Sliding down the banisters of the ivory tower.
I’m not sure if anyone reads this who doesn’t also read The American Scene on a regular basis, but I wanted to make sure everyone knew that I’ll be making the bulk of my posts there for the time being. Please come over and join the conversation.
Nicola can generally be found at the Yale Free Press these days. You should bookmark that too.
From the Yale Daily News:
Christopher Buckley ‘75, the satirical author and political commentator, will give the Class Day speech at this year’s commencement, the News has learned.
…
“Were I to give a speech,” Buckley explained, “I would probably in the first paragraph explain how to solve the financial crisis. In the second paragraph, I think I would deal swiftly with how to achieve peace in the Middle East. And in the third paragraph I would probably talk about how to get a job at Starbucks.”
Posted without comment, except to say that this will be given a thorough recap after the fact.
So while blogger etiquette demands that I give some sort of accounting of the last few months of silence here on Iqra’i, and some sort of vague and tantalizing promise of “big changes” that may be afoot in the near future, I will refrain from doing either at present. Largely because undergraduate bloggers are half-tamed things, and to expect predictability or accountability from us is often unwise. Suffice to say that when I’ve got something to say (sir), I’m going to say it now.
I watched today’s inauguration in a spare classroom (no, not one from a canceled class). Like plenty of other bloggers out there, I was struck by the end of the oath of office — the “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution” part. But I think Andrew et al., in focusing on the last man to take that oath, aren’t paying enough attention to the fact that it was administered with equal solemnity to the forty-two before him as well, which is what makes it really interesting. Each incoming President of the United States has sworn his allegiance to a document. Not the nation, and not even its body of laws, but the blueprint of its federal government. It’s a bit weird.
Allegiance by synecdoche itself is pretty standard, of course — ever pledged allegiance to the flag? But the Pledge makes the connection explicit: “…and to the republic for which it stands.” The Oath of Office never does; instead, it enlists the president into a series of active verbs that sound like some chivalric honor code. (The mental image reminds me of some scene from a future National Treasure sequel, with the President carrying the Constitution under one arm out of the wreckage of the National Archives as he fights off a pack of terrorist ninjas with the other.)
And the conventional oath for the vice president — and, for that matter, all Senators and Representatives — is even more ridiculous in its swashbuckle. You may have missed this if you were still reeling from the sight of Aretha Franklin’s fabulous hat, but Joe Biden solemnly swore to (among other things)
support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same…
Afterwards he held onto the Lincoln Bible for a few moments before unloading it onto someone else, lugging it awkwardly as if it were a gag prop. Which, in a way, it was. The oaths may be taken on the Bible, but it’s merely the witness; the Constitution, indisputably human-written, is the addressee. (Arguably, John Quincy Adams had it right when he swore on a book of constitutional law instead, or maybe it was redundant.)
It’s also controlling the proceedings, of course, and to me this is the weirdest part. Flub or no flub, the presidential oath of office didn’t matter. Barack Obama became president before he stepped up to the podium, somewhere during that interminable “Simple Gifts” performance, at exactly 12:00 pm. That is what the Constitution says, and that is what happened. The oath was just for show, like opening a solstice ceremony with a pledge to uphold the sun. (For what it’s worth, I agree with what’s been said about how flat and prosaic Obama’s speech and Elizabeth Alexander’s inaugural poem were, but they weren’t the point either. They were just everyday, spoken words. The ones that mattered were silent.)
Linda Hirshman has a fascinating exegesis of Obama’s choice to address his “fellow citizens,” rather than “fellow Americans.” But it seemed far simpler to me when I heard the speech myself. American nationhood is a fundamentally political thing: the Constitution its emblem, the citizen its basic unit. We were no nation before we were a state. (The national capital, America’s only monumental city, is as good a setting as any to underscore this.)
Which isn’t to say that politics is a sufficient base for interpersonal relationships, or that American civic culture needs to be fundamentally political, or even that welfare doesn’t “dehumanize” charity by politicizing it (though I don’t disagree with the last). But it is something to keep in mind.
ZOMG!!11one! Look what they did to Ben!
So I have never spent my college years collecting normal student experiences. In fact, I’m more likely to spend my time venturing into the bizarre. I could try to say that I produced this music video as a celebratory fusion of my work in performance arts and my Anglicanism…or you could just say that I did it because it was darn fun. Did you ever think you’d see Martin Luther dissin’ Johann Tetzel in a rap video? The clip below is the brainchild of my friend Alexander Dominitz, a young film director and cinebuff extraordinaire. For the full lyrics and much more, check it out at www.95thesesrap.com. H/t to Adrian for designing and launching the full website.
This is precisely how I live my life. Why so judgmental, XKCD?
Hindsight being so much better, I’m now seeing the real problem with my post: I set out to explain how I got somewhere, but the process itself doesn’t make any sense until you see where it takes you. I provided a road-map and a couple of snapshots taken along the way, but no pictures of the landscape where I am now. All of that makes the whole journey pretty damned confusing to anyone who doesn’t know me (and that sometimes includes myself — Eve manages to put her finger on things I hadn’t noticed at all, and I’ll get to those).
And so I’ve gotten responses that point out problems with the things I said and problems with the things I think. As to questions of virtue and freedom and the state, I think I’ve expressed myself satisfactorily in a few of these posts. When it comes to questions of tradition and truth, though, I haven’t given such clear answers. Part of that, of course, is that I’m not sure I have them, but this conversation isn’t going to stretch the form of blogging so far that it won’t snap back: it’s giving us a tantalizing hint of a new form entirely. Which, thumbs up.
James begins his long-awaited rejoinder:
First I need to say that Nicola is making, in my estimation, a big mistake by connecting certainty to truth. Of course you can have truth without certainty. Maybe not the truth about the point at which water boils or the size of Australia, but other kinds of truth: nonempirical truths.
If that’s a mistake, I’m still making it: I don’t know how truth can function as a locus of value if we can’t know what’s true. Obviously I don’t need to be able to prove something for it to be true in some ontological sense, but how do we go about evaluating our nonempirical truths? I’m not sure we ever can — and then what do we do when we have two conflicting claims to nonempirical truth? How do we choose? Intuition? I believe that things are true, but I can’t prove them; how do I convince someone else that they’re actually true, rather than useful figments of the imagination?
So this is not to say that truth or reason are unimportant, but that we can’t construct an entire Weltanschauung on the premise that only things we’re certain of can be valuable. This is, I think, what Eve was talking about in the example of the birthday cake of existence. We don’t always start from the bottom of the pyramid and build our way up; sometimes we start with one piece of a complex system and build our way in and out from there. We take one thing we believe and look for the pieces that fit. When we emphasize coherent and intuitive truths over the straitjacket of logical consistency, we’ll never be entirely certain (because we aren’t starting from a self-evident axiom). On the other hand, if we realize that one piece of our structure can only connect to (say) mass murder, we can take that piece out and look for something better to go in its place.
That sort of evaluative reason implies an outside normative standard. Where does it come from?
I started by explaining it as love, but I don’t think that really works. My Eliot-epiphany was largely “wow, this standard-that-isn’t-logical-consistency is also a legitimate way to approach truth!” Love features as an evaluative factor, not the standard itself. When I add a bit to my worldview, I make sure it’s consistent with my valorization of love, but that’s a way of measuring whether it’s consistent with some higher good. So what is the higher good? What am I really gauging truths against when I ask myself about love?
Nicola Karras gives these two really big, intricate apparati, and says that her post is the story of how they’re hinged together, and yet we never get to see the hinge! Now, I’m honestly not sure that a blog post of any length can really draw a hinge (an epiphany) in ways that make sense to strangers. …I think Nicola is trying to describe–to use my terms rather than hers–how she came to conjoin sublimity and morality, the same weirdness of the Jews which Clive Lewis describes in the introduction to The Problem of Pain. But Yahweh is shaped exactly like a hinge, and Nicola hasn’t given us any hinge-alternative.
God would be a nice, easy answer, but I can’t do it. Shouldn’t religious faith — the kind of thing that fills your life with meaning, that changes not only how you live your life but how you see the world — require something more than “oh, that’s the best explanation I’ve heard yet”? God shouldn’t be just another piece to be slotted into my Weltanschauung; he should be the center. And he isn’t, and (here I am, caught again with the whole reason thing) I don’t have a good reason to put him there.
Can tradition provide an alternative standard? Some people seem to have read me as saying so, but it’s far more complicated; I’ll pick up on that next time.
Apple customarily comes late to the game, sitting and watching and then releasing its own, usually better, take on the current offerings. If Apple went to a party, it would turn up last and leave with the hottest girl there.
I’m way more excited about the new Apple laptops than I should be, but my MacBook is getting elderly, and like any venerable friend, it has its issues — three replaced keyboards and another one that needs it except that I can’t be without it for long enough, power management issues, and it won’t run any of the games I want (okay, that’s probably a good thing for my productivity).
Also I’m a geek.
Serious philosophical questions and midterms do not mix well.
I have so many things floating around in my head, including some thoughts on capitalism vs. culture, but it’s mostly responses to the responses. Some of my favorites (and you should really read the whole things, because they say far more than I can quote):
EAT THE APPLE
Virtue ? That is your responsibility, whilst it may be nice to think of the spartans whipping virtue into the young, wishing you too could have the rest of modern society from its crack addicts to perverts to slothful today tonight watchers pushed towards a life of virtue, to do that is to deny their humanity, deny their choice and ultimately deny that they have any possibility of a virtuous life. For virtue can not simply be external behaviour rote learned. It has to be valued and sought after by the individual, not simply a pattern of behaviour forced upon an individual if they are to survive and participate in the community.
We may not be a virtuous society today, and many individuals may not express such a character. But for the first time in human history it is at least possible and an option. One built on a real foundation of respect towards us as humans who can choose individual achievement towards nobility, not a forced behaviour as if mere pet dogs trained to beg and bark on command.
You can seek community, or you can seek virtue. Not both, and likely neither with modern conservatism.
SHE SAID PERFORMATIVITY! …WELL, SHE SHOULD HAVE.
A good play can change not just a man’s life but his identity, but only if he “believes” it in a very particular way. He can’t really believe it—if he does, he’ll rush onstage to try and stop Oedipus from blinding himself!—but neither can he keep in the front of his mind that it’s just his friend Jeff in an Oedipus mask. That’s the kind of belief I have in my traditions, especially those that can’t be traced back to divine revelation. More on why traditionalism isn’t relativism here. I’d excerpt, but this post is long enough already; let it suffice to say that Oscar Wilde was my kind of conservative.
(Helen at Pomocon)
YOU KEEP USING THAT WORD. I DO NOT THINK IT MEANS WHAT YOU THINK IT MEANS.
Here is what I think: I think “postmodernism” is a great way to justify excessive navel-gazing, obtuse writing, obfuscated thinking, and various forms of related wankery. (But if anyone wants to convince me otherwise with a concise definition of the term, the comments are open below.)
THE STATE: WHAT’S UP WITH THAT?
My deeper point is that by not locating our own context/position, political discussions that are abstract (What is The Fundamental Issue?) assume a one-size-fits-all answer for all times and places. And they can inadvertently end up supporting a point of view I doubt (esp. in this case) the author really holds to. Moreover, a great deal depends on our location in terms of what we see/pick up on.
If postmodernism (conservative and/or liberal) taught us anything it’s that meaning is contextual and that contexts are never-ending, hence all our statements (including this one) are provisional. [Provisional however can be a very long time--point to pomocons]. My take is the best way to deal with that reality is to be as honest as we can about our own position and just say it out. In that way I think there is more an invitation to debate and dialogue than a framing that says “X Issue is THE One” and then creates sharp divisions between those who stand on either side of X. When often, the reality, I would say, is never that clear or simple.
TO DEFINE CONSISTENCY AS TRUTH IS TO DENY THE EXISTENCE OF TRUTH
I would substitute her categorical rejection of rationalism and a firm commitment to community with the following maxim: It is the conservative’s job to remain permanently uncomfortable with existence. Because it is precisely when we think we have arrived at final answers–whether they reside in reason or in community–that we actually become susceptible to totalitarianism. We shoud firmly accept, as the late Judge Learned Hand once declared, that “The true spirit of liberty is the spirit that is not too sure that it is right.” This belief was at the heart of the American Founding, and it is, sadly, a belief that has all but evaporated in today’s destructive partisan politics.
Conservatism should be about ideas and ideals, not about emotional appeals to interpersonal connections, and there is simply no way to arrive at the “right” ideas without reason. This element of balance is what seems to be missing from the worldview that Karass has arrived at.
MY BELOVED IS MINE AND I AM…WHOSE?
To the extent that this is a love story in which the beloved(s) remain intentionally unnamed, I can understand your interlocutors’ frustration! WHOM one loves (whether a person, a Person, or a persona e.g. a tradition) makes an enormous difference….
I can guess at a few possible beloveds; and you say yourself that this is a story of the shape of your thoughts rather than their content, but obviously it’s really difficult to separate shape from content, and I wonder if your decision to attempt the separation wasn’t a mistake.
I’m hoping that this reading of Nicola’s post is reasonably accurate. Because there are several different ways to read it, and a love story with a beloved (or beloveds) she can actually name would be the best one. A love story in which the identity of the mystery date hasn’t been revealed, but she thinks it might, and she’s going on a detective search–that’s also good.
(Eve — and seriously, read the whole thing. I think she groks me in a way that I don’t grok myself, which is always cool if a little scary.)
I promise I’ll get to all of this, not least because I can’t sit still until I do. In the meantime, feel free to discuss in comments.
In other news, I really, really want this shirt:
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