I’m writing a long article on this topic. And I’m going share parts of it with you two paragraphs at a time.

But I digress. Here are the two paragraphs:

Conservatives properly understood are as concerned with social ecology as environmentalists are concerned with natural ecology. That’s not to say the two concerns are mutually exclusive. But conservative environmentalism, whether natural or social, is anthropocentric. We’re concerned about the natural and social conditions indispensable for the flourishing of whole persons. The deep ecologists, pantheists, and so forth say that nature would cheer if man—the human person—were to disappear. From that view, the human being is a kind of cosmic accident who’s bound to trash his hostile natural environment. Deep ecology is really deep pessimism: How could beings such as ourselves ever show the discipline required to sustain ourselves? From a natural view, after all, there’s no reason we should exist, and it’s dangerous that we do. So the natural hope is that we’ll manage to take ourselves out before extinguishing all life on our planet.

We conservatives think that nature exists to be used well by the human person, just as we think that human nature isn’t an oxymoron. As the beings given speech or complex language by nature, we’ve been given excellences, responsibilities, perversities, and the potential for both good and evil not given to the other animals. We alone among the beings are given the charge of taking responsibility for “living in the truth.” And so we’re charged with subordinating our technological accomplishments—wonderful displays of the freedom we have been given that are often won at the expense of nature—to properly human purposes. Those purposes, of course, include sustaining our not only beneficial—but also indispensable—natural, social, and relational orders. How could there be freedom without such corresponding responsibilities?

Glenn Kessler’s The Fact Checker column at The Washington Post awards our President four pinocchios for his statement yesterday that, “The day after it happened, I acknowledged that this was an act of terrorism.”  This misrepresented his deliberate refusal to call the Benghazi attack a terrorist attack for several weeks after it, a refusal in which he simultaneously tried to provide himself cover by condemning “acts of terror” in general.

The piece provides a good in-depth study, of one specific instance of Obama’s lying, which as any one lie tends to, spins out into a specific set of lies. We see that at each step, our president employed deception quite carefully, precisely, and for low and ultimately foolish reasons.

I would say this is the regular pattern–that what Kessler reveals here is not at all unusual, but part of the reason for why, as I said once, even while praising his literary proclivities:

Obama has become one of our very worst presidents, particularly in his unprecedented degree of mendacity-employment and his sickening shamelessness about it …

That is, when Representative Joe Wilson cried out “You Lie!” during his Obama’s health-care speech before Congress back in 2009, he had, intentionally or not, done more than protested a specific falsehood, but had captured a basic fact about the man.

Obama lies. That is a key part of who he is, reflected even in his autobiographical self-construction.  Obama is a progressive. That is another key part. The two do not necessarily go together.

Sorry to say it, but some employment of mendacity by the office of the presidency, some blurring of the line between rhetoric and deception, is probably inevitable. It is a likelihood nearing a certainty that every president has lied in office, and not only concerning national security secrecy.  And that’s before we even get to campaigns!  Close students of history know this.

The problem with Obama is that it has been taken to another degree entirely. Proving that here is impossible–one would have to systematically compare Obama’s campaigns and presidency on this question, day by day, with those of previous presidents.  (Eventually, some historian will do this.) So I understand that many readers will not be with me here. Bush II was far worse, they will say. Or Clinton. Fair enough: such readers have their broad judgment calls, and I have mine.

But this seems an appropriate week to remind folks of my “It’s Different this Time” cry from the heart, a post-election essay in which I looked my fellow citizens in the eye and basically said, “How can we trust you, feel civic commonality with you, if you so casually vote for a man like this a second time?” Oh, I was accused of melt-down, incoherence, racism, narcissism, un-Christian ire, you name it, for that post. Daniel Larison scolded me, in typical TAC fashion, for not understanding the ongoing consequences for the Unfathomable Awfulness of Bush.

But I think at present we can see why I was within reason to say there, and not so much to the younger Obama voters but really to the experienced ones, that:

You had four long years to take the measure of this man. …for all who have been willing to honestly look, his character has been revealed to be one of arrogance, incompetence, divisiveness, and serial mendacity. …And, you still voted for him… …even in a situation where the Democratic Party did not stand to lose many decisive policy points…

I cannot remember if I ever posted anything to this effect, but one of things I wanted to say to moderates in the run-up to the election was that a man of Obama’s character, particularly when his worst tendencies got so little serious scrutiny from an irresponsible legacy (MSM) media, was probably bound to get entangled in scandals and constitutional-no-no’s that would provoke nation-dividing consideration of impeachment proceedings.  A moderate Democrat could honorably vote for Romney as a way to avoid this.

But here we are.  I sure hope clear evidence walling Obama off from this IRS persecution-of-conservatives campaign is there, and (of course) is true. But if not…

And he got what was REALLY PROVOCATIVE–our Democrats are less progressive than conservative–without disagreeing with it.

So there have been a lot of great posts by Pete, Carl, Ralph, Kate, and John in my (fairly brief) absence.

I especially appreciate Carl reminding us of the fine book by our friend Philippe Beneton (a very melodious name, sing it to the tune of “Felice Navidad”) that Ralph expertly translated. The distinction between SCIENCE and SCIENTISM always fills me with SELECTIVE NOSTALGIA. I remember it from any number of lectures during my undergraduate education (which occurred during the confused final days of neoscholasticism as the core of Catholic higher education in America). It’s also big for Walker Percy (who probably adopted it from Maritain and other French Catholics).

SCIENTISM is turning science (or what we can see with our own eyes about the way things really are) into a comprehensive, materialistic explanatory scheme that simplifies reality, above all, by abstraction from the human soul (or “who WE are”). So MARXISM was, of course, a very pernicious ideology. DARWINISM at one time was also fairly pernicious, not so much now. Those new atheists–who differ from many old atheists only in being more vainly and stupidly scientistic–aren’t so scary. They certainly aren’t for species-based eugenics, as some of those old “progressive Darwinians” were. Of course we have the more recent NEUROSCIENTISM, which includes really ridiculously reductionistic stuff–like neuroliterary studies and neurotheology. And don’t forget ECONOMISM (which does, in fact, include what Marxists teach but also what many libertarian professors of economics teach).

One antidote for SCIENTISM is to play forms of scientism off against each other. That’s why I try to get the Darwinans and the Lockeans in “dialogue” with each other. Each form of scientism does, after all, embody or vulgarize scientific insights which really are (partially) true. But the definitive limit to all forms of scientism is the Christian discovery that LOGOS is PERSONAL (see the writings of our philosopher-pope emeritus).

SOFT SCIENTISM includes various social-scientific explanatory schemes that suggest that people are held hostage by forces beyond their control. One form, in my view, is SECOND-TERMISM. Presidents for the last half century inevitably flail and fade during their second terms, because the 22nd Amendment keeps them from having a third one. They cover up and push back every crisis until after they’re reelected, thinking that the second term will be a time of statesmanship undistorted by electoral politics (as Obama told Putin). But it turns out that the various covered-up “issues” come to the surface, become uncontrollable, and the president doesn’t have the means of self-defense of appealing to the people through seeking reelection.

So the second terms of NIXON, CLINTON, and BUSH THE YOUNGER seem pretty well explained by SECOND-TERMISM.

And PRESIDENT OBAMA’s friends are saying that what’s happening to him right now isn’t his fault. He’s falling prey to SECOND-TERMISM.

It’s true that the president skillfully got through the election without dealing much with the covered-up BENGHAZI fiasco and the fact that ObamaCare is such an ill-considered mess that it can’t be implemented. And nobody listened to the TEA PARTIERS and such when they said the IRS was out to get them until the lamely incredible proactive apology.

We can deny in each case that the president is being victimized by “forces” while expecting that each of these problems is going to continue to get more daunting for him.

The personal element remains. How the president fares depends a lot on how intelligently he responds to the challenges of “delayed maintenance.” And how the Republicans fare depends on their personal response. Consider the difference between GINGRICH’s failure in 1998 and RAHM EMANUEL’s magnificent success in 2006. The situations were different, you say. Well, of course, I respond. Still, historical comparisons don’t have to be very exact to be instructive.

The Republicans have to start listening to PETE and YUVAL if they’re going to turn SECOND-TERMISM into a big victory in 2014.

If you care for this kind of warning, then let me say that there are probably SPOILERS throughout the following:

1. The Great Gatsby (Dir. Baz Luhrmann, 2013).

Nietzsche (there I said it!) says, “What is most difficult to render from one language to another is the tempo of its style.” This is as good a place as any to begin a discussion of the most recent translation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby to the big screen—and this time in 3D.

The novel is notorious for its style, told in the particular voice of Nick Carraway, and consequently there has been great difficulty in successfully rendering it into film. With a sense of distance and irony, the novel’s personal and retrospective narrative takes the tone of a regretful eulogy and/or apology. Its languorous prose looks up to Gatsby from a below that is somehow higher and also, more importantly, later. Carraway’s “back-trailer” move from the west to the east “withholds judgment” on character—including Gatsby’s—in order that it may focus on the study of “bonds.” That is, judgment is withheld until the survivor (Carraway) tells us that the view from the top to that of the bottom, just as the view from the east to that of the west, returns to itself in the end. We are told that no matter how tawdry it all may be, high and low and east and west must reckon with a view that is “borne ceaselessly into the past.” For the sake of understanding (including understanding the “promises” and “dreams” of the U.S. of America), it seems that Carraway’s experience is an education that requires from the reader recognition that beginnings are more important than ends.

However, Luhrmann’s movie, and not the novel, is under discussion here. Regarding the novel, Luhrmann’s movie gets the basics of plot and symbol right, but then again, it frames its telling as occurring within a mental institution where Carraway (Tobey Maguire), like Fitzgerald, suffers from morose alcoholism, anxiety, and other sundry neurasthenic ailments. At the institute, a good doctor claims that writing might prove therapeutic, and so the story begins in Carraway’s voice—a voice prompted by a psychologist’s head-shrink gimmick.

Like the novel, the film delves into themes of class, ambition, dreams, love, sex, excess, secret lives, luck, crime, corruption, time, mortality, etc. The figure of Jay Gatsby (Leo DiCaprio) remains ridiculous. After “five” long years, Gatsby steadfastly holds the torch for Daisy (Carey Mulligan) to this day. There’s also the green light at the end of the Tom Buchanan’s (Joel Edgerton) pier, a place where careless people can smash up things and return to their money. Yadda, yadda, yadda.

But it’s Luhrman cinematic style that he’s known for, and he once again shows it here. Making Romeo + Juliet into an emo ‘90s teen flick, this time he takes on a candidate for the “Great American Novel,” and gives it a makeover to his own taste—and in 3D. For added emphasis, and in case you missed it, at one point in the film Tom Buchanan asks whether Nick is still working on the “Great American Novel.” In this way, I suppose one could give the Baz Luhrmann treatment to just about anything in literature, and I’m sure SNL is already working on a good parody—Baz Luhrmann does Kafka! I’d go see that!

That said, I’m not sure what the makeover is for this time, though it is remarkable that Brooks Brothers recently had an Art Deco catalogue attuned to the movie. If Fitzgerald was attentive to the ways in which financial capital was based on speculation, perhaps this time Luhrmann is attentive to the free expenditure of capital as the basis for the celebration of one’s own individual identity in terms of consumer choice. Perhaps this celebration of the “me” is fitting therapy for today’s largely unemployed movie audience (unemployed in both the narrow and broad senses).

Regardless, the film is big, brash, colorful, excessive, kaleidoscopic, etc. It’s definitely a movie made for a non-reading public, as when the when the young party girl asserts that Gatsby is a nephew or cousin of Kaiser Wilhelm, adding, in case you didn’t know, that the Kaiser was the ruler of Germany.

There is no need to linger on these points. Great American Novel, historical literacy, or not, this movie does anything but linger. Instead it insistently pushes its frenetic filmic artifice into the forefront, and it cut-cut-cuts through dialogue and action in such a way as to prove that the Great American Novel was a silly idea in the first place. Prudes who worry about the sacred importance of the Gatsby text need to learn to embrace the shiny images that Luhrmann has projected onto the screen. Unfortunately, other than the voiceover narrative as therapy motif, we see no representation of the audience for whom the story is told. Apparently we find ourselves in a doctor/patient relationship understood in terms of the then modern scientific ideas which uncannily resemble the religion of Oprah Winfrey. Despite its shiny artifice, Luhrmann nonetheless seems to lack any deeper reflexivity other than pop psychology and the current tools of human management science.

The movie is all bright colors, glitter, garish costumes, confetti, and CGI cityscapes of Google Map type topographies between Manhattan and West Egg with the “Valley of Ashes” a short drive in between. It also nods to various filmmakers, with a notable Hitchcockian Rear Window sequence. But to repeat, it is all cut-cut-cut in a kaleidoscopic “whoosh,” as the erudite contrarian Armond White calls it. It’s a fast break movie with another Jay’s (Jay-Z) soundtrack playing a mélange of Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” and Alicia Keys’ “Empire State of Mind” in the background. Of course, we also have Adele and Beyonce thrown in for effect.

In his defense of the music, Luhrmann claims that hip-hop is the music of the street today, just as jazz was in the 1920s, and so this music should not be distracting to the viewer. Indeed he is correct, except that calling hip-hop the music of the streets in 2013 is almost like Fitzgerald calling Stephen Foster the street music of his day. But this only adds to the supreme artificiality of Luhrmann’s vision, and it does not distract.

Except that distraction is Luhrmann’s main motif as a filmmaker. To use the current therapeutic lingo, Luhrmann’s style is hyperactive and ADD. As already stated, it’s all cut-cut-cut. To avoid the slowness of the 1974 Jack Clayton version starring Robert Redford and Mia Farrow and written by Francis Ford Coppola–what with its long shots and hazy filtered photography–Luhrmann’s version overcompensates with nothing but falling confetti. The ’74 version emphasized regret and loss. This one emphasizes the frenzy to move ever upward (even if that means the overcoming of neurasthenia while safely ensconced in an institute under watchful and caring eyes).

Still, both versions fail to translate the tempo of Fitzgerald’s novel adequately. It may be true that Fitzgerald, as a professor of mine once put it, simply lucked out with Gatsby—writing it perhaps even in an alcoholic delirium. Maybe he lucked out—compare Gatsby to his other books, even This Side of Paradise. He wouldn’t have been the first. However, despite its excess, Luhrmann’s excessive Gatsby is entirely too sober (even calculating) in its 3D grandiosity, and hence it is all the worse for it.

I’m tired so I’ll get to the fine film Mud tomorrow.

2. Mud (Dir. Jeff Nichols, 2012).

Naturally I appreciate the kind and intelligent attention to my ideas from Peter Lawler, Richard Reinsch, and Carl Scott.  (I would not be dismayed in the unlikely event that the term “Ralphism” caught on, though I might have suggested a term more along the lines of “the Hancockian wisdom.”  But be that as it may…)   Anyway, I think the present focus on my concern for what Tocqueville calls “moral analogy” (indeed a lynchpin of my book), my friends risk exaggerating my … “classicism.”   I use Tocqueville’s alarm at the loss of moral analogy to evoke the necessity of a classical (& Straussian) moment in our reflection on the meaning of reason.  But I am clear that this moment is not adequate, that the analogy between the city and the soul, or the soul’s interpretation of its own meaning by reference to the city’s hierarchy cannot withstand the Christian and subsequent modern critiques.

So, to redress the balance in the interpretion of … OK, “Ralphism,” let me share just a few condensed statements, from my book, of my approach.  And again, thanks to all for your attention to my arguments.  I hope this provides the occasion for some further discussion:

[Augustine’s]  radicalization of Platonic dualism liberates the soul from human hierarchy and thus necessarily puts moral analogy, the bond between the spiritual and the practical, at grave risk.

…  The minimal truth that Biblical revelation reveals is that philosophers have no exclusive claim to a sense of the limits and inadequacy of even the most comprehensive goods available within the human city, or, as Christians will say, within the cities of “this world.”  Without presupposing the perfection of their rational natures, humans are capable of an awareness of their mysterious otherness from the conventions and implicit understandings that are the medium of our political existence, from the world organized by human power and human reason.  Human beings are “fallen;” even, or perhaps especially if they are not philosophers, they can somehow sense that their true home is elsewhere.   Nietzsche will ridicule Christianity as “Platonism for the people,” but already Augustine advances the claim that the people have a right to, so to speak their Platonism—that is, to their sense of transcendence or otherness, of having a home beyond any earthly city or “culture,” and this apart from any specifically philosophical claim.

A moment’s reflection will make it clear that this universalization of the awareness of a possible transcendence irreversibly complicates the task of political philosophy.  Man’s perfection and fulfillment are no longer available to him as a simply natural being, and so the philosopher’s claim of natural right is profoundly problematic.  And yet the political character of the human condition remains: in the absence of an authoritative and comprehensive Law determining human affairs, men must somehow reason together regarding the authoritative terms of their lives in community, or else abandon themselves to sheer accident and force.  But how will they reason when they cannot claim competence regarding final purposes?

…  This truth is that human beings will always be driven to some degree and in some way by an awareness of their mysterious transcendence of every concretely representable or publicly determinate good.  Augustine was right: no classical philosophical image of human perfection as culminating in the serene autonomy of the philosopher himself can contain or govern the longings of the human soul for some other kind of home.  The rule of reason cannot be direct, but must honor the problematic articulations of transcendence generated in man’s practical existence, religious, familial, and political.  For reason to assume any constructive responsibility among a humanity addicted to the flattery of “human rights,” to the unprecedented power over nature resulting from the coupling of universal material incentives with a negative spirituality or idealism, it will have to learn to show the connections between the indefinable freedom of the human spirit and the humbler necessities of our natures as beings dependent upon family, community, and polity.  But to do this, to take responsibility for some “moral analogy” connecting our theoretical freedom with our practical belonging, reason would first have somehow to learn to see its own goodness in the light of a transcendence it can never adequately name.

[And from the conclusion:] The irreversible Western inheritance of an Eternity not indifferent to Time no doubt implies a more elusive, if arguably also richer and dynamic, sense of the meaning of human existence than can be contained in the classical ruling idea of reason. It therefore also implies a more hazardous horizon for practical reason, in effect a resignation to the impossibility of containing the soul’s longings within a specific, substantive understanding of the nobility of the good. The illusion of the simple superiority of “theory” to “practice” (or vice versa) cannot be sustained, and the circulation of meaning between these poles must be accepted and assumed into the very self-understanding of reason. …              Practical wisdom today must be attuned to the truth of the fundamental aporia that is the deep spring of Western dynamism, the aporia defined by the alternatives of, on the one hand, a horizon of knowable goodness above ordinary human concerns and, on the other, by the Christian and revolutionary promise of the regeneration of all humanity.  Whether such an attunement is possible without respect for or perhaps even faith in a personal Divinity in whose love vertical and horizontal transcendence are thought to achieve their only true synthesis – this is the question I must further ponder, and on which I invite the reader’s assistance.