Also, we have this report:http://blogs.dailymail.com/donsurber/archives/10838 on the threatened lawsuits of thirty-seven states if the president’s “health care” legislation is passed.
How far this “states’ rights,” nullification, and tea party rising will go in their resistance to the central government remains to be seen. However, you’ve got to think that somewhere Bobby Lee and Jeff Davis are surely smiling.
]]>Marriage, in what is evidently its most popular version, is now on the one hand an intimate ‘relationship’ involving (ideally) two successful careerists in the same bed, and on the other hand a sort of private political system in which rights and interests must be constantly asserted and defended. Marriage, in other words, has now taken the form of divorce: a prolonged and impassioned negotiation as to how things shall be divided. — Wendell Berry
Wendell Berry. I’d be plenty happy to see more Wendell Berrys in the world. But, sometimes, apparently slam-dunk comments like these wend their way up from Berry’s Gutenberg printing press to approving corners of the internet, and I have to pause for a moment. Because, as is the case here, I feel a bit of a reflex to be vigilant — the big picture seems so right so fast that the temptation is to stipulate the seemingly little things.
The marriage-as-politics bit, here, for instance, seems like a little thing — a ready-made analogy to ring around the neck of a longtime cultural corruption indicator that many of us still haven’t tired of bemoaning, and for good enough reason. But, actually, treating contemporary marriage in the manifestation Berry wants to critique as a “sort of private political system” does quite a bit, on closer inspection, to send us down what I think is a very false critical path — one that might even play into the hands of the forces we wish to array ourselves sharply against.
The assertion and defense of rights and interests, I have to venture to say, isn’t politics — not necessarily. You can find it, for instance, in one of the least political places on earth, the room where contractually required arbitrations are performed. Divorce court, perhaps above all, stands as a living monument to how tirelessly (and at what cost) we’ve worked to export the assertion and defense of rights and interests out of politics and into law. Increasingly, I think, law is being set up as an opposite to politics, an antipolitics — again, not because people don’t fight over what they think they are entitled to want and what they think they need, but because the way in which they do is supervised and managed by a system of rules and regulations promulgated in a way that itself is divorced from actual political practice.
The contestations over relational power that Berry sees as characterizing marriage today must not be confused, I think, with the kinds of contestations you get under conditions of actual political practice. This sort of conflation seems to me roughly similar to that involved in calling gladiators warriors, and gladiator matches war.
UPDATE: Peter Suderman reminds me that I should link to this depressing item. “The Marriage Ref” is, as far as I can tell, pretty final proof that our model of acrimonial marital arbitrage is far from political.
]]>Conservative commentators proffer two entirely reasonable but not obviously compatible criticisms of the modern university today. First, they admonish administrators and faculty alike for creating an intellectually oppressive environment; instead of inspiring an open exchange of ideas through Socratic inquiry, they impose speech codes, a stifling regime of political correctness, and a heavily politicized program of moral indoctrination designed to recruit students to the favorite causes of leftist activism. On the other hand, conservatives reprimand the same crowd for being excessively permissive, even libertine, when it comes to issues of morality, especially the realm of sexuality. Hyper-liberal universities today are simultaneously too restrictive and too indulgent, seamlessly if incoherently vacillating between the two extremes.
The two criticisms only seem contradictory, though, when viewed in isolation from the modern university’s historical context. Today, the university still claims to champion the perfection of reason, even if the idea of rational liberation, following the postmodern deconstruction of it, has been whittled down to the virtue of nonjudgmental tolerance. Moreover, the university still claims to function as the shepherd of young students’ souls, although its latent Hobbesianism prevents it from using such old-fashioned and overly religious terminology. It still claims the moral authority of in loco parentis, going so far as to radically reform — rather than merely reinforce — the moral teaching provided by inexpert parents. Today’s college administrators actually do break from their intellectual inheritance in no longer being haunted by a worrisome skepticism that their institutions are not properly suited to the tasks assigned to them, or that the tasks themselves are mutually exclusive.
While conservative critiques chastise the university for its opposition to free and unimpaired philosophical exchange, they also censure it for no longer taking seriously its commitment to civic education — the task of inculcating not just the virtue necessary for democratic participation but also the patriotic attachment to the nation that is its precondition. In effect, conservatives are duplicating the Enlightenment tension between authority and rational liberation that generated the precipitous decline of the university in the first place. Essentially, conservatives want to combine the rational and erotic elements of the human soul but often without a clear idea of what this means. They instinctively and rightly understand that the disciplines have become disordered and disconnected, and that, in turn, the curricular requirements at even the best of institutions no longer abide by any unifying principle. However, they are no longer certain what could offer such a unity of either man or the disciplines that would serve him.
Much of the conservative critique’s confusion is a symptom of its intellectual debt to the most influential book written on the topic, Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind (1987). For Bloom, the dampening of our erotic longings, or the woeful flattening of our souls, can be diagnosed in the symptomatic decay of university life and the crisis of confidence in its general mission. Where Bercier attempts to rescue the medieval Christian version of the university as a conduit of tradition, Bloom’s objective is to defend the Socratic essence of the university against the effects of promiscuous egalitarianism. Despite his influence on the conservative critique of the university, Bloom’s motivation cannot be considered truly conservative: the Socratic university, like Socratic philosophy, is radically detached from political and moral life and so a vehicle of liberation from tradition. For Bloom, the de-Christianization of the modern university would not be evidence of decline per se as long as it resulted in the triumph of the life of reason over faith. In Bloom’s view, the only true community is the community of philosophers — which is tantamount to casting doubt on all real, historical communities, including the university itself.
]]>And I’ll be speaking in Dallas at the Adolphus Hotel on Saturday afternoon. (For more details, go to the ISI website).
YOU are invited to both events free of charge.
The topic in both cases will be the contribution of the neglected American Catholic thinker Orestes Brownson to the “building better than they knew” approach to gratefully but critically venerating the great political accomplishments of the American Founders. According to Brownson (and later John Courtney Murray), the best contribution the American Catholic realist can make to his country is to articulate the theory that corresponds adequately to our free political institutions. As I’ve said many times before, we can see that our Declaration was a statesmanlike legislative compromise between Lockeans and Calvinists, and the result was a kind of accidental Thomism. Something similar can be said about the actual language of the religion clauses of the First Amendment, which point in the direction, contrary to Madison’s theoretical anti-ecclesiasticism, of freedom of the church.
To prepare for for listening to ME, you might review my 40,000 word introduction to the ISI edition of Brownson’s THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC, which is one of the most ingenious and original things I’ve written. But I can see now that I didn’t manage to present Brownson’s thought properly as a whole.
So come out and hear how Brownson’s quite distinctive appreciation of America as a catholic nation, his misunderstood (actually mangled by Russell Kirk) idea of territorial democracy, his criticism of our Founders’ theory based on “the right of succession,” and his explanation of how our providential constitution is prior to our written constituion all fit together in terms of the whole truth of the human being as an economic, political, and religious (or created) being.
In Dallas on Saturday afternoon, you’ll also be able to hear the sage of Latrobe Brad Watson and Dr. Pat Deneen. It goes without saying that I’ll be the sensible mean between two extremes: The Claremonster view that our political Fathers taught the truth and nothing but and the Porcher dismissal of the dominant currents of our Founding as most deeply an atheistic project for the imperial mastery of nature.
]]>I don’t write for a living, and I have mostly sympathy (and perhaps also a little envy) for those who do. But it’s worth recalling that the expectation that journalists, critics, and editors could expect a middle-class income and lifestyle has developed only quite recently.
Before about World War II, newspaper writing was little respected and worse paid, more trade than profession. National magazines offered better fees and more respect. But relatively few people actually supported themselves writing for them. And the scribbler’s existence before the 20th Century–and outside the United States–was notoriously poor and dissolute. There are many memorable portraits of life on both the literal and the figurative Grub Street. The most compelling is Balzac’s Illusions perdues.
But the pre- and proto-capitalist economies of the 17th, 18th, and and early 19th centuries offered a solution that we’ve since forgetten: patronage. Rather than trying to sell their wares on the open market, the men of letters of Paris and London tried to sell themselves to wealthy and influential patrons. Work as a hired polemicist, secretary, or a private tutor, wasn’t romantic. But it did provide a stable income not only to honest hacks, but also some very eminent minds. What would Burke have been without Rockingham? Hobbes without the Cavendishes?
It’s hard to imagine any modern magnate personally supporting a stable of bloggers. But why? It would be cheaper, and probably more amusing, than endowing a building at some pompous university. For one thing, buildings can’t tell you how wise you were to pay for them. For another, they can’t tell your enemies how stupid they are. As it happens, I’m looking for a job myself at the moment. Let the bidding begin!
]]>“Nothing that the Buzz team did was technologically wrong,” Ms. Boyd said. “Yet the service resulted in complete disaster.”
Google got into trouble, she said, by linking something that people associate with being inherently private — their e-mail accounts — with something that is very public — status updates on a social network. The result was “a series of social disruptions,” Ms. Boyd said.
The blunder, she said, reflected a broader muddying of the line between what is private and public online. The idea that information exists in a binary world — public or private — no longer applies, she said.
“Google assumed people wanted different parts of their contacts converging and collapsing,” she said. “But just because people put different parts of their lives online doesn’t mean they want them in one place.”
More troubling, she said, is what Google’s flub may portend for the future.
“I can’t help noticing that more and more technology companies are exposing people’s information publicly and then backpedaling a few weeks out,” she said.
Ms. Boyd pointed to the recent changes in Facebook’s privacy policy that made more of its members’ information public by default. “Just because something is publicly accessible doesn’t mean people want it to be publicized,” she said.
The results could be harmful and damaging if they were to expose people’s information in ways they were not expecting, she said, and these issues are only likely to get more convoluted in the future.
“Neither privacy nor publicity is dead, but technology will continue to make a mess of both,” she said.
Let’s be clear about the reason we are experiencing this convolution the way that we are: leading tech companies have a colossal financial interest in making people convolute public and private. Any interest in persuading people that it’s a good idea to deconstruct the public/private divide in their personal lives — or, really, to let them be deconstructed — is ancillary at best to that larger financial interest, and at worst antagonistic.
Excuses like those Boyd’s ominous remark seems to portend — “nothing we did was technologically wrong” — are easy enough of targets to aim at and hit. And I’m not one to pretend that a few big corporations are singlehandedly responsible for taking our precious public/private distinction and shattering it at the feet of a golden idol. The fact is, we democratic individuals have come to recognize that cultivating, maintaining, managing, and policing liberalism’s essential public/private distinction is a lot more and harder work than we might be willing to allocate our precious resources (time, energy) toward. What it requires in particular — at the porous frontier between what’s personal and what’s not — is, I think, a rather robust, regular, and adult form of citizen politics.
Unfortunately, we have a longing to escape from that sort of politics, even at the cost of a robust, regular, and paternalist form of state-administered law. The journey there, as I see it, is characterized by the awkward-turtle sort of line-drawing generated by decisions like Planned Parenthood v. Casey and Lawrence v. Texas – where concepts of publicity and privacy become increasingly meaningless under the pressure of putting the stamp of authoritative law upon a much different divide — between what I’ve called official and unofficial life.
The divide between official and unofficial puts some private and some public things in one basket, and others in another. Regardless of what a particular American citizen thinks about homosexuality, abortion, or exes lingering in electronic address books, this is a significant shift in our social and political order, and it ought to attract more attention, as such, than it has. The implications of a shift toward official/unofficial life, and away from public/private life, are profound. And they throw into stark relief, I think, some of the ways in which a more progressive life may quickly become less and less liberal.
I would point out that the essentially erotic interest Americans seem to have in abandoning the public/private distinction is a lot different from the essentially monetary interest some American corporations have in getting as many of us to do that as possible. Neither our changing mores nor our developing technology are making a mess of public and private so much as moving to replace them with new categories that leave the public/private distinction looking quaint, arbitrary, and incoherent. The trouble is that the Googles and Facebooks of the world are pushing in this direction without a clear enough understanding of how the ‘progressive’ aspect of our mores represents a contingent vanguard and not a historically destined popular movement.
Yet at the same time, our innovative geeks seem genuinely blindsided by the severity of the residual relationship problems that they have caused to come back and haunt Americans uncomfortably and improvisationally negotiating the space between disrupted public and private realms. This emotional tone-deafness seems to me all too typical of geekdom, a world in which the self-evident inherent goodness of new features blinds us to the disruptions they inflict on the human realities they depend on. As the least socially awkward among us have always already known, the ultimate stomping ground for those seeking the experience of new features is society itself, with its potential of endless relational couplings and decouplings. Historically, those of us looking to max out those kinds of experiences have been the bugs, not the features, of liberal society. Tech companies geeking out on the profitable possibilities of ever-more-social transactions, official and unofficial, fail to realize that they are working to crash liberal society. And because of this, backlash against their efforts to do so are met with an awkwardness and confusion almost as poignant as those of their customers who have suddenly been plunged back into relationships they thought had been safely quarantined, online no less than off, in the past.
UPDATE: For a sane debate among tech-education enthusiasts that might go at least one step outside the rut, see here (h/t PEG).
UPDATE 2: And for some further thoughts at a hopefully not too vertigo-inducing level of abstraction, see here.
]]>I’m bothered by the way in which this moral narrative has managed to swallow up the health care debate without actually accomplishing the kind of political change it demands. Still, I’m not terribly concerned that the intelligent versions of the opposing sides of this debate aren’t getting a fair hearing. It’s a testament to the importance of the health care debate that we, Stupak’s defectors aside, haven’t exhausted our own interest in the big issues at stake. There are other debates, however, where the side opposing the universalist view of problems and solutions seems to have lost the will to coherent opposition. In general, our ability to articulate the wisdom of rejecting policy universalism is waning. On some occasions this matters more than others. One case that’s too important to let slide, no matter how wearying it is to struggle against the universalist mantra, is education.
The universalist take on education has been whipped into the public consciousness for so long that many of us, if gently prompted, could mutter its talking points in our sleep. It has become a brooding omnipresence of conventional wisdom, a veritable creed. Its tenets are simple:
* The only education that really matters is in math and science.
* Math and science education really matters because globalization is irreversible and irreversibly accelerating.
* In a world globalizing like this, the only way to ensure a thriving economy is to beat other economies at filling jobs that require competence in math and science at the lower end and expertise at the higher end.
* America isn’t an economy like this.
* The only way to make America this kind of economy is from the top down.
* Only a universalist view of the problem lets us see that the only way to accomplish top-down change is through a universalist solution.
And so we get, in today’s New York Times, this editorial:
The countries that have left the United States behind in math and science education have one thing in common: They offer the same high education standards — often the same curriculum — from one end of the nation to the other. [...]
The standards, based on intensive research, reflect what students must know to succeed at college and to find good jobs in the 21st century. They are internationally benchmarked, which means that they emulate the expectations of high-performing school systems abroad.
This is not a call for a national curriculum. [...]
As recently as the early 1990s, national standards were viewed with suspicion in much of the country. Attitudes began to change as governors saw that poor schooling had crippled a significant part of the work force, turned state colleges into remedial institutions and disadvantaged the states in the global market.
The proposed standards were developed in a collaboration among 48 states and the District of Columbia, suggesting that national opinion, once bitterly divided on this question, has begun to coalesce.
It seems so difficult to get a hearing in opposition to this kind of pitch — who could dare be against greater success? — that I am tempted not to bother. But on the other hand, so few people are making a concerted effort to do so that there may be a point after all. What is particularly galling is that the universalist standards used to generate the supposed necessity of universalist, education-nationalizing solutions are applied with a rank inconsistency that rises past the level of whim to that of blatant selectivity. When a comparison between the US and some other country isn’t relevant to universalist projects, it’s discounted as nondata or statistically insignificant. But when a comparison is relevant, look out! We rank x places behind South Korea in Aptitude Y, as demonstrated conclusively by Study Z, we are scolded, without any sort of reference to why this fact, and not an infinitude of others, matters in the totality of the circumstances, and, worse, without any sort of explanation as to why our trailing ranking matters.
This problem is particularly embarrassing when it comes to India. At least with China, the claim that we must stop at nothing to compete at a comparative qualitative and quantitative disadvantage in math and science with the statist behemoth is silently reinforced by our fear of losing global hegemony to a power with interests and ideas in competition with our own. Why on earth would we want to put the screws to ourselves in this regard with India, a friendly English-speaking democracy? Because a nationwide push for standardized math and science performance will keep customer service call centers in America, where they belong?
It is hard not to slip into snark, because the tenets of the universalist creed on education are founded on such weak assumptions. The same basic errors in thinking you see among global-warming crisis-mongers reappear in giant form when it comes to globalization crisis-mongers. Fear of the future leads to a dramatically blinkered and filtered view of the present. The ‘major industrialized nations’ we are supposed to measure ourselves against face serious problems that are simply edited out of their appealing competitive profiles. The hugely idiosyncratic paths that have determined appealing features of those countries’ profiles are ignored or mentally suppressed. And the misfortunes that befall industrialized nations which obsess over scientific excellence at the expense of cultural and political competence at the level of the individual citizen are forgotten, if ever they were learned.
I cannot emphasize enough that none of this means that challenging global trends are not real, or that obtuse self-satisfaction is the answer. Conservatives have not done a good enough job of proving this out. But they are at a disadvantage: too few audiences, popular or elite, seem to have the time or the patience even to hear them out. Nonetheless: if the top-down, universalist view of a crisis of global warming is deeply misguided, a prudent consciousness of the unpredictable calamities that are likely to result from climate change more generally is a fine idea — and one that generates a completely different approach to policy, in style and substance. Similarly, the universalist view of our education problem distorts and masks its true character and extent. Our obsession with producing competent/low-skilled technocrats at the bottom of our workforce and expert/high-skilled technocrats at the top has caused us to deepen and accelerate the destruction of the local conditions that make possible, in a broad-based way, the general education into American culture and American citizenship that we really need to flourish, in this century or any other.
Can we have it more or less both ways — better math and science education and better education in the humanities, with one eye on international challenges and one eye on our domestic health? Certainly. But not if we give in to the universalist temptation. If ever there were a place to level the critique, advanced most recently around here by Ivan, that the ideology of technocracy relies upon commitments or convictions which themselves have no grounding in science and cannot be justified by instrumental reason, this would be it. The consequence of this sleight of hand is the impression that it cannot be a coincidence that technocratic ideologues wind up being the main beneficiaries, in prestige, power, and wealth, of the policies they push and the rhetoric of crisis they rely on.
The further impression is created that ideological technocracy will, paradoxically, never deliver us from the mode of crisis manifest in whichever particular panic has seized the day. By stipulating a permanent state of exception from which we can never truly escape, the only option available to us is a therapeutic one — technocracy as an endless coping mechanism. This therapeutic logic transcends merely political or partisan divisions of right and left. The real attack against the kind of ideological technocracy favored by the left is grounded in a deeper philosophical insight than even conservative political theory can provide. Critics of modernity are inclined to state the architectonic opposition as between philosophy and science. But the decisive issue, I am going to venture to suggest, is that at this level of abstraction it becomes more and more impossible to distinguish science as such from politics as such. Which again, for those readers with long memories, brings us back to Strauss’s closing words on Machiavelli, and, hopefully, another round of reflection from our Dr. Hancock.
]]>Chisel were based in D.C. But somehow they preserved that New Jersey sound, which evokes the experience of being pressed up against the plate glass window of a cool, expensive restaurant or lounge, watching the goings-on within from the cold street. Springsteen had that sound, of course. But so did punk bands like the Bouncing Souls, Lifetime, and a dozen even more obscure, mostly short-lived outfits of kids with guitars.
None of this is great, or even good music by Roger Scruton standards. But pure aesthetic achievement isn’t the only thing we should, or do, value in music. The new Ted Leo record contains some terrific, thoughtful rock ‘n’ roll. What’s more important to me, though, is that it sounds like home.
]]>1. Tocqueville finds both religious madness and an insane materialistic restlessness in America. The French have pretty much stayed with that criticism, still viewing us as Puritanical workaholics. So to be a Eurocentric American liberal today–or to be for change our liberals now believe in–is for being less Puritanical (on, to begin with, sex) and for adopting the more laidback French work ethic (withe the assistance of a more generous public safety net).
2. But Tocqueville also thinks being Puritanical is something in which we should take pride. The Puritans weren’t all that nuts. And they took popular enlightenment, civic responsibility, familial morality, the dignity of worthwhile work well done for everyone, and the equality of all human creatures with dead, unprecedented seriousness. The idealism at the core of our idea of equality has an irreducibly Christian element, as do our strengths when it comes to the family, citizenship, work, and charity. So as I’ve said before: When some French or Spanish guy calls you Puritanical, the appropriate response is: “Yes, thanks a lot, you should be more Puritanical too.” (For what happens to young Americans when they turn to today’s Europe to cast off their repressive American moralism, see Woody Allen’s repulsive VICKIE CHRISTINA BARCELONA.)
3. But the French–and also our friendly English critic Chesterton–are right to criticize the excesses of Puritanical America–prohibitionism, for example. This just criticism, whether it comes from Tocqueville or Chesterton, is more culturally Catholic than anything else. (It’s the darn prohibitionism that kept our immigrant Catholics from voting for the moralistic isolationist Bryan that so many Porchers admire.) The French rightly saw (for a while) that our Puritanical prohibitionism had morphed in the direction of bizarre and tyrannical health and safety legislation–concerning smoking, for example. They also saw that it had morphed more broadly in the direction of our humorless political correctness.
4. But Chesterton should have appreciated more than he did that Bryan’s struggle against Darrow was finally on behalf of defending our creedal belief in the equal significance of every human being against a Nietzschean form of Darwinianism. Bryan and Chesterton certainly shared the view that our Declaration’s creed was really about the equal significance of every human creature, and it depended upon a foundation for that personal significance in God and nature. So for Eurocentric liberals today our “fundamentalist” Darwin denial seems to be a peculiarly American form of redneck insanity. But even if it’s finally misguided, there’s something profoundly dignified and genuinely egalitarian about it. It should cause us to think, more broadly, about the question of whether even “the Laws of Nature” of our Declaration really account for who we are as persons.
5. So I have a lot more to say. I haven’t touched on either our Lockeanism or our progressivism (except its perverse Darwinian element) yet.
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