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.

NOT TO COLLEGE

I also appreciate Richard Reinsch’s introduction to Ralph Hancock’s excellent book The Responsibility of Reason, which Peter links below, but it seemed a little odd to me to use Rawls’s concept of “public reason” as the key example of the sort of reason-reliance that Ralph wants us to see the insufficiency of.  A better way into Ralph’s thought on this is to note that he was the translator of a neglected classic of contemporary French political philosophy, Philippe Bénéton’s Equality by Default: An Essay on Modernity as Confinement (2004, ISI; 1997 publication in France).

Bénéton presented two key pillars of contemporary modernity: the modern democratic creed and the modern conception of science. The latter of these he characterized as “scientism.” What follows are a few pieces of a review I wrote of the book (for PPS):

…“scientism” holds that science is the only true form of reason, so that “whatever lies outside the scientific method lies outside reason.” Research that is scientific must have the qualities of “exteriority, neutrality, technicity, and generality”; intellectual activities and investigations that cannot meet these criteria…cannot provide us with real knowledge.

…Bénéton shows that scientism, even though it is not relativistic itself, functions as an “accomplice” to the dogmatic relativism fostered by the modern conception of equality. When a relativistic man hears someone say that an action of his is wrong, he responds by saying: To me it is good, and I determine what is true for me. Whereas the scientistic expert refuses to endorse his second statement, he backs him up on the key point by insisting that no one can know anything about values.

Another societal consequence of scientism is its impact on language. Words and phrases like “self-expression,” “group,” “deviance,” and “structure” migrate…into our common usage, becoming a mental filter through which we perceive the world. We become progressively unable to think thoughts that accurately perceive the interior, the contingent, the cultural, the unquantifiable, and—in a word—the substantial.

A central claim of the book is that as “substantive reason withdraws,” it is replaced by “practical reason cut off from being, a reason reduced to a procedural or instrumental function.” An “irrational rationalization of the world” is taking place, in which two forms of rationalization, the procedural and the instrumental, tendentiously order everything.

Procedural rationalization consists of the procedures that autonomous individuals must agree on if they are to “live together in disagreement”; it preserves their autonomy while allowing pressing collective decisions to be made. [This is where Rawls's concept of “public reason” would come in.] But, practically speaking, it requires an expanding judicial regime to manage conflicts between the increasing number of rights, and it tends to “legally neutralize” natural and substantial differences, such as those between the sexes and, most alarmingly, those between adults and children. …contractual relations tend to replace customary ones. Outside of one’s immediate family, responsibilities for others that were once taken for granted are abandoned, unless they are narrowly defined as part of a job and legally insulated from onerous rights claims. Institutions become soulless, ruled not by persons but by procedures, and collective life becomes more and more careerist and commercialized.

Instrumental rationalization works from the assumption that rationality is purely instrumental—without substantive knowledge, all we can really know is that certain techniques obtain certain ends, although we have no way of judging the ends. This brings us under the sway of what is economically valued as a “good.” …Armed with the excuse that another researcher, firm, or nation will pursue whatever leads they do not, specialists wash their hands of responsibility. Knowledge of technique, quite deliberately agnostic about the ends, winds up running the world.

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Incidentally, I prefer that manner of attacking market-worship, which gives you all the “good stuff from Marx” as Peter did a few posts back, without suggesting that Marxism deserves less contempt than it does, and without using the problematic (because really socialist-invented) word “capitalism.”

We might note the obvious influence of Leo Strauss’s Natural Right and History upon Bénéton’s framing of modernity, but he works out the implications of historicist relativism and Weberian social science in ways that are more attuned to both the contemporary academy and to our day-to-day lives. Moreover, the overall feel of the book is more of a French Catholic one—Charles Péguy’s spirit inhabits it throughout. In any case, it remains to my mind one of the more lucid articulations of the contemporary situation. Of modernity.

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How to escape such confinement-by-truncated-reason?  Well, one of the key thinkers to look to would be our Ralph Hancock.  It goes without saying that the best introduction to Ralphism remains his own book, especially its accessible enough introductory chapter. And I should quickly mention that its chapter on Strauss is a must.

So Richard has the best introduction to Ralphism I’ve read. I’ve also just read an unintentionally (perhaps) a little bit funny blog by Rod Dreher wondering why his (really, really profound and beautiful) Ruthie book hasn’t been picked up by Walmart or embraced by evangelicals. Ralph’s book is profound and beautiful too, but it’s much more of an acquired taste. (I often complained to Ralph that his teaching style doesn’t correspond to my learning style.) I don’t think Walmart will get interested, but actually evangelicals and Catholics should be, as well as Straussians who want to speak more persuasively and truthfully on God, politics, and the soul. And irresponsible liberals who both talk up and think too little of reason would learn the most from Professor Ralph, but good luck getting them to realize how lame their idea of “public reason” is.

In Richard’s eloquent highlighting, Ralph wants to restore real reflection on the “moral analogy” between a well-ordered soul and a well-ordered city. That’s the key to doing what I want (big-time) to do, to restore the right kind of politics of “mediation and compromise.” That’s what Pete wants to do too.

But, for myself, I would highlight more that the truthful contribution of Christianity to human thought is that the city doesn’t correspond to the soul or the whole person. And it’s the end of “civil theology” and such that chastens our expectations from politics with the insight that each of us transcends the city as persons, as relational beings open to God and the good. That chastening, though, isn’t “libertarian.” The city is the home of relational beings and not autonomous individuals, and so the city is about encouraging or at least not “deconstructing” the family, the church etc. And political life itself is a relational human good, although not the highest human good.

So here’s a short post by the fine blogger Alan Jacobs. With Alan, Sam Goldman, and Rod Dreher, I have to admit that THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE is starting to surge in a big way.

So Alan’s point is that colleges are engaged in a destructive amenities arms race. Their health clubs and such are getting ever more impressive. But they never end up really making this or that institution distinctive, just because the next magnificent edifice (this goes for student centers, science buildings, and forth too) built someone else will be bigger and better. It is, of course, a real disadvantage for your average private college to have fallen too far behind in this race.

Ordinary colleges are going into debt to remain competitive. And the costs they’re cutting are those connected with having most courses staffed by tenured or tenure-track faculty. Merely offering a good education in the traditional fields, it’s thought, isn’t enough to have your college stand out in a way that will gain the increasingly scarce resource called the college-bound student.

Meanwhile, enrollments are dropping for most four-year private residential colleges. And there’s less real “liberal education” than ever (as a percentage of the whole called “higher education,” at least). There’s also the allegation that there’s less real educational “value added” than ever, except in the STEM majors and the traditional liberal arts. So the libertarians are right about the bubble bursting soon, if it really is true that students can’t be suckered into borrowing to live in a luxury hotel forever.

I have to add, to make sure this isn’t viewed as criticism of my home team, that Berry College will be overflowing with good students in the fall. And Berry has no significant debt at all. (It has acquired the questionable and certainly expensive amenity of D-3 football, but it’s clear we can AFFORD it.)