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Culture, Anti-Culture, and Lists
Monday, November 16, 2009, 9:45 AM

The list is the origin of culture. It’s part of the history of art and literature. What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible. It also wants to create order — not always, but often. And how, as a human being, does one face infinity? How does one attempt to grasp the incomprehensible? Through lists, through catalogs, through collections in museums and through encyclopedias and dictionaries. There is an allure to enumerating how many women Don Giovanni slept with: It was 2,063, at least according to Mozart’s librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte. We also have completely practical lists — the shopping list, the will, the menu — that are also cultural achievements in their own right. — Umberto Eco (via, via)

Talk about bad examples. Mozart’s librettist, an amazing and in some respects ominous figure, used the Don to dramatize very near the opposite of what Eco claims. Da Ponte was born and raised Jewish; before his Catholic conversion, his name was Emanuele Conegliano. He was well-educated. Any learned Catholic Jew writing a Don Giovanni libretto knows well enough where the Don came from — the Spanish priest Tirso de Molina, whose Trickster of Seville and the Stone Guest brought Don Juan into the world. Trickster is too coy a word for the Don, one the Don would use himself to mask what he is. The Don, with his lists, counts his conquests (i.e., rapes and cruel seductions) of women (and girls) as conquests of the world. But the Don’s conquests bring death, not life, to culture. The Don’s stone guest is the ghost of Don Gonzalo, the father of yet another poor conquest, who tried to avenge her honor but failed to kill the Don. But the stone guest is also Fate, whom the Don mocks and defies. Fate gets him in the end. The Don is an agent of destruction; to rebel against death and damnation, he deals death and dishonor. The Don is not trying to reconcile himself to the infinite but to use finitude as a weapon against that which endures. The Don must know his war on the very foundations of culture is ‘futile’ from his own point of vantage. He will mock and deride daughters, fathers, and Fate until whichever day, whether near or far, some combination of the three catch up with and destroy him. No matter how he lowers, parodies, and disgraces, order (and, in a Christian formulation beyond the pagan one of Fate, grace) will prevail. Yet the Don carries on. The Don is a nihilist. Masquerading as a great achiever of culture, he is actually a scourge of culture. His defense of his list is just as Eco hints — those seductions are, merely, ‘completely practical’. The achievement of that line of argument is not cultural but anti-cultural.

UPDATE: Read Alan’s selections from Auden’s “Infernal Science”! The difference between an itemized list of provisions or words and a list of conquests or captives or kills is a difference between the life and death of culture because it is the difference between not cursing and cursing unique persons and souls. The Don curses by reducing persons to numbers — and there is no consolation in the ‘specificity’ of being, say, the 7th victim of a rapist, the 284,341st victim of a Great Leader, or the 1,984th score of a sexual athlete.


Nu-Paganism Watch
Tuesday, October 27, 2009, 4:29 PM

Exciting news from the Bayside City Council elections:

the Queens Tribune reported that a conservative Republican was running a strong race in the 19th district and had a chance to win in the overwhelmingly Democratic city. But this was a conservative Republican with a difference: Dan Halloran is the spiritual leader of a local pagan group that worships Norse gods.

What’s the difference? Odin-worship just screams ‘conservative’ to me! Just look at the role model; I mean, you’ve got hanging from the world tree pierced by a spear (fiscal responsibility), plucking out an eye at the Well of Urd to gain wisdom (good education policy), not to mention rituals in which eight groups of eight animals were hanged on eight consecutive days, culminating with the hanging of eight innocent men on the eighth day (tough on crime).

Furthermore, we are told, Halloran is a real Odinist, not one of those sissy neo-Wiccans that you meet in head shops. Look:

When Halloran founded New Normandy seven years ago, he was looking for something much more formal and traditional. Sancio describes it as “definitely on the historically accurate end of the spectrum.”

…

Sancio and Bloch say that the ritual of “blot” can involve sacrificing a valued object, but sometimes it involves killing an animal. Bloch stresses that this happens only “on very rare occasions, and when it’s done, it’s done by someone who knows what they’re doing.” Bloch likens it to Kosher or Halal butchering. The animal — usually a lamb, pig or chicken — is subsequently roasted and consumed. Bloch calls it “a kind of sacral barbecue.”

Sometimes killing an animal? Wait a second! This doesn’t sound like any Odin-worship that I’ve ever heard of!

Odin, the chief god of the Norse, was associated with death by hanging, and a possible practice of Odinic sacrifice by strangling has some archeological support in the existence of bodies perfectly preserved by the acid of the Jutland (later taken over by the Daner people) peatbogs, into which they were cast after having been strangled.

Behold the Nu-Paganism! It’s like Eros lo volt, but with more tea-candles and some period garb. I’m reminded once again of this exchange from Neil Gaiman’s American Gods:

“… My friend and I were disagreeing over what the word ‘Easter’ means. Would you happen to know?”

The girl stared at him as if green toads had begun to push their way between his lips. Then she said, “I don’t know about any of that Christian stuff. I’m a pagan.”

…

“And tell me, as a pagan, who do you worship?”

“Worship?”

“That’s right. I imagine you must have a pretty wide-open field. So to whom do you set up the household altar? To whom do you bow down? To whom do you pray at dawn and at dusk?”

Her lips described several shapes without saying anything before she said, “The female principle. It’s an empowerment thing. You know?”

“Indeed. And this female principle of yours. Does she have a name?”

“She’s the goddess within us all,” said the girl with the eyebrow ring, color rising to her cheek. “She doesn’t need a name.”

“Ah, … so do you have mighty bacchanals in her honor? Do you drink blood wine under the full moon while scarlet candles burn in silver candleholders? Do you step naked into the seafoam, chanting ecstatically to your nameless goddess while the waves lick at your legs, lapping your thighs like the tongues of a thousand leopards?”

“You’re making fun of me,” she said. “We don’t do any of that stuff you were saying.”

…

“There,” said Wednesday, “is one who ‘does not have the faith and will not have the fun,’ Chesterton. Pagan indeed.

Somewhere, the students of Hampden College are slowly shaking their heads with dismay.


Thanks
Sunday, October 4, 2009, 9:56 AM

to all for making September our biggest month of visits ever.


What’s in a Word?
Thursday, October 1, 2009, 5:51 PM

I must confess that I wasn’t entirely expecting Conor to go in the direction that he did in his reply to my question for him about l’Affaire Latimer.

In this case, I think the people is a very well-defined concept. It refers to all the citizens of the United States of America. The same group is name-checked in the tenth amendment. Is it possible to be loyal to a group so large? Yes, I think so.

It seems to me like this mode of reasoning does violence to the concept of loyalty, much like the various “lovers of humanity” from Rousseau onwards have done violence to the concept of love. This is a classic example of semantic creep. We start with a word, in this case “loyalty”, that refers to a distinct but complex set of emotions, inclinations, habits of action, and perceived obligations that can exist between one person and another. We then expand the definition to allow it to refer to a different but similar set of the above that can exist between a person and an idea, or a metonymous entity, or a collection of people that he’s never met but who happen to meet some important criterion.

Never in this process do we stop to consider whether the same word used in its two different contexts is referencing the same underlying state of the world — in fact, the very purpose of this kind of semantic creep is to obliterate such distinctions. Our purpose here is to allow the second context to borrow some of the lustre of the first. Opposition to the second meaning of the word becomes indefensible, after all, are you really opposed to love? To loyalty? The response that certain kinds of things are simply inappropriate objects of what we once called “love” or “loyalty”, that those advocating the “love of humanity” are committing what computer scientists call a “category error”, is pretty flaccid in the face of that kind of rhetorical cudgel. And so our language grows sloppier. Pretty soon, we’ll be talking about “a sense of loyalty to the People”. Oh dear.

All of which is a longwinded way of suggesting that the concept Conor is talking about is something called “civic duty” or “civic obligation”. It’s improper to frame this as a question of conflicting loyalties. The tools we have for resolving those kinds of conflicts don’t do the work we need here. 

Now, Conor rightly raises the question of whether there’s any loyalty at work here at all, noting that the idea of owing loyalty to one’s employer merely because he is one’s employer is hopelessly archaic. What makes me less sympathetic to this view, however, is the well-known fact that if there’s one thing that Bush was notable for in his hiring policies, it was subverting just this trend. Some called it nepotism, and nepotism may in fact be the right word, but let’s not forget that nepotism carries with it the expectation of ongoing loyalty, of a relationship that is not purely “business”. If Latimer didn’t like that arrangement, he shouldn’t have taken the job.

And so now we come to the time for evaluation: could it be that Latimer is both a craven and treacherous worm AND a civic hero who nobly informed the American public of stuff that it Needed to Know? Of course! The correct answer to E.D. Kain’s question is “Both”. The reality that sometimes duties conflict, sometimes all of our available options result in sin, sometimes there is no right thing to do, is entirely compatible with a suitably tragic worldview — a worldview which recognizes that there is something inconceivably broken and flawed at the root of the world.

But, as E.D. and others have pointed out, it’s very unlikely that Latimer’s tell-all will result in much civic gain at all, and equally unlikely that Civic Duty was anywhere near the front of his mind. So in reality he’s just a craven and treacherous worm, and nothing more.


Not History but Novelty
Wednesday, September 16, 2009, 1:01 PM

Michael Gerson’s latest column bemoans the death of historical meaning in our personal romantic narrative. It’s true that the therapeutic historicism that still seems to undergird a lot of popular culture — people telling their stories to one another — is actually being undermined or deconstructed by something that’s not very therapeutic and not very history-obsessed either. The bad thing about hookup culture, or really the anti-culture beneath it, is that it might suck a decade or two of your life into a smithereens of physical and emotional novelties upon which no intelligible or humanly compelling narrative can be imposed. The upside is that charismatic novelty tends to push back against the cloying, tutelary aspect of therapeutic history. Our bad longing to be beasts is making a renewed effort to compensate for our bad longing to be brutes. However, we must be reminded that the ’70s and ’80s were much beastlier decades than the one we’re living in now. The ‘flattening’ problem that Bloom worried about was too nervous about a brutish end of history than an infinity of beastly novelties, but we’ve put so much effort into sanding off the sharp edges of our beastliness that it’s no surprise collective naughtiness seems at the same time to be getting safer and more dangerous. What strikes me as odd or funny is how democratic it all remains; very few people champion the hook-up culture as a means of Darwinian or aristocratic self-sorting, which of course it could be.


National Affairs
Tuesday, September 8, 2009, 11:23 PM

The heir to The Public Interest, a new journal by the name of National Affairs, is now living and breathing and live on the web. The sharp and judicious Yuval Levin has brought together a team of great minds, including Adam Keiper, Reihan Salam, and a Publications Committee full of heavies like Eric Cohen, Bill McClay, Leon Kass, and our very own James W. Ceaser. David Brooks reads National Affairs. Shouldn’t you?


Why do they want marriage?
Wednesday, August 5, 2009, 4:10 PM

One used to see a great deal more of this kind of rhetoric:

Instead of applying its impressive muscle to creating an alternative to this hoary, unsecular, historically sexist, and needlessly restrictive institution, the movement instead opted to perpetuate it. If the status quo could be expanded to include same-sex couples too, the GLBT community would withdraw its challenge to matrimony’s monopoly on the legal recognition of committed relationships.

Those of us who eagerly awaited a legally robust alternative institution are the losers. The GLBT movement was the only constituency on today’s horizon with the power to force that sort of reform. In all likelihood, no strong and legal alternative to marriage will be achieved during our lifetimes.

How times have changed! What can account for the dramatic change in objectives of the GLBT movement in the United States? I think Andrew Sullivan gets it half right when he says:

there are some minimal tangible social goods associated with marriage that I believe would be enormously beneficial for gays and straights: the institution encourages stability and commitment in an emotional and sexual world which often pulls us away from that. It encourages shared sacrifice; it instills the disciplines of shared living; it promotes thrift; it integrates gay people into their own families and society;

Pace Eve Tushnet, who would argue that all conceptions of the good are ultimately religious, the goods Sullivan is identifying here are both secular (or at least non-denominational) and civic. The common rejoinder from those who oppose efforts to expand the traditional definition of marriage is usually a variant of “how dare you walk all over our religious tradition in pursuit of your secular good!” And yet that objection lost traction when religious men and women made the tactical error of yoking their religious tradition to secular institutions. This is a heck of a pickle. Is there any way out?

I suspect that there is, if not a way out, then at least a temporary respite grounded in the observation that the only reason why marriage is even palatable to disordered moderns is that the meaning of marriage has already been twisted beyond recognition. Marriage is taken lightly. Marriage is viewed as nothing more than an agreement between two consenting adults. What is so shocking about Sullivan’s argument is actually its relative rarity. Far more common these days are arguments rooted either in the rhetoric of equality or the rhetoric of contracts. In that sense, Sullivan is actually quite refreshing. He gets (even if he won’t come out and say it) that marriage has power because it is ultimately rooted in the sacred.

So, in the interest of seeing how far the ‘conservative case for gay marriage’ actually goes, I invite Andrew Sullivan to tell me whether or not he would push a button that resulted in:

A. The elected representatives of the several states and the United States Congress instituting legal recognition for same-sex marriages.

B. The elected representatives of the several states repealing laws that allow for no-fault divorce.

C. The elected representatives of the several states capping the number of times one may be married at something fairly permissive (say, four times).

I’m also curious to see how my fellow right-wing Christians feel about this. I already know what the libertarians will say. I’m tentatively gung-ho about pushing the button. I suspect that it would strengthen both the civil and the religious aspects of marriage — preserving the tension inherent in what is a hybrid state/religious institution without resolving things too definitively towards either side. Furthermore, I think we tend to underestimate how detrimental no-fault divorce actually is; repealing it would have ameliorative effects both culturally (say goodbye to the ‘two consenting adults’-theorists) and empirically.

Come on, oh conservative supporters of same-sex marriage, show us how conservative you really are!


Heaven: The Lost Weekend that Lasts Forever
Wednesday, June 10, 2009, 12:13 PM

I’m glad that my disability article has been so well-received, but reader after reader has pointed to one unanswered question — actually, two unanswered questions that mean the same thing. (Don’t worry — these questions make sense even if you haven’t read the article.) They are: What is the real difference between self-improvement (good) and becoming a completely different person (bad)? Will my sister Martha be retarded in the Kingdom of Heaven, and, if not, is she still Martha?

The inimitable Joe Carter — one of the most able debaters since, well, you know — has raised just this point:

Jesus had no compunctions about curing disabilities, no matter how “fundamental to a person’s character” they may have been. The reason is that lameness, deafness, blindness, and other maladies are corruptions of God’s good creation. Nowhere in Scripture does it suggest that such afflictions are anything less than the lamentable result of man’s fallen condition.

. . . The reason we privilege physical wholeness is because it is closer to God’s ideal for creation.

Disability might be fundamental to Martha’s idea of herself, but it isn’t any part of God’s idea of her. Given that our bodies belong to Him, we ought to strive for fidelity to His plans and not ours, right?

Nope.

I see the virtues of Joe’s argument, having once made it myself, but, if you click through the link, you’ll see what Dara wrote in response:

But if we take “fidelity” [to God's plan] as an ideal, what do we do with monasticism/asceticism and debauchery? Both of these seem to require seeing the body as an obstacle to purpose–not just disciplining it, but breaking it and breaking through.

Obviously this is a little dualistic, but it’s a perception of dualism that makes fasting or “in vino veritas” work. Can this be integrated into the fidelity ideal? Should it be?

Sometimes we get closer to God by striving for perfection; sometimes we do it by turning our imperfections up to eleven: fasting, asceticism, bodily mortifications, drunkenness, etc.  That’s what Dara means by “breaking it and breaking through.” I can agree with Joe or I can get drunk, but I can’t do both.

If the desert saints got closer to God by inflicting physical imperfection upon themselves (i.e. the delirium and physical weakness that come from extended fasting), then surely it makes sense to say that preserving someone’s physical imperfections can be fidelity to God, too.  (Especially if those imperfections come with the compensating “fuzzy, intangible benefits” I talked about.)

But that’s just a preliminary point. If I can convince Joe of just one thing, it would be this: Drunkenness is a helpful metaphor for the kingdom of heaven; so helpful, in fact, that it answers the question of whether Martha will be disabled there.

When I read this passage in St. Bernard of Clairvaux’s On Loving God, I nearly dropped the book:

Hear how the Bridegroom in Canticles bids us to this threefold progress: “Eat, O friends; drink, yea, drink abundantly, O beloved” (Cant. 5:1). He offers food to those who are laboring with bodily toil; then He calls the resting souls whose bodies are laid aside, to drink; and finally He urges those who have resumed their bodies to drink abundantly.

. . . When the flesh is laid aside, [the soul] eats no more the bread of carefulness, but is allowed to drink deeply of the wine of love, as if after a repast. But the wine is not yet unmingled; even as the Bridegroom saith in another place, “I have drunk My wine with My milk” (Cant. 5:1). For the soul mixes with the wine of God’s love the milk of natural affection, that is, the desire for her body and its glorification. She glows with the wine of holy love which she has drunk; but she is not yet all on fire, for she has tempered the potency of that wine with milk. The unmingled wine would enrapture the soul and make her wholly unconscious of self; but here is no such transport for she is still desirous of her body. When that desire is appeased, when the one lack is supplied, what should hinder her then from yielding herself utterly to God, losing her own likeness and being made like unto Him? At last she attains to that chalice of the heavenly wisdom, of which it is written, “My cup shall be full.” Now indeed she is refreshed with the abundance of the house of God, where all selfish, carking care is done away, and where, for ever safe, she drinks the fruit of the vine, new and pure, with Christ in the Kingdom of His Father (Matt. 26:29).

It is Wisdom who spreads this threefold supper where all the repast is love; Wisdom who feeds the toilers, who gives drink to those who rest, who floods with rapture those that reign with Christ. Even as at an earthly banquet custom and nature serve meat first and then wine, so here. Before death, while we are still in mortal flesh, we eat the labors of our hands, we swallow with an effort the food so gained; but after death, we shall begin eagerly to drink in the spiritual life and finally, reunited to our bodies, and rejoicing in fullness of delight, we shall be refreshed with immortality. This is what the Bridegroom means when He saith: “Eat, O friends; drink, yea, drink abundantly, O beloved.” Eat before death; begin to drink after death; drink abundantly after the resurrection.

I have quoted at length because I don’t want Joe to think I’m cherrypicking passages to make Bernard sound like the lush of Christendom. No, he really is using drunkenness as an extended metaphor for bodily resurrection.

So let’s pick up the ball where Bernard left it. We can say that drink makes a man act like a different person — “X just isn’t himself when he drinks” — but this transformation is regular and predictable; that is, alcohol affects everyone in approximately the same way, so we could extrapolate from a drunken man what his sober self is like.  Which means that his sober self isn’t quite there, but it isn’t quite lost either.

In the same way, the kingdom of heaven transforms people completely but predictably.  I don’t know exactly what this will look like and neither do you (i.e. I don’t know exactly how “cured” Martha will be there), but thinking about heaven this way helps us understand how I might be cleansed of those faults that are fundamental to my character and yet still be me.


Help Your Self
Wednesday, May 20, 2009, 9:01 PM

My friend Matt Crawford has written a book! It is a very good book! I will have more to say about it later! But for now, go read this warm review of Shop Class as Soulcraft, by Slate‘s Michael Agger!


Bean and Time
Friday, May 15, 2009, 3:54 PM

One line of commentary on my last post is deeply disconcerting. Three of our fellow bloggers on the postmodern conservative website have launched a scandalous attack on Maxwell House, mocking the American company which, until Folgers came on to the scene, was the number one producer of coffee in America. It pioneered the idea of providing a decent cup of coffee at an affordable price to every person in America, which is the democratic idea put into action. To belittle Maxwell House is to run down America.

Samuel Goldman, our nation’s most brilliant young Germanist, spoke in his reply of Heidegger and the experience of angst. He therefore knows full well of Heidegger’s attack on the great American principle of average quantity: “The primacy of sheer quantity is itself a quality, i.e., an essential characteristic, which is that of boundlessness. This is the principle we call Americanism.” It is precisely this great principle of mass distribution that pseudo-aristocrats deplore — this, along with the related economic principle of maximizing the use of resources. The latter is articulated in the great aphorism of “good to the last drop,” which stands in contrast to the pseudo-aristocratic practice of flaunting one’s concern for economic logic by leaving grounds in the cup, a notion otherwise known as Der Satz vom Grund.

Peter Lawler, the great American theorist, is no less guilty of snobbism than Goldman, only with less excuse. He has written eloquently on the limits of Darwinism and on the limits on the idea of progress, and yet here he happily joins hands with evolutionary Larry in casually dismissing Maxwell House on Darwinian grounds: “It goes without saying that the gradual disappearance of Maxwell House from our country is one undeniable sign of progress.” I do deny it, along with editor Poulos’s flippant rejoinder “Maxwell House — American to the Bitter Dregs.” The decline of Maxwell House (and the concomitant rise of Starbucks) is a clear sign of corruption. It is correlated with every matter of cultural decline, from the mounting threat of demographic extinction to the selection of Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House of Representatives.

Maxwell House is an American icon, in the grand tradition of A&P and Chevrolet. Its motto good to the last drop was allegedly supplied by none other than that great American Theodore Roosevelt. Finally, to return to Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks, which launched the whole conversation, I now reveal a secret that accounts for the reference to coffee at the end of my post. It has rarely been remarked that Hopper’s painting revolves around the theme of coffee and coffee drinking: there are, count them, three mugs on the counter, and they all contain coffee — no one here is drinking rosehip-raspberry herbal tea. The sugar is pure granulated white, not raw brown. The coffee, trust me, is Maxwell House. No instance in recorded history exists of anyone drinking Maxwell House with brown sugar. That’s the necessary condition. The sufficient one is that there are two huge urns of coffee behind the counter, and no one, even today, uses anything but Maxwell House to prepare coffee in this way. Finally, the color of the coffee in the glass tubes of the two urns is green, a “detail” that plays with Hopper’s use of light and color. (This critical detail is not visible in any reproduction I have looked at, though it is not only noticeable, but conspicuous, in the original.) I know from an experiment that only Maxwell House is so thin as to allow itself to refract light in this way. Maxwell House is our House of bean.

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