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Incoherence and Independence
Saturday, August 29, 2009, 9:15 PM
James Poulos

A semi-tangent apropos of the thread developing below on Reagan’s is-it-or-isn’t-it conservatism: it’s true that Reagan’s public brew of conservative moralism and vigilence combined with western-libertarian free-range thought, inclusive of religion, reflects in telling or cautionary ways his hodgepodge of a private life. But this has been old news since Constant, whose long tormented relationship with Germaine de Stael surely sucked more out of a man’s marrow than Reagan had lost by the time he made President. There does seem to be an inevitable — and in quarters left and right disturbing — link between the politics of independence and a culture of incoherence. The glorious jumble of conservatism, liberalism, and libertarianism on display in America since its most hashed-out Constitutional coming of age (I’ll have to leave the Civil War out of it for now) is the political byproduct and reinvestment of a culture ever without, as Philip Rieff says Tocqueville showed us, an officer class.

Something frustrating to any defender of this long status quo must be the manner in which smart critics of the sorry things about our time follow left conservatives too far off the deep end in insisting that the wages of American freedom are, necessarily, exhaustion, bankruptcy, and a final reckoning with our apparent deep-seated need to return to the Great Herd, to fess up to our Herdiness. It’s mindboggling how Lasch, the great partisan of populist republican citizen competence, managed to get himself mixed up in our memory with Carter, who was right about the endurance of injustice but wrong about the virtue and the value of the U.S. Government stepping in as our kindler, gentler — yes, sweater-clad — Leviathan. We Americans want our Leviathan the better to be more efficiently and completely left to our own multifarious devices. To be sure, a still-growing number of us want to outsource the problems that manifest themselves politically as injustice to an omnicompetent ombudsman empowered to make us Do the Right Thing. But this allows us to translate moralism back out of politics and into private life, in the form of the right t-shirts and bumper stickers, or even the right charities, communities, and congregations.

To zero back in on the title of this post: our incoherence can be, as Tocqueville explained, a wearying and distracting thing. But it is the price paid by a free people, who presume of themselves a fortitude, and a set of resources, powerful or authoritative or rich enough to see them and at least two generations of their posterity more or less through. Country radio is practically a sermon on this subject. On the one hand, it appears from the perspective of Herdiness that the incoherence of the independent spells doom for our species flourishing. Yet it more often or apparently spells greater doom for some limited number of individuals, who, in the momentum of the general scrappiness, wind up forgotten, discounted, mythologized, or remembranced in an honest prayer, and possibly some combination of all of the above. The question we keep circling back to is simple: which resources does the American individual need to remain both independent and incoherent without destroying either himself or his country? And, I suppose, the followup: are those resources too scarce? In a way that second question is more important, and question-begging, than the first. It returns us to that almost grim question of the relation between conservatism and solidarity.


Celebrating Obscenity
Tuesday, July 28, 2009, 12:17 PM
Will Wilson

It’s official. Cultural libertarians have jumped the shark. Read this Reason.com article and marvel. That’s right, the author isn’t celebrating the fact that citizens have a right to be vulgar, but rather the fact that citizens are vulgar.

James’ article on the ‘Sex Vote’ never seemed more apropos. The ongoing decline of certain portions of the libertarian movement from being defenders of political liberty to being cheerleaders for the kinds of cultural degeneration which have led to the abolition of those liberties in the past is simply horrifying.


Dept. of “You’re in Over Your Head”
Monday, July 27, 2009, 2:14 PM
Will Wilson

Sci-Fi Author John C. Wright takes down a belligerent reviewer in style:

The thrilling conclusion:

An interviewer once asked me if my Christianity or my political philosophy would offend readers, by which he meant readers to the Left of Center. I answered that since such readers get offended at plain, ordinary and decent things like heroism, romance and marriage, I have no need to expend effort to offend them with more abstract or topical questions.

Read the whole thing. It’s chortle-worthy.

Hat-tip to Mark Shea.


Youth, Technology, Modernity, Time
Sunday, July 26, 2009, 9:33 AM
James Poulos

Thanks to Alan Jacobs, I have read the latest excerpt from The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs. “I will restore your sense of childlike wonder,” he vows. “There is nothing you can do to stop me.” Hold that thought. The excerpt in question reads thus:

Did you know that now, thanks to iPhone, you can use location services to tell your friends where are you are at any given moment, and if they’re on iPhone and have that same app they can find you, and then you can then ask iPhone to tell you if there are any Tex-Mex restaurants within a five-block radius, and what movies are playing at the nearest cinema? Then you can use Twitter (or, rather, one of the 14,000 Twitter apps) to tell your followers what you’re up to, and automatically feed that into your Facebook page so that your Facebook friends can comment on your movie plans, and advertisers can scour your personal messages and use keyword searches to send target messages to each of you, and deep thinkers like Robert Scoble and Chris Anderson will reassure you that you are not just getting sucked into the maw of the brain-killing machine, and this is not just mindless time-wasting twattle but is in fact extremely profound and revolutionary and important and intellectually challenging. Because in the old days you just read books and that was so passive, but now you’re so engaged and interactive, you’re not just a media consumer but you’re also a media creator — why, in fact, you’re a public intellectual — and if you don’t fully immerse yourself in every last bit of this shit then you will no longer be participating in your culture which means you will lose your job and everyone will laugh at you because you just don’t get it and you might as well be some 90-year-old dude sitting in a pee-stained bathrobe drooling.

Well, guilty as charged, right, although remember, History, that I don’t have an iPhone…and anyway, this post concerns the awkward, ambivalent, ambiguous, and ultimately perhaps even “love-hate” relationship between youth and technology — a circumstance which, we ought to recognize, puts some interesting cracks in that supposedly inexorable historical Wall of Sound called modernity. Fake Steve Jobs revealingly revels in the coercive aging powers of technology. Anyone who is not hip to the trip is, as we have been trained to recognize, in immediate danger of being deemed — and not only deemed! — obsolete. Uncannily, the antiseptic and user-friendly apparatus contrasts with the woeful state of those who reject or cannot keep up with it. In a lurid horrorshow of the flesh, the irrelevant old are physically revolting and stripped of dignity: what Freud called “dreck” and what the Nazis called “pieces”. But Freud, of course, goes to show that the shrieking mockery of the old as irrelevant reveals what it conceals. How very relevant these nightmarish elders really are. (I cannot help but think in this instant of Real Steve Jobs, hardly able to keep himself young and indeed hardly interested, his more moderate ambitions limited to mere survival. Yet even mere survival, in Jobs’ ironic case, requires celebrity, wealth, and a giant leap for man over the organ-donor cue into the possession of one small liver.)

Yet Fake Steve Jobs, with a telling residue of his own dignity, represses the profane proverbial vision of the contemptible aged stewing helplessly in their own feces. Halfhearted even still in his technologically-inspired transgressions against the flesh, he dresses the archetypical old man in merely urine-soaked garb. (Just as technology can complete no transgression without the complicity of our will, so Fake Steve Jobs only points us suggestively toward the ultimate in fear, loathing, and disgrace. Our goaded imaginations must connect the dots. Borges, in his discussion of the last circle of Dante’s Hell, has ably described this dramatic virtue of only half-revealing vices, sins, and horrors.) Recall, however, that Fake Steve Jobs has no compulsive compunctions about throwing the s-word around. Incredibly, paradoxically, monstrously, it is the young who must “fully immerse” themselves in “every last bit of this shit,” on pains of being fully alienated from their culture, their economy, their society, and even their cherished custom circles of friends and family. Yes, even Tocqueville’s Manchild of the Future, safe in the two-ply softness of universal despotisms and particular freedoms, has no last line of defense against this kind of technological harrowing. Tocqueville’s uncanny vision of a ‘good’ bad modernity is that of a closed, comprehensive system, depressingly bereft of internal contradictions: the omnicompetent, omnipresent One rules all-too-compatibly over the All in their endless, and endlessly superficial, variations. Fake Steve Jobs gives us a vision of modernity in which the system of order can never be closed and never attain comprehensiveness — one that always ‘bleeds’, so to speak, at its moving horizons. The longing for eternal youth crashes eternally against the longing for eternal life; technology crystallizes the irresolvable natural war between the incarnate spirits of novelty and durability. In this respect, technology itself carries an internal contradiction. But that contradiction is established by the competing longings of the soul or psyche’s oscillating movement in time. It is as if there is no logic of science or money that is not always already an import from the time-bound condition of us in our human being….

Thus the question put to Tocquevile’s dystopia is whether the irrepressible love-hate relationship between youth and technology makes life more irrepressibly beastly than Tocqueville imagined, or cared to imagine. Ultimately, Tocqueville’s challenge to Hobbes, on which the jury is still out, was to suggest that the age of the individual could only proceed as a democratic age; but Tocqueville’s soft depotism and Hobbes’ Leviathan look, in their virtues and their vices, uncannily similar. Both Tocqueville and Hobbes give us visions — one sad, one glad — of a kind of regime that emerges characteristically from a world of individuals. Yet neither Tocqueville nor Hobbes force us to consider squarely enough what beastliness looks like in the society managed by such a regime. The absentee citizens ruled by Tocquevillian and Hobbesian despots, in other words, don’t care as much about the nagging tension between the experience of novelty and the experience of durability as we would expect real people to care. The despotic regimes on offer seem implausibly to guarantee a way of life in which the stakes captured in the inherent tension of our souls’ movements in time have been drastically lowered. Nietzsche feared that such a great lowering was not only possible but triumphant. But Nietzsche’s searing attacks on the blinking burgher are less important today than his uncomfortable comments on brief habits, histrionic Greeks, and wooden iron — remarks which point us suggestively toward a deeper, and less easily caricatured, fear…one which brings me back around, in fact, to the now not-so-silly threat with which we began.


Dignity vs. Honor on the Front Porch
Friday, July 24, 2009, 8:52 PM
James Poulos

Reihan has a nice two-post roundup of relatively sane commentary on the Gates imbroglio. We could have an interesting conversation about race, memory, and HONOR in America (as opposed to mere or simple dignity), roping ole Tocqueville back into it, or not; either way, it does seem right to conclude that the racial valences to this news item might actually yield in important ways to the manifold pressures of MANLINESS, especially Manliness Today — local cop vs. jetsetting prof, and all that…

PLUS…Joe has more. I have to say arresting Gates for disorderly conduct was an exercise in absurdist literalism.


Generation Hobbes
Tuesday, July 21, 2009, 10:00 AM
James Poulos

One drawback of Leviathan is that Hobbes, the great theorist of the individual, doesn’t theorize the kind of individual that emerges in real life in the wake of, say, Napoleon. (This is a kind of individual different yet from the one we associate with the Revolution itself.) Already within Hobbes is the promise that great freedom awaits those savvy enough to surrender their political liberty. Yet the specific interests and passions of individuals ready to dump political liberty today, of course, look rather different than they did in Hobbes’ time. Now, the character of these differences could be summed up as, or chalked up to, certain developments in capitalism or technology — to the outworking of the relations between man and money on the one hand and man and nature on the other. On the other hand, we could consider that the rise of individuality as a moral ideal has been changing the way we relate to one another in a way that’s more cause than consequence of the man-money and man-nature relationship. It’s significant that this development remains only implicit in Hobbes.

To explore it, we’re better off turning to the French, where the bourgeois individual has long found himself with one foot in the gutter and one eye on the stars. The interplay among the best of all possible bourgeois hedonists and his vices and ideals should focus our culture-class analyses of contemporary life in the age of the democratic individual. We really could have benefited from putting Rorty’s feet to the fire on the ambiguous, dissolute, overheated, extremely contemporary individuals of 19th-century French fiction — the characters in Constant, Stendhal, and Zola (for instance) who are so more instructive on the topic of our predicament than (for instance) the poetically aristocratic Humbert Humbert. The key to understanding the strange combination of passivity and restlessness that we find in the rising generation of the under-30 set has extraordinarily little to do with the comprehensive idiosyncratic perfection of Humbert’s that Rorty sees as the last pitfall facing the bourgeois hedonist in pursuit of the End of Cruelty. Christopher Lasch’s analysis of the contemporary ’self’ is problematic in places for an interesting and important set of reasons, but put against Rorty, Lasch convinces us that Humbertian beastly genius is too rare a flower of evil to typify the errant individual in contemporary life. Lasch’s characterization of that individual as the narcissist is itself partially out of date, however. The hallmark of the rising generation isn’t the minimalist solipsism of the late ’70s and early ’80s — a weird, failed world into which they were born and, as they well know, often miserably, incompletely raised. It’s an admittedly equally weird sharedness of what used to be intimacies, a psychology of self-conscious interchangeability — a fundamental disbelief in the irreducibile and integral character of the individual person.

An important task for people who think about this stuff today is understanding what kind of regime arises from such a culture. Fortunately, some smart guys, like Tim Carney, Gene Healy, and John Schwenkler, are on the case. Together, they help show us the dismaying affinity between individuality and statism in action — and the stakes involved in determining how much we’re stuck with Hobbes, and what we can do about it.


Dignity Now?
Sunday, July 12, 2009, 1:04 PM
James Poulos

David Brooks’ recent column, called “In Search of Dignity,” is of pomocon interest. Just as Brooks tends to view genius as the practical result of expeditiously logging big hours of disciplined rehearsal, he sees the survival of dignity as dependent upon the persistence of a “larger set of rules or ethical system.” But for the classic American dignity sheet, Brooks refers to a list that George Washington cribbed from “a 16th-century guidebook”. To be popular today, Washington’s 110 Rules would have to be cut down to 12 Steps, a Top Ten List, or, perhaps, an open-ended series of volumes and anniversary editions of Dignity for Dummies or The Seven Habits of Highly Dignified People.

But even with the plausibility — or reality — of titles like these, Brooks thinks that the best example of dignity today is probably Barack Obama, who shows everyone that internalizing a coolly calculated restraint to the point of second nature — what used to be called ‘grace under pressure’ — is the way to really satisfy one’s biggest ambitions. (Brooks could have sharpened his point even further by noting that Obama’s sophisticated “reticence” and “dispassion” are clear components of HIS own self-realization as an individual being in command of himself. “Americans still admire dignity,” writes Brooks. “But the word has become unmoored from any larger set of rules or ethical system.” This is because we see the ultimate in dignity to be accessible only through the ultimate in being our own individual person.)

Any system or rule set strikes an uncomfortable contrast with our longing for the full experience of individuality. Yet, as we have known ever since Tocqueville, this kind of bipolar experience is a hallmark of democratic life. The only way we can make sense of the shifting smithereens of our Protean, Pelagian contemporary life — overflowing as it is with constantly changing relations, identities, poses, and attitudes, unregulated by strict and finite social hierarchies that last generations — is by recursive reference to public opinion itself. But since public opinion is qualitatively unknowable as a whole, we turn to experts who can supply us with reliable-enough quantitative knowledge about the slices of life that matter most to us at certain times. Social statistics a la four-out-of-five-doctors, ten-million-people-can’t-be-wrong, and the ubiquitous top-ten lifestyle tiplists represented most disposably by Cosmo and Maxim boil down into clear, concise form information about what to do that we can’t readily arrive at in a democratic age by other, perhaps more classical means. Simplicity of method, precise enumeration, comprehensive brevity, and textual literalism count as the great virtues of this approach to social knowledge. These are also many of what we might recognize as the quintessentially ‘modern’ virtues. What’s important to learn from Tocqueville is that the mass production and celebration of these virtues is less the consequence of some ineluctable logic of capitalism — that is, man’s relation with the natural world — than of man’s relation with the social world — that is, how we relate to one another. Once our individual being is realized en masse, away we go.

But of course the happiness that we seek to obtain through recourse to the modern virtues, in what Tocqueville called practical Cartesianism, is at odds with the very individuality that we seek. Happiness and individuality are competing goods or visions of the highest. Or, as a wise man once observed,

Vain illusions which generate the idleness that comes with inward serenity are dispelled [in the age of the individual]. There is, we learn, no invisible realm of freedom, no impregnable Stoic fortress, into which we can securely retreat. It is undeniable progress to stop ranking people according to their social class, gender, race, religion, and so forth. Productivity is the most visible and surest foundation for a meritocracy—which is why Americans today are having more trouble than ever finding a higher standard than productivity to determine their dignity. Even with the economic downturn, Americans are wealthier and freer than ever, but their dignity seems to depend on being useful and pleasing to others. They increasingly lack the inward self-confidence that comes with having a personal standard higher than “success.” We might want to say that Americans are both more and less free than ever—and in a way that would earn a Stoic’s cold contempt.

Thus Martha Nussbaum attempts to renovate Stoicism as a virtue of mass consensual cuckolds, viewing serial monogamy as an inevitable part of life that we must prepare ourselves always to be resigned to. Nussbaum’s fetish for ensuring we all think of ourselves as always already erotically broken and codependent — what Philip Rieff derisively called “crippled pets” — is a perfect example of both how bad a bad trip post-Christianity can be and how more-Christian-than-Christian in its attempt to saddle us with a needy species being. Nussbaum’s portrait of we codependent rationalizing animals is too close for comfort to MacIntyre’s of we dependent rational animals, however God-poor Nussbaum’s world, and God-rich MacIntyre’s, may be. Still, it’s true that MacIntyre’s human animals are too poor in living out their real individual being while Nussbaum’s are too surfeited with the allure of some fake or mystical quality of individuality. The challenge for Americans desperately seeking dignity is to recognize the difference between living as real individuals and seeking out unreal individuality. The reality of our individual being — and the happiness it opens to us — is actually undermined by the unhappy quest for the full experience of individuality. A stoicism, and a dignity, for our time?


Postmodern Conservatism and Civil Rights
Monday, July 6, 2009, 2:54 PM
Peter Lawler

Here’s an excerpt from an article on the Sixties of mine in THE INTERCOLLEGIATE REVIEW. It supports the Tocquevillian thought that things are mainly getting better and worse, as well as the thought that the aggressive nationalizing of the civil rights movement was in response to a state and local failure of self-government:

If memory serves, the only real political issue that inspired passion in the early Sixties was civil rights—meaning desegregation. The first and only political event I remember attending (with my parents, of course) in the early Sixties was a very classy picnic at the Alexandria, Virginia estate of a very devout Episcopalian gentleman-lawyer from an old Southern family. This man, Armistead Boothe, was widely admired as the heroic leader of those who opposed “massive resistance” to desegregation in the Virginia legislature. Running for lieutenant governor, he was narrowly defeated by the “Byrd Machine” candidate.

To us, the Byrd Machine seemed to be a corrupt alliance of business interests and segregationist fanatics. Opposition to it seemed noble, even aristocratic, a cause worthy of a dignified Christian gentleman. If Virginia didn’t slowly desegregate on its own, Boothe warned, the national government and its courts would eventually make them do it in a ham-fisted way. The Sixties’ “second Reconstruction” of the South was, in fact, caused by a Southern failure of self-government. It could have been avoided had astute gentleman like Boothe prevailed over demagogic populists—such as the George Wallace of the Sixties.

Maybe the worst feature of the Sixties as a whole was the pointless violence. One persistent piece of evidence of the basic health of American society, even during the Sixties, is that the violence always aroused the politically effective anger of a silent majority. That was true of what happened on our campuses, in our cities, and at the 1968 Democratic convention. But it was first true about the segregationist violence in the South, especially in 1963. Until 1963, the truth is, the nonviolent “direct action” of the civil rights movement had not had much effect. But by mid-1964, Americans, tutored by newly-expanded TV nightly news, were convinced that something had to be done to end southern lawlessness. That was the year, of course, that Congress finally passed civil rights legislation with real teeth, and the Democratic president who pushed it through won a huge victory over the Republican candidate who opposed it (and who only carried states in the Deep South). All Americans, as our Constitution has always intended, were finally recognized as free, equal, dignified, and politically participating citizens.

The second Reconstruction was, of course, not only good for justice, but for prosperity, in the South. Air-conditioning and integration combined to produce the Sunbelt—the most “livable,” entrepreneurial, and Republican part of our country. The Sixties’ transformation of the South, like almost all social change, was both good and bad. What was left of agrarianism and localism and the distinctively southern or aristocratic criticism of the excesses of American commercialism atrophied, and men like Boothe are virtually extinct. There are certainly good reasons to be repulsed by the wasteland of the McMansions, megachurches, and superstores that flourishes better than anywhere else in southern suburbs, even while admitting that the South–even more now than then–remains the most genuinely religious and patriotic part of our country

The first and least controversial of the liberation movements of the Sixties was good for both justice and business broadly understood, but in some ways not so good for love, for community, for enduring personal significance.

Now let me add something to the article: The most edifying and popular movie I remember from around the same time was TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD. The small southern town was full of memorable places and people, but also with a redneck racism–based on a grinding poverty–that wasn’t resisted by those who ran the place. Atticus, the father/lawyer, was as noble a Stoic as there’s ever been, and he courageously stood up for the natural aristocrat’s understanding of justice and basic decency. But justice wasn’t served in the local court, and poor Atticus spent plenty of time alone with his books, with no one to talk to.


Argot
Sunday, June 28, 2009, 12:41 PM
James Poulos

My lighthearted abbreviation of ‘premod’ conservatives (in contrast to pomocons) has inspired John Schwenkler and Conor Friedersdorf to newly subversive heights:

“prefab” will be the new term of choice for conservatism of the talk radio variety [....] In honor of Michael Bay’s latest travesty, “prefabricons” is an acceptable usage, too.

John decries regurgitated talking points as “novel and exciting” as a built-by-numbers rest stop. Here’s inviting Conor to dub someone’s approach to politics “intellectual McMansionism.”


Lookin’ Up to Big Brother
Friday, June 26, 2009, 9:15 AM
James Poulos

Over at The Atlantic, I give a synopsis of what I’m on about when talking of the ‘pink police state’ — Orwell’s ‘Big Brother’ meets the big brother who drives a Camaro, goes to community college, and bounces at the local strip club.

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