Monthly Archive for March, 2008

The Profane Profession

Published
by
Kate Maltby
on March 13, 2008
in Inexplicably Burke, Ladies and Politics
. 0 Comments

A quick response to Nicola’s engagement with Jake on that grimy curbside business of prostitution would be to sagely nod and murmur in a slightly self-satisfied manner about the predictability of a classic libertarian vs traditionalist conflict. In the red corner: “Prostitution will always occur - we should provide clean economic channels for an inevitable series of transactions to occur in a crime-free environment”. In the blue corner: “Legalizing constitutes condoning! We can’t promote a culture that commodifies sex! Quelle horreur, the Queen of France, then the Dauphiness, would exclaim!” When Nicola argues that: “Conservatives should object to prostitution”, it sounds horribly like “objecting morally should be the same as criminalizing” - at which point Jake, I and all the other mishmash of libertarians and classical liberals can congratulate ourselves on being able to separate the two. Or affirm, as Jake does, that government cannot legislate social change.

Yet while I agree with the libertarian conclusion in favor of legalization, such an argument tends to straw-man the traditionalist position. It’s not that traditionalists don’t realize that prostitution will always occur. They know only too well. They recognize, frequently, that there is nothing that can be done, however hard they bring down the force of law, that can dent the durability of the oldest profession in the world. In fact some may even recognize that by criminalizing prostitution they run the risk of increasing the incidence of it, and certainly make the lives of vulnerable women far nastier and often shorter. The tension between Nicola’s and Jake’s views, however, actually stems from an even more basic traditionalist criticism of libertarianism’s laissez-faire approach : that shame is good. As always, this leads back to the dance of the seven Burkean veils that seems to preoccupy the Right at Yale. The “sacred” veil of which Nicola speaks is not imposed by those who are ignorant of that which lies beneath. It is merely that the illusion is more useful, and more bearable than the reality. This particular function of the veil is to split our vision of ourselves into two tiers: the grimy world of our failings and the elevated ideal, which even if rarely lived purely can at least provide a exemplar to which we can aspire. Legislators who outlaw prostitution do not delude themselves that prostitution will cease overnight. They merely hope that it will become invisible. Yes, invisibility is even more dangerous to the women involved than visibility. But a world in which we at least kid ourselves that we treat each other’s bodies with dignity makes the personal ties on which society is based far more sustainable.

Which leads me to the problem of my personal contradictions. I continue to support the legalization of prostitution on the quasi-economic grounds that legalization lessens the actual suffering posed to women. Yet like any good anti-Marxist I have always considered the aesthetic and intellectual wellbeing of society to be far more important than mere economic conditions. So I continue to apply my libertarian economics to my cultural concerns with the old “a cultural free market creates the most vibrant cultural life” chestnut. This argument is worth at least a whole blog post of its own, so you’ll all have to keep watching this space. Clues: cultures are defined by oppositions engaging with a theme, high culture is frequently inspired by its opposition to low culture, a world in which we are free to listen to Britney Spears is a world in which some will always react by turning to Bruckner to make sense of it all. You need not have read your Foucault to accept that it is impossible to prevent the discourses of the noble society and the base society from negotiating each other.

The argument that “the government cannot legislate social change” misses the point of Nicola’s claims, for she does not dare to hope that true social change can be effected, only that those elements which already exist can be separated from each other and labeled appropriately. To take up arms against it, therefore, one must argue that this very taxonomy of shame is unviable. One can disagree with the aesthetics of the traditionalist ideal - which in the specific case of prostitution, would be unlikely. One can disagree with the prioritizing of cultural health over the economic well-being of individuals - in which case both sides of the argument are premised on a false dichotomy. Or else one can disagree with the heart of the traditionalist argument and posit that such a division between the real world and the ideal world is thoroughly unhealthy.

EDIT: I’ve straightened out the formatting here; I’m not entirely sure what was wrong with it. –N

Ruminations on the Oldest Profession

Published
by
Nicola Karras
on March 12, 2008
in Inexplicably Burke, Ladies, Navel Gazing, Philosophy and Politics
. 5 Comments

In the shadow of Spitzer, Jake asks why conservatives should be opposed to prostitution.

I suppose the family-based argument has some validity, but it’s incomplete: it says nothing about unmarried people without families who could engage in a consensual exchange. ($5,500 an hour indicates that both parties are VERY happy with the deal they’re getting. I don’t see why government should stand in the way of blocking that commerce.)

Most of my objections to prostitution are phrased along feminist lines, contra the Third Wave “oh, but it’s so empowerful!” way of thinking that says as long as it’s your choice it’s just peachy. Some of that applies here, too — even if one disregards the obvious situations where prostitution is the best of a bad series of options, and thus a reasonable thing to pick, I’m willing to believe that there will still be some women who want to be prostitutes.[1]

The question, however, isn’t what they want, but what they should want.

Conservatives should object to prostitution because it profanes something that should be sacred. When inspected from a purely materialist level, traditional marriage is essentially an extremely inefficient kind of prostitution. But that isn’t the point. Commodifying the body, objectifying the sexual act without the emotional and spiritual content it should carry, breaks down our very notions of humanity. We are possessed of dignity, which is beyond price, and which is doubly important to the feminine. Dignity is so often the only — or, at least, the most effective — way to relate to power from a submissive position, because so long as it’s respected it requires the dominant force to behave differently.

Conservatives should object to prostitution for the same reasons they object to hookup culture. Consent is necessary but not sufficient to establish morality.

 

[1]If someone could craft a policy that could distinguish between women/girls forced into prostitution by physical or economic coercion and women who really do want to be prostitutes, and could protect the first and permit the second to do as they pleased, most feminist critiques of prostitution (read: the ones that do not include the term “false consciousness”) fall apart.

What does one equalize power relationships with, anyway? A bulldozer?

Published
by
Dara Lind
on March 11, 2008
in If You're Not Postmodern You're Not Paying Attention and Philosophy
. 5 Comments

You know you’re a token when…you leave school and the Internet for a few days and discover that your friends have taken the opportunity to straw-man you in absentia.

Actually, I’m thrilled that thanks to the (post)modern age I can leave the room without leaving the conversation. But I do feel that, as the only self-identified representative of the “pomo Left” I know, I should provide a correction to Helen on McCarthy on Russello on Kirk:

I feel like power is one of the biggest differences between the pomo Left and the pomo Right: they think power relationships have to be neutralized, we think they only have to be sanctified (i.e. love is a power relationship, but that’s fine because introducing love into a power relationship makes it okay, etc.)

Only an idiot would earnestly believe that “power relationships have to be neutralized,” because only an idiot could believe that they can be neutralized. There are so many types of power bound up in any given relationship, and they don’t always flow the same way or to the same degree. The postmodern Left, more so than the postmodern Right, recognizes this, and we encourage (and, when possible, pursue) the expression of less-obvious forms of power by those who lack power by standard metrics. To call an action “purely symbolic” isn’t to make a statement about its effectiveness — its power — but to describe the form that power could take.

This is the difference between “transgressive” and “subversive”: do you look at the rulebender as a brilliant and visible outlier expressing herself without troublesome ramifications, ultimately reinforcing the norm/ative outside which she stands? Or do you recognize that she herself is exercising power, of a type qualitatively different that which seeks to bind her — moving sideways so as to avoid getting pushed down?

I’m perfectly willing to admit the latter attitude may not encompass anyone who considers himself both a postmodernist and a liberal/leftist. (I don’t think a postmodernist could use the word “progressive” with a straight face, but what do I know?) My strain of pomo leftism comes not from Foucault so much as Michel de Certeau, who doesn’t get his due inside academia, let alone outside it.

Sed Noli Modo

Published
by
Nicola Karras
on March 9, 2008
in Extemporanea, Ladies and Yale
. 0 Comments

Apparently, I’m a conservative Christian [NSFW]. I’m curious how on Earth I could have forgotten converting, or, alternatively, how one could have gotten that idea from the blog.

Man, I thought Sex Week was over, and I was very glad about it! Kate, I think, summed it up best: the entire business was poorly thought out, poorly executed, and then defended zealously by a group of overly-sensitive planners. Sheer incompetence, combined with a lack of propriety and/or respect for women, is inevitably going to lead to ugliness. (Cf. the first link above?)

And now to return to Russell Kirk…

I’m majoring in Dead White Male Studies.

Published
by
Nicola Karras
on March 8, 2008
in Inexplicably Burke, Navel Gazing, Philosophy and Yale
. 2 Comments

The Canon Wars, it seems, are being fought on the blogs as well as in my Thursday afternoon seminar. (h/t Helen) I like the Western Canon, which I will happily defend from the ravening hordes of post-structuralist Japanese drabble scholars or whatever they are.

Education is more than the assimilation of facts. College can’t be replicated by reading books – even very good books – or, indeed, by classes in isolation. Education must include critical reasoning and normative judgments applied to the kinds of facts one can get from books, professors, or the internets. Students can’t simply be told that something is true: that would be to learn to internalize an ideology without examining it, and (much to my personal regret) no one has the revealed truth at their fingertips to be sure it’s right.

On the other hand, if there is too much criticism, too much examination, students may examine and discard things they ought not. This is the danger of the “new conquering empire of light and reason,” the Enlightenment project: it questions everything, and leaves nothing behind. Deconstruction is the logical end of the Enlightenment, both as goal and as final step.

The only way out, I think, is to teach a fundamental respect for the system before teaching the kind of questioning that can tear it apart. For American universities, this system is a Western – and more specifically, an American – one. The story of America’s development is full of injustice and oppression (women, Indians, blacks), but we can’t just reject it as the demesne of Dead White Men and start over again. First, of course, there is the obvious danger of utopian projects – the French Revolution, not to mention the Russian Revolution, the Cultural Revolution, &c. should have cured us of that temptation – but, more importantly, we are the outcome of our history, created and informed by it and unable to separate ourselves entirely from the perspective it gives us.

Still, though we are inescapably the product of our context, we can – and must – consider it critically. There is a nature to a human being, or to a culture, that can never be entirely erased, but to valorize that nature as it is rather than as it should be is irresponsible in the extreme. We can’t allow ourselves to relapse into quietism, whether through laziness or a blind adherence to the status quo. The impossibility of perfection is no argument against careful improvement and reform.

To be effective, though, this change needs to be within the terms and framework of our tradition. If we understand the underlying values and premises of our own tradition, with the forces that have shaped us and our society, we can see the flaws in our culture, love the whole despite them, and work within it to make it better.

This is the goal of a university education: to understand the institutions and values that have made our nation and culture what they are, and so made us who we are; to critically interrogate our inheritance, understand its contemporary application, and uphold or transgress it as we think best for the whole.

So, yes, of course teach the canon. But teach the canon critically, as a conversation through the centuries between men of genius. Teach the conflicts. Teach the questions. Teach, in other words, to think – because only after that can you do.

…the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his contemporaneity.

No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. (Eliot, 1922.)

I think this may be God’s way of telling me I need to read Tradition and the Individual Talent more often.

Truth: Less Interesting Than Fiction

Published
by
Nicola Karras
on March 7, 2008
in Extemporanea
. 0 Comments

Both James Poulos and Peter Suderman were kind enough to link to us, and wondered what iqra’i means. It’s actually a remnant of my suspended Arabic studies, though I prefer Poulos’ definition (”Deserve that Yale Man” in Zarathustran), not least because Indo-European languages are infinitely preferable to Semitic languages.

I have been reliably informed by deconstructionists that meaning is a fascist construct; nevertheless, I’ve explained it here.

Why bother with caritas? The state can take care of it.

Published
by
Nicola Karras
on March 7, 2008
in Philosophy, Politics and Yale
. 7 Comments

EDIT: Helen suggests that we outsource our eros to the state, too. I shudder to think what this might look like.

Last night’s Yale Political Union resolution (”Your poverty is your problem”) unsurprisingly failed to pass.[1] Consider that this is an environment in which statements like, “Well, if private charity could get everyone out of poverty, and the state could only get most people out of poverty, it’d be a tough call,” are par for the course. Consider also that our guest was Yaron Brook, President of the Ayn Rand Institute, and that the affirmative in the debate oscillated between decrying the welfare state (thumbs up) and advocating objectivism (thumbs down).

Still, Dr. Brook was an extremely engaging speaker, and if not entirely convincing then at least more eloquent in support of Ayn Rand than most people I know. (Confession: My first real exposure was in 4th grade, when my best friend read Atlas Shrugged because he liked trains. He’s better now.)

As Dara pointed out, though, the Randian system suffers from a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of coercion. If I were to hold a gun to the head of a suicidal man, I would be emplying force but not actually coercing him. On the other hand, if my mother were very upset with me, she wouldn’t have to use any force to make me do what she wanted: I care enough about what she thinks that her opinion can function coercively. Now, obviously, I don’t have to do what my mother wants, though I want her approval; similarly, I don’t have to do what a gunman wants, though I want to live. To say that I should intentionally condition myself not to care about my friends and family is as ridiculous and contrary to human nature as saying I shouldn’t care about my own life. I am neither a beast nor a god, and thank goodness for it!

More…

Jean Valjean and the Warm Fuzzies. (Not a music post.)

Published
by
Dara Lind
on March 7, 2008
in If You're Not Postmodern You're Not Paying Attention, Politics and Yale
. 6 Comments

I’m sure Nicola or Kate will wax more eloquent regarding last night’s debate about welfare, but thanks to the fact that they are done with midterms and I am not, I’m waking up earlier, and I have questions that went unresolved.

  1. Is it really possible to believe that coercion is exclusively synonymous with violence — that is, that no one is ever coerced to action by circumstances (economic, social/cultural, etc.)? It seems obvious to me that the scope of options a man has is circumscribed by circumstance — sometimes so tightly that only one option remains. The normative question aside, is it even coherent to say that Jean Valjean could and should have chosen to let his sister’s child starve?
  2. It’s widely agreed upon that intermediate institutions are usually more efficient (and sometimes even more effective) than the state, and that they allow people to connect to others in a more direct way than through taxation. But their effect on civil society as a whole seems to be a bit more ambiguous, because the people to whom one feels connected through a non-state institution are only a subset of the community in which one lives. Is there hope for communitas in postmodernity? And if so, what mediates it if not the polity (and therefore, by extension, the state)? (I suspect localism might be the answer, but cities have governments too.)

While fishing for links for this post I discovered an impressive number of charitable organizations called “Communitas,” or some variation thereof. I approve of the branding but hasten to point out that the fact that so many different organizations have such a name moots any persuasive value the name would have. And the link I eventually found, while AWESOME (Wikipedia does virtual sociology, goes meta), doesn’t quite cover it either — unless we’re trying for communitas through vanguardism.

Havel in Havana, Trotsky in Tianjin

Published
by
Dara Lind
on March 6, 2008
in History and Politics
. 0 Comments

The NYT today has a deliciously intriguing piece today on signs of “cyber-rebellion” in Cuba. It’s got some similarities to the emerging narrative out of China: government tries to restrict the flow of information over the Web, pro-freedom hacker youth find creative solutions and (thanks to exposure to the Great Big World Out There) begin to understand how oppressed they really are. In the case of Cuba, however, Internet access is much more restricted so information is spread via flash drives passed on from person to person.

Technically, I’m sure this makes it less efficient and circumscribes the potential range of any given communication. But it also becomes a fundamentally different type of revolution. It’s using technology to reinforce existing lived relationships, and connect them to a broader historical narrative. What this means is that the world of “truth” represented by free flow of information is congruent to the world in which people live, and opposed to the “false world” of the state. In China, by contrast, the lived world is opposed to the virtual world, and therefore can’t help but be on the side of lies (symbolically, at least).

I’m extremely wary about citing techno-subversion as a sign of incipient revolution under any circumstance — for one thing, the mainstream media’s tendency to consider any online unrest a symbol of widespread “discontent of the young within the system” seems to rely on projecting American patterns of Internet use rather than considering whether or not all youth in a country actually have Internet access, and whether it’s fair to generalize about those who don’t. But I think if it does happen, it’ll be more likely to happen under a Cuban model, where rebellion is amphibious between the lived world and cyberspace, than under a Chinese one.

The man who said “It is difficult to imagine that even manifest ‘dissent’ could have any other basis than the service of truth, the truthful life, and the attempt to make room for the genuine aims of life” was one of the most successful revolutionaries of the past century. I can see the Havelian spirit in Cuban cyber-rebellion. The man who said “You cannot live through (life) unless you have before you a great idea which raises you above personal misery,” died, a failure in exile, at the hands of his gardener. There is some degree of Trotskyism in the internationalist, super-virtual Chinese rebellion. I like it far less.

By the way, I do think it’s possible to make the argument that Havel has conservative impulses. Isn’t a strong preference for truth as revealed in practice over the interventions of the state (and all homogenized ideologies) just another brand of localism?

Quick Hits

Published
by
Nicola Karras
on March 5, 2008
in Extemporanea, If You're Not Postmodern You're Not Paying Attention, Inexplicably Burke, Politics and Yale
. 1 Comment

I currently reside at the bottom of a deep pit of paper writing and internship applying, emerging only briefly to bring you a collection of links that make me wave my arms in the air for various reasons.

The Traditionalist Counterculture at First Principles:

A jeremiad against the materialism and consumerism of the modern Right, Dreher’s book is a manifesto for—to quote its original subtitle—“Birkenstocked Burkeans, gun-loving organic gardeners, evangelical free-range farmers, hip homeschooling mamas, right-wing nature lovers, and their diverse tribe of countercultural conservatives.”

The Pomo Mind at Reason:

In his final chapter, Russello deals most explicitly with the relationship of conservatism to postmodernism, particularly to Lyotard’s “crisis of narratives”—the splintering of metanarratives into discrete, incommensurable stories. It is here that Russello insists that Kirkian conservatism and postmodernism do not simply have the same enemies but have common interests as well. Cultural decentralization and localism are two of the overlapping concerns Russello finds, and he notes parallel themes in several traditionalist and postmodern thinkers. In 1926 Bernard Iddings Bell, an Episcopal clergyman and friend of Kirk’s, was “among the first ever to use the term postmodernism as a description of an age emerging from the collapse of Enlightenment rationality,” Russello notes. Meanwhile, the postmodern theorist Hans Georg Gadamer came to a rather Kirkian understanding of, and respect for, tradition, arguing that it could not be understood by an objective, outside observer. “To stand within a tradition,” Gadamer wrote, “does not limit the freedom of knowledge but makes it possible.”

Peter Johnston in the YDN:

The problem is that, in a society increasingly conceptualized as one of rights-bearing individuals — one moving away from common law and toward the philosophical framework of the Declaration of Independence — marriage is understood as little more than a visible contract, a public declaration of mutual love. Proponents of gay marriage who lament that the absence of gay marriage “prevents gay couples from a public expression of their love for each other” thereby confirm the fears of their opponents, for the foundational character of marriage is entirely absent.

Under common law, in addition to having a foundation, marriage is a foundation. It is the liminal ritual by which a new social unit, the family, comes into existence. Those who oppose gay marriage are not motivated by the desire to prevent the public expression of mutual love. They simply maintain that marriage cannot be divorced from the family. This is not to say that family arising out of gay marriage is impossible. But gay family is less familiar, less obvious. So the opponents of gay marriage will only change their mind if gay marriage is understood as the foundation of a family.

Jake McGuire on the erosion of the purpose of the university:

Dean Salovey finished the panel response by referencing the Woodward Report, the defining document about how Yale treats conflicts between speech and tolerance at an institutional level. He put the most emphasis on how the Woodward Report says that when mutual respect and friendship have to be weighed against freedom of speech, mutual respect and friendship ought to be sacrificed. He only went as far as calling it “provocative” and “interesting,” but made an explicit point of stating that he was not defending the Woodward Report’s argument. (Indeed, it was quite telling that he called it an “argument” at all.)

Conclusions:

  1. I need to finish my work so I have enough free time to read.
  2. Peter Johnston is right, but seems to have missed things like this.
  3. Dean Salovey is responsible for further ebbing of my dwindling faith in humanity.