Afghanistan: Lowered Priority

There have been some news stories lately about how the Taliban are advancing, we are slowly losing ground in Afghanistan, etc. While this may be exaggerated, I'll take this as a cue to argue (again) that, while I don't advocate immediate scuttle from Afghanistan, I do think it should be fairly low priority for America -- lower than Iraq, and lower than virtually all of our other commitments abroad.

What is the purpose of our troops being in Afghanistan? At first, they were meant to capture Bin Laden, to topple the Taliban, so as to punish a regime that had allowed Al Qaeda to base itself there, and to deny Al Qaeda that base. But now? Presumably, they are meant to prevent the Taliban from coming back to power, and providing Al Qaeda a future base. But it's one thing to strike at an enemy, another to deploy troops indefinitely to prevent a possible future threat. There is something to be said for defending a friendly Afghan regime, however weak, as opposed to the diplomatic and military costs of toppling an enemy regime once again--but still, the threat from Al Qaeda in Afghanistan must be taken as a diminishing hypothetical. And, yes, honor demands we capture Bin Laden -- but we muffed our best chance, and keeping an army in Afghanistan in perpetuity is too great a price to pay.

I should specify here that I don't think terrorists by themselves are much of a threat; they are always the catspaws of state sponsors. Al Qaeda doesn't disturb me; Al Qaeda as the tool of Saudis, Iranians, Iraqis, Pakistanis, does. Now that we are wary of terrorists, an Al Qaeda camp in Afghanistan is much less threatening.

Afghanistan, of course, now plays a role in our foreign policy in foreign lands. It's a base from which to threaten Iran, including by air strikes. Although we depend on Pakistan for supply of Afghanistan, our forces in Afghanistan now also act as a lever against Taliban/Al Qaeda in Pakistan, and one of the threatening levers against the Islamist half of Pakistan's army and society. In a minor fashion, it helps projects American power to Central Asia, thus blunting Russian and Chinese power projection in that region. It provides a theatre where we can fight with our NATO allies -- of some psychological, diplomatic, and military value. And in general, our reputation is now bound up to some extent in our success there.

But the cost of these benefits, of course, is that we have to deploy major forces in Afghanistan - at a cost in blood, in treasure, far from a seacoast, hence in a permanently precarious position, for it requires continued good relations with nuclear-armed, unstable Pakistan. And what is Afghanistan? Desperately poor, lacking resources, near the backsides of marginally valuable lands. The largest ethnic group, the Pathans/Pushtuns, are 40% of the nation -- not large enough to suppress the other ethnes, too large to be suppressed (short of Soviet-scale genocide), and, apparently, not wooable from their affiliation with the Taliban as the Sunnis of Anbar were wooable from Al Qaeda. They are not wooable, in good measure, because our very stupid decision to continue the War on Drugs in the same area as the War on Terror means that we have alienated every farmer in Afghanistan by our attempts to keep them from earning a halfway-decent wage from poppies. If they could be separated from their sources of support in Pakistan, perhaps a military solution might work -- but Pakistan is nuclear-armed, touchy, and unable and unwilling to secure its own northern territories; a really effective American incursion into Pakistan (for the purpose of securing Afghanistan!) risks, God help us, a nuclear war. Any strike we send against Pakistan or Iran would be far more effective from the sea, and I can't imagine that Afghanistan is vital for either purpose. Central Asia is more or less the last region of the globe we should bother projecting influence into, and conducting a war in Afghanistan to make our NATO allies feel good is a ludicrous proposition. This just doesn't seem worth the candle.

So, I advocate a policy of modified scuttle. One way to put this: Pakistan and Iran are our true problems, not Afghanistan. We should deploy in Afghanistan only in aid of a policy meant to destroy both of them as nuclear powers in the medium term--and once those objective are achieved, get out ASAP. Alternately: if we're not going after Pakistan and Iran, bleed the mission down. Deploy soldiers away whenever needed elsewhere, including for R&R to rebuild our army. Declare victory and go home. Iraq matters; Afghanistan doesn't. And still more alternately: Iraq and Afghanistan are linked politically; it's difficult to withdraw from Afghanistan without increasing pressure for scuttle from Iraq. So win the war in Iraq ASAP, and then begin the scuttle from Afghanistan. But in all circumstances, don't consider ourselves committed in perpetuity to that back end of nowhere.

Moral Judgments and Law

My pet Constitutional Amendment reads "Save where expressly forbidden by other aspects of the Constitution, all laws that express or enforce moral judgments are legal. The judiciary may make no moral judgment in interpreting the law; that right is reserved to the people, the legislature, and the executive. The idea that a law is irrational to suit its purpose may not be stretched into a moral judgment."

That way, the Court will keep their hands off of methods of execution, length of criminal penalties, penalties for any and all sorts of immoral behavior, in the bedroom as much as in the boardroom, so long as they comport with our enumerated liberties.

At a bare minimum, we'll be able to give kiddie rapists the death penalty.

PS. Only intermittently on the computer between now and Monday.

A. J. P. Taylor's Autobiography

It starts with brio. The English upper classes apparently knew nothing at all about working when they left university. This applies even when you come from a peculiar lefty, Lancashire family, with pots of money and a devotion to the Bolsheviks. Taylor confesses to an ignorance at the beginning of his career about research methodology, teaching, and the basic facts of history that is both appalling and, well, comforting. If he could make it as a prof, any of us can!

This is why one should read history. It makes one feel better about oneself.

Het Eind van de Wereld

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands, June 23 (UPI) -- Thousands of people in the Netherlands say they expect the world to end in 2012, and many say they are taking precautions to prepare for the apocalypse.

I always thought the nice thing about the end of the world was that you didn't have to prepare for it. If the ancient Mayan calendar is correct, and 2012 is the year that time runs out, aren't matters sort of...out of our hands at that point? Personally, if I were sure an apocalypse was coming in four years, I think my "preparations" would include a lot of unpaid bills and skipped appointments for dental checkups and oil changes.

The Dutch really are a fastidious people.

Grand Theft Argument

It has become de rigeur for sophisticates to make sport of cultural conservatives whenever the latter express alarm over pervasive violence and vulgarity in American media. That would be fine with me, if only the sophisticates could represent the conservatives' arguments with anything approaching fairness. But they can't, because if they did, their mockery of the cultural conservatives' concerns would appear far more laughable than those concerns themselves.

And even the most thoroughgoing travesty of the conservative position is sometimes inadequate to save the sophisticates from becoming the butt of their own joke. Case in point: Bill Blake, writing in this week's Chronicle of Higher Education. Blake sets out to defend the video game Grand Theft Auto IV from its detractors, who include Hillary Clinton, Mike Bloomberg and other folks well to the left of the late Jerry Falwell. Blake's description of the critics' position virtually deconstructs itself:

Critics warn that anyone who plays the game will end up doing in the real world exactly what they do in the virtual world. In other words, watch out for a run on missile launchers and vigilante strippers.

Can Blake really be so simple-minded? Surely the critics are worried that Grand Theft Auto will encourage a jaded attitude toward violence generally, not a desire to specifically emulate this or that feature of the game. But Blake persists in this nonsense for paragraph after paragraph:

Whatever evidence there might be that violent media content causes violent behavior, or that graphic sexual content stimulates unhealthy sexual behavior, there is a simple test that invariably proves otherwise. Buy the game and then take some time to play it over the next few days or weeks — however long you feel is necessary for a proper test...

After you're done, ask yourself a few straightforward questions: Do you want to go outside and steal a car? Do you feel the need to obtain a missile launcher? Do you feel like having sex with a stripper? Or, to more accurately represent the sort of reasoning involved in media-effects claims, do you feel that having sex with a stripper is now a real possibility for you?

"More accurately represent"? Give me a break! Again, no reasonable person is arguing that playing a video game that involves firing missile launchers and having sex with strippers will give normal people an urge to fire missile launchers and have sex with strippers. (Although, for the record, I do feel that having sex with a stripper is a real possibility for me, provided I find the right stripper and make a quick stop by the ATM machine...)

The argument which Blake refuses to reckon with is the one which says that a game with lots of missile launchers and sex with strippers will, if played long enough, cause people to feel that violence and casual sex are a little less shocking -- that natural or socially-instilled aversions to these things will be undermined to some slight degree, and that over time such changes in outlook can have subtle but important effects on our behavior. The closest Blake comes to acknowledging this possibility is when he goes on to claim that the real test of whether a video game can be dangerous is

whether it's possible for you to change from whoever you were into someone completely different, someone who no longer recognizes the conditions and regulations of a society that, until you played the video game, were all you knew and believed in.

Well, no. It's quite unlikely that one video game could result in such a wholesale conversion of a person's personality. But that's not really the point either. The point is that there are lots of violent and vulgar video games out there, of which Grand Theft Auto is only the most notable example. Taken together with movies and TV shows and music, the ethos of Grand Theft Auto has now become a significant part of the society in which we live, and children grow up exposed to its influence on all sides. Most likely, the mere fact that someone is playing and enjoying Grand Theft Auto suggests that such an ethos has already become to affect his or her psyche in important ways.

Blake disparages Hillary Clinton's statement that we need to treat violent video games like we treat alcohol and tobacco. He should consider the fact that even the benighted senator probably does not believe that one cigarette or one shot of whiskey -- or even a year of generous indulgence in either vice -- is likely to ruin a person's health. The problem is one of cumulative effects.

Moreover, there is something idiotic about making a distinction between the effects of things we ingest or inhale and the effects of things we see or hear. Both types or inputs result in changes in our physical being: both make a real difference in who we are. This very argument was enunciated by one of the first proponents of what Blake calls "media-effects" arguments, Plato, who pointed out in his Protagoras that words are more perilous than meat and drink, for we cannot even inspect them to determine their goodness or badness without their full influence immediately being felt.

Ultimately, no sane person believes that we are unaffected by the stories and songs we hear and the images we see. After all, we know childen can be taught to read and write and even to reason in one way rather than another. We know people learn to talk and dress like those around them. Humans are social and sympathetic animals, a fact dramatically revealed by recent research on the systems of "mirror neurons" in our brains: we now know that to see or hear about an action or an experience is to sympathetically reproduce that action or experience within our own minds.

In this regard, there is no obvious reason why an absolute distinction should exist between "artifical" stories and images like those in movies or video games and the "real life" stories and images through which we define our world. However much we tell ourselves, "it's not real, it's just make believe," a part of us doesn't recognize the distinction. We will only enjoy or even understand a movie or book or video game to the extent that we suspend our disbelief, to the extent that the distinction between real life and fantasy is incomplete.

Here again, Plato was intellectual light-years ahead of the contemporary sophisticates who want to argue that "media effects" aren't real. And I submit that the evidence that they are real is all around us. It's not that uncommon to run into a person who seems unduly influenced by the artificial ways in which characters in books or on television talk and behave. My own sense of humor, I fear, has been shaped mainly by what I've seen on TV.

Blake ends his article with a surprising and rather incoherent plea for a return to old-fashioned "ethical criticism" as a substitute for "media effects arguments":

Maybe it's okay to have ethical ideals about media that are based on principled ideals and not on fungible empirical evidence of cause-and-effect patterns of experience....By reaching for media-effects evidence, we are in effect trying to reduce the need to really think out and reason through the issue for ourselves. Because the evidence appears empirical, we don't bother to consider whether it actually warrants the claims we end up making.

Evidence, eh? Odd that Blake hasn't so much mentioned any of this "evidence" until this, his penultimate paragraph. But let that pass: there are other problems here. Is Blake really saying we should reason in the absence of, or in defiance of, evidence? What does it mean for evidence to only appear empirical? Is this evidence different from the genuinely "empirical evidence" that Blake contrasts with "principled ideals"?

By the end of the article, it's pretty clear that Blake is not only omitting the strongest parts of his opponents' arguments but unable to construct anything more than the most rickety logical structure himself. His final appeal -- and the final change of ground in his argument -- is to the power of the human will to resist outside influences, and one gets the sense that this is what is left after all his previous attempts to make his case have so clearly misfired. There is poetic justice here. Just as Blake is finally reduced to a declaration of faith in the imperviousness of the human soul, so his entire critique of the culturally conservative position on sex and violence in media has the feel of an effort sustained not by logic, not by evidence, but by will alone.

Andrew Roberts, History of the English-Speaking Peoples in the Twentieth Century

Reading this book is like listening to a bombastic fool at a bar thunder out opinions you share, but in such a stupid fashion that you start wondering whether you've been wrong all your life. An excellent exhibit for the Phoebe-MSI theory that conservatives should work at being better academics before they get around to making polemical points. Embarrassing. (If not as bad as Goldberg's Liberal Fascism.)

Details? It's an extended patchwork of We Were Right About This And This, Oh, And This Too. History doesn't satisfy any polemic fully, and the narrative is an obvious procrustean bed. And the interest is in using history to prove the polemic, which is not what any true lover of history should do.

Goldberry Trawls The Web

Arise, Ye Prisoners of the Union.

Eric Flint, 1812 and 1824

I've just finished reading Flint's 1824, having read 1812 last year. They're fascinating books. Quick plot summary: Flint, an efficient writer of potboiling SF & Fantasy, sets up an alternate history where (first book) Sam Houston (of Tennessee and Texas), a regiment of black soldiers, and a Genius Scots-Irish Radical Sergeant named Patrick Driscoll (the deus ex machina and apparent stand-in for the author's political views) become heroes in the War of 1812, persuade the Cherokee, Creeks, etc. to migrate of their own free will to Arkansas and Oklahoma a decade ahead of schedule (so as to allow them to survive unbroken), and set up a black Haiti/Sparta as a refuge for slaves in Arkansas proper. In 1824, (second book,) independent Arkansas has provoked the racial tensions of the Civil War to reach the boiling point a generation earlier; first Southern freebooters, then the US Army, are thwacked by the black Arkansan army; President Henry Clay (!) and Secretary of War John Calhoun, and the Deep South are humiliated and politically isolated, while Andrew Jackson and John Quincy Adams gussy up a Democratic-Republican Party uniting New England, the Mid-Atlantic, and the Upper South in a program devoted to gradual emancipation of the slaves.

Why do I find these fascinating? They are briskly written, keeps the anachronisms generally confined to modern-sounding dialogue, and, as political fantasy/romances go, rather sophisticated. (Flint knows Cherokees owned slaves, say, and that a black-Indian alliance in Arkansas would be rather uneasy.) (But he thinks that Florida was already a state in 1824, doesn't wedge in an alternate history to make that a fictional fact, and even makes Florida play a role in his 1824 election! Bad Flint!) But what gets me is that these are Jim Webb alternate histories--intensely concerned with the Scots-Irish and their role in American history. Flint pounds the Scots-Irish theme again and again--Sam Houston is Scots-Irish, Andrew Jackson is Scots-Irish, so is X, Y, and Z character from American history, the choices they make are the choices of the Scots-Irish ethne. The book is a fantasy about how to get to a more racially-tolerant alternate America -- and the role of the Scots-Irish is crucial. That is, Flint emphasizes the radical potential of the Scots-Irish--his deus ex machina Patrick Driscoll was a United Irishman in 1798, he pounds us with Andrew Jackson's Scots-Irish populism--and, sotto voce, is terribly, anguishedly aware that the Scots-Irish annealed themselves politically with the South, slavery, and racism, and is trying to figure out an alternate history that severs the Scots-Irish from that tie. He can do so with a fair bit of historical backing--Scots-Irish and Indians did intermarry a lot, and Sam Houston's biography, of which I was not entirely aware before, does make him a natural figure to cast in this fantasia. (He really did live with the Cherokee, briefly married a Cherokee lady, etc.) I agree with Flint about the importance of the Scots-Irish as the cutting sword of both America against the Indians, and of the South against blacks--see, Obama, Appalachian resistance to voting for--and of their crucial role in Democratic populism, though I would weight the historical possibilities for racial radicalism for the Scots-Irish a bit lower than he does. But I agree that he is right to see the Scots-Irish as the hinge of American history. Flint, by the by, is a labor-union activist according to his bio; from internal clues in his books, I suspect him to be of mixed German and Scots-Irish heritage.

A critique, then. Flint's alternate history is lacking precisely because he shares the point of view of his radical Scots-Irish protagonists. For one thing, his sense of economics is lacking--of the actual attraction of capitalism and moneyed politics, that would attract ordinary people to vote for them. He dislikes (non Scots-Irish) Southerners as much because they are rich as because they are slaveholders--indeed, in a move that Toni Morrison pre-exploded in Beloved, he posits Scots-Irish smallholders as more paternally kind to their slaves than plantation slaveowners. Lord knows the Jacksonian coalition was powerful enough in America, but he overstates its attractions, and does not quite understand why one might oppose it. Then, too, his black Arkansas Sparta survives on--oh, I have to say this--voodoo economics, some happy state-entwined capitalism that underpins its army in the initial clashes with the US. This is ludicrous--and it reminds the reader of the unmentioned ghost in the book, Haiti, the real revolutionary black state, which combined political independence and economic disaster, whose miserable history provides a large hint of what any sort of black Sparta in Arkansas really would have ended up like. Flint's own Jacksonian economics subtly distorts the plausibility of the book.

Then, a lack of understanding of American nationalism. Flint's book turns among other things on the idea that America would have granted actual independence to the Arkansas-Oklahoma Confederacy, including with coastline on the Mississippi. I think there is approximately zero chance that any American government would have granted more than the usual sovereignty granted to Indian nations to any land occupied by the United States--which, since 1803, most certainly included Arkansas and Oklahoma. (The exact border with Spain/Mexico was settled later, but the US certainly recognized no other sovereignty in the area.) Flint relies on the sort of Whig opposition to the Mexican War as appearing against an American Conquest of Arkansas--which could never have occurred, because Arkansas would never have been sovereign. Nor does he quite give full weight to American nationalism, expansionist and Manifest Destinyish, which would have boggled at recoiling from any large part of the continent. This expansionism obviously was intertwined with race feeling--but not identical to it. I don't see his hero Andy Jackson, at any rate, ever bending on American expansion to the Pacific.

Third, the role of the Scots-Irish. Flint knows how deeply the Scots-Irish were entwined with slavery--it's the point of the book--but he doesn't quite address it honestly. Every radical is always explicitly identified as Scots-Irish, but his two great bugaboos--John Calhoun and the Georgia militia--are not so identified, when the former was all Scots-Irish, and the latter I rather think considerably so. The savagery towards Indians and blacks Flint so hates really is very closely identified with the Scots-Irish in history, from their first migration to North America. He can't quite face it--can't quite say that Jackson vs. Calhoun is a Scots-Irish civil war, (or perhaps just an American one, which would somewhat nullify his emphasis on Scots-Irish ethnicity,) and just how many of the Scots-Irish, even in his alternate history, are the Baddies. Good guys Scots-Irish, bad guys largely unidentified White Americans? Doesn't quite work.

Then, hovering behind the scenes, is Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party. In essence, Flint is trying to move the Civil War up a generation and have the North and Upper South led by Andy Jackson, with the Federalists as the minor support. But this role, after all, was played in reality by Lincoln and the Republicans--but with the New Englanders and the wealthy in the cockpit, and the populist & border & Scots-Irish types the weaker members of the coalition, not least because most such were rebels & Democrats. Flint is reassembling the actual Republican coalition under Jacksonian leadership--and not mentioning how close his alternate is to the reality, because this might involve recognizing precisely how many of the virtues he praises were, and are, encompassed by the Republican party. There is an anxious silence about Lincoln and Republicans.

There is also, of course, a critique of modern Democrats too. Flint loves the Scots-Irish not least for their fighting fury--he's also fond of that terrifying, terrorist abolitionist, John Brown--and any such account must, by implication, critique those modern Democrats who aren't Scots-Irish, loathe the Scots-Irish, and despise the very fighting fury Flint loves. Flint hates rich bastards, he hates racists, and he thinks you need fighting Scots-Irish to do a proper job on them.

I share with Flint an appreciation of the fighting fury of the Scots-Irish. But I also note with concern that he shares it--that the author, to a disturbing extent, enjoys unleashing their violence on the people he dislikes--Southerners above all. It's a murder fantasy, among other things--indeed, the sort of murder fantasy that presumably inspired the real Scots-Irish as they went out to kill an Indian or a black, just with a different target. It's a fantasy that involves a rending and a lessening of the United States--a terrible virtue, Scots-Irish and Puritan, that prefers a civil war to a foreign war, that thinks so little of fellow citizens and fellow Americans that it thinks the best solution to their evil to be their slaughter in large numbers, that purifies in blood. It is indeed Jacksonian--and a reminder that Republicanism was good in part because it softened that Puritan and Scots-Irish impulse, that it did not pursue a terrible justice wholeheartedly, that it followed Lincoln rather than Jackson, a man who felt sorrow for the deaths he caused, as Jackson could not have and Flint would not. This needs to be remembered.

And Flint's vision, if idiosyncratic, is part of the modern Left's. The hatred he displays toward his fictional villains, for their evil, is not unlike the hatred the modern Left feels towards--well, many Americans, presumably including me. I want America to be dangerous to evildoers abroad--Flint wants America to be dangerous to evildoers at home. Those of us whom he would think of as evil should be aware of just how terrible a Flint, in power, could be.

He's Scots-Irish, don't you know.

Soon I Will Become Invincible, Humanities Edition

PC Man: Could it be? My old enemy? ... Dr. Conservative?!?!

Dr. Conservative: Yes, it is me! ... it is I! Me?

PC Man: Whatever.

Dr. Conservative: My ignorance is no excuse; you ought to care. But I digress. Soon you will fall beneath the power of my Think Tank, manned by my Canadi-pundits. Their control of the Executive Branch is as nothing to the power of their witty bon mots. Their only weakness is the lack of the First Amendment in Canada ... blast, I shouldn't have mentioned that.

Canadi-pundits: Boss, you're making life tough for us, eh?

Dr. Conservative: Pah! What care I for the fate of immigrant henchmen? Now, PC Man, see your friends fall! Theory Lad!

Theory Lad: I'll deconstruct you! Reduce you to an archaeology!

Dr. Conservative: Bwah-hah-hah! I have prepared a Tradition Potion; soon you will find New Criticism too adventuresome, and read nothing but Great Works!

Theory Lad: Noo!

Dr. Conservative: By white men!

Theory Lad: Monster!

Dr. Conservative: Except ...

Theory Lad: You'll show mercy?

Dr. Conservative: Philology! German philology!

Theory Lad: Aaiee! The cases! The cases!

Dr. Conservative: And you, Free-Verse Girl ...

Free-Verse Woman: Free-Verse Woman.

Dr. Conservative: Your poems are wretched. Egotistical maundering, without rhyme or reason. Do you even know what prosody is?

Free-Verse Woman: Um ... no.

Dr. Conservative: You will learn. Ah, the world will be a much better place under my iron heel.

I Wanna Be A Cop

Brilliant.

Austin Grossman, Soon I Will Become Invincible

A novel split between the point of view of a comic-book supervillain and of a cyborg superheroine somewhat disaffected with the cyborg lifestyle. Sending up superhero conventions--not alone in doing this, see Watchmen and Powers, but with humor that is also gentle and sad. Worth reading. Especially if you're a comic book geek, but maybe even if you're not.

Gadamer, Truth and Method

I've finished it -- skimming the last part, I admit. Nothing I can say could do it justice. It is an extraordinarily impressive work of philosophy -- and fairly readable, as philosophy goes. It also doubles as an intellectual history of a great many strands of philosophy, introducing me to names in German philosophy I've never heard of before, and clearly should read more of. A great many things I've thought in a fuzzy and incoherent manner he argues articulately. I will probably say "as Gadamer says" in future blog-posts, quite a deal.

Perhaps the take-away is that we truly know things when we are aware of how we are embedded in a tradition of knowledge, how we belong to that tradition, how we helplessly love the tradition that forms our very means of knowledge, and allows us to add to it. But again, Gadamer says it better.

Gasoline Taxes

Gasoline taxes ... high MPG requirements ... all that wonky stuff ... if they're so good, and Europe and Japan have more of them, why have Europe and Japan been growing less quickly than the US since 1980? (Which is the case, yes?)

Having made that blithe assertion ... is there any good economic study on the effects of gas taxes, MPG requirements, etc. on economic growth? Does it have any correlation at all, positive or negative? I could, after all, imagine the following scenario: that EuroJapanese energy policy in itself has a positive effect on economic growth, but it is the result of a general urge to muck about in the economy, which depresses economic growth more than energy policy raises it. But I just don't know. So, good studies?

On Contempt of Foreigners

Among the things that drives me into a rage is the easy way foreigners, whether in America or outside, decide to share their negative opinions of my president and my country. Why, in a foreign land not so very long ago, a cabbie decided to share such feelings upon learning I was American -- not even concerned with his tip, I guess. (I'm also not fond of the way people so easily share their low opinion of New York City, but that's for another post.) No sense of common manners seems to restrain them, either as guests in my country, or as hosts of a visiting American. Over the years, inhibited soul that I am, I have stored up a certain number of responses I wished to share. The common thread would be that not only do I not feel ashamed of my country, but, you know, I feel a certain pride in being American, even superiority, and indeed contempt for various foreigners -- certainly for foreigners who cannot restrain their ill opinion of my country. Let me give examples of what I want to say:

* I have been alive longer than many democracies in the world. My father, born in 1931, has lived as a free man longer than virtually every democracy in the world. My ancestors (some of them) have been free men since 1776, 1620, and the immemorial English past; liberty is in my blood, and barely skin-deep in you.

* We are God-fearing citizens of a free republic. Some of you are slaves, tyrants, and would-be tyrants. Others of you are godless libertines, whose godlessness means your liberty will not survive for long. You are generally, as Kipling put it, lesser breeds without the law.

* You British have done quite nicely, but you're still subjects to a monarch, and I am a citizen of the Great Republic.

* You French have also done quite nicely, but your Republic is stained with blood from its birth--and rather fragile lately. It rotted and fell apart in 1940, succumbed to a soft coup d'etat in 1958, and in 1968 survived only after your President fled to the French Army in West Germany to check for his base of support. This is not characteristic of a really sturdy Republic.

* Yes, we are Puritans. Virtually everything good in the world comes from Puritans. Your moral complaisance is a cause for shame.

* We follow a God of liberty, a God of love, and a God of war. Most of you follow lesser gods.

* Your good opinion is nice, I suppose, but hardly essential. Why should I care about what you think?

* The United States of America is the terror of evil men. If you proclaim yourself afraid of us, you proclaim your character.

And so on.

Gadamer Commonplace #1

I am midway through Truth and Method, and it is as stunningly brilliant as advertized. I will never be able to do it justice. A first quote:

Only a piece of advice that is meant in a friendly way has meaning for the person advised.

I have an upcoming blog post on why Americans should not as a rule care about the opinions of foreigners; this sentence captures the meaning perfectly.

Alpheus should read Gadamer because he builds his theory upon a concept of play.

Father's Day, or, How Raising a Child is Like Cooking a Small Fish

On this third Sunday in June, this remarkable article by Joseph Epstein is worthy of consideration. After neglecting or downplaying fatherhood for decades, our society finally seems to be returning to an appreciation of the man's role in child care. The new ideal, however, seems to be of a father always present, ever attentive, assiduously steering his son's or daughter's development from day to day and from moment to moment. Epstein reminds us that there is such a thing as overparenting, and that many young people nowadays seem to suffer from its effects.

Personally, I find much to envy in Epstein's description of his own parents' hands-off approach to his upbringing, and I would guess he's right when he argues that too much parental attention risks either seducing a child into narcissism or driving him into resentment and rebellion. Needless to say, all children will need serious parenting sometimes, and some children will need serious parenting all of the time, but the prevalent idea that parents should be as involved as possible in every aspect of their children's lives strikes me as little short of perverse.

The paramount goal of childrearing, presumably, is neither to forge a particular relationship with the child nor to guide the child's development in a particular direction, for both of these goals are fundamentally selfish ones. They also defy an emerging consensus among child psychologists that children enter the world with their personalities substantially predetermined. In fact, the end of parenting should be the full independence and autonomy of the child. Parents have done their job well to the extent that they have less and less of a job to do.

It obviously takes years, of course, before a child can become a fully functional adult -- I find it hard to imagine it happening before puberty at the very earliest -- and in the meantime parents will have a good deal of parenting to do. They must provide for the child, see that he (or she) is healthy and receives an education, and maintain a relentless vigilance to see if he requires parental intervention in the form of advice, commands or punishments. But my intuition is that it may be with parenting as it is with so many arts: less may be more, and timing may be everything. The most a child can hope to learn from a parent, I think, is a few big lessons about how life is to be lived. The wise parent will know to choose well both the content of those lessons and the best occasions for teaching them.

And, as often as not, the wise parent will have to reluctantly but deliberately stand back and allow the child to make his or her own mistakes. A careful reading of Epstein's article will suggest that his parents were not absentees. But they seem to have been alert rather than engaged, and they taught by example rather than by involvement. It is the rare child who will not learn best from examples, a fact for which the first book of the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius offers especially poignant testimony. Consider especially, on this Father's Day, the long pernultimate paragraph on Aurelius's adoptive father Antoninus Pius.

In the nature of things, a father cannot fail to be important -- for better or for worse. That importance is an argument above all for care and for restraint. It is probable that, in the end, the best thing a father can do for his son or daughter is simply to be present and to be a good man.

POSTSCRIPT: This post is dedicated, with all good wishes, to Withywindle on his first observance of this day as a father, and to another young father, a mutual friend of ours and regular reader of this blog.

American Tories

America they loved, and fought to keep
Her loyal to her dam. Failure, not cheap,
Bereft them: exiled, abandoned, forgot,
Their love is dust in scattered graveyard plots.

Transport Costs

An article in the Wall Street Journal today says that rising oil costs are also increasing the costs of transport, making it cheaper to produce in Mexico than to produce in China and ship across the Pacific. Query: wouldn't all those gasoline taxes everyone yammers on about also have the effect of reducing globalized transport, redistribute trade to (inefficient) local economies, act to protect local manufacturers? Were all the gas taxes the Europeans put in a generation ago meant to act as protectionist support for local manufactures? If a gasoline tax acts as a transport tax, shouldn't this act as a major cost when we tot up its costs and benefits? (Aside from the destruction of what remains of rural America?)

Why Is There Rising Inflation?

Genuinely curious. The last bout in the sixties and seventies is usually ascribed to trying to pay for the Great Society and the Vietnam War at the same time. Prescription drug benefits, tax cuts, and the Iraq War don't offhand seem like they should be remotely as inflationary in their consequences. Am I wrong? Are there other factors? Is it just something that happens from time to time? I can't quite get a handle on it.

On Abolishing the Airforce

Re Gowanus' request, I looked at this link:

http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=abolish_the_air_force

It's a basically sensible take, echoing stuff I've heard before, and essentially believe. I'd very much like to take ground support and give it to the Army ... some thoughts:

1) The fact that the Air Force is run by ideological knuckleheads doesn't necessarily mean one should get rid of the Air Force; it means one should find sensible people within the Air Force and promote them to positions of power. Of course, sensible people may be thin on the ground in them thar hills ... if possible, reform beats revolution.

2) The difficulties in abolishing the Air Force, outlined in the article, are so great that it probably isn't worth the bother. Unfortunately, there's a Catch-22: we probably can't abolish the Air Force short of a devastating military defeat. An unabolished Air Force might lead us to a devastating military defeat. Ummm ...

3) The idea that Strategic Bombing Alone Will Win Wars is idiocy. But strategic bombing can be a very powerful force multiplier, an essential disarticulator of enemy cohesion, and I think it would be idiotic to remove it from our arsenal. Maybe it even needs a separate Air Force to conduct it properly.

4) Could one put a pruned down Air Force in the position of the Marines? They're not one of the Big Three, but they have institutional and intellectual autonomy, and a place at the table. Maybe that model would be good.

Academic Happening

* Academics can be long-winded. Also, they can bat around jargon without really knowing what it means.

* Still, they do tend to be nice people.

* When academics are catty after hours, they critique one another's methodologies.

* "What is the purpose of this paper, Withywindle? You seem to be hinting at something more." Not spoken: "The intellectual history has extremely conservative real-world implications. I'm trying to set up the foundations to be a conservative intellectual, maybe even a conservative public intellectual, without anyone noticing. Sorry, I can't say that out loud."

* I missed Goldberry and Shirebourn a lot. I was probably grumpier than I should have been--and I'm not necessarily a model of social decorum to begin with!

Incredible...

Really astonishing. Where does the U.S. go from here, if all captured terrorists, confined anywhere on earth, are to possess the rights of habeas corpus? As commentators are already pointing out, "unlawful combatants" now seem to have more rights than normal POWs. What's the use of wearing a uniform, under these circumstances?

The bright side, from a conservative perspective, is that this ruling offers an extraordinary opportunity to the McCain campaign to gain traction by criticizing what, at first blush, appears to be a particularly dangerous act of judicial imperialism. Unfortunately, McCain's stated positions on how the prisoners at Guantanamo should be treated may not be all that far from today's Supreme Court ruling. I'm on pins and needles, waiting for some word from the McCain camp....

Science and Conservative Values

Jim Manzi, in today's National Review Online, has an article on my favorite topic: the intersection between science and politics. Unfortunately, it's not a great article. Manzi's point is that conservatives need more engagement with science, and shouldn't merely fear or resist it. Needless to say, I agree with this: society as a whole needs to better understand science and scientific thought. But when Manzi gets down to brass tacks, he seems to have trouble offering ways in which conservatives can hope to profitably adjust their relationship to science.

Manzi's two major examples of topics on which conservatives are thinking amiss are evolution and global warming. His point about evolution is not a new one: even if evolutionary theory is correct in all its details, that still doesn't tell us anything about the existence or nonexistence of God. Conservative Christians, therefore, should just chill out and stop messing around with dubious enterprises like "intelligent design" and related claims that Darwinism just doesn't stand up to scrutiny.

Well, I guess I agree that it's time for Christians to acknowledge that the evidence for the revised Darwinian model is overwhelming, but it seems to me that they've also -- even if only on a subconscious level -- faced up to another truth that Manzi and others still seem moved to deny: the stronger the case for evolution, the weaker the case for God's existence.

For centuries, belief in God has involved a certain narrative about the origin and development of life on this planet. While this narrative is logically separable from lots of other traditional theological claims, the fact is that it has come down to us as part and parcel of the revelation that also provides the basis for our knowledge of God. And not only that: one of the attractions of belief in God was that God seemed to be the least unlikely explanation for the beginning of life on earth. Now we have what seems to be a more likely explanation for life, and a big component of revealed religious truth has been exploded. On any rational calculation, the establishment of Darwin's theories as almost certainly true significantly reduces the probability that God is, in fact in his heaven. Serious Christians are right to fear for their faith, and Manzi seems a bit naive when advises them to amputate creationism from their theology and then go whistling past the graveyard where God is probably buried.

Manzi has a different point about global warming: the science is wildly uncertain and, in particular, is far too uncertain to justify particular policy proposals. Here again, I agree with him (and I suggest readers who disagree consider some of the implications of this thought-provoking little essay). But isn't this a standard conservative position -- at least among conservative intellectuals (as opposed to conservative politicians or religious leaders)? I can't quite tell whether Manzi thinks conservatives need to stop rejecting global warming theories out of hand -- because they pose no intellectual threat in the policy realm -- or need to stop treating the policy advice of the global warming crowd as if it had some real scientific sanction. In which of these two directions have conservatives erred? I confess I don't know, and since Manzi doesn't say, I'm not 100% sure he does either.

What Manzi's article really reveals is that the conservative movement plays host to two very different attitudes toward science. Religious conservatives have a prior commitment to their faith, and science qua science is really not for them. The same is true, needless to say, of religious liberals -- or of folks of any affiliation who let their politics or personal tastes govern their evaluations of scientific research. The attempts of the devoutly religious to enter the lists with the scientific community over something like evolution are simply not made in a spirit of free inquiry.

On the other hand, there are also conservatives of a different stripe, who are by and large comfortable with science and scientific thought. Many of these conservatives, in fact, are conservative exactly because they are skeptics who reject the left's tendency to achieve certainties on the basis of ratiocination unsupported by adequate evidence. These folks, like members of the "Religious Right," tend to call themselves conservatives and to vote for Republicans, but the epistemological stances of these two groups could hardly be more unlike.

Off For A Few Days

Back soon. Be good while I'm gone, and I'll bring prezzies.

PS. Lilo and Stitch is just as good as when I saw it in the theatres. Everyone should go now and rent the DVD.

On the Education Wars Again

Returning to the education wars, Phoebe asks for something more in the way of a conservative critique of academia. So, I have some thoughts—indeed, I have old thoughts on the subject of a conservative curriculum. But to revisit the subject:

The first goal of education is to prepare fit citizens, to impart the civic and political virtues. I rather think some sort of core curriculum, connecting modernity back to Greece, Rome, etc., is the best way to achieve this—see the above blog-posts. But to a great extent, this sort of curriculum wrangling is beside the point without a great change in attitude. You have to resurrect the attitude that these virtues are worthwhile, that tradition is of key importance, that all that is new needs to be fitted into the old. (Fitted, not erased. Read Foucault within the long tradition of philosophy, not first and last. Proceed from civics to engineering and neuroscience.) How do you get there? Neither the faculty nor the administration is generally interested, and it’s very difficult to change academia without a party within the system. So you need to create a party within the system.

What is needed is a multi-generational effort to put tradition-minded conservatives into the academy. First traditional education needs to be provided outside the academy, to influence parents and independently-reading youngsters. (The ISI program fits the bill.) Then a significant cohort of these traditionally minded youngsters need to enter the academy—go to grad school, become professors, get tenure—jump through all the professional hoops, learn the best part of the disciplines, and then, when safely esconced in the academy, begin to agitate for change. This change, I would emphasize, can’t be simple reaction and erasure. The emphasis has to be on suturing—to resurrect tradition, to put it in one’s own classroom, and slowly to re-institutionalize it, while keeping all that is worthwhile in modernity—and recognizing that there is a great deal worthwhile in modernity.

The first aim—and perhaps all that is needed—is to make a critical minority of the humanities and social sciences faculty to be conservatives. A critical minority, with any luck, would be able 1) to eliminate political bias in future hiring decisions, and thus to perpetuate itself; 2) to remove the social, pedagogical and institutional biases that result from assuming there are no conservatives in the room; and 3) to veto the hiring of incompetent, ideologically-motivated hacks on the left. (And assume that the liberal majority will do quite well at vetoing hacks on the right.) One might have further ambitions at that point, but I think that even getting to this stage would take at least fifty years.

I am assuming a sharp-elbowed, self-consciously conservative minority here. The old-style conservatives (and many of the old-style liberals as well) let their kind be destroyed by ideologically conscious leftists who, once let into academia, set out to remove all political dissenters. In self-defense—to establish themselves in a highly intolerant institutional setting—conservatives, once in the door, will have to kick and scream and fuss to make sure the left majority doesn’t shove them out the door again, toot sweet. Conservatives must be wily as serpents, and brass-knuckled, to get themselves a stable home in academia.

We won’t be resurrecting the old academia—no Newmanist ideal of a Catholic university—with religion, or even secular tradition, at the center of the entire academy. It isn’t possible—and that sort of monopoly probably isn’t even desirable. But give conservative academics, and tradition, a secure portion of the academy—give every student the chance to study that tradition—have it be treated with respect within the academy—and then the tradition will survive in America, even if it isn’t everything. That, I think, is a sufficient goal.

But we need somehow to persuade that first cohort of conservatives to enter academia, to persist in the shadows, until there are enough of them that they may safely hoist the flag. How that’s to be done, I don’t quite know. Some concerted campaign by conservative leaders, calling on conservatives to take on an academic vocation, needs to be started. Perhaps conservative zillionaires could be persuaded to subsidize conservative graduate students? To found more Baylors, where conservative academia has some institutionalized home? The first step has to be done outside the academy.

On the Importance of Civil Rights

Never mind the Man from Mars; what about the Man from China? How would he judge the importance of the different revolutions of the 1960s? The Pill and Mass Affluence I think he would take as very important--if not yet immediately relevant to much of Chinese society, already the model, the goal, the oncoming revolution. The Great Forgetting of the West he might not find terribly important--would the West seem much the same to him, in 1908 and 2008 alike? But I think the Man from China, aware of the even bloodier Great Forgetting in Mao's China, more traumatic and perhaps more devastating, would realize a Great Forgetting is rather important. And Civil Rights? - does that impinge the Man from China's serene or angry assurance that China is the center of the world, and the rest barbarians? Does it much affect his self-confidence vis-a-vis Europeans? Does it make a Chinese intellectual more likely to desire equal rights for Tibetans or Uighurs? Does it have any resonance in an intellectual tradition for which "civil rights" has, at best, rather distant translations? I think that when the Man from China writes his history of the United States, the Civil Rights revolution may not receive much attention.

Not that what the Man from China thinks is necessarily relevant for how we Americans write, and judge, our history.

On Medicine

Think too much of it, and you think too highly of the body. We all must die. All that matters of us, in any case, is our relationship with other people--our friends, our loves, our family. Why struggle to live when they are gone? The best of us is gone with them.

Sola Fide

The conception of character as deed aligns with the idea of salvation by works; the conception of personality as thought and contemplations aligns with the idea of salvation by faith. The ex-Lutheran Heidegger's resolute being-unto-death is a secular transcendence that mimics salvation by faith alone. The desire to "express our individuality" is a transference of an attitude toward God to an attitude toward other men. But God knows all; men cannot; we cannot lie to God; we can lie to other men, and to ourselves. If one must have a personality, I think one ought to share it with God alone, and spare the rest of us.

On Birth Control

"To control our own bodies" ... "control" is a wonderfully ambiguous word. One way, this means "to be free"; another way, "to exercise power." Does this imply a soul separate from a body, which can exercise power upon its fleshly case? Does it imply freedom of a self primarily defined by its body, not its soul? In either sense, there is the liberal individualistic presumption, that we are essential, isolated selves, and that rights and powers emanate from these individualities. But if we are essentially constituted in a community, in being-for-another? The idea of a right to birth control, to abortion, would evaporate. (Along with much else of the modern liberal order, of course.) The Clintonian formulation that abortion should only be done after a conversation comes closer to this conception. Procreation, birth control, and abortion would become matters of civic duty rather than of right--China's One Child Policy is more justifiable under this philosophy.

Set aside matters of philosophical right for a moment. It is this conception of the emotional self, isolated, necessarily a prisoner or a master, which provides the emotional power of "to control our own bodies," along with so much else of the imperatives of liberty. If our selves are relational, our liberties are relational, I think the intensity of the claim to have power over ourselves (since not even conceivable in this scheme) evaporates.

But a different set of imperatives does arise. Honor and shame, I think, are values of great importance to the relational self. So consider Medea, who kills her children not as a matter of right, of individual liberty, but as a matter of honor, to prevent being shamed by Jason. I think one could use my scheme to argue for birth control and abortion as matters of honor rather than of right.

Setting aside the humanity of the baby in the womb for all this discussion, of course.

On the 1960s

Some discussion a while ago at Tim Burke's Easily Distracted about declension narratives; more recently about old codgers grumbling about changing times over at Nobody Sasses a Girl in Glasses and What Would Phoebe Do? Did the 1960s change everything, and for the worse? I rather think yes ... though the latter part of the contention is more evaluative than descriptive. But what about the 1960s' importance?

1) The Pill. The untying of sex and reproduction.

2) Mass Affluence and the Welfare State. The untying of work and survival.

3) The Great Forgetting. When 2500 + years of civilization changed from the object of critique to the unknown past.

Tying all of these to the 1960s is, of course, disputable, particularly as to chronology. Sex has been loosening from reproduction for a while--see condoms, mass manufacture of, 1920s, thanks to development of rubber plantations in Malaya--and the sexual revolution apparently didn't hit the American working classes until the 1970s, and has as yet made limited headway in Saudi Arabia. Nevertheless, the formation of sexually liberated patterns of life dates from the 1960s, and this matters. For mass affluence, this is also a particularly American chronology, and unraveling of the work ethic again needed time after the 1960s to sink in--but the Soft Life got its pattern made in the 1960s. The Great Forgetting chronology I think should be most under dispute--does one date the dissolution of European civilization to Luther? To Descartes? To the French Revolution, to World War I and II? All played their role. The question, I think, is when does an insurgent critique become the standard discourse, such that the old discourse is forgotten. When does the idea that the Aeneid prefigures Christ so utterly replace the original conception, that nothing else is thought of or imagined? I do think that, at least in the educated circles of Europe and America, this inflection point was the 1960s--and that the spread outward from there is natural. (The idea that poplar culture was always divorced from high culture is, I think, grossly overstated; they've always existed in complex interrelation.) (Why the 1960s for this last change? Is it because of the first two changes? An independent development? I'm not entirely sure.) The coincidence of all three of these changes in the 1960s does, I think, argue that we should say that the perception that the 1960s brought about a very important change is accurate, and not merely the muttering of codgers about changing times.

And was it a Great Fall from Paradise? A subject for a different blog-post, perhaps. But less us say that a great deal was lost, and that one should acknowledge the magnitude of the loss, even if one argues that more was gained. And if it was a Fall, it was a great deal more consequential than most, in the endless progression of the Earth from gold to silver to dull lead.

Austin Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate

Tightly focused political history of 1653, from Cromwell's disbanding of the Rump Parliament, following the course of Barebone's Parliament, its disintegration, and the founding of the Protectorate. Close study of scanty sources, nuanced judgments--including one that Barebone's Parliament did not consists of nothing but jumped-up tailors, as per Royalist invective (and, perhaps, wistful Marxist imagination), but rather an odd selection of the traditional elite. That is, a traditional Parliament would have not only the House of Lords, but also a House of Commons consisting heavily of greater gentry, somewhat less heavily of lesser gentry, and with a smattering of merchants, professionals, etc.; Barebone's Parliament, which could draw only on the narrow religious coalition that supported Cromwell's government, had a handful of lords, a smallish number of greater gentry, a largish number of lesser gentry, a fair number of merchants, professionals, etc., and one colonel who had been a craftsman before the wars started. The members had some experience as Justices of the Peace, borough and county officials, etc., but less than normal Parliament-members. So, yes, the average social position was different from the usual, and the amount of experience was distinctly less, but it wasn't a revolutionary difference.

This has some bearing on one of my wistful alternate-history-speculations--Could Cromwell's England Have Survived? Given my fondness for much of the ambitions of Cromwell and his cohorts, I'd rather like to answer in the affirmative. To say that a traditional ruling elite constituted the Cromwellian government is to argue that the Restoration was less predetermined--that in a plausible alternate history, the Protectorate could somehow have come to an accommodation with England's ruling classes. Woolrych's book mildly advances that argument--but only mildly. Yes, Barebone's Parliament was drawn from England's traditional ruling classes--but their composition does emphasize the thinness of their support. Furthermore, if all pictures of Total Revolutions turn out to be simplifying myths, than what matters is the scale of Significant Alteration. Barebone's Parliament still represents a pretty Significant Alteration, compared with other real-world Alterations rather than Imaginary Revolutions. A surviving Cromwellian England might not have been impossible--but, judging by Woolrych's portrait, it was still pretty implausible.

I have a plot outline in my head, incidentally, for an alternate-history short story that gets the Protectorate to survive. It involves George Fox ending up in the Cromwellian Army, and bringing the Quakers in to support the Cromwellian regime. It will probably never get written or published: the ideal audience consists of alternate-history enthusiasts with a taste for evangelical Protestant theology, and I fear this audience does not a viable market make.

Denver! Denver! Denver!

Fight, Hillary! All the way to the convention! You go, girl!

...

Not that being a Republican has anything to do with that recommendation.

I Have Found Shirebourn's School

On the street outside St. Ann's, someone had graffitoed, in multi-colored chalk, the first thirteen lines of the Aeneid, in Latin. They provided the line references at the end. I know St. Ann has a future-Brown-student reputation, but clearly Shirebourn must go here.

The Ends of Stories

I'm reading Austin Woolrych's Commonwealth to Protectorate -- on which perhaps more later -- and it's reminding me of the days when I knew something about the British Revolution, long since forgotten in rhetoric research. In particular, I'm reminded that two of the ding-dong battles among the revolutionaries were about whether 1) to abolish Law French, and make English the language of business in the courts (Law French was already several centuries obsolete by the mid-seventeenth century); and 2) to abolish tithes to support the clergy of the Church of England. Neither change was made in Revolutionary England--the old order batted away all attempts at reform. And it occurred to me, I never did learn when they finally got around to getting rid of these. So a quick Google-search: Law French abolished in 1732, tithes in England in 1868 (I think). 1868! Two centuries after Cromwell!

Already impressed by the persistence of English institutions, I am even more impressed. And I am reminded how we historians are afflicted by a narrow focus--perhaps inevitably--and only learn parts of stories, whose dangling ends continue far past our area of expertise.

A Post-Doc I'm not applying For

I'm not making this up. I couldn't.

Rhetoric and the Liberal Education

Just rediscovering the obvious again: my rhetoric schtick overlaps with the principles of liberal-arts education. (Rhetoric - humanism - humanities - funny that.) Liberal arts is about developing character, wisdom, rather than about learning particular skills to apply on the objects of the world. It is about applying the rhetorical mode of reason, which cannot but have a reflexive effect on character. Following Garver, it is about educating rhetoricians rather than sophists--people who persuade other people by staking their own character, by opening themselves up to persuasion, who do not simply regard persuasion as a way of manipulating other people, but as the reason of the heart and the character.

The place of tradition, the core curriculum, is to provide resources for the young to develop their characters. But character is distinct from personality--character is not just expressed by actions, deeds, it is essentially expressed in relation to other people, it is political; developed within the context of the tradition (which the core curriculum provides). The idea of a unique self, sufficient unto itself, inner and essential, is alien to the entire idea of the rhetorical liberal arts. We have a core curriculum, rather than choosing our own texts, precisely because our character is generated by our polis, living and dead--and because character is developed as a relation between people who have read the same texts, character constitutes the relations of the polis as much as it is constituted by them.

The liberal arts are meant to generate plural capacities for plural characters, not individual personalities; plural capabilities for action in the polis, not individually self-satisfied contemplation; capacities for the varieties of office (officium) necessary to sustain the republic. The value of such plural character is inseparable from its function to sustain the polis; it is never intended for its own sake.