Archive for the 'Philosophy' Category

Faith, hope, love: two out of three ain’t bad.

Published
by
Nicola Karras
on October 14, 2008
in Extemporanea, Navel Gazing and Philosophy
. 6 Comments

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?

Eve has a suggestion:

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.

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
. 8 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
. 89 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…

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.

Dreams of my father

Published
by
Kate Maltby
on September 15, 2008
in History, If You're Not Postmodern You're Not Paying Attention, Literary Factions, Politics and Social Theory
. 1 Comment

David Frum isn’t usually my favorite pundit but recently he’s been posting too much common sense to ignore. He’s been at the forefront of conservative skepticism about Palin. One key Frum line is that Palin euphoria has moved the McCain platform from the home of straight-talking realism to a confusing land in which personal charisma, endearing backstories and competing aesthetics muddy each other. Thanks to the Palin pick,

it turns out that many conservatives care as little as ever about administrative skill and executive accomplishment. Our party and our movement overwhelmingly respond to symbolic cues.

It’s an argument other commentators have been picking up on all week and it’s got plenty of GOP loyalists worried. Peggy Noonan was embarrassed to be caught claiming that Palin only got the pick because

“I think they went for this, excuse me, political bullshit about narratives. Every time the Republicans do that, because that’s not where they live and that’s not what they’re good at, they blow it”

The question that keeps coming up is where personal narrative belongs effectively in a McCain campaign. Paul Mirengoff puts it best

We conservatives have had a good time ridiculing the Obama phenomenon, especially its messianic feel — the willingness of its adherents to pour so much hope and belief into such an empty, or at least incomplete, vessel — and its elevation of “narrative” over substance.

It turns out that we were dying to have basically the same experience.

I’d question Noonan’s conviction that “Republicans can’t do narrative” - after all, what was Bush Junior’s 2000 race but the return of the prodigal son? It turned out there was a way to take those alcoholic frat boy stories and make them do good. But Mirengoff is right to point out that they can’t ridicule Obama’s campaign for being narrative-heavy and then turn the same trick themselves. Incidentally, it’s telling that he calls Palin “a vessel” - guess those passive views of femininity just gotta pervade the language mornin’ noon and night.

But there’s a specific literary reason why Palinites shouldn’t try fighting Obama when it comes to narrative in America. Some months ago I heard a truly great literary conservative argue that the truly American narrative is the narrative of the fatherless. As a Brit, I’m often stunned by how preoccupied my American friends are with matters of ethnicity - if a nation won’t provide centuries of history to help one root one’s identity, perhaps neurotically plotting one’s genealogy and racial composition can help fill the void.

Look at the great American novels: Huck Finn, the story of a parentless boy torn between escaping and yearning for a shiftless father; The Scarlett Letter, the plot entirely driven by a child’s fatherlessness; The Catcher in the Rye, told by a boy whose parents are all too absent but who spends his days wishing he could offer children the paternal protection he clearly craves himself; The Great Gatsby, whose dominant character desperately covers up his father’s lowly origins and tries to create a whole new lineage for himself, even though that same rejected father is one of the very few who’ll show up for his funeral…the list goes on and on, the literature of a nation defined by a sense of historical rootlessness, descended from no forbears and entirely self-begotten.

So it’s not a theory I can claim as my own work, but I like it. And when it comes to narratives of fatherlessness, Obama is always going to win hands down. Sorry Sarah, you got the pick because the media strategists hadn’t read enough American novels.

And while we’re at it, check out this older Frum post attributing the cold reception given to Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind on publication to the Old Right’s reluctance to privilege the power of romantic narrative.

Let’s dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago.

Published
by
Nicola Karras
on September 6, 2008
in If You're Not Postmodern You're Not Paying Attention, Media, Philosophy and Politics
. 1 Comment

I am so over Andrew Sullivan. His incessant Palin rants remind me of nothing so much as the crazed Obama COLB people. Conspiracy theories can be great fun, but like their close cousins, they’re pretty terrible ways of making electoral decisions.

Of course, that’s what happens in a democracy (see also: here). Populism wins out every time in a numbers game. The only way out is to have a real elite that commands real respect, because it speaks to real people.

Bobby Kennedy quoted Aeschylus from memory, but the truly remarkable part of his speech was that people responded. Here were admittedly unoriginal ideas, but they were framed in the language of a cultural elite, and they still worked. There were no riots in Indianapolis. It wasn’t just his Boston Brahmin accent or his clothes that marked him out: he was talking about Aeschylus, whose name many of my Yale classmates wouldn’t recognized. It wasn’t a prepared speech. It wasn’t a calculated ploy. It was just the way he thought and talked — and it worked, because erudition was respectable.

We don’t have that natural, intellectual elite any more. We sneak it in from time to time: when Obama gave his Call to Renewal keynote, he used Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling. He didn’t say so, and indeed he couldn’t have — forget about Honest Tea and arugula rocket, just imagine the pundits’ response to name-dropping a Danish existentialist!

On one of his wild oscillations, Sullivan swings close to this:

The good is a society where genuine talent and expertise and education are valued, and regarded as virtues in a public official. Conservatives - until they turned into religious populists - believed it was a good thing that our leaders have advanced education, for example. This is a good elite, and we need it. The bad sort of elite is when the educated class starts looking down their noses at the wisdom and common sense of ordinary people, insulate themselves from where they came from and their families and have contempt for the mores of many less educated Americans.

(Unfortunately, he jumps right back into the attack-dog politics, sans lipstick, in detailing Palin’s educational inadequacies.)

So sure, Sarah Palin isn’t an intellectual. But that’s not the problem, or at least not the root: America, and the West as a whole, no longer see intellectualism as an aspect of the good life. It is, at best, a career for disconnected eggheads. The rise of Kronman’s “research ideal,” or Foucault’s “specific intellectual,” has severed our belief in universality of truth. The modern intellectual is a specialist, concerned with a “local” truth. He doesn’t claim to find meaning or define a telos, and the tradition he engages with is only the literature of his own field. He has a speciality, and he accumulates facts for the storehouse of the ages. It doesn’t tell him, or anyone else, how to live.

No wonder the politics of ressentiment have frightened us away from elitism. When we define an elite simply by its irrelevance to everyone else, of course populism is the only answer. It isn’t enough to have joined in the argument of an intellectual tradition, or even to have come to an answer: if we leave the cave, it’s only so we can go back better prepared.

So study Aeschylus. Study Shakespeare, and Eliot, and the best things thought and said by men — but don’t hole yourself up in the ivory tower. Come back down. Use it. Show Indianapolis that it matters, that it makes you a better leader, that you understand. Stop engaging in the phony populism of an entitled elite. You don’t just deserve respect. Do something to earn it.

Without Limits

Published
by
Kate Maltby
on August 9, 2008
in Arts, Extemporanea and If You're Not Postmodern You're Not Paying Attention
. 6 Comments

Just as TKB and The Reactionary Epicurean are disputing the level of barbarism entailed in the Olympics, I come upon this gem from Simon Barnes at The Times. When it comes to the subject of doping, TKB takes The Economist as her crib to applaud gene doping, while the Transhumanist Epicurean agrees that gene doping consists of using our “God-given Reason (a part of our Nature) to tweak our God-given Bodies (another part of our Nature)”. Where Barnes goes further than them, however, is in his presentation of the arguments for allowing even those performance enhancers that will cause long term damage to the athlete’s health and life expectancy: “Normally, someone who knowingly does something dangerous in order to achieve great things is regarded as a bit of a hero…so isn’t someone who knowingly takes a dangerous drug to win a gold medal for his country also a hero?” I would agree with his logic if it weren’t for the nagging feeling that the real beauty of the Olympics is that, whatever we pretend, it is not a celebration of the collectivist spirit. It’s about the triumph of the individual will, whatever coloured labels those individuals stick on their backs in return for a bit of cash and support. Indeed, it’s the athletes whose lives do become enslaved to the good of the nation whose stories most sully the reputation of the Games.

Nonetheless, one can be sympathetic to Barnes’ point on individualistic grounds. The achievement of excellence at extreme personal cost is truly heroic according to our traditional conceptions, even when it entails no shared benefits beyond the agent. That’s why Achilles is the foundational hero of the West, and even Macbeth compels our sympathy. Pushing your body to the limit has always been par for the course for athletes - hence the high injury rate - and no one has ever denied that overly building up one aspect of your physique will actually damage your life expectancy. Just look what happens when supermen retire and run to seed. More seriously, we allow people to make their own choice between health and buzz when we let them buy cigarettes and alcohol (yes, you can sell yourself into slavery). But where Simon Barnes is at his most compelling is in his very first paragraph. ‘The worst decision sport ever made was to start testing for drugs. Once they began to catch the cheats, all hell broke out and we began to lose the faith…Now the world is full of people declaring that they don’t care who wins what at the Olympic Games, because “they’re all on something”.’ Constant obsession about drugs takes the magic out of sport. The Tour de France, after all, was created precisely as a superhuman contest that no one was ever expected to endure without boosting their performance artificially - in the good old days, long before doping tests, the athletes were all known to be on cocaine, but people still wondered at and lauded them, because their achievements were so unnatural as to be miraculous. Once we accept that we can’t stop people doping, the less active 99.99% of us might just be content to sit back in our armchairs and watch the sheer spectacle of athletes transgressing the frail limitations of this too too solid flesh.

Which leads me back to the real point at issue between TKB and the Epicurean. For TKB, the Olympics represents “a collective unwillingness to abandon the mud from which we rose”. But her opponent counters that “they represent striving and excellence, not wallowing in our filth. Tacky, contrived, commercialized striving to be sure; but striving nonetheless.” This is precisely why the Olympics is a mark of a civilised world. I say this grudgingly - as a hopelessly nerdy, library-inhabiting child, I watched the sporty girls with a mixture of disdain and envy, asking myself why anyone could take pride in success on the netball field when reading Milton was evidently of far more practical value, because it was a real tool for understanding the world and living the examined life. Yet it’s precisely in celebrating skills without immediate practical value that we demonstrate that we have developed beyond “pagan exhibitions of all that fascinates the reptilian brain within us”. The practical benefits that sports training can bring - teamwork, leadership, confidence and so forth - can only be discovered and harnessed after we’ve historically developed such training for its own sake, as any civilised society should the arts. This isn’t entirely modernistic either, for modernism has always enshrined a cult of utility. To the modernist, human experience only makes sense if there is a practical, evolutionary explanation for it. We no longer live in the pagan world in which one’s skill at the javelin directly correlates to the amount of food on one’s plate, although the biological determinists would surely have us return there. So at the Olympic level, such skills serve a purely aesthetic celebration. And if that aesthetic is one of transgressing humanity, then the Olympics must be an essentially transhumanist celebration.

But can the robot love?

Published
by
Nicola Karras
on July 21, 2008
in Arts, Navel Gazing and Philosophy
. 0 Comments

I just got back from (finally) seeing Wall-E. So much ink, virtual and otherwise, has been spilt over the film that I’m not sure I have anything fascinating or original to share. My favorite moment of the film — besides the ought-to-be immortal phrase “I don’t want to survive, I want to live” — was very simple.

Wall-E bumps into the floating chair of one of the Axiom’s inhabitants, turning off the ever-present screen that keeps her virtually connected to all her friends. (Irony levels rising…) Suddenly, she sees the starfield beyond the ship’s windows, the panoply of multimedia advertisements, the wonder both of nature and of what man has wrought. She looks down: “Hey, I didn’t know we had a pool!”

That feeling it just familiar enough to make me wistful. Every so often, I pause and look around. Suddenly, instead of seeing “just” a tree, I remember the complicated dance of photosynthesis and respiration, the compact mystery of the atoms, the sheer alien wonder of a thing that turns sunlight into leafy shade. And then I blink, and check my email.

The joy of Wall-E isn’t in the story or the animation, but in the discovery. Like the best science fiction, the robots and spaceships are only there to make us remember the wonder of home.

The Impossible Dream

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

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.