Archive for the 'Philosophy' Category

Leave the bow-tie, take the cannoli.

Published
by
Nicola Karras
on July 6, 2008
in Inexplicably Burke, Philosophy and Yale
. 14 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.”

Meme adoption, behind the Times.

Published
by
Dara Lind
on June 29, 2008
in If You're Not Postmodern You're Not Paying Attention, Media and Technology
. 2 Comments

Before this morning, I had only one Facebook friend who had adopted the middle name “Hussein” — an acquaintance I acted with back in Ohio. After today’s NYT trend piece, I now have six.

I can’t help but feel that adopting a meme after you’ve read about it in the New York Times isn’t just a cardinal violation of the Hipster Code of Conduct, but a total misuse of social media. As laid out in the article, the point of the meme isn’t just to declare support for Senator Obama — heaven knows, there are dozens of other ways to do that on Facebook alone — but to force a reconsideration in one’s own friends of the supposedly “dangerous,” “un-American” nature of the man’s middle name. It’s a brilliant idea, using the individual connections of social networking to influence individual political attitudes.

But if you don’t interact online with people who would judge someone negatively based on the associations “Hussein” presents, it’s a useless gesture, and I doubt many Yalies do have Facebook friends who fit that description. Furthermore, while a few friends spontaneously adopting the name Hussein might be recognized as a political statement, and therefore merit some consideration by those who would otherwise draw bigoted conclusions, dozens of friends doing so can’t be seen as anything other than “the next Facebook trend,” and therefore doesn’t provoke much further thought at all — sabotaging its purpose.

The rapidity with which memes can become mass phenomena on the Internet is astounding, but that doesn’t mean everything has to be a mass phenomenon. When we turn every gesture into a Gesture (a wave into The Wave), we blunt the edge of the original action. Maybe once we start treating everything on the Internet as a new toy, we’ll be able to develop notions of scale and proportion; more likely, though, the capitalist confidence that spontaneous, unchecked growth will allow everything to find its proper place will defeat inclinations toward more cautious planning. The Internet never found a good idea it couldn’t broadcast, but this may be far too much of a good thing,

Literature ≥ Philosophy

Published
by
Nicola Karras
on June 26, 2008
in Arts, Literary Factions and Philosophy
. 2 Comments

If you want to be more like me — and why wouldn’t you? — you should read the following books.

  1. Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson.
  2. American Gods, by Neil Gaiman.
  3. The Vorkosigan series, by Lois McMaster Bujold. (Start with Cordelia’s Honor, then Young Miles.)
  4. The Principia Discordia, by Malaclypse the Younger.
  5. Cat’s Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut.

You may have noticed that all five (well, six) are science fiction or fantasy. This is entirely appropriate, because it’s in the realm of speculative fiction that we can best explore the cultural and philosophical implications of our society.

American Gods explores our spiritual desolation:

“This is a bad land for gods,” said Shadow. As an opening statement it wasn’t Friends, Romans, countrymen, but it would do. “You’ve probably all learned that. The old gods are ignored. The new gods are as quickly taken up as they are abandoned, cast aside for the next big thing.”

Cat’s Cradle is a parable on emptiness and the absurdity of love:

Man blinked. “What is the purpose of all this?” he asked politely.

“Everything must have a purpose?” asked God.

“Certainly,” said man.

“Then I leave it to you to think of one for all this,” said God.

And He went away.

The Principia Discordia responds with both mysticism and a call to chaos:

“Gentlemen,” he said, “why does Pickering’s Moon go about in reverse orbit? Gentlemen, there are nipples on your chests; do you give milk? And what, pray tell, Gentlemen, is to be done about Heisenberg’s Law?” He paused. “SOMEBODY HAD TO PUT ALL OF THIS CONFUSION HERE!”

Snow Crash offers a stateless dystopia full of metaphysical confusion and low-level heroism:

“Wait a minute, Juanita. Make up your mind. This Snow Crash thing—is it a virus, a drug, or a religion?”
Juanita shrugs. “What’s the difference?”

The Vorkosigan books give us whole worlds, with vastly different human cultures, but always return to backwards, neo-feudal Barrayar, a planet the Nisbetcons should love:

“Reputation is what other people know about you. Honor is what you know about yourself. Guard your honor. Let your reputation fall where it will. And outlive the bastards.”

There’s far more to all of them than this, of course, and if you are unconvinced I’d be thrilled to discuss at length.

The planet is your souvenir. So’s the umbrella in your drink.

Published
by
Dara Lind
on June 11, 2008
in If You're Not Postmodern You're Not Paying Attention
. 6 Comments

LEGAL DISCLAIMER: The knowledge of alcohol revealed in this post comes exclusively secondhand, gleaned from those who (unlike me) are over the age of twenty-one and can therefore drink legally. Really. I swear.

While the Pomocon Worthies seem to have found common political cause in Left Conservative’s “decentralist manifesto,” I’ve gotten lost on the social-theory side of localism — especially the skepticism it requires toward modernity’s globalizing technologies, as my DTO piece hinted at and the ongoing lamentation of the death of the “local scene” illustrates.

But I suspect that I’ve finally resigned myself to being on the wrong side of history on that one (at least until the Internet becomes not only more personalized but more humanized). After all, it occurred to me the other day that if we were living a few hundred years ago, during the dawn of globalized trade, we’d probably be heralding the death of place by lamenting the demise of regional liquors. “How on earth will Russia still be Russia when anyone, anywhere can drink vodka?” we’d sigh. (Never mind that potato vodka itself was, of course, a fringe benefit of the Columbian Exchange.) “And who would be so boorish as to drink rum north of the Tropic of Cancer?”

Obviously, the global (or at least globalized) availability of various types of drink hasn’t shorn them entirely of regional character — after all, global markets require increased niche specialization, and a homeland can be repackaged as “brand heritage.” Vodka manufacturers seem to have come closest to tearing the roots from the bottle, taking advantage of their product’s lack of sensory identity to universalize it. (Remember the “In an Absolut World” campaign? And don’t get me started on the vodka martini…) On the other end of the scale are whiskeys — in a unique position anyway, given that each sub-variety has its own heritage — whose branding often not only embraces geography, but history and genealogy. I find the Canadian Club campaign tagline “Damn right your dad drank it” to make for pretty annoying ad copy, but it’s a good ilustration of how this plays out with regard to Canadian whiskey; and if the medicine-show packaging of Jim Beam wasn’t obvious enough to illuminate bourbon’s brand image, there’s always the down-market brand Rebel Yell.

And then there’s tequila, whose unique position in the phenomenology of globalized booze was revealed to me today on the bus ride home after I struck up a conversation in Spanish with a fellow passenger. (No, this isn’t standard practice on Minneapolis buses — Minnesota nice doesn’t go quite that far, thank goodness — but I appreciate every chance to practice my Spanish I can get these days.) An older white gentleman spent a few minutes staring at us, then leaned over and very deliberately said (in English) to my interlocutor: “Excuse me, sir, but could you tell me which is the best tequila?”

This is fairly telling on its own, at least for the process of association: Spanish-speaking –> Mexican –> tequila. But seeing the amused look on our faces, the gentleman (rather apologetically) attempted to justify his interruption, beginning “When I was in vacation in Cancun…”

The thing about globalization, you see, is that people turn out to be the most mobile things of all. This gentleman didn’t claim to be as informed about tequila as someone whose nationality suggested an intimate familiarity with it, but his taste for it was justified because he’d first tried it on its native soil as a tourist. But Cancun, of course, isn’t just a place but a scene, a year-round fiesta turistica — and tequila, when it is consumed in the States, is usually consumed as a vehicle for reckless abandon of the spring break variety. The relationship of drinker to drink is no longer one of heritage, but one of role.

The same can be said of most other spirits (again, vodka excepted): they’ve become both unique and accessible, their heritages collectible like souvenirs. WASPness can be accessed not just through marriage or surname, but through a glass of quality Scotch or a G&T. Anyone can walk into an Irish pub these days, but if you don’t at least order a pint of Guinness you’re not getting the proper “pub experience” and the boisterous, night-out-with-the-boys collegiality that phrase connotes. The list goes on.

Maybe it’s just that I and most of the drinkers I know are relatively young, and on the whole we haven’t settled into being “gin drinkers,” “bourbon drinkers,” etc. But it seems to me that those who have settled into those labels have done so because there’s a particular image they consistently wish to put forward. Welcome to the globalized world, where heritage is identity is commodity, and the only consistency is consumer choice.

But here’s the rest of the story: After listing his favorite brands of tequila, the hispanolhablante on the bus (who was in fact Mexican) turned to me and joked in Spanish about Minnesotans who thought they’d seen all of Mexico after visiting Cancun, Puerto Vallarta and Cuernavaca. He explained that he was pretty familiar with these places too, of course — after all, he’d seen them frequently when he worked as a bus driver for tourists like the man who’d just asked him for advice. When we advocate the real world as a means of creating genuine civic spirit, it’s necessary to remember that just because each participant can see the other doesn’t mean they’re on equal footing, and the power dynamics that play out are often the inheritance of global political economy. Just a note of caution.

Like so many other genies of modernity, this one couldn’t be put back in the bottle if we tried to do so, and we shouldn’t. But I think that the question of chosen versus unchosen identities/loyalties gets complicated by the promise of playing heritage that global liquor distributors make.

Most importantly, though, it means that John McCain’s promise to “veto every single beer” isn’t just a slip of the tongue or a mark of senility — it’s downright anti-American. The nativists are right, he is trying to destroy what’s left of our national heritage!

About the Death of Peoples

Published
by
Nicola Karras
on June 7, 2008
in History, If You're Not Postmodern You're Not Paying Attention, Philosophy and Politics
. 5 Comments

…the modernists of the Right have been, almost without exception, fascists and totalitarians, for they know that when things fall apart and the center does not hold, the only recourse is to an invented and imposed order. (Tonsor, 1986)

There’s been a long discussion among the Pythagorean Brotherhood about whether fascism is “on the right.” Jamie Kirchick wold take it a step farther; he suggests that “Pat Buchanan simply has a place in his heart for ethnic nationalists and brown shirts. Sympathy for racists and authoritarians runs in his family, after all…” The implicit accusation of anti-Semitism, though not unusual for Kirchick, is disgraceful, and does a disservice to the real question. What is the relationship between fascism and conservatism? It’s less sinister than the Left might like to believe — and closer than the Right wants to admit.

More…

Tuesday Anthro Blogging: in which Dara apologizes for her hermeneutic tendencies.

Published
by
Dara Lind
on May 27, 2008
in General Scholarship, Philosophy and Social Theory
. 0 Comments

I’m not sure I have anything interesting to add on pedagogy per se, but Helen (perhaps predictably) piqued my interest in this exchange by linkdropping my favorite half-guilty-pleasure anthropological article ever, “Notes on the Balinese Cockfight”:

When Roland Barthes unpacks the symbolic meaning of everyday things, or Clifford Geertz talks about what’s really going on in a Balinese cockfight, or feminist film critics say that screwball comedy is inherently sexist, they’re not pointing out possible interpretations; they’re calling attention to messages we’ve already received without necessarily realizing it.

First of all, of course, it’s sort of important to point out that we can’t know for sure if Geertz’s interpretation of the Balinese cockfight is definitely “what’s really going on,” because we only have Geertz’s account to work with. I’m sure there are other, contradictory accounts, but I haven’t read them and I’d be surprised if Helen has. (There is at least one line of enduring criticism of the piece that I’ve encountered, however, which is that Geertz somehow neglected to mention that Indonesia was in the midst of civil war and unrest while he was doing his fieldwork. It’s certainly possible that this had little or no impact on the cockfight, but is it really the job of the hermeneutist to bet against hidden connections between social systems?)

The broader issue here is that the sphere of things that are true about a particular text/film/phenomenon — messages that one can accurately say are embedded — is, if not infinite, incredibly vast. But it’s obviously true that not every message embedded in a piece is received, as any failed artist will attest; my favorite example of this, of course, is Brecht, who in attempting to make a theatre beyond the personal and the sentimental ended up inventing characters with whom his audiences sympathized madly. Sure, there’s an obligation to point out the influential messages, but doesn’t falsely assuming that a message has been influential distort the text rather than revealing it?

It’s also often true that messages are reflected rather than created by the text — while screwball comedy may have, in its way, reinforced gender inequalities (something to which those of us who consider ourselves genre conversationalists remain susceptible). Recognizing the difference between conduit and origin is important, sure, but a reflected message is only half the battle – it’s somewhat irresponsible not to try to go back and search for the origin itself, especially if you’re attempting to point out to your students/readers/audience messages that they’ve already received.

The enduring popularity of the essay, and Geertz’s work in general, isn’t because of its theoretical insights but because of its literary ones — hermeneutics requires a faithful representation of the text being considered, and “thick description” makes ethnography much more fun to read. Geertz does a brilliant job with narrative in the piece, but narrative really does require deliberate choices, and those depend more on the hermeneutist’s own perspective than we scholars, critics and pundits usually care to admit.

Quick hit. Like a rubber bullet in Seattle in 1999.

Published
by
Dara Lind
on April 24, 2008
in Extemporanea, If You're Not Postmodern You're Not Paying Attention and Media
. 2 Comments

Posting will likely be light until about mid-May (it’s the end of the semester and I, for one, have about 60 pages in research papers, if I’m lucky). I’ll log in later this weekend to direct you to some distractions, but for the moment I just wanted to point out the following:

If you redirect the beginning of globalization so that it turns inward and introspective, you get blogalization.

I think there’s actually some legitimate significance to this. I’ll write the essay someday.

Good and evil are the prejudices of God — said the snake.

Published
by
Nicola Karras
on April 5, 2008
in Philosophy and Politics
. 3 Comments

Mother Jones has a fantastic article about the effects that torture — excuse me, “enhanced interrogation techniques” — can have on the torturers. (h/t Eve) This, I think, is the best argument to make against torture. It’s horrifying and dehumanizing to the victims, but we regularly accept the necessity of other dehumanizing acts, especially when on a war footing.

The more important point, and the one that far too few emphasize, is that torture destroys the soul of the torturer. It’s dehumanizing to be tortured, but it is, at least, something that someone else is doing to you. To be the torturer is to dehumanize yourself — or, perhaps, to rip off that veil of second nature that hid something you had never seen before. A state that permits — indeed, encourages — its citizens and soldiers to destroy themselves morally in its service as no business compelling anyone’s loyalty.

Ben Allbright doesn’t want to accept that what he did was torture, because unless you’ve deadened yourself to the term (and disturbingly many have) you have to accept that it’s wrong.

Ben loves to debate, perhaps because he usually wins, but now he was endlessly, fruitlessly arguing with himself. “Every human being instinctively knows right from wrong. There is never a justification for torture.” But then again, “Is softening people up wrong on some levels? I don’t know. It wasn’t beneficial to them, but it was presented as necessary.” He had seen a side of himself he didn’t know existed, and now he had to live with that. “In combat you question your mortality,” he told me. “In these prisons you question your morality.”

Ben isn’t the exception. People do these things. People enjoy doing these things. There is a seed of darkness at the heart of man. It isn’t overwhelming — we feel guilty, until we train ourselves not to — but it’s there, and the whole purpose of society and tradition and culture and (if we must) the state is to teach us: first, not to let it out and then, to eradicate it if we can.

For the most extensive period of human history, punishment was certainly not meted out because people held the instigator of evil responsible for his actions, and thus it was not assumed that only the guilty party should be punished: — it was much more as it still is now when parents punish their children out of anger over some harm they have suffered, anger vented on the perpetrator — but anger restrained and modified through the idea that every injury has some equivalent and that compensation for it could, in fact, be paid out, even if that is through the pain of the perpetrator. …to what extent can suffering be a compensation for “debts”? To the extent that making someone suffer provides the highest degree of pleasure, to the extent that the person hurt by the debt, in exchange for the injury as well as for the distress caused by the injury, got an extraordinary offsetting pleasure: creating suffering — a real celebration… (Nietzsche, 1887)

There are any number of reasons why John Yoo, and the rest of the Bush Justice Department that tried to find legal justifications for torture, are wicked men, but here is the best: they decided, on utilitarian grounds, that torture was necessary, then demanded that someone else pay the price. There is certainly something noble in throwing yourself on a grenade to save the rest of your platoon. There may, I think, be something noble in doing the same with your soul — if there really is a ticking time bomb, if it really will save New York, then perhaps it’s noble to damn yourself to save others.

It is never noble to throw someone else on a grenade.

Freud, backwards — and in heels.

Published
by
Nicola Karras
on March 31, 2008
in Inexplicably Burke, Ladies and Philosophy
. 10 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.)

“I’m obnoxious and disliked, you know that, sir.”

Published
by
Nicola Karras
on March 24, 2008
in History, Media, Philosophy and Politics
. 3 Comments

I’ve been watching the HBO miniseries on John Adams, and aside from the fact that they have yet to burst into song, I like it. (Also, George Washington is played by my erstwhile next-door neighbor, David Morse.)

Two things strike me about the show. The first is the regionalism: the real sentiment that somewhere else in America is not “my country” seems to be limited to Southerners. Still, though I know that the colonies were culturally distinct, that the difference between a Virginian and a New Englander far more than geographic, it hardly seems an issue today. Has the federal vision of America, where states maintained their own identities like European countries under the EU, failed? Or is this just another example of my East Coast cultural hegemony speaking?

The other point, which I think is more interesting, is the shows treatment of the reasons for American independence. Some of the delegates talk about natural rights, with Lockean language about self-rule and self-determination, but some follow the example of John Dickinson, of minuet fame:

“I have looked for our rights in the laws of nature and can find them only in the laws of political society. I have looked for our rights in the constitution of the English government and found them there.”

This fundamental tension — “the British Crown is abusing our natural rights as men” vs. “the British Crown is incompetent in preserving our traditional rights as Englishmen” — is incredibly important to our understanding of the Revolutionary War. I know which side I would have fallen on had I been there, and I’m pleased as punch to see a mainstream representation of this debate among the Founders.

I am a little frustrated to see the “Join or Die” graphic used so much in the show; it really wasn’t the flag of the colonies. Then again, HBO has a bad habit of using the shows’ own logos in the show. (Cf. Carnivàle.)

This may be a better representation of the Revolutionary War, too.