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Universality Is Not the Issue, Dude
Sunday, October 25, 2009, 9:42 AM

I hoped I could prove this with a link, but back during the presidential primary race, I told at least one person that, when it came to the health care debate, not universality but comprehensiveness was the issue. You can imagine that a pomocon has an ingrained or inherent dislike for comprehensiveness; the logic of total systems points us ever deeper into the details of quantitative and qualitative knowledge in a way utterly unlike that recommended by Tocqueville, for whom plunging citizens into the tough daily details of active citizenship would in fact militate against the transformation of democratic governance into a top-down total system. This is to say nothing of my pomocon irritation with, say, algebra, where one tiny error in arithmetic renders an answer just as wrong as do errors produced by massive, drunken recklessness or even spitefully deliberate miscalculation. (Over to you, Will.) I might add on a final tangent that comprehensiveness in a religious key seems to me perhaps to point the anxious soul toward a therapy of doubt; attending to noncomprehensiveness could in this view actually build vital bulwarks of faithful conviction. For this to work, however, one would have to ‘make an exception’ and deeply love the comprehensiveness of God.

But we were talking about health care. Would anyone really find great cause for upset with an arrangement delivering universal, but highly noncomprehensive, coverage? Such coverage would be far less inclined to seep or reach down into the minute details of our lives, making the sorts of micromanagement decisions we have associated, even before Tocqueville, with despotism. If you agree so far, Ross and Reihan have some, um, details.


Dignity and Identity
Wednesday, September 16, 2009, 11:38 AM

In comments below on my post about Yuval Levin’s book, Imagining the Future, Michael Peterson asks: “Will someone, somewhere, define human dignity?” Not me, at least not in this post…but here’s an account of what needs to happen first. One of the best passages in Yuval’s book is a dissection of a certain problem conservatives confront in arguing about bioethics. The right, he tells us,

must transform moral sentiments into arguments for morality. Its chief ally in this effort is the deep moral wisdom at the heart of our civilization — by which most Americans live their lives. But the effort itself can pose real risks to precisely the character of that wisdom. The nature of both modern science and modern politics demands that the argument proceed in this way. Both incessantly unveil the veiled and shine light on hidden things. We gain much that is immensely beneficial from both, but we risk losing much if the process of transforming sentiments into arguments is not carried out properly [...] (128).

For Yuval, the conflict is between the “implicitly mysterious taboo” and the “explicitly known and meticulously scrutinized object” (127). For a number of reasons, I prefer to speak of things forbidden or interdicted instead of things that are taboo; foremost among them, I suppose, is that I think Philip Rieff is right that ancient cultures organized around fate viewed taboos as pertaining to power whereas Jewish and Christian cultures organized around faith viewed interdicts as pertaining to authority. But I also want to suggest that we should distinguish between nouns and verbs that are forbidden, or to be hidden, or shameful, and so on. Because Yuval also notes incisively that the concealed or tacit or secret in our lives, when subject to the forces of contemporary science, becomes “an event wide open to a variety of experimental manipulations” (126). Some forbidden things are forbidden deeds or occurrences which are dragged out into the light to be interacted with in many new ways. But some forbidden things are concrete nouns. And I think I’m safe in saying that one of the ways in which we tend to destroy the forbidden or ‘stigmatized’ character of some nouns is by redescribing them as mere bundles of events or occurances. Scrutinizing an event is a different experience, with different moral implications, than scrutinizing an object. It is perhaps analogous or tantamount to the difference between beholding an image and beholding the real thing the image represents.

Strangely, however, in an effort to maintain the moral sentiments which attach incoherently or inchoately to things kept hidden and secret — things that might be forbidden but might not, and might even be sacred — Yuval finds himself falling back on the virtual language more applicable to the experience of events and images than nouns and realities. Moral sentiments, it turns out, are ‘senses of’ things. Yuval wants conservatives to “develop and articulate a coherent worldview,” especially with regard to “loosely defined terms like ‘human dignity’” (129), and rightly so; but it is hard to tell whether this requires or actually ‘cashes out’ as a “sense of the appropriate uses and limits of human power,” a “sense of what is humanly important,” a “sense of what the future may plausibly bring,” and a “sense of responsibility” (130-31). Yuval winds up leaving us with the paradoxical notion of an “explicit sense of the world” (129).

All this puts me in mind of George Kateb’s introduction to his book The Inner Ocean, a collection of essays that defend the individual, as liberals are apt to do, on the basis of rights. Kateb admits doubt that “Mill would have remained absolute” in his defense of “‘self-regarding’ activity” had he “taken up certain cases that unawareness or decorum prevented him from discussing” — cases like “consensual incest between adults, the use of addictive drugs, voluntary slavery, extreme sadomasochism, nonhomicidal cannibalism, necrophilia, bestiality, and voluntary acceptance of one’s own sacrifice” (13), all things that Kateb rejects as individual rights. He justifies these exclusions by announcing “no right to accept another’s renunciation of a right” (13), but obviously this is as ‘principled’ a stance as the stance against ‘extreme’ sadomasochism, and slips quickly into tautology (whatever you can’t renounce must be a right, and whatever you can, not). Yet Kateb recoils from the determination that these bad things must also be banned things because they “injure the human dignity of people who do them” (14). Since Kateb does not “associate human dignity with any teleology or reason for being,” however, he is forced to raise “in dismay” the fact that he is “not able to deal” with the issue “adequately” (14). He sighs:

Let us say that a society of rights-based individualism encourages these and other crepuscular activities to become topics for open and popular discussion; that that fact can be taken as a paradoxical sign of the moral grandness of such a society, for practically every desire can be honestly admitted and talked about despite shame or without shame [...] (14).

Here a liberal winds up in the same predicament Yuval diagnoses among conservatives. It turns out that contemporary science and politics alike cause us to treat forbidden things precisely as if they were not forbidden — as the precondition of forming our ‘value judgments’ about them! But why? Perhaps the culprit is scientific and political individualism — methodologically individualist in the first case and rights-based in the second. We have discovered that both these kinds of individualism are in fact corrosive to individual identity. Methodological individualism tells us that only large-n statistical studies, in which the individual is minimized to his or her most interchangeable, can produce usable knowledge; rights-based individualism tells us that people must be allowed to interact expressively in ways that disrupt and undermine the boundaries of personal integrity as long as they want to and ‘aren’t hurting anybody’, although we all recognize that the ‘line’ between what counts as hurting and what doesn’t is, by the lights of rights, arbitrary or inexplicable. So the inevitable result is ‘unrebuttable’ personal testimonies about how you can commit incest and still be a perfectly normal person.

Scientific and political individualism seem to put the definition of dignity in the hands of individuals. But it turns out that they really put the definition of individual in the hands of individuals; no matter what people do to themselves and one another, they appeal to the same basic concept of dignity to justify their acts. Only, they describe their acts as events which somehow fail to strip them of the individual character to which dignity attaches. We stop talking about what you have to do to remain intact as an individual (noun) and start talking almost exclusively about what you can do to experience individuality (verb, adjective, adverb, etc.). The full spectrum of experiences of individuality are said not to destroy dignity, but they corrode or undermine the very thing that it turns out dignity depends on — individual being, which, from this perspective, suddenly looks a lot different from individuality. Our integrity or identity as individuals is actually the precondition of our bearing dignity; dismayingly, we have it within our power to strip ourselves of dignity, even minimal dignity, because we have it within our power to fragment or even destroy our individual being.

What would seem to be needful, then, in order to have a productive conversation about the meaning of human dignity — and in order to preserve our liberal regime — is a prior theory of individual being which isn’t scientific or political.


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

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.


Rise of the Techno-Rubes
Friday, August 21, 2009, 9:56 AM

Every big idea that works is marked by simplicity, by clarity. You can understand it when you hear it, and you can explain it to people. Social Security: Retired workers receive a public pension to help them through old age. Medicare: People over 65 can receive taxpayer-funded health care. Welfare: If you have no money and cannot support yourself, we will help as you get back on your feet.

These things are clear. I understand them. You understand them. The president’s health-care plan is not clear, and I mean that not only in the sense of “he hasn’t told us his plan.” I mean it in terms of the voodoo phrases, this gobbledygook, this secret language of government that no one understands—”single payer,” “public option,” “insurance marketplace exchange.” No one understands what this stuff means, nobody normal.

And when normal people don’t know what the words mean, they don’t say to themselves, “I may not understand, but my trusty government surely does, and will treat me and mine with respect.” They think, “I can’t get what these people are talking about. They must be trying to get one past me. So I’ll vote no.” — Peggy Noonan, WSJ

Well, doesn’t that just hand a heap of ammunition to the left, for whom the problem with the right is that it’s anti-intellectual, anti-scientific? “I don’t understand it, so I hate it, I’ll kill it.” That’s the rap on the rubes of the Republic. Nobody normal understands what the public option means? Caveman think. Right?

Here’s what I think. Noonan wants to underscore that science will never be our public language, because science never can be any people’s public language. Even when public — and private — life is apparently inundated with science. We see this powerfully in the way therapy has been progressively medicalized; everyone knows their doses, kids and their parents fluently rattle off their prescriptions, etc. The health-safety-and-convenience approach to sex is all science, epitomized in those c-y-a Yaz ads with the hired normal girl talking frankly to her peers about the real risks attendant upon birth control that eliminates your period while you’re at it. And yet, even our deep degree of medicalization leads us, as Noonan alludes, toward a discourse of incantation, of magic words. Messy talk therapy has its revenge on antiseptic medicalism. Even on scientific ground, the public learns to utter the right code words of a never more than artificial language. Naming our drugs is not to know them. Nobody wants the fine print on the back of those prescription drug ads to be large enough to read. Hand-waving comes along with the health, safety, and convenience: a board of experts has deemed the risk reasonable; now gimme the cure. Noonan’s voodoo buzzwords can be known, even understood, but not possessed. They name things we have no hand in. They are for, but not of, the people. The possession of nature that the scientific knowledge of nature is intended to afford can only be democratized so far. Second- and third-hand knowledge confers little ownership.

None of which is to say that science isn’t useful or good, or that the possession of political practice which generates a knowledge of political life (note the arrow flowing in the opposite direction) can’t itself be transformed into a dysfunctional system of incantation and alienation. It is to say that the vision of the future in which science sweeps away the public stupidity of politics will disappoint those who do not expect it to be replaced by a public stupidity of science. Matthew B. Crawford has shown how the rise of technology has accompanied a serious fall in manual competence. The complement to this point would be a showing that the rise of techno-politics not only erodes public political knowledge but fails to replace it with anything near the full measure of empowering ownership that justified, if you look closely, the ‘modern scientific project’. The key to the virtue of the scientific method was its supposed democratization of the power and independence conferred by knowledge: method is great because it is standard and repeatable, with reliably replicable results, by anyone anywhere. The analogy with custom is direct: the basic rules of living are good because wherever we are, we can rely on their presence and operability too. And this was the power of scientific method over the endurance of custom, which could only be clung to, finally, for sentimental reasons.

But the democratic promise of the Enlightenment scientific method has been lost. Scientists create knowledge most often sold to private parties who manufacture products, like drugs, of which we can only partake as passive, ignorant recipients of that knowledge. They are empowered and enriched; we enjoy, at best, a mitigation of symptoms. Even if scientists posted the method behind their discoveries online, acceding to the full transparency which power and profit reject, that method would remain impenetrable to the public. Even if permitted by law, nobody can learn how to make Paxil in their kitchen, the better to face the day and master their fate and destiny. The expiration of patents and the inevitability of generic drugs is cold comfort here. Medical science is fundamentally different from Enlightenment science, in this important respect: medicine is administered, scientific knowledge is not. The scientific method promised democratic empowerment, and on that basis posed a legitimate challenge to democratic politics. The medicalization of science, in its turn away from the mastery of the natural world to the mastery of the human world, promises centralized administration, posing a challenge to politics of all kinds, and a far less legitimate one at that.


Politics and Nature
Wednesday, August 12, 2009, 9:18 AM

Pardon me for writing a linkless post. This is the world that we live in, at least for the time being. Apropos of recent Lawlerian and Kenneallian comments on the allure of History and the trouble with health care, has anyone else been struck dumb walking across their living rooms by footage of these town halls? Here are figures straight out of the nightmares of refined public opinion: funny-looking, funny-talking rubes, gesticulating, utterly unable to couch a statement or ironize a put-down, so dreadfully serious about their importance as citizens. Citizens! In the mouths of refined public opinion today that word, formerly associated with revolutionary utopia, now tastes atavistic, like a bad flashback or a vow of revenge. In a wild inversion of Aristotle, politics is now thought of as an activity for lower life forms.

Politics is for Dummies: a motto for an era, of ‘Historic’ moral and social crisis: Neither the American people nor their bumbling, petty representatives in Congress can be trusted to orchestrate and execute a national health care system worthy of the name. Not that we wouldn’t trust them if we could. It’s just that neither citizen politics nor legislative policymaking are able to produce what the very idea of a national health care system leads us to envision. Politics is as disgustingly natural as sausage-making — something which, if it cannot be eliminated, must be kept from getting naked.

‘Real America’ turns out, in a horrible reversal of irony, to be all too real, triggering the mythical liberal disgust reflex as no Reality TV marathon could do. It’s not that refined public opinion doesn’t believe in ‘Real America’. Rather, that so many ‘Real Americans’ still exist is cause for great loathing, and that they want to seize control of policy by practicing politics is cause for great fear. ‘Real Americans’ are shockingly, dismayingly real in their uncouth natural being, in the way they let their nature show. Their dress, their bodies, their speech all undermine the type of nobility cultivated by the culture of the bouffant and the pantsuit and the eye lift and the catchphrase and the parsed statement and the consultant and the expert: Their lust for political participation is an unnerving reminder that we still have not done enough to beat ‘Real America’ back into the past and lock the door…

This is the narrative that’s emerging from our national health care debate, which as of right now is going extremely badly. The battles over bioethics are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the painful conflict between liberal nobility and conservative nature. Conservatives can prevent themselves from being overwhelmed by fear and loathing for nature because they can live — sometimes, despite appearances to the contrary — with dignity. But consider the conflict between liberal nature and conservative nobility. The same situation now appears reversed: liberals accuse conservatives of denying human dignity in pursuit of a silly, illusory, and harmful vision of noble independence. Liberals are disgusted by conservatives who think the ideal society is rooted in good conservative folk of a lower class than they would ever want to be a part of. And conservatives are disgusted by liberals whose ideal society is planted on a democratic vista of good, but hopelessly lower-class, liberal folk. And the disgust rubs off on those multitudes, who, each side believes, are being kept in an all-too-natural condition. Both politics and the absence of politics can appear grotesquely natural. These two visions invite two possible conclusions: either adjudicating between them shall or shall not be a political undertaking. But in each case, the deeper question is: political because of our inescapable species nature, or political because of something else?


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

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.


Randomness and Pantheism
Monday, July 20, 2009, 11:39 AM

Patrick Appel has a long, introspective roundup of reader reax to some posts on atheism at the Dish. He closes with a personal take, acknowledging

there is a connection between pantheism, agnosticism and atheism. [...] Most of the tension between the terms does revolve around “God” and how you define it. As for the connection between agnosticism and atheism, the Pope has a point when he discusses the difficulty of living an agnostic life. From Benedict’s Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures:

Even if I throw in my theoretical lot with agnosticism, I am nevertheless compelled in practice to choose between two alternatives: either to live as if God did not exist or else to live as if God did exist. If I act according to the first alternative, I have in practice adopted an atheistic position and have made a hypothesis (which may also be false) the basis of my entire life…

By this measure I would be an atheist. I no longer believe in a personal God that possesses consciousness as we understand it or requires prayer and obedience. I’m not sure I ever did. And I live my life as if God does not exist. At the same time, I’m overwhelmed by the complexity of life and my inadequacy in understanding the systems that created and maintain the universe. “God” seems like an appropriate term for these mysteries.

Call it “Appel’s Paradox” — a tension or anxiety experienced, I think, by quite a lot of people nowadays. One can approach this paradox seeking to cure or to cope with it. A life lived according to a final choice between as-if theism and as-if theism, even if ‘merely practical’, aspires to cure Appel’s Paradox. But it’s to be expected that the cure never really comes; the predicament of the agnostic mirrors the predicament of the believing Christian, who must make a worthy home of this temporal vale which can never provide us the full measure of respite and repose that we dream of when we dream of home. But the consolations of faith fortify Christian pessimism in a way that the agnostic, to follow this line of thought, cannot enjoy. When the incredible can no longer be denied, even atheism becomes unbelievable. But the failure of the agnostic to find repose, in faith or out of it, leads him or her altogether past any basis of an entire life and into a long, chaotic oscillation, moving between living as if ultimate meaning shaped life and living as if it did not.

The promise of the therapeutic is that this chaos may be ordered institutionally — a task that requires ritual-making and ritual-breaking performances of commitment and de-commitment. Pessimism, from this standpoint, tends too severely toward the nihilistic embrace of complete randomness or meaninglessness. The promise of the therapeutic, then, holds out the prospect of coping with the soul’s wearying oscillations by sustaining performative change in a condition of open-ended linear progress. The linearity of contemporary optimism, often deemed the logical consequence of modern scientific thinking, can actually be sourced independently or alternatively in our passionate efforts to escape the destructive exhaustion of our souls or psyches, and seek repose without God.

Even our therapeutic optimists realize that we finally have to be pessimistic about technology’s ability to provide that repose. Ultimately, they must be optimists about our ability to provide it to one another — despite the many ways in which we tacitly (at least) consent to mistreating and instrumentalizing one another. I think that this view our our human interrelationships leads us forcefully to think of persons as containing powerful qualities that we can access and enjoy, pick up and put down, almost like deities in a polytheistic cosmos. But no matter how profoundly our individualistic qualities can be turned against our integral individual being, they are not gods, as we readily admit. Away from polytheism, and toward pantheism, we go.

UPDATE: Patrick enrages a pantheist, whose remarks fascinatingly and suggestively hop among Spinoza, Islam, and gnosticism.


Osawatomie or Bust: Vacationing in Kansas and the Postmodern Experience
Thursday, July 16, 2009, 12:49 PM

One thing is certain: the image of America and postmodernism are inextricably bound up with each other. Nay, I will go a step further and say — get ready — that they are “coeval.” (Coeval is a rare term used by a certain philosopher and his acolytes.)

How so? Postmodernism in its first phase had what can only be described as a difficult relation to modern science and technology. You need only read any of Ralph Hancock’s various “postmodern conservative manifestoes” on this blog site to prove my point. It seems that the mindset created by modern science, which understands reality as objects or “beings” (and ultimately as “beings” to be reckoned for our use), has served to distance us from an authentic encounter with Being. And that is something to be pretty upset about. Just ask Martin Heidegger. For Heidegger, and for a whole school of thinking that preceded and succeeded him, “America” came to stand for the very embodiment of this technological mindset and way of life. America, he said, is katastrophenhaft or the “site of catastrophe.” It dehumanized us, uprooted us, cut us off from access to the silent source of what can save us.

Heidegger even seemed to blame America for the catastrophic error of sending astronauts to the moon. (We will be celebrating the fortieth anniversary of the event this week.) The very thought of folks walking around up there, and taking pictures of the earth, ruined forever the very possibility of humans experiencing these bodies in their “original” or natural sense. As he said in his Spiegel interview:

Everything functions. That is exactly what is uncanny. Everything functions and the functioning drives us further and further to more functioning, and technology tears people away and uproots them from the earth more and more. I don’t know if you are scared; I was certainly scared when I recently saw the photographs of the earth taken from the moon. We don’t need an atom bomb at all; the uprooting of human beings is already taking place. We only have purely technological conditions left. It is no longer an earth on which human beings live today.

As you might imagine, all of this America bashing led to a kind of perverse fascination with this country in postmodern circles. To come to America, to do a travel log of this country, was to experience the flatland of modern existence. One thing, however, changed in the aftermath of Heidegger. It became unsophisticated to appear as blunt as the master. Rather than rail against our fate, it is better to embrace it, allowing irony to replace disquiet. So it was that Alexandre Kojeve identified America with the “end of history,” with frogs making music and all of that, and Jean Baudrillard feigned his enjoyment at the utter artificiality of Disneyland. Everything in America became “camp.”

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

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?


Attention Front Porch — You Missed One Wave!
Saturday, July 11, 2009, 3:01 PM

I would note a couple of complications for the Front Porch discussion of Strauss in relation to an Alternative Tradition in America. Discussion of these complications might help to clarify what, if anything stable and substantial, is really at stake between a Front Porch and a Pomocon position (assuming these are or can be made coherent bodies of thought).

Man’s antagonism towards nature was not an invention of modernity. Nor was his sense of alienation from his concrete, local community, his human city on a human scale. Leo Strauss knew this — it might indeed have been the main thing he knew — but I gather he wanted to be friends with Christian Natural Law types, so he mostly lays this thesis between the lines: the First Wave of Modernity is … Christianity. (So add “1” to all the other waves.) It is Christian universalism and individualism that irreversibly complicate the Front Porch project, long before these longings evoked by the Bible were reconceived as a project of human autosalvation.

Fortunately, though there is a powerful logic leading from each of the first three waves to the next, we are not permitted to believe in the inevitability of the ongoing slide down the slope. Otherwise, why was Strauss writing? Or, for that matter, why Tocqueville’s “Legislative” efforts, Tocqueville who understood the boundless slipperiness of equality, but found his duty and even his nobility or greatness in affirming a choice of a decent and just, though very imperfect democracy.

There is no such thing as pure modernity. Pure modernity is Nietzsche (Nietzsche is the pure Machiavelli), and Nietzsche is not, finally coherent — his passion to combine the nobility of Caesar with the compassion of Christ could only be sought by actually following Christ, and this I take it he could not consider. All modernity is adulterated, and the American Founding is so in an especially blessed way. The American Founding is already an Alternative Tradition, and every Alternative Tradition is adulterated. There is no pure theory of practice, either modern or “alternative.” Liberalism is indeed parasitic, and it is indeed very much morally depleted — no disagreement there on my part – yes, and shameless, pornographic, all that no doubt, too. But a wise “alternative” would have to be… yes, parasitic on liberalism (or on its roots in Christian universalism and alienation), too.

(On the question of natural depletion – the ecological question – I take Prof. Deneen’s concerns very seriously, though I may see a little more truth in the Lockean assertion or wager that much material value is in human labor and invention. But it is certainly true that the technological mindset is structurally blind to the good of wholes, even the whole human body. In any case, I believe the threats to our moral-spiritual-familial ecology are the most urgent. Or perhaps I’m just not smart enough o work on both problems at once.)

Thus I have already publicly raised the question whether “The Tocquevillean Moment is Over” — by which I mean the moment of trying to preserve felicitous religious and localist contaminations within liberalism without directly confronting the theory or notions of liberalism (self-interest well understood and all that). Does this post-Tocquevillean question move me towards the Front Porch?

Maybe this is where I differ from my more purely localist-traditionalist friends, and where I think I am not only, admittedly, more “Straussian” than they, but also, I think, more Tocquevillean: liberal individualism is partly true, and very American, and therefore irreversible short of some catastrophe it makes no sense to wish for. To contain and moderate this partial liberal truth it is necessary first to acknowledge it, otherwise we make enemies faster than we do friends. At the same time, liberalism obviously is not the whole truth – far from it. And to re-enthrone an “alternative” understanding that for our Founders was so firm that it could remain largely implicit, namely, that a good human existence, a truly humane existence, requires acknowledgement of “sacred limits” (Strauss) to individual self-expression, and therefore some shared horizon that is essentially religious, however general, that is, to re-enthrone “virtue,” this is a philosophical-political project, a kind of regime re-founding that cannot be defended or pursued by the via negativa of resisting federal incursions and praising family farms (which I think I like). We cannot break the compulsive grip of individualization/centralization except by confronting the understanding of the good from which it springs. (This of course does not mean constructing an alternative Pure Theory of the Good.) Lincoln was right about this at least: public opinion is everything, and I see no hope for our country short of a sea change in public opinion. I don’t know just how or even whether such a change is possible, but I am convinced that “all who remain enamored of the genuine greatness of man should unite and do combat” against this compulsive grip of extreme secular liberalism.

I have enjoyed addressing a word to your Front Porch. And now you can tell me if I’m right about where we agree and disagree.

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