Archive for the 'Philosophy' Category

I happen to have Mr. McLuhan right here.

Published
by
Nicola Karras
on March 24, 2008
in Philosophy and Politics
. 4 Comments

The semi-annual vacation reading of all my parents’ periodicals brought me to an article by Yale’s own David Bromwich (with whom I will take a class eventually) on euphemism and torture. He describes the “nerve-deadening understatement” of our discourse — wars of unprovoked aggression become “regime change”; mercenaries become “contractors” and finally “employees”; escalation is a “surge” (which sounds as though it contains taurine); torture is “abuse” or simply “professional interrogation techniques.”

The word “professional” is telling, because though this shift numbs our visceral reaction to violence, it’s essentially because it’s an importation of the corporate/bureaucratic world into politics. It isn’t an accident that Bush 43 is the first president with an MBA, promising to run the government “more like a business.” Ever since “dialogue” became a verb, language has been methodically stripped of meaning, connotation, color. Words like “war” and “mercenary” and “torture” conjure up a wealth of images; words like “conflict” and “contractor” don’t.

This isn’t the stylishly gritty world of noir, which can be vivid without color; it isn’t even the helplessly washed-out, brown-tinged wasteland of Westerns. Our language has become bland and mechanical, and so have the ideas we express with it. We envision society as a machine: if we punch the right buttons, we’ll get the outcome we want.

Our favorite thought experiment about torture, the ticking time bomb, assumes that people work like machines, and hides the real point: torture isn’t just a thing we have to do sometimes to avoid a greater evil, an unpleasant job like cleaning the bathroom or flossing. It destroys what makes us human. The ticking time bomb isn’t a question of whether torture is justified, it’s a question of whether we can sacrifice not only our bodies but our souls. Any given thought experiment can’t cover every side of an issue, though they can be useful in forcing someone to address something they’ve ignored. The danger comes when we revert to the same old canards: we never see what they leave out.

Jargon or mindless repetition of canards — corporate, political, or academic — can absolve us of the responsibility for thought. Once, in a fit of disgust with a literature class, I decided to write the most ridiculous paper I could. It started:

…the poem’s rich language suggests passion and decay, lush vitality and decadent rot. The opposition of incongruous images…contains a wealth of semiotic detail that expands and refines the implications of the text itself. The dialectical structure created by the juxtaposition of contrasting elements is subordinated to the circularity of the image as a whole, indicating the cyclical nature of life, inevitability of death, and art’s unique role in revealing these.

Taken together, this does not mean anything, but even the most pretentious word here has a legitimate use elsewhere. Adam and the Reactionary Epicurean claim that jargon is only exclusionary, that the only point to using words like “epistemological” or “liminality” is to show how much smarter we are than anyone else. The RE goes so far as to claim that “anything that can be said can be said in small words of anglo-saxon origin.” This is generally true — “fire” is a better word than “conflagration,” and our urge to complicate our language smacks of préciosité — but complicated and obscure words serve a vital function: genre.

At another point, the RE explains that “Möbius transformations form a group under composition which is isomorphic to the automorphism group of a sphere.” Since I am a Humanities major, this means nothing to me, but if he says it in small words of Anglo-Saxon origin, it loses the indefinable tinge and magic of math.

Non-specific language turns the extraordinary mundane, as when mercenaries become “contractors” — and as when epistemology becomes “knowing stuff.”

If you don’t recognize the title, run, do not walk, to your nearest video rental facility and get Annie Hall. Alternatively, watch this.

(Note to Adam: I am in no sense a neoconservative, unless you mean “neo-” in the sense of “new”; in that case, far better to call me a baby conservative, which, while patronizing, is at least true.)

This post is entirely frivolous.

Published
by
Nicola Karras
on March 16, 2008
in Extemporanea and Philosophy
. 2 Comments

The books I read function as a fairly accurate measure of my emotional state. At the moment, I am happy, and so I am reading Chesterton’s Orthodoxy. I like it a great deal, though I’ve only just moved from the condemnation of modernity to the Christian apologetics. (If I were unhappy, I would have more traditional beach reading, like The Road to Serfdom.)

Now, compare and contrast…

  1. “I did try to found a heresy of my own; and when I had put the last touches to it, I discovered that it was orthodoxy.”
  2. “Yes, I like Piña Coladas
    And getting caught in the rain
    I’m not much into health food
    I am into champagne
    I’ve got to meet you by tomorrow noon
    And cut through all this red-tape
    At a bar called O’Malley’s
    Where we’ll plan our escape.”
    So I waited with high hopes
    And she walked in the place
    I knew her smile in an instant
    I knew the curve of her face
    It was my own lovely lady
    And she said, “Oh it’s you.”
    Then we laughed for a moment
    And I said, “I never knew.”

What other one-hit wonders can we match to famous writers?

Ruminations on the Oldest Profession

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m majoring in Dead White Male Studies.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More…

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Enter, sputtering in disbelief.

Published
by
Dara Lind
on February 27, 2008
in If You're Not Postmodern You're Not Paying Attention, Navel Gazing and Philosophy
. 2 Comments

This probably isn’t the best way to introduce myself (EDIT: okay, maybe it is) but I differ with 2/3 of Nicola’s characterization of modernism, postmodernism and “post-postmodernism”:

1. Postmodernism isn’t the denial of meaning; it’s the denial of Meaning. Any postmodernist (and most reflexive conservatives, whether they consider themselves postmodern or not) will admit that the arbitrariness of meaning doesn’t make it any less important to the individuals who have created or inherited that meaning for themselves.

2. “Post-postmodernism” is only a good term insofar as it’s reminiscent of “postapocalyptic” — and even that’s more an asset of style (”postapocalyptic” is an AWESOME word) than of sense. Because there’s no inherent contradiction between meaning (properly understood as arbitrary but still valued), the recreation of meaning isn’t something we have to move beyond postmodernism to accomplish — it’s just another take on the postmodern agenda. This is why I prefer the term “creative postmodernism” to “post-postmodernism.”

I’d also add that conservatism isn’t the only type of creative postmodernism, though it’s unusually well-developed. While the postmodern liberals who think that in pointing out the arbitrariness of oppression they are promoting autonomy have it all wrong, in my opinion, some non-conservative ideologies — such as feminist theory, perhaps — could be construed as creatively postmodern without being conservative by most standards.

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
. 6 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.