.

When people speak of corruption they refer to corruption of the spirit and corruption of the flesh. Correspondingly, reactions against corruption have taken political and anti-political form. One of the primary tensions on the right nowadays being between those who want to fight corruption by rallying around classical republicanism and those who put more faith in the repudiation of political struggle itself, we might infer that enemies of corruption are destined to be divided. But this would be wrong. Though the anti-corruption coalition as a whole might never be more united than the average Venn diagram, the diagram’s middle portion contains some individuals convinced of the necessity of both a political and a non-political response to corruption — and able to organize the entire coalition, or a decisive chunk of it, accordingly. When this class of leaders appears, this particular age of the con will at last near an end.

But not, I think, without a fight. We have compiled a long list of excuses for corruption, and we may surprise ourselves in our hesitance to forget them.


On Lifestyle Choices
Saturday, December 19, 2009, 3:40 PM

Reihan says something that gets the wheels turning:

At the moment, my side, the partisans of going after downscale voters first, is losing the argument to those who recommend going after the voters Michael Petrilli has described as “Whole Foods Republicans.”

What makes these voters potential Republicans is that, lifestyle choices aside, they view big government with great suspicion. There’s no law that someone who enjoys organic food, rides his bike to work, or wants a diverse school for his kids must also believe that the federal government should take over the health-care system or waste money on thousands of social programs with no evidence of effectiveness.

These voters, interestingly, are almost the opposite of Rod Dreher’s “Crunchy Cons,” the Birkenstocked Burkeans who are more aptly described as evangelical hippies than as affluent cosmopolitans with a libertarian streak a la the voters Petrilli has in mind.

I’m unsure that we can assume with quite as much confidence as we could in, say, 2003 that bike-riding localists who “want diversity” are likely to be upwardly mobile. In fact, I suspect that ‘cosmopolitan’ attitudes about the way humans should relate to nature are quickly coming decoupled from economic class in America. The relationship between class and putatively ‘cosmopolitan’ attitudes about acceptable human-to-human relations is another matte — one that’s harder to think through clearly in some important ways. But ‘crunchy’ lifestyle choices really aren’t luxuries in the fashion of other material goods commonly sought after by the upwardly mobile. Organic food is not that much more expensive, seeming, at least to my unempirical eye, to be getting a bit cheaper all the time. And certainly forsaking that $1799 flatscreen this year, or every 2 years, would allow many otherwise budget-conscious Americans of modest means to get choosier about the quality of their everyday food. Surely a bike is cheaper than a car; surely a diverse public school is cheaper than a private school curated according to specific tastes, interests, and affinities of any sort. And so on.

All of which suggests that shifts in the culture are cutting against the polarity sketched out by Reihan and Petrilli. Specifically, Reihan seems correct to observe that the typical crunchy con isn’t likely to be a small-government yuppie, but wrong to follow Petrilli in assuming that all ‘cosmopolitan’ lifestyle choices line up in the same way with certain economic indicators. The social mores of upwardly-mobile cosmopolitans, in short, have cultural valences with heavy political implications that their environmental mores simply don’t. There’s nothing about a commitment to individual-scale, family-scale, and even community-scale crunchiness, remember, that dooms a person to supporting cap and trade. Although technically there’s no reason a person living out liberal lifestyle choices of, say, a sexual variety has to translate their behavior into a political agenda, many such individuals do. This a trend I expect to continue.

The close link between ‘personal preference’ and politics is what’s loosening when it comes to crunchy or green ‘lifestyle choices’. Bundling socio-sexual and cruncho-environmental behavior under the same category of ‘lifestyle choices’ is increasingly misleading — suggesting that ‘lifestyle choice’ itself is increasingly an underspecified and euphemistic term that impedes, rather than facilitates, our ability to understand who we are today.

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