Quick takes on the sparks flying off Helen’s latest:
1. Definitely Alex Massie is right as far as it goes when he heaps criticism on
this notion that there is a "Red" America and a "Blue" America. True, this is fostered by all the sweet and pretty maps, but it’s still nonsense. To look at those maps you’d never think that a klutz such as John Kerry won almost 40% of the vote in Texas or that Bob Dole won the best part of four million votes in California in 1996.
But how far does it go? It may be silly and wrong to think of Texas as a "red state" in any substantive way . . . while it may still be accurate and meaningful to recognize the way reds and blues have formed state- and region- transcending national cultural-ideological blocs. My caveat would be what I’ve said elsewhere, which is that we’re really a 10/80/10 nation as opposed to a 50/50 one, and that both parties have gotten worse at doing the kind of national politics in which coalitions of different interests and passions are assembled on the same team.
2. I’m glad that my persistent targeting of cultural libertarianism is getting traction, yet Daniel is being extra-provocative when he says the following:
Cultural libertarianism is not only ill-equipped to make sense of tragic universe, but it assumes that a tragic universe – one affected by the consequences of the Fall – does not exist or if cultural libertarians accept that it exists they assume that virtually all troubles can be resolved or at least ameliorated. I detect an adapted version of Delsol’s Icarus Fallen argument that cultural libertarianism, like liberalism, is intent on trying to eliminate structural realities and burdens in our earthly life that cannot – and more to the point should not – be eliminated. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that cultural libertarianism simply seeks to avoid or ignore these realities. We cannot escape these realities, and we can at best divert them into new and potentially more dangerous forms, which Delsol dubs black markets.
Now we’ve gotten into Fall-of-Man territory before around here, so what I really want to do is narrow in on the starting point/endpoint problem presented by a conviction as to universal tragedy. Daniel would have us believe that cultilibertarians and liberals want to "eliminate" the ‘negative cash value’ (to coin, as Nietzsche said, an ugly phrase for an ugly thing) of tragic outcomes — namely, pain, suffering, and the loss of dignity and gain in guilt that are understood to be attendant to those things. Surely that makes for the kind of utopian fantasy that a cultural libertarian and political liberal would be likely to cultivate. But listen to Freddie’s query:
Why would the moral necessity of some suffering disqualify the attempt to limit all suffering?
The answer’s contingent on the character of the attempt, I’d caution: consider the attempt to limit, right now, every instance of suffering and the possibility of further suffering; versus the attempt to eliminate it; versus the attempt to mitigate, on a rolling basis, whatever kinds of suffering one encounters in the course of everday life; versus the attempt to end such suffering; versus the attempt to mitigate (or end) suffering one encounters as a result of a globe-straddling informational media colossus; the list goes on and on, and it frustrates efforts to cleanly cleave the moral world into those content with tragedy as such and those so discontented with it that they will stop at nothing to make it impossible. (Which is a surefire path to tragedy anyhow.)
3. Which brings me back to the starting point/endpoint problem. The question isn’t whether the universe (or life) is tragic; the question is whether this is where we begin in our moral reasoning or where we end up. Listen to Freddie again:
(Personally, I’d be more impressed with the idea that social conservatives have a more sophisticated moral interpretive mechanism if they didn’t so often use that mechanism to arrive at "homosexuality is evil", or anything else from the usual boilerplate. But, again, that assumes opinions found in my own moral framework. Can’t get out of it. Wouldn’t want to.)
I wonder what Freddie would do with the moral reasoner whose point of interpretive departure — as opposed to their interpretive destination — was that homosexuality was evil (or ‘an evil’, if you like that language better). The challenge of evil in the world is like the challenge of tragedy: less a matter of copping to it than figuring out what to do about it, in one’s capacity as an individual, a member of a polity, a member of a religion, a member of the human race. To be very crude about things, the conservative inclination is to be less political about tragedy, and the liberal inclination is to be more political about it. This could be because conservatives tend to recognize that tragedy is something inherent to politics, that they are, in some way, flipsides of a single coin. This is plausible in two ways: (a) there is a tragedy within politics, because politics is where we take and create our irreconcilable differences, and we can’t ever establish, through politics itself, the utopian polity in which injustice is impossible or never happens; (b) there is a tragedy pertaining to the fate of politics, in which some non- or anti-political order conquers or enslaves political practice, crippling its ability to adjudicate our bottom-line differences in a way that conduces to their healthy management. Conservatives tend to be less troubled by tragedy (a) than tragedy (b), whereas for liberals the reverse tends to be true. (The footnote here is that the liberal concept of politics as I understand it is a scientific one, so the one liberal version of tragedy (b) is when something — usually religion — overthrows the scientific usurpation of political practice.)
4. Of course, the world is not divided crisply into conservative-land and liberal-land, nor are the minds and souls of men. So there’s actually not much to be gained, for purposes beyond getting one’s intellectual bearings, in trying to impose this still-too-abstract framework on our actual political practice. Things are far too scrambled up, and this is actually to the good, because it makes tragedy (a) far less likely. What’s my example, then, of how we better oriented ourselves intellectually by running through these kinds of thoughts? Well, we discover that the supposed biases in favor of and against ‘sophisticated’ moral reasoning are actually mostly canards. Freddie is convinced that Helen (and probably everyone) can’t separate her preferences about moral sophistication from her preferences about moral reasoning. But it seems obvious to me that if MacIntyre is right about one thing it’s that non-philosophers are still, in the course of everyday life, practical practitioners of something that’s like philosophy. (So in America today I see very few Rortyans proper but many practical Rortyans.) This is important to cutting a little deeper into the central question animating this whole discussion — the purportedly "red state" claim that the unexamined life is worth living, and the attendant hypothesis that the examined life is not necessarily as worth living as at least some unexamined lives.
5. Nobody seems willing to argue nowadays that the FULLY examined life — the life of the philosopher — is the only life worth living. And nobody really seems interested in arguing either that the FULLY unexamined life — the life of the Nietzschean idiot or the Aristotelian natural slave or the Fool on the Hill or whomever — is worth living. The real controversy on the right (and on the left, too, I think, but this is obscured somewhat by the action among conservatives) is in the muddled middle: what degree of examination is proper to the good life? And for a lot of reasons this question today mostly means: what degree of irony is proper to the good life? Nicola has wanted to argue that even a very high degree of irony is compatible with the good life, and might even be necessary to it for conservatives stuck in the present time. For Nicola — if I’m reading and remembering her right, postmodern conservatism is largely a conservatism that can be willed into successfully being true blue no matter how much irony modernity has pumped into the universe. Postmodern conservatism for Nicola appears to be the courageously self-stipulated conviction that conservatism — with its attendant commitments to traditional truth — can never be defeated by any attack mounted by irony or ironists.
Without (fully) litigating that claim here and now, I bring up Nicola’s concept of pomocon because it throws light on the fragility of all partially examined lives, right, left, center, and question mark. Helen wants to say that culturally libertarian political liberals are stuck feeling guilty about not at least making a best effort to eliminate suffering:
it seems to me that liberalism/libertarianism has to attribute all human suffering to things like irrational cruelty, material scarcity, haste, poor judgment, and incomplete knowledge of the data set. They might be able to admit that some suffering is necessary because of the limited amount of stuff in the world, or the fact that human beings don’t have perfect knowledge, or the fact that instincts like selfishness are ineradicable. However, they can’t describe a universe in which suffering is morally necessary.
Which is right as far as it goes, but Freddie’s point is that people who are correctly described by an account like this usually wind up not actually living up to their utopian ideal. I think Freddie, like Rorty, would actually say this is good and proper: utopian ideals are there to spur us toward making our best efforts at living up to them; they are not there to be taken as moral guarantees of heaven on earth. They are meant to be impossible, but they are also meant to be inspiring to action. So it’s not surprising that liberals feel guilty about not being able to "do something" about Darfur, even though many of them are "doing something". What they mean is that they feel guilty about not being able to eliminate the suffering in Darfur, or really that they feel guilty about the reality of a suffering that doesn’t really affect them at all. It is the guilt of the spectator of an actual tragedy (as opposed to a staged tragedy. Staged tragedy is pleasurable because it allows us to cathartically experience the very close (but not too close!) approximation of that guilt without actually having to live through it for real.)
6. All of which is to say that we are all stuck shuffling horizontally within a vertically demanding framework, and that in this democratic age there are really no true partisans of the absolute lowering to beasthood or the absolute raising to superhumanhood or godhood that you get in really aristocratic ages. We all prefer the muddled middle of the partially examined life, and on top of that now most of us also prefer some medium amount of irony. Though our fights within-tribe over what those amounts should be can ger very heated, as can our fights across-tribe about what should be held up to reason and held up to irony, it’s important to consider the likelihood that our shared practical pragmatism is a lot more significant to our collective destiny than our differences about its extent, condition, and purpose. Politics, not incidentally, becomes a lot less exhausting and bitter — healthier and more ‘manly’ — when we come at it after indulging in at least this much self-examination and irony.
