Post-Buckley Miscellanea

* HBO will have a John Adams miniseries, starring Paul Giamatti and Laura Linney. The subject exhilarates; thoughts of the execution worry. But the essential point is, I don't have cable.

* Doing research, I came across an article on Gadamer and Adam Smith, by one Tom G. Palmer, written in 1987. He is now the head of the Cato Institute!--or some high muck-a-muck for them. Small world.

* Leon Wieseltier in the latest New Republic objects to being defined by a brand, because it replaces your true self with a superficial appearance. No, no! Branding is objectionable, if at all, because it replaces a self-generated appearance with a pre-manufactured appearance. Let us have no talk of true selves.

In Memoriam, William F. Buckley, 1925-2008

William F. Buckley is dead. Long live William F. Buckley.

How can a conservative properly express his admiration for the man? He was a titanic figure, a man who famously expressed his desire to stand athwart history, yelling "stop!" That was back when "history" meant Marxism: the gradual erosion of human liberty in the face of the state, and the gradual abolition of ancient ideals for the sake of removing all obstacles to centralized power. So Buckley organized National Review, yelled stop, and "history" -- as history now records -- slowed in tracks, hesitated, and began to turn aside. The end of that story is not yet told, but Buckley's redefinition of conservatism -- his recreation of conservatism as a force capable of appealing to the highest human impulses and therefore capable of meeting the anti-liberal Left on all fronts -- has meant many of the premature obituaries for freedom and the sacred have had to be heavily edited and returned, unprinted, to the files.

As a young man, I knew in a general way who William F. Buckley was. Many people are familiar with him; they know him by inessentials. His patrician accent, his pompous diction, his famous aristrocratic slouch. his slightly sharklike smile have predisposed too many to dislike the man. I disliked him too, once. And then, slowly, I came to learn what he stood for. Before Buckley, conservatism was too often a desiccated ideology of small-minded plutocrats and other hateful elitists. After Buckley, conservatism has held -- to the frustration and rage of so many on the Left -- the moral high ground. Buckley recognized that the Left had largely abandoned that high ground: the bright uplands of liberalism, rightly understood. Buckley led the charge that captured those summits. He and his allies got Goldwater the Republican nomination in 1964, and the Thermopylae of Goldwater's immolation paved the way for Reagan's sweeping victories less than twenty years later. Buckley lived to see it all, and more.

How did he do it? He was a fluent writer, a spirited debater. He possessed boundless energy and unshakeable confidence. In his youth, he had glamor and good looks and money, and these things mattered in attracting others to his cause. But most important -- the source of his fluency and spirit and energy and confidence and charisma -- seems to have been his love for the cause itself. He devoted himself, as few of us ever can devote ourselves, to a single end. He believed in what he stood for; he lived by his own ideals.

There have been so many testimonials to this over the last few decades, as Buckley became (in defiance of probability) a mainstream figure, a grand old man, a legend. He was selfless in his support for like-minded people, stooping so often from his Olympian pedestal to encourage and support young writers and scholars of a conservative bent. He was often a scourge of his enemies --many will remember how he exploded at Gore Vidal in 1968, saying something nasty to Vidal after Vidal had said something much, much nastier to him -- but that does not seem to have been the character of the man. What one hears from everyone who really new him is that he was gracious. That is the word that is always used. It will be used in many commemorations in the days ahead.

I am thinking at this moment of one particular example of Buckley's graciousness, when he was still a superficially carefree young man, a golden boy whose money and insouciant privilege allowed him to dream in his twenties of establishing a great national magazine. He worked hard to recruit to the staff of that magazine an old, sad, forsaken, reviled, self-lacerating, ugly, fat, spent, dying ex-Communist named Whittaker Chambers. Chambers did not have many friends left in those days, after he had exposed the communist espionage of Alger Hiss and revealed, in the process, his own sordid and humiliating past. But to Buckley he was a fellow-believer -- a man who had joined and then abandoned Communism because he cherished humankind -- and a writer whose prodigious talents equalled or excelled Buckley's own. Chambers was not easy to befriend, but Buckley was tireless in his pursuit of Chambers's friendship. Buckley's attentions lightened Chambers's declining years and Chambers lent intellectual ballast to Buckley's incipient intellectual enterprise, warning the Right of the dangers of embracing McCarthyism and penning National Review's salutary renunciation of Ayn Rand.

I mention all this not only to reflect upon Buckley's warmth and decency but to recall what Chambers said about Buckley when he first met him: "that boy was born," he said, "not made, and few of his sort are born in any age." Chambers knew instantly what much of the world took decades to discover. Buckley possessed extraordinary greatness. He was a force of nature, an outstanding spirit. He was, in fact, the kind of force and the kind of spirit that can change the course of history. He is a reminder of the great legacy of conservatives, and of the immense, often undreamt of power of words, and belief, and dedication.

Nascitur, non fit. Buckley loved Latin -- or at least he was unusually prone to use it in everyday speech ("without apology," as he once wrote). I would like to pay tribute to him by saying he was primus inter pares, that he was sui generis, that his legacy will last per saecula saeculorum. But it seems best at this moment only to offer the stately old hortatory subjunctive: Requiescat in pace. May he rest in peace.

Cognitive Dissonance

Listening to the debate between Obama and Clinton last night, I found the extended discussion of NAFTA especially surreal. Both these candidates were falling all over themselves to criticize unregulated trade as harmful for American workers, especially those in industrial regions like Ohio, where the debate was taking place. (It was especially amusing to see Hillary Clinton working to disassociate herself from one of the signal accomplishments of her husband's administration.)

Here's the thing: sure, importation of cheap foreign goods puts downward pressure on the wages of American industrial workers; in some cases, it even costs them their jobs. But the importation of foreign goods is not nearly as hard on the American worker as the importation of foreign labor, which drives down wages even more and costs jobs not just in the industial sector but also in services.

If some evil plutocrat really wanted to stick it to the working men and women of places like Ohio, the thing to do would be to allow into the country millions of poor but hardworking people -- Mexicans, maybe -- wbo would be willing to take jobs at rates, even illegally low rates, that make it impossible for U.S. citizens to compete with them while maintaining their customary standard of living. If my hypothetical plutocrat really wanted to add insult to injury, he could make sure these foreign workers would benefit from government services without paying all of the taxes that American workers are expected to pay.

Maybe he would even want them to have driver's licenses.

On Lengthy Quotations in Marlborough

From Marlborough's letters. Sometimes more is less.

On Prison Rape

I am reminded of the plague of prison rape in America--one of those terrible problems that bubbles up into the occasional article of concern, and even (which speaks very badly of us) as the topic of uneasy humor, but is somehow never a priority. To recap: some enormous number of prisoners are raped--simplifying brutally, it is possible that fifty percent of prisoners are rapists and the other half are raped. The racial gangs of prison serve both as facilitators of gang rape, and defenses against it. It is an enormous barbarity in America.

And nothing will be done, doubtless. The left--a certain stripe of feminist is so invested in the idea that rape is anti-woman that they cannot spend much time on the subject of the rape of men. More broadly, I think that prison reform on the left is most concerned with the prisoner-as-victim, and has more trouble with the prisoner-as-victimizer. On the right--a callous assumption that prisoners people are bad people who deserve whatever they get--that rape is part of the expected punishment of a prison sentence. And then, of course, the only effective reform is to spend a great deal of money--decreasing the size of prisons, increasing the number of guards, making sure each prisoner has a room of his own. (Shades of Virginia Woolf.) (The left, when it wants to spend money, I think does not have new prisons as a priority either.) And why spend scarce money on prisoners?

So, no solutions here. Just the memory of a terrible, shameful problem--of sins of omission on our part that lets evil men inflict unmerited evil on other evil men. Which stains all of us with, well, the culpability of that evil.

Churchill on Marlborough

Now one hundred pages into Churchill's biography of Marlborough. I begin to see why he got the Nobel Prize for literature. Glorious history--and completely against modern professional norms. He explains things like the operations of sieges so a layman can understand! More seriously, he narrates events while constantly referring to their later significance--Marlborough's early life for not only his later life but also for Britain in the 1930s, as Churchill writes. Also, uninterrupted judgments on Churchill's part, both of importance and morals. Wonderfully traditional history.

More Late-Night NPR, WNYC, Some Acronym or Another

The New York Commissioner of Health, Richard Daines, talking in detail about the bureaucratic reorganizations to improve health care in New York state. Impressions: a thoughtful man with a great command of facts, doing his honest best to improve the system. Wins kudos by noting that single-payer health has drawbacks too--that doctors are paid very little abroad in single-payer systems, with adverse consequences to health--that there are drawbacks to every health care system--and giving a cheer for federalism, as a very good learning process for the different state health bureaucracies. I can't help but mull the Friedmanite critique that one would prefer the market to make decisions than any set of bureaucrats, no matter how intelligent and well-informed. I also seem to recollect Friedman saying that the medical system was such a farrago of government incentives, that plotting the way to a market system of health care was a mare's nest of unusual proportions. Which may mean that realistically, all we can hope for in the near-run is a health care system not too badly bollixed by the government. If you're going to have bureaucrats running the health system at all, this Daines sounded like a good one to be in charge.

Followed by an advertisement: Listen to the New York Philharmonic broadcast live from North Korea! Ah, what would public radio be without a pitch for Gulag music?

Maybe I should switch the dial back to Coast to Coast. Which, by the way, had the following brilliant exchange (or something like this) a few weeks back:

Host: So, is Jim Morrison really dead?

Morrison's Bandmate: Of course he is. You'd have to be crazy to think otherwise.

Host: [pausing, as he realizes he now has no show, and much time to fill] So, are there callers with questions?

Withywindle's Inner Soul

(Read "Withywindlish" for "English")

The English, the English, the English are best
I wouldn’t give tuppence for all of the rest.

The rottenest bits of these islands of ours
We’ve left in the hands of three unfriendly powers
Examine the Irishman, Welshman or Scot
You’ll find he’s a stinker, as likely as not.

The Scotsman is mean, as we’re all well aware
And bony and blotchy and covered with hair
He eats salty porridge, he works all the day
And he hasn’t got bishops to show him the way!

The English, the English, the English are best
I wouldn’t give tuppence for all of the rest.

The Irishman now our contempt is beneath
He sleeps in his boots and he lies through his teeth
He blows up policemen, or so I have heard
And blames it on Cromwell and William the Third!

The English are noble, the English are nice,
And worth any other at double the price

The Welshman’s dishonest and cheats when he can
And little and dark, more like monkey than man
He works underground with a lamp in his hat
And he sings far too loud, far too often, and flat!

And crossing the Channel, one cannot say much
Of French and the Spanish, the Danish or Dutch
The Germans are German, the Russians are red,
And the Greeks and Italians eat garlic in bed!

The English are moral, the English are good
And clever and modest and misunderstood.

And all the world over, each nation’s the same
They’ve simply no notion of playing the game
They argue with umpires, they cheer when they’ve won
And they practice beforehand which ruins the fun!

The English, the English, the English are best
So up with the English and down with the rest.

It’s not that they’re wicked or natuarally bad
It’s knowing they’re foreign that makes them so mad!

Flanders and Swann, "Song of Patriotic Prejudice"

Rereading Habermas

Rereading Habermas' Theory and Practice, I realize how deeply his theory is a response to Aristotle's conception of phronesis. He knows that there is a sort of knowledge that allows for action in the world, and that scientific knowledge/social science, has, from Hobbes onward, chosen a form of knowledge that does not result in praxis, action in the world. He does, however, think that there needs to be a form of phronesis and praxis that takes reason into account--both because reason has a normative, transcendental value, and because modern, scientific civilization requires the use of scientific reason. His attempt to create a public sphere, communicative rationality, is in essence a way to attach rational content to a phronetic structure--or perhaps a reworking of Aristotle, who allies phronesis with some external system of morality, where Habermas plugs reason in as the external system of morality. I think my critique of Habermas' adherence to transcending reason still holds--but I deeply underestimated how familiar he is with rhetorical/phronetic thought.

Nota bene: critical theory and consciousness raising are means to create a phronimos with right judgment, hence the ability to enact right practice; they are both Aristotelian in their origins, although with a transcendental aspiration of which I disapprove.

Listening to NPR

(It helps the baby fall asleep. The parents too!)

2AM or thereabouts: Love and real-estate! People who move in to each other's apartments too soon, or linger in each other's apartments too long, because Manhattan housing is so expensive! Upper East Siders who won't date Upper West Siders because the commute is too long! People who won't move more than a few blocks because their identity is too tightly bound up with their neighborhood!

(To paraphrase: who are these people with their first-world problems?)

(There was a New York Times article last week about people who wouldn't date across the cuisine differences--vegans who won't date carnivores, etc. Does this mean that if you're a vegan Upper West Sider, you won't date a vegan Upper East Sider? How do these people reproduce? Don't they desperately need to read that Lori Gottlieb article about settling? And haven't they ever heard of "suburbs," where the land is cheap?)

3AM or thereabouts: "Our topic today is homeless lesbian, gay, and transgender persons of color. If you're a homeless lesbian, gay, or transgender person of color, please call in .... (some minutes later) .... if you're interested in the topic, or if you're a homeless lesbian, gay, or transgender person of color, please call in ..."

Prudence and Sex

(Trolling for key-word searches!)

Speaking of delusive searches for transcendence ... the search for some sort of emancipation, transcendence, in love, passion, sex, is clearly one of them. Sex and love should be as rhetorical, prudential, and untranscendent as everything else. Meaning? Well, if prudential, sex should be a mindful passion, not a mindless one--Jane Austen's point of view (Persuasion!) isn't a bad place to start. (This also works as a critique of mysticism by theologians with an appreciation for belief with bones in it.) Love should be neither techne for episteme--neither mere craft, nor anatomy. Timeful and productive--could one construct an argument for family values from this? Maybe, maybe not. But, yes, let us consider sex as praxis--would that be an improvement on the present?

On Politicians Plagiarizing

Clinton's surrogates accuse Obama of plagiarism. Is plagiarism a mortal sin for politicians? I'm not sure why it should be. I suppose it speaks to character, but I would take plagiarism as a far worse sin for an academic, whose prime academic directive includes a prohibition thereagainst. Pragmatically, I would say that to recite someone else's words bespeaks sloppy, lazy staff-work, and a tin ear for proprieties. Worth taking into account in one's calculations, though I wouldn't say it's terribly important.

Against Publicized Charity

Forced to watch Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, I find a television program that shows us people (not least the producers of the show) congratulating themselves for their charity, intermixed with the recipients of the charity prostituting themselves by exposing their gratitude, ad nauseum, on national TV, without the slightest sense of shame for being famous beggars. The usual wretched phraseology of modern times--"we're giving him independence"--as if independence can be received as a gift, and not achieved. Yes, charity is good; yes, instilling the desire for charity in others is good; yes, one promotes charitable behavior by public praise--but, God, what a vile show. How about a show called "Anonymous Benefactor"?--production costs also born by the anonymous benefactor, no product placements, no commercials, no nothing. It can still be mawkishly sentimental, and support a beggarish sense of entitlement, but at least the self-regard would be cut out.

Against Presidents's Day

Oh, you know, it would be nice if Washington and Lincoln each had their own holiday, and even nicer if we educated schoolchildren to appreciate each man's virtues properly. I don't really want to get into the necessary turf-battle though--saying one should get rid of MLK day (the replacement holiday for the January-February season) because King doesn't matter as much as Lincoln or Washington. Really, all admirable people. But if we are going to have Presidents' Day, I favor obligatory recitations by all citizens of the life story of Benjamin Harrison. Largely to bug Alpheus, who has made a fetish of knowing nothing about the gentleman.

Against Authenticity

Where Heidegger goes wrong, I think based on reading secondary sources, (!) is making a cult of the "Being" half of Being in Time. A sufficiently authentic, sincere, resolute self provides us a way to transcend our timeboundedness. But this is to make a fetish of ethos, character, to say that our character can ever be more than the temporary product of our self-fashioning--a version of the romantic fallacy. For us Renaissancists: Erasmus seems to have invented the idea of a unique character, and the idea metastasized into that of an essential character from there. Any attempt at transcendence from within is doomed, and perversely dangerous! Not character, not passions, not reason can be anything more than a tool or a temporary construct--there is no road to certainty in any of them.

(For a modern political note: the idea that art is harmless presupposes the idea of an essential character immune to the persuasions of art; remove that vanity, and you see the danger of, for example, Murphy Brown, as a poetic attempt to reshape an audience's character.)

I can see where this line of reasoning also gets you to a critique of the Descartian self--that that too is an attempt for transcendent certainty, equally false and dangerous. But the attempts to get rid of the self make a fetish of uncovering the Truth of the Void--and to say that All is Chaos is also an attempt at discovering a Hidden Truth, know? I think one should say that selves exist, as provisional, reiterated constructions--appearances, even to ourselves, but as real as all appearances.

But what is more dangerous nowadays? The cult of the Authentic Self or the cult of the Deconstructed Non-Self? In academia, the latter cult was riding high in the 80s and 90s, but I think it may be subsiding. In the world at large?--identity politics strikes me as a cult of the authentic self, and far more dangerous (Obama, Clinton) than the deconstructionist cult.

And note the virtue of humility: you allow other people to speak of your character, rather than speak, with frequent claims to a spurious authenticity, of your character yourself. Is not humility then a pluralistic, democratic virtue?

A Brief Against Valentine's Day (Yes, Really)

I should probably save this post for tomorrow when it will be more, um, topical. But there's always the chance that Withywindle, funamentally a less curmudgeonly soul than myself, will want to post some kind of special Valentine's message to the mother of his child. And then, in the agonistic spirit of Valentine's Day -- against which I'm about to inveigh -- I'll have to blog Valentine's greetings to the love of my life, and this post will wind up seeming to strike a graceless and discordant note.

So I'm posting it today, and when they ask you what it means, say you this: "Tomorrow is St. Valentine's Day." And Alpheus just doesn't like this holiday very much.

Why? Well, it would be one thing if it were just a modest day, on the order of Mother's Day or Father's Day, for expressing one's affection for one's sweetheart. But it's not. It's become one of the big annual holidays in the Western calendar, right up there with Christmas, Hallowe'en and, in America, Thanksgiving. But unlike these other days, Valentine's Day isn't really a holiday, at least in the sense of a break from the regular order of things. Unlike these other days, it doesn't encourage us to approach life with a different mentality than we do during the rest of the year. If anything, Valentine's Day is a time when some of the worse tendencies in our society reach a nauseating crescendo.

Christmas, even apart from its specific religious significance, is a celebration of generosity and brotherly love and (especially if one includes New Year's Day) a time of renewal -- the non-Christian Christmas alternatives, like Hanukkah and Eid, are really an excuse to share in this spirit. Thanksgiving is a celebration of family and that most underrated of emotions, gratitude. Even seemingly silly Hallowe'en is a chance to reckon with buried fears and return to childhood's sense of the world as a fundamentally supernatural place.

Valentine's Day, by contrast, is a celebration of Being in a Relationship.

Now, I'm not knocking Being in a Relationship. 'S wonderful. 'S marvellous. It really is a reason for joy. But it seems to me that, in contemporary society, the glorification of romantic love threatens to cast a shadow over all sorts of other human relationships. How many products of our culture -- books, films, music, etc. -- pay tribute to love within the family, love between friends, love between neighbors, or any sort of love that isn't somehow rooted in the desire to see someone naked, to touch and be touched?

And I'm not saying that, within a relationship, sexual desire doesn't combine comfortably with other sorts of love. Of course sexual love (which the Greeks called eros) can lead to deep feelings of friendship or kindship (philia). It can even coexist with that third kind of love, human fellow-feeling or altruism (agape). But let's not kid ourselves: on Valentine's Day, it's eros that we're celebrating. One can send flowers or candy to one's family or friends or acquaintances, but we all know it's not really the point of the day. There's even the possibility of a misunderstanding, since in the context of Valentine's Day such gifts would be so easy to misconstrue. On Valentine's Day, eros -- personified in art as the little boy with the bow-and-arrow -- is king. Just as he is in contemporary America the other 364 days of the year.

Sexual love has always been popular (for obvious reasons). But now, as other social connections break down, it's exalted in our culture to an extraordinary degree. Most tragically, the Pressure to Be in a Relationship has become fairly intense and it's assumed that everyone who isn't in one is suffering for that reason. It seems clear that that pressure and that assumption can be worse than solitude or sexlessness itself: the feeling that one is being pitied or derided gets added to the burden of loneliness.

I haven't seen The Forty-Year-Old Virgin (even though I'm a huge fan of Steve Carrell's other work) but in few other societies would a forty-year-old virgin automatically be a figure of fun. Newton was (as far as we know) a forty-year-old virgin. So were Elizabeth I, Kant, Kierkegaard, Tesla, and a host of others, including all those religious over the centuries whose vows of celibacy are generally seen now as odd and at least slightly pathetic (hence, no doubt, the sharp declines in the number of non-pedophiles who want to be priests, monks, or nuns in the Catholic Church). History amply demonstrates that one can have a happy, successful life without Being in a Relationship.

But this is a conclusion that our present society is strongly disinclined to accept. Sadly, because when Being in a Relationship (or at least, a series of relationships) is seen as a social necessity, then society makes no place for the people who are either wholly or largely asexual, who have religious scruples against sex, or who are simply unable, for whatever reason, to negotiate a relationship or enounter that corresponds to their desires. No doubt people in these categories -- especially the third -- are already not perfectly not content with their lots in life. Their discontent can only be intensified when society exaggerates what they're missing. That society does so represents a departure from the traditional inclusiveness of Anglo-American culture, which has historically been especially accomodating of non-standard life choices. The vigorous spinster or eccentric bachelor were long accepted fixtures of English society.

No more. And Valentine's Day, as presently constituted, doesn't help. The public nature of the gift-giving, the huge commercial lead-up to the day itself, seems to intensify many people's socially-driven feelings of loneliness or inadequacy. I knew someone in graduate school -- a celibate fellow, possibly he had never been in a relationship -- who basically went into hiding around February 14th because he couldn't stand how the Valentine's season made him feel.

His reaction was, admittedly over the top, but plenty of people complain of less intense unpleasant feelings. I know that, whenever I've been single, Valentine's Day has always been a bit of a black day. And I wince when I hear stories of people who are giftless while everyone around them is displaying their flowers and boxes of candy in a sick competition to see who's the recipient of the most love. I guess I've been protected from this horror, even in my most celibate periods, by my native unsociability -- or maybe my bad memory has erased those occasions and whatever bad feelings are associated with them -- but I can readily imagine the unpleasantness of it all. And this is all not to mention those who have lost the ones they love, to break-up, death, or the other chances of life.

Does it really have to be this way? I wish there were a lower-key opportunity for affirming one's devotion to one's beloved. (The Midwest has such a tradition: Sweetest Day, which is celebrated on the third Saturday in October.) I wish our society conceived of love differently, or didn't place such a premium on one particular kind of love and one particular way of expressing it.

But here we are. Valentine's Day, in its present form, will no doubt outlast me. I just want to register my objections to it. And to humbly suggest, to whomever might be reading this blog, that they may wish to consider not making too much of a big deal about it in the presence of their single friends.

Oh, and don't worry, Arethusa -- I think you'll like the tokens of my affection. I just didn't send them to your workplace!

Other Voices

The secondary sources roster on this blog gives a good idea of what Alpheus and I find interesting, but it misses some people who don't have blogs of their own, and obscures particular people I find interesting at collective sites. The following is a thumbs-up for various people I read irregularly.

* David Bell, The New Republic: occasional essays and blog-posts, normally on French historical topics. Informed, lucid.

* John Derbyshire, National Review: the Paulite Montaigne of Long Island. Style, introspection, originality, and a rather consistent Enlightenment pagan.

* John McWhorter, City Journal, The New York Sun, etc.: black linguist who has made a name for himself for departing from civil rights orthodoxy. He is not, I think, a conservative in any sense of the word--and especially worth reading as someone trying to carve out a space for black politics somewhere between civil rights orthodoxy and conservatism. And always a pleasure to read on linguistics.

* Peter Brown, New Republic: aside from knowing everything about antiquity, he writes essays on the intersections of British literary culture and homosexual culture, from a strongly heterosexual standpoint. Essays on Louis MacNeice and A. E. Housman in the last few years were very good.

* Ralph Peters, New York Post: military/foreign affairs specialist. A quirky hawk willing to critique the Bush administration quite strongly.

* Ramesh Ponnoru, National Review: a conservative very good at differentiating between what he wants and what is. I was very impressed some years ago with an article of his arguing, convincingly, that affirmative action is both morally wrong and perfectly constitutional. He also regularly points out the unpopularity of various conservative positions at the country at large, as against the pollyanna claims of his conservative pundit peers. Cautiously pro-McCain.

* Stanley Kauffman, New Republic film critic: the only film critic in the world who could write, "When I read about the Braddock story in the newspapers back in 1932, I thought it would make a good movie. I am surprised it took this long for Cinderella Man to come out." The only (?) nonagenarian film critic in the world.

Why Rhetoric?

So as I maunder on about rhetoric, the not-yet-bored reader may ask--why? Well, it provides a number of satisfying answers for debates I previously conceived of as between (surprise) reason and revelation, Athens and Jerusalem forsooth. In intellectual debates in college and afterward, on various e-mail lists, I was concerned with two issues, broadly conceived.

The first was the possibility of moral judgment--of the possibility of calling things good and evil, of not succumbing to the shades-of-grey moral relativism Alpheus has referred to not so long ago. This crystallized for me junior year in college, in a Russian history seminar, with an article by Theodore von Laue on how we Westerners cannot judge Stalin--a deeply meretricious piece, that convinced me of the moral necessity of judgment--that the "who are we to judge?" school of thought (loosely termed) is not only juvenile, but evil in its consequences. So a great deal of argument was spent arguing for the human capacity of judgment, and duty to engage in it.

A second debate was on the limits of human knowledge, of human reason--deep pessimism of human capacities, allied with reiteration of innate human sinfulness. (And the possibility of dynamic goodness as well.) This was against the many optimistic liberals and libertarians, convinced of the possibilities of knowledge--of (self-regardingly enough) their own knowledge, of elite knowledge--and, I became more and more convinced, of the acceptability of authoritarian impositions on humanity when justified by Science, Reason, what have you. I was very much concerned to cast a skeptical, populist critique against the claims of reason.

These two positions, of course, contain a tension--if you cannot know, how can you judge? My early version of an answer was to argue that one must judge on limited knowledge, that one must decide, make a moral judgment, even if new knowledge changes your judgment tomorrow. But this does have dangerously unstable consequences--and does leave the source of knowledge dangerously self-sourced. Reading Hegel in graduate school, I decided that one must have recourse to God, to revelation, as the ultimate authority of knowledge, of morality, as a necessary anchor against individual decisions in morality, themselves vulnerable to the corruptions of the human mind. This is a weak, deist, philosophical recourse to God--but there are many paths, no? So, revelation as the way to sustain moral judgment and the critique of reason, without relying on my own existential choices in morality.

It was at this stage that I ran into Habermas and his public sphere theory--influential in history, in public discourse (n.b., Timothy Burke's frequent use of the phrase "the public sphere" on his blog Easily Distracted)--and was irked by it, essentially because it placed excessive faith in human reason, in ways I found predictably problematic. So I began to consider a critique, based upon the European tradition of rhetoric. But as I read increasingly deeply in this tradition, I discovered that it is a philosophy as well--a third contestant, up against both reason and revelation.

Rhetoric is a form of reason that assumes the limits of human knowledge--that constantly critiques the scientific, Enlightenment reason, philosophy of any sort, that assumes the possibility that the mind can transcend its limits. It is centrally concerned with the issue of judgment--moral, aesthetic--and, indeed, says that judgment is inescapable. In its critique of transcendence, it can challenge revelation--but there is a long tradition of sacred rhetoric that claims that rhetoric is amenable with revelation, does not directly challenge it as reason does. For me, therefore, rhetoric is a way to recoup reason, while still critiquing its transcendentalizing abuses, to think one's way's toward human judgments, ideally without abandoning the anchor of revelation. It is also a way to think my way through much of the European intellectual tradition, not least the British Enlightenment, and both begin to appreciate them properly and organize them for my own use. It is for these reasons very attractive.

But ... I recently discover that Heidegger is recouping rhetoric ... and Nietzsche, the pragmatists, presumably Derrida and Foucault, all those bogeymen I have growled at over the years--that the twentieth-century rendition of rhetoric has been used to destroy the idea of the individual subject, of certain meaning, for a great deal of blither. But also it leads to Arendt and Strauss, who are less blithersome. Does a commitment to rhetoric lead me to Derrida and Foucault? Will I think more fondly of them when I am done? Or can I think my way through to a less blithersome rhetoric? I have no idea where my research will lead me to, but at any rate the process is wonderful.

I hope this explains a bit of why I find rhetoric so interesting.

Meanwhile, back to Adam Smith. FYI, homo economicus is an everyday phronimos.

Brittle McCain

An interesting exercise in judgment ... when I endorsed McCain (with great consequence, as readers of the blog can tell), I didn't quite envision a scenario where he could win the nomination, but with quite this level of fragility, this level of reluctance on the part of conservatives to vote for him, this consequent weakness for the general election. Ah, the unpredictability of human events! Ah, rhetoric. ...

When (if?) I go on the job market again, I think I might try to market myself as a philosopher of rhetoric, as well as an intellectual historian. I'm not one yet, but my current reading program could make me one by next fall! Most precisely, I think I am interested in the intellectual history of philosophies of rhetoric, perhaps by way of coming up with my own version of one.

Next time I get to the library: Nietzsche and Rhetoric. If Nietzsche does mark the resurrection of rhetoric (as Heidegger and Rhetoric claims), that means that the eclipse of rhetoric lasted at most a century, from Kant to Nietzsche--a fairly small period in a two-millennium tradition!

Alpheus, and others, occasionally accuse me of seeing rhetoric everywhere. To which I must plead guilty. But the smaller claim, smaller project, is to trace the history of rhetoric throughout--if not to claim that it is everywhere, than at least to claim that it persisted in every age, with great consequences.

Academic Production, Baby in House

Today I assembled two pages of notes into one paragraph of a first draft of an article. I expect this to be my maximum rate of academic production for a while! Strangely enough, I have planned things in advance so as to be at a stage of article-production where scattered minutes in a day will still get me places at a moderate clip.

More on Rhetoric

(Withywindle, Goldberry, and Shirebourn now home.)

The introduction to Heidegger and Rhetoric is a brilliant essay, mind-opening. If this take is correct, then the early Heidegger (ca. 1924) is quite appealing. But ... they are translating Heidegger, not just into English but also into rhetorical terminology. Are these both distorting translations? -- after all, there is a large cottage industry of academics trying to turn their favorite philosophers into sweet, decent people, who basically favor liberal democracy, mom, and apple pie. Perhaps this doesn't quite work for Heidegger.

And everytime they quote the man, I stare blankly at the page.

Christopher Fry, Collected Works

(Goldberry and Shirebourn home soon; I'm back for the night to take care of our kitty-cat.)

I finished the collected works of Christopher Fry just before the arrival of Shirebourn--a hasty summary. He is, ultimately, a minor artist--too much in the same note of Christian ecstasy, death-obsessed young men and the women who love them, a trouble putting proper plot and character enfleshments of his poetry and ideas--and even in that note, uneven in quality. But still definitely worth reading. The Lady's Not For Burning is clearly the best of his work--justly so acclaimed. I think Venus Observed probably comes a close second--a full-length play with real characters and plot, quite good. (And The Best Sentence in the English Language.) A Phoenix too Frequent, an early work, is also quite good--but it's a one-act with three characters, Fry still learning his trade. Of his two explicitly religious dramas, The Boy With A Cart is his apprentice work--not bad, but too dependent on Choruses of Englishmen--and A Sleep of Prisoners is very good of its genre, albeit my taste is ultimately more for secular drama with actual characters than religious drama retelling (more or less) Bible stories. The three historical dramas, in descending order of quality, are, The Dark is Light Enough (set during the 1848 revolution in Austria), A Yard of Sun (set in Italy immediately after World War II), and Curtmantle (Henry II and Becket). The first two have their points, though they lack truly engaging protagonists; the last really is rather bad, talking heads spouting Ideas, and suffers by comparison with all the other Henry II and Becket plays out there.

Shirebourn

Withywindle and Goldberry are proud to announce a son, Shirebourn. He is extraordinarily handsome.

Blogging will be less frequent for the next eighteen years.

Historicize the Eschaton

Alpheus a while ago commented on students who, blithely historicizing the beliefs of their subjects in class, fail to historicize their own beliefs. This reminds me of Leo Strauss, who, in one of his essays, talks of how scholars should not historicize the thoughts of their subjects, but instead enter into direct dialogue with them. I would rephrase this (as Strauss doubtless does elsewhere—I am ill-read in Strauss) to say scholars should historicize themselves as well as their subjects—approach their subjects not from the supposition of a god’s-eye view beyond history, but from the supposition of a human-eye view within history, Kantorowicz a self-aware historical man as much as Frederick II, Schlesinger embedded in history as much as Jackson. It is not historicization, but imperfect historicization, that makes an approach to true empathy, understanding, engagement with the ideas of another man possible.

I should say that I take this to be in essence the same as the “naive” engagement with the thought of a philosopher, where the ideas are assumed to have transhistorical significance. To historicize yourself is not to distance yourself in history, but to be aware of yourself as engaged in history, to realize that the ideas grip you through the warp of history—to know what air is, but still to breathe it and see clearly through it. On my rhetoric string again—borrowing from Eugene Garver, I believe from Machiavelli and the History of Prudence--to be a proper historian is to be a rhetor engaged in history, aware of the distinction between appearance and “reality”, but committed to the appearance nonetheless, aware that the commitment to the appearance, before the universal audience of mankind, makes the appearance as real as anything in this limited world. An improper historian, on the other hand, is committed to a disillusionment that pretends to seeing absolute truth behind the veil of appearances—a utopian view, aspiring to essential knowledge, that is the scholarly equivalent of immanentizing the eschaton. It’s all really class! It’s all really race!—and by disregarding appearances, disregard the truth in appearances and ideals—see subtext and no text—ultimately don’t know the truth, the real history, at all.

Now, variations of this view get you to Sorelian noble lies, Straussian professorial wise men who hide the truth from the ignorant many, and indeed a Marxist commitment to theory-in-action. I like to think that one can avoid commitments to these various bogies, while still maintaining a self-conscious balance of historicizing knowledge and commitment to ideals within history. But some political corollaries: as citizens, we are supposed to be rhetors, historians, knowledgeable of text and subtext, able to speak both of brutal interest and soaring ideals. But politicians—they, I think, should avoid public expression of subtexts. They are our political actors in all senses, they must be on the stage, they must always speak the text, the ideals—ideally, should genuinely believe them—should express our ideals, believe they do the best for the country as a whole, etc.

Hence my dislike for the Democratic mantra of identity politics. We have ideals of equality, judgment by individual character, for which judgments by race and gender may be nasty subtexts—but should never be spoken by the politicians. And every time Obama or Clinton says “America should think so well of itself when it votes for a black/woman,” aside from the smarmy self-regard involved in the statement, this is a disillusioning wink to the voters—a revelation of the machinery behind the curtain—historicizing knowledge, shorn of public commitment to our ideals, which kills those ideals. They strip away the mask—and for that, should never be entrusted with public office, much less the presidency. They are Alpheus’ students grown up, but grown no wiser.

Christopher Fry, A Sleep of Prisoners

Adams: Strange how we trust the powers that ruin
And not the powers that bless.

David: But good’s unguarded,
As defenceless as a naked man.

Meadows: Imperishably. Good has no fear;
Good is itself, whatever comes.
It grows, and makes, and bravely
Persuades, beyond all tilt of wrong:
Stronger than anger, wiser than strategy,
Enough to subdue cities and men
If we believe it with a long courage of truth.