Archive for the 'Inexplicably Burke' Category

The Impossible Dream

Published
by
Nicola Karras
on July 7, 2008
in History, Inexplicably Burke and Philosophy
. 1 Comment

A reader writes:

Chivalry (assuming they mean it not just as a synonym for knighthood, in which case it would be tautological) was a performance, as much drag as you say the wearing of a bowtie is. The whole thing with asking ladies for their favors and wearing them in the joust, of quests against knights defending magical castles etc, was very deliberately staged. It always already looked back to the distant past — people in the 12th-15th century looking back to a mythical King Arthur. Knights were of a social level where marriages were arranged and the whole courtly love thing was window-dressing (either for marriage or adultery). Nor did chivalry improve the treatment of women outside the knights’ own social class. Remember Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur was written while he was in prison for rape.

This is an important point. I’m all in favor of stories that make us better. Looking back to a noble and vanished past can inspire us to greater virtue, whether or not the past was actually noble. (C.f. sacred veils.) It’s much the same as looking to literature for inspiration, with the added hook that we can claim a real inheritance.

It’s that very claim of inheritance, though, which makes the sacred veil problematic. Our interaction with the past owes far more to our unthinking assumptions than to the stories we articulate. Trying to embody the values exalted in our stories is one thing; ignoring our actual inheritance from the things behind the veil is quite another.

It becomes a sort of doublethink — we “know” that knights treated ladies well, and we aspire to the same. At the same time, there are viciously unchivalrous undercurrents in our society, from Malory to the present. Claiming chivalry as an inheritance may inspire us. Claiming it as our only inheritance lets us ignore all the other strains in our heritage — their causes hidden, perhaps, but their effects all too evident.

Don Quixote is a tragic figure because, for him, the veil worked. He called the whores ladies not to inspire them to better their lives, but because he didn’t understand that there were whores. The world in which he found himself could not have come from the noble past he believed in. His private world was cleaner, better, purer, but it was all in his head.

The good old days weren’t always. That doesn’t negate the lessons we draw from them, or their value as stories and roles, but we mustn’t allow the fact that “it would have been nice if” to blind us to the nastier things that we have inherited unthinking.

Leave the bow-tie, take the cannoli.

Published
by
Nicola Karras
on July 6, 2008
in Inexplicably Burke, Philosophy and Yale
. 15 Comments

The newest members of the fold — and really, boys, you don’t write, you don’t call, I have to hear about it from David Porter? — seem to skirting the edge of the reactionary temptation:

If only to preserve consistency with our often ancient ideas, the latest fashion in such circles hasn’t changed in years — among the gentlemen, bowties and tweed jackets are encouraged. Ask us about rap music, a new television show, or weblogs, and you might well be told that we’ve never heard of such newfangled oddities. Fail to hold a door open for a lady? Fear our wrath.

To quote a New Haven local who once had the good fortune to be confronted with a conservative gentleman clad in a three piece suit, a bowtie, and a gold-chained pocket watch complete with pipe, “are you serious?!”

Yes. Yes we are.

There are two ways to wear a bow-tie or a tweed jacket: as if it is the most natural thing in the world, or as a deliberate and self-conscious bit of drag. The problem is that there are very few people today for whom bow-ties and tweed jackets do come naturally. For everyone else, it’s drag — it has to be drag — and drag isn’t serious.

For the bow-tie to come naturally, you must be blissfully ignorant of the present — and that sort of ignorance is impossible. You can, and in fact the Cavers do, rail against the Enlightenment. You can’t claim to have missed it. No matter how distasteful we may find modernity, no matter how much we might like to do so, we cannot go back.

To their credit, they seem to have realized some of this:

But these niceties we hold dear, while gloriously chivalric and ultimately harmless, are nevertheless dishonest. As conservatives, we recognize the limits that our times and our location place on us. We can no more avoid the awful din of popular culture than could a knight of old avoid chivalry. But our white lies serve a lofty purpose in reminding us of the ideals we seek to uphold and helping us to keep something sacred in times that demand the breakdown of all barriers. Thus the conservative can take neither his quaint mannerisms nor the environment in which he finds himself lightly.

But a bow-tie is not a bulwark against modernity. As an unspoken claim that you, at least, have avoided the dissolution of a traditional order, it is prima facie untrue. As an intentional riff on a vanished tradition, it necessarily recognizes its own absurdity. The old sources of meaning have disappeared, and when we choose to ape their forms we recognize that what they offer us is glittering illusion.

We use them not to hold something that might otherwise slip from our grasp — it has already gone — but to recreate them, imbuing them with new meaning. They are, in themselves, harmless, but when we grow solemn about them we forget that we are merely playing. It is exactly our “quaint mannerisms” that we should take lightly. Chesterton, the prophet of God’s mirth, tells us as much: “It is easy to be heavy: hard to be light. Satan fell by the force of gravity.”

Freud, backwards — and in heels.

Published
by
Nicola Karras
on March 31, 2008
in Inexplicably Burke, Ladies and Philosophy
. 3 Comments

“How can a woman be expected to be happy with a man who insists on treating her as if she were a perfectly normal human being?”

The most common thing people ask me (well, maybe second, after “how do you pronounce your name?”)[1] is how I can be both a conservative and a feminist. The shortest answer is Freud over Marcuse. I’m an inveterate contrarian, but Amanda at Pandagon comes surprisingly (if hyperbolically) close to summing it up:

The patriarchy, while being unfair, is the only way we have to maintain civilization itself, and without it, we’ll descend into anarchy with people killing each other in the streets. It’s a tad unfortunate that women’s ambitions, rights, and very souls have to be destroyed to maintain the system, and that even men, no matter how unwilling, have to be forced to uphold this oppressive form of masculinity that can destroy the bodies and spirits of gender non-conforming men, but we all have to make sacrifices to keep society going, don’t we?

The sort of patriarchy I oppose is the porn culture embodied by Sex Week, the idea that women are best considered to be sex objects. The sort of patriarchy that involves drawing distinctions between men and women is fine; the male dominance this entails is unavoidable. (This is why a recognition of privilege is so vital for conservatives. If we aren’t trying to destroy power imbalances, we have to recognize their full extent.)

Society requires the repression of certain instincts and desires. Freud’s critique is that society often represses more than it needs to: “if civilization imposes such great sacrifices not only on man’s sexuality but on his aggressivity, we can understand better why it is hard for him to be happy in that civilization.” Society doesn’t need to destroy women’s “ambitions, rights, and very souls” for its survival. Ambitions must be shaped and rights must be balanced with duties, but society makes our souls more human.

Of course, contemporary constructions of gender can be immensely damaging (e.g., pressure for men to repress any emotion besides anger). The solution, though, is not to create a non-repressive civilization, but to transgress, subvert, and reform our own traditions so that we repress the bad and nurture the good. A fair way of doing it would be nice, and is certainly something we should strive for — but we mustn’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

[1] The emphasis is on the first syllable: ‘nik e le. (WordPress refuses to show a schwa.)

Guns, God, and Gays — three great tastes in one!

Published
by
Nicola Karras
on March 25, 2008
in Extemporanea, Inexplicably Burke and Politics
. 0 Comments

Much as I hate to contradict Chuck Norris, he’s way off base. Condemning the Day of Silence, he writes:

…Thomas Jefferson drafted a bill concerning the criminal laws of Virginia, in which he proposed that the penalty for sexual deviance should be unique corporal punishment. Jefferson’s views were indeed representative of early America:

“Whosoever shall be guilty of Rape, Polygamy, or Sodomy with man or woman shall be punished, if a man, by castration, if a woman, by cutting thro’ the cartilage of her nose a hole of one half inch diameter at the least.” Can you imagine a statesman proposing such a law today?

I could write a long screed about the history of sodomy laws (hi, Mom!) and why they are a bad argument against the gays, but Chuck Norris has more to say:

While I’m not, of course, espousing such treatment, I do believe that we equally and adamantly should oppose such aberrant sexual behavior from being condoned or commemorated in our public schools…

I could discuss the Day of Silence, and how it doesn’t do much of anything, but my friend Edmund has something to add:

“To represent a man as immoral by his religion, perfidious by his principles, a murderer on point of conscience, an enemy from piety to the foundations of all social intercourse, and then to tell us that we are to offer no violence to such a person under favor, appears to me rather an additional insult and mockery than any sort of corrective to the injury we do our neighbor by the character we give him.”

If Chuck Norris thinks there’s something admirable in Jefferson’s proposal, why doesn’t he espouse it or something like it? Well, because it’s horrible, and if people recognize that such views like that lead to such abhorrent notions, they might abandon them. As well they should.

Following conclusions to their logical consequences: it’s what’s for breakfast.

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.

I’m majoring in Dead White Male Studies.

Published
by
Nicola Karras
on March 8, 2008
in Inexplicably Burke, Navel Gazing, Philosophy and Yale
. 3 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.

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.

Man will become better when you show him what he is like.

Published
by
Nicola Karras
on February 25, 2008
in If You're Not Postmodern You're Not Paying Attention, Inexplicably Burke, Navel Gazing and Philosophy
. 2 Comments
  1. “Most allegedly postmodern thought emphasizes the arbitrary character of all human authority, the freedom of each human being from all standards but his own will or creativity, and the death not only of God but of nature. These allegedly postmodern characteristics are really hypermodern; they aim to ‘deconstruct’ as incoherent and so incredible any residual modern faith in reason or nature. They shout that everything modern — in fact, everything human — is nothing but a construction.” (Peter Lawler, Conservative Postmodernism, Postmodern Conservatism.)
  2. “Traditionalism is unreflective and an immediate experience of a way of life. It has no need for intellectual formulation. It just is. Conseratism is…a reflection of the fact that the meaning of tradition is no longer self-evident. Conservatism is the political recreation of the meaning of tradition and in doing so puts tradition to work in the struggle of political ideas. …’if tradition is integral to conservative politics, it is because it represents, not history as such, but history made present and perceivable.’ It is an interpretation, a reconstruction, a ‘practical’ past…” (Aughey, Jones, and Riches, The Conservative Political Tradition in Britain and the United States.)
  3. “…the deliberate following of prescription which Burke advocated was something different, because it was the result of choice, from the uncalculated loyalty of the past. Those who have eaten from the fruit of knowledge cannot forget.” (Graham Wallas, quoted in The Conservative Mind.)
  4. “All the super-added ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns and the understanding ratifies as necessary to cover the defects of our own, shivering nature, and to raise it to dignity in our own estimation, are to be exploded…” (Burke, Reflections.)

Modernism is the search for meaning; postmodernism is the denial of meaning; post-postmodernism is the creation of meaning.

Conclusion: Conservatism is post-postmodern.

Conclusion 2: Conservatism is post-postmodernism.

If all the young ladies who attended the Yale prom were laid end to end, no one would be the least surprised.

Published
by
Nicola Karras
on February 12, 2008
in Inexplicably Burke, Ladies, Politics, Sex Week 2008 and Yale
. 0 Comments

Things I never expected to hear in the dining hall: “The female orgasm will be today at four o’clock.”

Sex Week is an interdisciplinary sex education program designed to pique students’ interest through creative, interactive, and exciting programming.

No. No, it’s really not.

I am all in favor of sex education. College students knowing how to avoid pregnancy and STDs is a wonderful thing. (Nothing, I’m afraid, will ever rid the human race of the awkwardness that accompanies sex, and I’m not sure I’d be in favor if it could. There’s something to be said for a little endearing fumbling — provided you eventually figure things out.)

But the problem with Sex Week (okay, one of the problems with Sex Week) is this: It’s not about safe sex. It’s not even about — God forbid! — virtuous sex. It is, very fundamentally, about the glorification of an emotionally vacant culture which emphasizes body over mind, carnality over romance, and objectification over any kind of true connection.

The feminist objection to Yale’s hookup culture is that it lends itself to the dehumanization of women. This is true but vacuous. Hookup culture leads to the dehumanization of the human, to the separation between love and sex, to the idea that the most intimate things we do with our bodies are no more meaningful than scratching an itch. But can we undo it?

Will quotes the bit of Burke that I was planning to:

“All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off. All the super-added ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns and the understanding ratifies as necessary to cover the defects of our naked, shivering nature…”

We may sit here all we like and implore Sex Week and porn culture to let us put her clothes back on — but even if we succeed, the damage has been done. She has been stripped bare in the public square and exposed to the stares of the mob. Life requires pleasant lies. She may be but a woman, and as a woman but an animal, and yet to treat her as one is the height of vulgarity.

Like a woman, life has her powders and paints to hide blemishes in public. With her lover she can be plain and still found beautiful, but no true gentleman would want the world to see his lover as he does. To be a conservative, I think, is to recognize the necessity of pleasant lies: not to mislead us, but to make us love before we understand.