Here’s Daniel Larison (more specifically, one of many good points Daniel Larison makes in response to this post ):
If it was absurd to say that an unexamined life was worth living, as the “red state” correspondent claimed, it is perhaps even more absurd to say that a complicated life full of conflicts is one that has been examined. It is also not clear that all “blue staters” are simply utilitarians, but almost certainly have their own sets of conflicting obligations and their own “truckload of inherited traditions,” which may include utilitarian ethics and liberal politics. Consider: she says that “red staters” have unquestioningly inherited their traditions, but she says this by way of illustrating how unquestioning “blue staters” are, so which is it?To which I must first say "Fair enough." If I can clarify: I’ll mostly endorse, with important caveats, the generalization that Red States are into traditional Christian-flavored values and Blue States are culturally libertarian; this doesn’t prove that Democrats lead unexamined lives and Republicans examined ones; however, it does mean that Red State lives are worth examining and their Blue counterparts aren’t. (Warning: This claim will be bent, folded, spindled, and mutilated before this post ends; not quite retracted, though.)
Larison, as a Christian, understands this universe to be a tragic one because of the Fall (feel free to substitute some secular description of human nature’s brokenness, if you prefer), a condition which applies in all time zones. My "Red Socrates" thesis depends on the claim that cultural libertarianism is ill-equipped to make sense of a tragic universe. Tragedy involves looking at human suffering and saying that it was not only unavoidable but, more importantly, in some sense just and proper . Loyalties come into conflict and people get hurt, but that’s what’s supposed to happen when loyalties conflict!
Contrast this tragic sensibility with this definition of the purpose of politics (from a description of liberalism in an old Pomocon post I can’t find): "to reveal and institutionalize the needlessness of human suffering." I don’t mean to straw-man the Left, but 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. This may be a particular prejudice of mine, but I believe moral philosophy rests on that fact. After all, if you’re just studying the most efficient way to allocate pleasure, isn’t that called economics?
On a lighter note, I’ll answer Larison’s charge that hip-hop and R&B address adultery as often as country music does. It may or may not be true that they do—my iPod rarely strays from country, Memphis soul, and 80’s pop, so I wouldn’t know—but I’m fairly certain that they don’t take up the topic in the sustained and systematic way that country music does. The "cheatin’ song" doesn’t just describe a bunch of songs with a topic in common; it describes a genre, with all the internal complexity that the term implies. It’s like the difference between movies that take private detectives as their main characters and honest-to-God film noir . Larison’s certainly right that I failed to draw a straight line from art that "mucks around in the swamp of moral turpitude" and art that is morally sophisticated; I did so a long time ago here , and so will simply gesture in that post’s direction.
Lastly, an autobiographical aside: my Red State credentials are suspect since, though I did grow up in Mississippi and North Carolina, I was raised by an Atticus Finch , went to Yale, and now live in Brooklyn. If these facts affect your reading of this post, I won’t complain.
UPDATE: Alex Massie challenges the claim that country music is a Red State genre. I stand by it, and send skeptics to this article on why Johnny Cash’s liberalism is an important part of why he’s one country singer it’s okay to like. As for what worldview is implied by Motown, I admit I have no answer for Mr. Massie.
