Archive for the 'Navel Gazing' Category

Pay no attention to Caesar. Caesar doesn’t have the slightest idea what’s really going on.

Published
by
Nicola Karras
on October 11, 2008
in If You're Not Postmodern You're Not Paying Attention, Navel Gazing and Politics
. 2 Comments

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.

(Chasing the Norm)

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.)

(Another Damned Blog)

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.

(Indistinct Union)

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.

(Exit Cave Right)

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:

Burke is dead.

Published
by
Nicola Karras
on October 9, 2008
in If You're Not Postmodern You're Not Paying Attention, Navel Gazing, Philosophy and Politics
. 7 Comments

Freddie dissects me and comes up short:

…I was sure I had missed something: where was the resolution to Karras’s existential crisis? Where was the moment where she found her access to the truth that frees her from the spiritual emptiness that pure intellect had left her with? I couldn’t find it, and can’t. I find instead her (very understandable) sense of loss at the dissolution of real authority and real certainty, and the choice to embrace foundationalism and its political child, conservatism.

He couldn’t identify the moment where I found “access to the truth” because I didn’t. That is, in a way, the whole point. The problem with that rationalism was the human inability to grasp truth by itself. I spent my time looking for something that I could be sure was true, and I couldn’t find it. I still haven’t. I’m not certain. My realization was not of the truth of anything in particular, but in the fact that I could have meaning without the certainty of truth.

So yes, of course my “ethic is an ethic of necessity, not of truth.” Truth would be lovely. Truth would, I imagine, give me some objective meaning. But meaning also comes from the search.

This is a willed belief in tradition, a knowing choice of old institutions, the inherently meta rejection of the meta. “I had been drowning, and looking back I saw how easy it would have been to latch on to something murderous to save myself.” Not, “the life raft was the reality of Christ/community/tradition/etc”. Instead, the pure pragmatism at grasping at whatever piece of driftwood happened to float by. This is postmodern premodernism, and it has become kind of popular.

I may not have been clear, and in retrospect the whole drowning thing is a dubious analogy. Let me try to explain myself again: when we regard foundationalism as the best way to understand the world, we are desperate for some foundational principle. We will grasp at whatever driftwood floats by. When I thank my lucky stars, it isn’t for the fact that I happened to grab a particularly benign piece of driftwood but that I realized I didn’t have to grab one at all.

How does that work? It segues nicely into Freddie’s questions about tradition and postmodernity:

How can traditionalism survive, when you know that mere human subjectivity is the source of tradition? Conservatism has tradtionally been suspicious, even hateful, of postmodern skepticism towards meta-narratives. I think many of the pomocons believe that they can have the destabilizing nature of postmodernism and yet still knowingly choose the stability of classical forms, traditional mores. But the old school conservatives abhor the postmodern for a reason. They know the limits of willed obediance to the past, they recognize the fragility of any conservatism of choice.

I’m not one of the arbiters of Pomoconservatism, but I’ll give this a shot. My emphasis on tradition is not, God knows, because I discovered that tradition is objectively correct. It’s not even because I’ve decided to think that tradition is objectively correct. (The former is impossible; the latter is lame.) Rather, it’s because tradition does form us, because tradition does give us meaning. We have to examine it and search for truth within it, because if truth is the sort of thing that can be found, that’s the only place we’ll find it.

Freddie is right: you cannot choose to be premodern. Those who have eaten from the tree of knowledge cannot forget. There is something pathetic about the conservatives who try to pretend they missed the Enlightenment. But if a postmodern conservatism does not stick its fingers in its ears (”la la la la, William of Ockham, I can’t heeeeeear you…”), it also does not insist that I have chosen my choice and that’s that.

Postmodern conservatism is a reflection of the fact that the veils have already been stripped off; tradition has already lost its reflexive hold on us. It still shapes us, but we recognize that it is to some degree arbitrary. The values we want to see in the world are informed by our tradition, but because we know that, any attempt at change must be a reflective, self-conscious process.

So what is the project of postmodern conservatism? Is it, as I think Freddie understands it, to justify conservatism in the language of postmodernity? Or is it the first steps towards overcoming?

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy

Published
by
Nicola Karras
on October 8, 2008
in Navel Gazing, Philosophy and Politics
. 49 Comments

I mentioned this “political autobiography” project for class and a few people were interested. I am one of my favorite topics, so I’m happy to share it; find out All About Me after the jump. (I feel very silly about this.) This is more of an attempt to trace my development than the actual content of my thoughts — that’s a much more interesting story.

More…

Ten pages down, ten to go.

Published
by
Nicola Karras
on October 5, 2008
in Navel Gazing, Politics and Yale
. 6 Comments

“La Contre-Révolution ne sera pas une révolution contraire, mais le contraire de la Révolution.” — Maistre.

From the end of my “political autobiography” (for class):

More than anything else, I am concerned with how we think about things, and what that means to us in terms of living both virtuous and fulfilling lives. I’ve long since stopped caring about labels: call me a conservative, a libertarian, a reactionary — just don’t call me late for the counterrevolution.

Now to finish write the other two papers due tomorrow. (Note to my mother: just kidding!)

Breaking down is easy

Published
by
Kate Maltby
on September 19, 2008
in If You're Not Postmodern You're Not Paying Attention, Literary Factions, Navel Gazing and Yale
. 1 Comment

One of my new favorite professors, R. Howard Bloch, dropped a few sentences yesterday that overwhelmed me with happiness - suddenly made my ego felt justified in its hyperactivity. We were reading the self-justifying memoir of the great scholastic philosopher Abelard (’im what got ‘is bits chopped off for bonking Heloise) and discussing the spectacular arrogance of a man convinced he was constantly being persecuted by his jealous inferiors. And that’s when Professor Bloch dropped in this:

Paranoia is the purest form of literary criticism. It’s the product of an incessantly interpretive mind. Imposing patterns upon patterns of self reference, it places the self center and everything is filtered through its relationship with the interpreter. And the best thing about is that it’s totally incontrovertible. It’s based purely on a closed system, a set of subjective references set upon each each other.

Apologies if I’ve misworded it in remembrance. It should be obvious why this is great stuff, as a casual extension of work done by 20th century theorists on the ways in which patterns of literary expression manifest the patterns of our psychological processes. For the best examples, see the work of another much beloved professor, Peter Brooks, for whom the Freudian balance between repetition and teleology becomes a model for how narrative prevents a novel’s plot from foreclosing too quickly:

narrative must tend toward its end, seek illumination in its own death. Yet this must be the right death…Deviance, detour…these are characteristics of the narratable…Plot is a kind of arabesque or squiggle toward the end.

But the reason I’m excited about paranoid literary criticism today is that it relates the psychology of the literary critic to the psychology of the blogger. The blogger obsessively creates links upon links, tracing patterns of influence and tracking exactly whence everyone is getting their ideas. A hardcore blogger will find a way to relate every interesting new story back to her own obsessions. Such constantly linkage makes for closed self-referential communities riddled with extensive mutual analysis. Maybe that’s why the sharpest literary critics I’ve known are also the most successful bloggers. It’s all great fun, just like literary criticism and paranoia.

It may be a surveillance society, but it’s our surveillance society.

Published
by
Dara Lind
on September 17, 2008
in Navel Gazing, Politics and Yale
. 0 Comments

Rule: I take criticism poorly. I find it irritating. But I don’t find it disturbing.

Exception: The commenter who responded to my YDN column about the lack of explanation surrounding increased campus police presence by asking, “What are you trying to hide?”

Oh, right, I forgot. Only the most shamefully degenerate college student would ever engage in illegal activity. Like underage drinking. Or file-sharing. Or jaywalking.

Of course, that’s not only a straw man but an inaccurate one. The real assumption is that it’s foolish to think that the police would ever care about the illegal things students do, because their sole purpose is to protect us from the bad guys. Sure, this comes from a place of blind faith in the institution — “Of course the University has nothing but our best interests at heart!” — but also from entitlement: “We pay their salaries with our tuition, they have no choice but to be on our side!”

There’s also the fact that the closer you get to having decision-making power yourself, the sillier it seems to scrutinize the intentions of power (Obama on FISA, anyone?). But as dangerous as it is to rationalize that “When I’m in charge it will all be okay,” it’s more troubling to assume that there’s some sort of mutual understanding between “decision-making people,” that they have the same interests at heart — and, furthermore, that those interests are necessarily in the best interests of society. That it goes without saying that the police are here to protect students from the strangers roaming their courtyards, and to imply otherwise is not just ridiculous but rude. What are they supposed to be around to protect, anyway? The law?

Shiksa Countries Are for Practice

Published
by
Nicola Karras
on September 11, 2008
in Navel Gazing and Yale
. 0 Comments

I was going to blog about yesterday’s YPU debate with John Mearsheimer, but Philip Weiss has done it for me. He gives a great impression of the debate (and the peculiarity of the Union as an institution), and he gets us right.

Read the whole thing.

Before it got going Will Wilson and his friend Nicola Karras of the Party of the Right came over to introduce themselves. Wilson is burly and looks like a wildhaired Irish orator. He wore a 1776 tie and had read my work in the American Conservative. Nicola was smaller, quieter, hair pulled back. Will was to be one of the speakers. I thought, Maybe she is Will’s acolyte.

Don’t give him any ideas…

Strange Google Hits

Published
by
Nicola Karras
on September 4, 2008
in Extemporanea and Navel Gazing
. 0 Comments

I check out the blog stats every once in a while, and sometimes people find us via Google searches I can only describe as…strange.

The Peculiar:
different ways to care for chickens
unfortunate sex images
want to make molds for banisters
what is the spiritual significance of the navel

The “Good Question”:
does sarah palin smoke cigarette
why do pornstars keep their shoes on?
what do social theorist do for us

The Sublime:
men in suits throwing pies
everything is performative
uses of cigarettes and alcohols equals modernity

So my choice is “or death”?

Published
by
Nicola Karras
on August 21, 2008
in Extemporanea, Food and Navel Gazing
. 2 Comments

As I think I’ve mentioned before, I used to work in a bakery, so I really enjoy this blog.

The worst part is, I think this is still better than my cake writing.

The most important lessons from my high school job?

  1. Never trust the customer to write down what he wants on the cake. A Penn professor whose son was graduating from MIT wanted a cake that read “Congrats on your Collage Graduation.” I can only hope he taught math.
  2. Never assume you know how to spell someone’s name. Don’t even suggest. The mother of a two-year-old once gave me the evil eye for asking if her daughter’s name was spelled Anita. No, it was Eneedah. Duh.
  3. The larger the difference between cake size and child’s age, the crazier the parent is. A 13-year-old with a 7″ cake? Probably a lovely person. A one-year-old with a full sheet cake? HIDE.
  4. People are weird. Someone once sent me to put extra sprinkles on a cake because otherwise it might not be appealing to children.
  5. No one listens to instructions. If you tell them to refrigerate the cake lest buttercream icing melt all over the kitchen counter, you’d better do it twice. Or three times. And even then, you can reliably expect a furious phone call from at least half the customers.
  6. Never, ever argue with a bride. I still have scars.

ETA: For what it’s worth, I’m still holding out for one of these.

While we devotin’ full time to floatin’

Published
by
Kate Maltby
on August 13, 2008
in Media, Navel Gazing and Technology
. 0 Comments

I’m still buzzing from Andrew Sullivan citing my Transhumanist post in the Daily Dish. Of course, my favourite bit of the Simon Barnes piece I’d originally sparked off was his finale:

It is required behaviour at such a point for the journalist to give all the answers to the world’s problems in a couple of pithy phrases and then go to the pub.

So by extension, the blogger is luckier - it is required behaviour for the blogger to collate a few sources, briefly sketch out the complexity of all the world’s problems, and then, leaving one’s readers to go to puzzle out their own solutions, to go to the pub.

So just for Andrew Sullivan, the King of Bloggers, here’s my thank you present - my vision of the future of Olympic advertising:

And of course such camaraderie towards Sullivan would never be an attempt unsubtly to curry favour. It’s just that us conservative classical liberal Christian homosexual-agenda-promoting cautiously-Obamacon Oxonian Brits in America had better stick together.