After the Future

Kierkegaard on the Couch

...the specific character of despair is this: it is precisely unaware of being despair.  --Soren Kierkegaard, Sickness unto Death

There is abundant chatter today about “being spiritual” but scarcely anyone believes that a person can be of troubled mind and healthy spirit. Nor can we fathom the idea that the happy wanderer, who is all smiles and has accomplished everything on his or her self-fulfillment list, is, in fact, a case of despair. But while Kierkegaard would have agreed that happiness and melancholy are mutually exclusive, he warns, “Happiness is the greatest hiding place for despair.” --Gordon Marino

I just caught this op ed by Gordon Marino in the NYT.  It's kind of shocking, actually, that something like this would appear there. It seems so out of place these days. His points regarding the distinction between depression and despair are very important. A parallel distinction between 'acedia' and depression is also very well developed in Kathleen Norris's Acedia and Me. I'm not going to get into what 'acedia' means here, but it is not the same as Kierkegaard's 'despair'.  They are similar, though, in this respect: they are not to be confused with clinical depression--they are conditions hazardous to one's spiritual health. In fact, as the quote above indicates, for Kierkegaard, someone in a state of despair--which is the condition of the loss of Self--could be very self-satisfied and think himself happy. Despair is not an emotional condition; it's a spiritual one.

I came of age in an era when Freud was still taken seriously, and when it wasn't shameful to admit you found Jung intriguing. But we're in a post-Freudian era now. Something happened--in the 80s or 90s?--when it became accepted conventional wisdom that the ailments of the soul were nothing more than bad brain chemistry . I was never a Freudian, but Freud, at least, when he was taken seriously, created a space in our mainstream cultural life for considering the possibility that we have souls that are in need of our care.

For Freud the soul or psyche was mostly a cauldron of sub-rational, instinctual impulses, but while I was never a Jungian, I found him interesting for finding a quasi culturally legitimate way to talk about the super-rational and transpersonal archetypes as mixed in with all the other impulses in that cauldron. That kind of thing seems to have been pushed to the periphery now.  One rarely finds anything in the mainstream media that is even remotely interesting in its discussion of the spiritual life or of the care of the soul.  That's why I was so surprised to see this piece in the Times.

Ernest Becker, in his book The Denial of Death, argues that Kierkegaard was talking about both the sub- and super-rational in a proto-postmodern idiom decades before both Freud and Jung. Kierkegaard and Nietzsche are, in my opinion, the profounder and more honest psychologists in comparison to Freud and Jung, and  each Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, in a profounder way, was a  prophet pointing to two possibilities that lay before humans in what later became the postmodern age.

Let's do a bloggy comparison of the two: I admire Nietzche's cultural analysis, but find his prescription for a cure regressive.  I admire Kierkegaard's cultural analysis, and see him as someone who points us to our best future. Both understood the leveling cultural forces carried by late modernity and the spirit of capitalism and how they were grinding up the human soul and churning out despairing Last Men. And both offered alternatives, which I would argue are the only alternatives to being a bread-and-circuses Last Man if one is serious about finding one. Kierkegaard's solution, if not the road less frequently taken (I think there are many 'anonymous' Kierkegaardians out there), is certainly a road much less celebrated in popular and high culture. W.H. Auden and Walker Percy were deeply influenced by Kierkegaard.  What significant literary figure or thinker is alive today about whom the same could be said?

 

Nietzsche and, more obviously, Darwin define the cultural narrative that dominates mainstream secular thinking in our time. Darwin’s influence is better understood, but Nietzsche is no less important in terms of his significance in shaping the postmodern stream of secularist thought. When talk of Nietzsche comes up, it’s usually associated with a discussion of his idea of the uebermensch “Superman” or, and the way the Nazis appropriated it in to their bizarre ideas about the Aryan master race. While the German word uebermensch is usually translated into English as superman, it's meaning is closer to "overcoming man." 

And we could point to many of the toxic ways in which Nietzsche’s philosophy, fairly or unfairly, has been adapted to justify excessively pathological behaviors. Just as there are vulgar Christians, there are vulgar Nietzscheans, and it's unfair to attribute to the eponymous founder the limitations of those who claim him as their inspiration. (Nietzsche understood that as well as anyone as in his famous quote: "In truth, there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross.") Nietzsche was an honest and very serious thinker, and he was confronting a very real problem head on. He was struggling for a way to embrace transcendence in a world in which grace was an impossibility. Not possible, I'm afraid. There was only one Nietzsche, and he died in an asylum. But he deserves credit for seeing more clearly than almost anyone the nature of the problem and the importance at the 'end of an age' to find a new model of open-ended human future possibility to which late moderns could aspire that contrasted with the homogenized lumpen mass into which he thought his contemporaries were being transformed. He called this homogenized mass the Last Man.

(Digression: The problem of the Last Man is very interestingly grappled with in the unfairly maligned Francis Fukuyama book The End of History and the Last Man. Yes, that "last man".  The book is not so much about the triumph of capitalism and social democracy as about asking the question: "Is that all there is to life? It's a big, big problem and nobody wants to talk about it. I given him credit for trying.)

The conflict between Superman and Last Man has had a tremendous impact on our popular culture in the way we have come to understand heroism or what the well-lived life is. It is seen, for instance, in almost every film that comes out of Hollywood since the 1960s. The protagonist, whether he’s an action hero, or the free-spirited type that for instance Jack Nicholson portrays in One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke, or even Matthew Broderick in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (just to take three films that randomly come to mind) is a variation of Nietzsche’s uebermensch.

Whether Nietzsche would approve of these heroes is another matter, but we understand our heroism these days in a Nietzshean idiom. He is formulaically depicted as a larger-than-life, make-up-the-rules-as-you-go-along Superman who always fights a villain who represents the repressive, conformist law of the Last Man--aka, "The System". Every plot that pits the alienated, risk-taking, bold individual against the soul-crushing ”system” is a variation on this Nietzschean theme.

The American adaptation of Nietzsche’s Superman is hardly perceived as pathological. Rather in one variation or another, he is  the charismatic, passionate man. He’s in touch with his instincts, he knows what he wants, and he thinks that rules are for lesser beings, namely the Last-Man wimps who lack his boldness and initiative. In Hollywood terms you’re either a Superman or a conformist, ground down, bread-and-circuses Last Man, and if you’re a Last Man, your story is only interesting if it’s about how you find the courage to become a Superman.

(Another digression: I just saw the Mira Nair/Hilary Swank "Amelia", and it's the same old me-too-ism that shapes the least interesting part of the feminist narrative. Why do only men get to be an uebermensch?  Nair's Amelia needs to be free, not caged. The animals running on the savannah--they're so free.  Please. It's so cliche now, I'm amazed that anybody bothers to explore this theme. Ok. I get it. She was ahead of her time, but what a bore. It's just the story of a woman wanting to go down the dead end already explored by men who preceded her. That's a feminism devoid of the feminine, which is it's own kind of dead end.)

So the Nietzschean heroes tend to be transgressive "liberal" types who seek to overcome the restrictions of traditional morality when they appear in popular cinema, but in real life, particularly in the American political sphere, the Nietzschean hero is embraced more readily and dangerously by the political right. Right wingers like Dick Cheney see themselves as uebermenschen, and see Liberals as the contemptible promoters of a society that produces lumpen last men: Rule of law?  That's for Last Men, not for me. I am a superman who creates his own reality. Ironies, of course abound, when it comes to the ways in which the lockstep, conformist, law-and-order movement conservative comes to support leaders like Cheney, who sees himself fancies himself above the law and beyond good and evil.  These movement conservatives are, alas, Last Men, and they submit to the strong man, the Big Daddy, who promises them bread and circuses and to keep them safe.

But movement conservatives don't see themselves as Last Men. Rather they see themselves as players in a grandiose heroic fantasy. They see themselves as defenders of freedom, and they see Liberals as destroyers of it. Movement Conservatives, with the exception of the demagogues who cynically manipulate them, are Last Men through and through, but they project their Last Manhood onto their ideological polar opposites. One thing about Freud and Jung: they understood how projection works. And if there is one essential element of collective right-wing psychology, it's projection of dissociated negative parts of themselves to demonize those whom they perceive to be their enemies, whether they are Communists, Muslims, or Democrats. Obama is a trifecta in this respect. 

So what alternative does Kierkegaard offer to either the Last Man or the Superman?  Here's Marino in the NYT piece:

Though it will make the Bill Mahers of the world wince, despair according to Kierkegaard is a lack of awareness of being a self or spirit. A Freud with religious categories up his sleeves, the lyrical philosopher emphasized that the self is a slice of eternity. While depression involves heavy burdensome feelings, despair is not correlated with any particular set of emotions but is instead marked by a desire to get rid of the self, or put another way, by an unwillingness to become who you fundamentally are. This unwillingness often takes the form of flat out wanting to be someone else.

I explore this problem of Selfhood in my posts "From Outer to Inner; From Given to Chosen I and II", But here's the bottom line: The difference between Nietzsche and Kierkegaard is that the latter was open to the super-rational, the realm of grace and freedom. Nietzsche's world, for all his longing for liberation, was a closed system, a jail, the overcoming Self come to a dead end, locked in on itself, an eternity of drawn-out Groundhog Days, endless cycles of eternal return. You can argue that Nietzsche is the braver for accepting the hard truth, but to do so requires a willful rejection of so much evidence for the existence of grace.

You don't have to believe in the Christian mythos; unpacking that is graduate level work that isn't all that important in the final analysis.  Just acknowledging the existence of grace is all that's required. It's Ariadne's thread, lying there right in front of us and and if one uses it as a guide it will bring him wherever he needs to go, whether with the correct intellectual understanding or not. And for some pulling on that thread might lead them to Kierkegaard who might help them make some sense of what they've got hold of, because his work is nothing if it is not primarily a phenomenology of grace. That's the only thing that explains his description of the movement out of the aesthetic, into the ethical, and ultimately into the religious. It's at the heart of his  ideas about the teleological suspension of the ethical. It's why he points to Father Abraham as the paradigm of the man of grace. But the reverse is true as well: you're not going to get anywhere with Kierkegaard unless you have some basic apprehension of the basic logic of grace.  His stuff will seem only to be convoluted nonsense without it.

And if the world is in fact devoid of grace, and the great tradition that bears witness to it is delusional, then Nietzsche's intuition or logic of eternal return is quite correct. But once you accept the possibility that he is not correct the world is turned upside down logic of salvation history, of interventions from outside the closed system that are designed to subvert the system from within its belly, not in the style of the Nietzchean hero, but in the style the Logos bearer--those who have Selves reconstituted in the image and likeness. Frodo Baggins is more the heroic prototype here, but for more on this, see my posts Christian Liberty and  Disembedding and Theosis.

 

 

 

 

Quote of the Day: Yglesias (Updated)

The Senate Republican caucus is organized, like the House caucuses of both parties, like a partisan political organization whose objective is to advance the shared policy objectives of the party. The Senate Democratic caucus, by contrast, is organized like a fun country club trying to recruit members. Join Team Democrat and Vote However You Want Without Consequence! But it's no way to get things done.  (Source, h/t Benen)

I don't know what Lieberman--or Bayh, Lincoln, Landrieu, Neslon--will do eventually, but I suspect they'll get in line when it comes to the cloture vote.  But the point Yglesias makes still stands--the senate Democrats' m.o. is farcical. 

UPDATE: Stating the obvious, Greenwald on the Maddow show tonight makes clear how both Bayh and Lieberman and their wives are shills for the insurance industry.  Do they really want the conflict of interest scrutiny that is going to come their way big time if they support the Republican filibuster?  I doubt it:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Fighting for Healthcare Update

For many years, it's been centrist and conservative-leaning senators who have been scoring legislative victories by digging in their heels, so this represented a quite dramatic turnabout. It is difficult to remember the last time that progressives won a legislative victory by laying down firm demands and sticking to them. In the House, the Congressional Progressive Caucus has found its feet, too, and is locked in a final battle with conservative Democrats over the shape of a public option.

At the end of last week, Sen.Olympia Snowe of Maine, the lone Republican that Democrats are still trying to woo, said that she couldn't support a bill that had a public option with an opt-out provision. Snowe preferred a public option that would be "triggered" into being by a failure by the insurance industry to meet certain benchmarks.

But Reid and the leadership faced this basic math: There is only one Snowe and there are 60 members of the Democratic caucus. If just a few Democrats abandoned the bill, it would fall short even with Snowe's support.

This battle for healthcare is one thing that gives me hope that the pessimism that animated my post yesterday about the power vacuum created by a supine congress and filled by executive power is unwarranted. If a cohort of principled progressives in congress win here, perhaps it will empower them to address the abuse of executive power problem. The imbalance in our system of checks and balances is by far the most important issue the republic faces going forward.  But if a victory in healthcare is the first step toward congress reasserting itself, I'm fine with it.

Obama Coverup

I just came from reading Greenwald's piece this morning about the NYT editorial taking Obama to task for covering up the Bush era war crimes and for embracing Bush abuses of power. The comments after the post voice a lot of impotent rage, and I sympathize. But while it's disturbing, it is only baffling to those of us who really don't understand how power in large institutions works. 

Power does many things, but one thing you can count on it to do is fill a vacuum, and that vacuum has been created by a largely supine, morally vacuous congress. We can only count on congress to stand up and be counted when it comes to condemning the sexual indiscretions of Democrats; matters relating to the rule of law, the integrity of the constitution, or checks and balances, not so much.

Obama and his people deserve the criticism they're getting about not relinquishing the executive power arrogated by Bush/Cheney.  I don't think that at this point we can cut them any more slack on that. But there is tremendous institutional resistance to give up power; If a balance is to be regained, executive power has to be taken back, and the ones to do it are Congress and the courts.

And we, the people, are supposedly the ones who control congress.  But the reality is that entrenched power does as it pleases until challenged by a force that is greater than it. And that power does not exist except in numbers, and we are either too apathetic, or if not apathetic, too divided and conquered to muster enough numbers to pose much of an electoral threat.

We are forced into a position in which we must rely on the benignity of entrenched power, and that, of course, is foolishness.  And so things will progress along this tack until things get so bad, probably when the Republicans take over again, that there will be some kind of push back, and that will be pretty ugly. Until then most people just won't care. They've other concerns closer to home, and that's just the way of it.

Futile Culture Wars

My response (with a few slight edits) to a Jame Poulos post at Postmodern Conservative, "Why the Culture Wars Won't Die."  My argument is that while he might be right that these wars won't die, like most wars they are futile waste of energy that serve the interests of people who are not on the front lines.  I'm quoting  commenter Matoko Chan in the opening epigraph:

There is no “Culture War”.

There is only cultural and demographic evolution.
No religio/demographic group can fight cultural evolution.

I'm with Matoko Chan. The anything-goes folks vs. the honor-the-ancestors-folks have been fighting a war that has little relevance to culture or to the future of culture. Culture happens. And cultures die or at least experience winter seasons, which perhaps will give way after a while to a springtime. The winter season of the 14th century gave way to the springtime of the 15th.

I'm with Barzun. The West is decadent. Decadence happens, and like winter it's not necessarily a bad thing. It's just a time that doesn't have much exterior spiritual energy anymore--the spirit has gone underground, so to speak, into the soul's interior. And since the whole movement of salvation history has been a movement from outer to inner, from given to chosen, from the law given on slabs of stone on Sinai to the law written in the heart after Pentecos, it's understandable that the outer trappings of Christian Civilization should gradually become emptied and less relevant for the living of the faith.

I'm with Nietzsche. He was just observing what had become inarguable. Not that God was dead, but that He wasn't to be found in cultural/civilizational forms out there. Sure the forms exist, but with a few exceptions these forms have as much relevancy to the spirit that once animated them as the New York St. Patrick's Day parade has to the spirit St. Patrick. They are dead forms animated by the undead energies of nostalgia, jingoism, and other vulgar passions. Conservatives simply don't want to face up to this truth, and keep fighting this battle for a zombie culture, and in doing so are looking for love in all the wrong places--out there in the mainstream culture. They are fighting for the preservation of cultural forms that were shaped by spiritual cultural energies that simply no longer exist.

Look. I'm a trinitarian Christian. I go to mass and I believe in the real presence. I see the mass as the central event, the time when we reenact Christ's living into our death so that we may in turn die into his Life. I look forward to the retrieval of a kind of sensibility that naturally understands the world sacramentally, numinously, and I believe that's in our future, but it's not how we commonly experience the world now. And that retrieval, if it happens, will not depend on the preservation of medieval forms or some dream of Christendom's return. All that matters is that the mass be celebrated, that men and women of conscience, whether believers or unbelievers, respond to the ubiquity of grace that they, we all, swim in, and culture will take care of itself.

Focus your energies where they might actually bear fruit. This culture war business is futile nonsense. Let Christians live deeply their Christianity and let them find ways to renew the face of the earth, and if they do it, not through some head trip bent on preserving the unpreservable, but in radical trust that God has a future for us, all shall be well.

See also "Faith, Hope, and Love in a Decadent Age."

The FOX Brouhaha

I'm just trying to understand the administration's calculation in using this attack tactic to deal with right-wing media. Clearly right wing media are never going away. Clearly, while they get a big media share of the news pie, they still only reach a relatively small number of people. And the number of people who identify with Republicans and with its obstructionist program promoted through its media megaphone is down around 20%. So why should the administration care? Why not just let these people talk to themselves, and let them continue along this path which leads to marginalization and irrelevancy to every one with an ounce of sanity and common sense?

The answer: it's a containment strategy. The administration is concerned to hear that after the ACORN incident, mainstream news organizations are chastising themselves for not taking more seriously the news that these right-wing media invent, and the last thing the administration wants is for right-wing nonsense to be taken seriously outside the right-wing media ghetto. That's what they want to nip in the bud before we get full throttle into the kind of thing Clinton had to deal with. The problem lies in how right wing nonsense was covered by the networks and other mainstream media to legitimate what was fundamentally illegitimate.  It's understandable that Obama's people would be looking for ways to prevent that from happening.

If the administration can make the case that FOX deserves to be marginalized, not because it criticizes the administration from a conservative point of view, but because it is not really independent insofar as it serves as the talking-points media arm of the Republican party, then they have a legitimate case to be made that FOX is different and deserves to be shut out until it changes its behavior. The equivalency with MSNBC or with the opinion journalism of Maddow and Olbermann is unfounded.  They represent a Liberal/progressive point of view, but their opinions are not Dem talking points, they are often critical of Democrats, and they simply bear no resemblance in their relationship to the Democrats that FOX news personalities bear toward the Republicans. And most important, while they make no effort to hide their biases, they don't make stuff up. There is no equivalency here, and it's fair for the administration to point that out.

The problem is not that nobody at FOX has no serious journalists--there are apparently a few who qualify--nor does the problem lie in that sometimes they criticize the administration from a conservative point of view.It isn't just opinion; it's abetting and colluding with Republican political strategists. The problem lies in how a problem how these strategists make things up, throw mud on the wall to see what sticks, spread disinformation and confusion, and seek to subvert any legitimate debate with fearmongering and jingoism. They fabricate and distort in the hopes of manufacturing controversy that the MSM will cover, no matter how baseless, because people are talking about it. Think Vince Foster, Whitewater, death panels, Obama is a racist, fascist communist, etc., etc.

The challenge for the administration is not to marginalize legitimate criticism but to quaranteen that kind of baseless fabrication. How do you do the one without the other?  It might not be possible, but I don't begrudge them for trying.

P.S.  See also this bit on Mickey Kaus's take. The point isn't that it's unbiased, but that it's not independent.

You Gotta Dance with Them that Bought You (Updated)

"Can I speak freely about the liberal whiners?" asks a well-connected Democratic strategist. "These are the same people who have never participated in, much less won, a campaign, who have no idea what it takes to maintain a majority and keep a speaker of our party, who want Obama to kowtow to the loony Left, and then they're going to be the ones who say, 'What happened?' in November 2010, when we lose the House and possibly the Senate and maybe a lot of governorships." (Source)

When I read comments like this, what I really hear is "Don't these people who care about the public interest understand that if we Dems are going to win in 2010 we have to do the will of entrenched corporate power?"  The "conserva" in conservadems has far more to do with being bought than it has to do with political principle or ideology. 

In this political environment "conservative", whether in reference to Republicans or Democrats, means you dance with them that bought you. It has nothing to do with conservative political principle except as a pretext used by these politicians to justify their having been bought. They're bought by the Defense Industry, the Pharmaceutical industry, the Insurance industry, and Wall Street. Who am I missing? Whatever--there's simply not a lot more you need to understand.

Fighting for Healthcare Update

I'm feeling pretty good about getting a decent bill. We've come a long way from where we were in August. The insurance industry and its shills on the hill have overreached and have no credibility, and a broad consensus has developed that the Public Option is the only way to keep down costs. There are no good reasons to be against it, if you're a Democrat, and voting against will bring the unwelcome negative publicity that the vote is controlled by the insurance industry. The only ones standing in front of a good bill are a few conservadems who are needed for a cloture vote when the Republicans filibuster.  These conservadems will be under enormous pressure to vote for cloture, because it would be historically unprecedented for a Democrat to vote in support of a Republican filibuster. You can be sure that if they don't vote for cloture it's because they care about their future with their corporate backers more than their standing in the party. (This idea of a silent filibuster is ridiculous and Reid should be pilloried if he allows it.)

I'm not as concerned about a strong public option bill coming out of the senate.  I think that Reid needs something that can get the sixty votes with or without Snowe, opt-in opt-out, trigger--whatever it takes--and then when the senate conferences with the house I think the bill that finally comes out will have  a strong public option that can get 51 votes in the senate. The first step is just get it past filibuster.*

I think the momentum has shifted, and now it's just a question of how robust the public option will be. It will be up to Pelosi, Weiner, others in the house to insure that one is in the final bill. It will be up to Obama to pressure the fence-sitters in the Senate to go along with it. I think it's going to happen. 

*Correction (10/24/09):  In making this statement I assumed incorrectly that the conference report could not be filibustered. It's unusual, but it can be.  The bill coming out of conference back to the senate needs 60 votes just as the one leaving it does. The main points stands, however.  No Dem will stand with the Republicans in a filibuster. Lieberman might, though.

Quote of the Day: Andrew Bacevich

If the Afghan war then becomes the consuming issue of Obama’s presidency - as Iraq became for his predecessor, as Vietnam did for Lyndon Johnson, and as Korea did for Harry Truman - the inevitable effect will be to compromise the prospects of reform more broadly.

At home and abroad, the president who advertised himself as an agent of change will instead have inadvertently erected barriers to change. As for the American people, they will be left to foot the bill.

This is a pivotal moment in US history. Americans owe it to themselves to be clear about what is at issue. That issue relates only tangentially relates to Al Qaeda, the Taliban, or the well-being of the Afghan people. The real question is whether “change’’ remains possible. (Source; h/t Greenwald)

I haven't been writing much about Iraq/Afghanistan because what is there new to say? It may seem simplistic; nevertheless, the only compelling reason to explain this commitment to futility is that it benefits certain very important and powerful interests. Your normal politician, who understand the steep price fighting them would require, would rather not pay it, and so finds a way to pursue projects that don't disturb them too much. If Wall Street owns Washington, it's a joint venture with the big players in the defense industry. Insurance and Big Pharma are important players, but not in the same class as defense and Big Finance.

There are other layers of reasons for these policies, but they are all secondary, pretexts, or ex post facto rationalizations, and none alone or in combination would be sufficient to motivate this futile policy, just as WMD, or deposing a dictator, or promoting democracy was never the central motivation for invading Iraq. These secondary layers have legitimacy only as supporting justifications for the central reason: it serves the power and profit interests of a few narrow but very powerful interests.

That's what America has become, and Obama and the Dems are either unwilling or unable to do anything to change it. So nothing changes until Americans use their power-in-numbers to push back against the power-in-wealth that currently dominates the system. But power-in-wealth knows how to prevent power-in-numbers by tried-and-true, divide-and-conquer tactics. The culture wars are its current tool, and liberals are as easily manipulated by this play as movement conservatives. 

Politics isn't that hard to understand. It operates according to very basic, very primitive greed and power rules. We're in our current predicament because the American people, smitten by the Reagan fantasy, ceded their power to a pack of wolves who, spouting religious, patriotic, and free-market cliches, have largely destroyed a sane, workable New Deal framework, and in doing so nicely set themselves up to rule the hen house for the last thirty years.

This regression was so easy to effect because people with money have enormous power to co-opt the system to benefit themselves and to fund clever propaganda to cover their rapine. The Republicans took the lead, but the Dems happily followed, so now anybody who speaks out sincerely and passionately for the public interest, or any policy that based in common sense or common decency, is considered either a rube or a far leftist.  

So I don't know that any of us could do better than Obama if we were in his position.  Presidents only look powerful when they do the will of entrenched power.  Resist, and you will be destroyed.

Faith, Hope, and Love in a Decadent Age

Patrick and I have been having a comments conversation in the response section of my post "Empty Rights". Without taking sides, he's been trying to help me understand why conservatives have a hard time with rights language, and I'm grateful that someone has because I'm really curious to understand it. But so far I haven't been dissuaded that their problem comes down to: "Rights language has been co-opted by the secularists, and they don't appreciate how the whole business of rights depends on there being a transcendent cosmic order to guarantee them; nor do they appreciate that without the Christian universalism first articulated in the Gospels and by St. Paul no one would have developed any ideas about rights in the first place."  If it were only a matter of philosophy and the history of ideas, I would agree for the most part, but these considerations are irrelevant in the political sphere. 

This post is not about arguing one way or the other about the centrality of Christianity to the development of the Western ideas about human rights, but to argue that whether people recognize the intellectual pedigree for the modern rights tradition or not, they have an intuitive moral recognition of the inherent dignity of the human being, and can still be agnostic about cosmic orders or persist in their prejudices that Christianity is wrong about everything. It shouldn't matter in the political sphere. The idea of human rights or natural rights, in this fundamental sense, stands on its own two feet and can define the common ground in the political sphere for all people of good will, no matter what their cultural differences.

Patrick referred me to a 2008 post by Daniel Larison about secular conservatives in which he makes the conservative point:

If secular conservatives have “pride in Western Civilization,” as Derbyshire puts it, they cannot very well ignore or deride as nonsense the central religious inspiration of that entire civilization, which is Christianity. Are they obliged to accept revealed truths? No, but they can and should pay due respect to the revelation that animated Western societies for most of their history and the traditions of our ancestors that have been tested over time and which have endured to become established customs.

I treasure what Larison treasures, but this statement and so many more like it by conservative intellectuals always strike me as a little Rodney Dangerfield-esque. It's a little pathetic when you have to demand respect from people who don't naturally feel it. Too much of conservatism is about hurt feelings, of wondering why people don't like them or take them seriously.  And then blaming them as the cause of our civilizational decadence.

Conservative Takedown of Reagan's Conservatism

I get a kick out of Patrick Deneen.  He's a charmingly impassioned fuddy-duddy, and as such one of the best articulators of a kind of principled, romantic conservatism which, like Quixote, compels him to tilt at windmills that spin on unperturbed with little awareness they've been attacked.  I admire him for that, I guess because I'm similarly engaged in futile tilting for another cause.  Because while I value much that he values and dislike much that he dislikes, the banner under which I ride is different from his.

Deneen, being the conservative that he is, takes for his most common target social Liberalism, but I think he's particularly good when he starts pointing out that what passes for conservatism in America is anything but real conservatism, and the idea that Reagan and Reaganism is conservative is laughable:

Where is the harrowing self-examination in conservatism's complicity in what can only be regarded as the massive defeat of most recognizable core beliefs and commitments of a conservative disposition over the past thirty years, often of Republican party ascendancy? Have we strengthened our communities? Have localities gained more opportunity and capacity for self-rule, with power devolving from the center to the peripheries? Have we enacted robust forms of subsidiarity? Are families at the heart of our personal and national commitments? Have ideals of morality and virtuous character been maintained, much less been strengthened? Have religious commitments deepened, and in particular, provided strong resources against a dominant culture of hedonism and materialism? Have our schools and universities aided in supporting these and similar commitments? . . .

If "conservatism" over the past thirty years has achieved anything, it has been the evisceration of older virtues such as thrift, moderation, self-sacrifice and a certain stoicism that might have prevented broad swaths of the population from gorging themselves in a credit fiasco generated in the belief that we could forever have something for no money down. It has been in the forefront of efforts in the international realm to remake the world in our own image, a neo-liberal paradise of hedonic-based markets, the wanton exploitation of nature, and the destruction of those communities and cultures of stability and continuity that provide not only "family values," but the proper understanding of what constitutes living well. The progressive John Dewey argued that the aim of all life was "growth"; have conservatives, so-called, argued otherwise? Or are we all now partisans of a process that can only be said to culminate in cancer?

However the Republican Party might represent itself to the gullible folk willing to accept its nonsense propaganda, it cares not a whit for these conservative concerns listed above by Deneen. Movement conservatism is a form of zombie traditionalism, traditonalist mores animated by the alien spirit of corporate consumer capitalism to produce one of the most bizarre, intellectually incoherent, insane undead political  movements in American history.

Deneen describes conservatism using Emerson's phrase as the "party of memory," and I understand and appreciate what that means to him. My contention, though, is that there is no longer 'living memory' that we Americans can live from. It simply no longers informs our mainstream culture, and the project to try to sustain or conserve one's cultural heritage as a given "living memory" is as futile as the Irish trying to sustain Gaelic as their national tongue. That ship has sailed, and now the best we can be is the party of re-discovery, of re-membering, resurrecting, the treasures from the past that most lay strewn about in shards, and of using them in a future-oriented project to build something new.

And I'd also argue there's nothing wrong with growth metaphor so long as it's understood as organic rather than engineered. All living things grow, not just cancers. Cancers are aberrational. Societies and cultures grow, and they can grow in healthy ways. We've grown, for instance, beyond the widespread acceptance of chattel slavery. Problems arise when the growth is forced or when some imbalance develops.

Obama and Peace Prize??

First Thought: Shouldn't this be about actually having accomplished something? 

Second Thought:  Wow, the "world establishment", so to say, was really freaked out by Bush Cheney, and it wants to do whatever it can to let Americans know about its relief that America has rejoined the more or less sane mainstream again.

Third Thought: Has there really been enough separation between Bush's policies and Obama's policies to warrant this award?  How much is this about style and how much about substance? Apart from giving speeches, where's the peace? Afghanistan?

Fourth Thought: Rush and Fox will be making all kinds of fun of this, but who cares?

Fifth Thought:  I guess it just boils down to its being a slow peace year.

Empty Rights

Ivan Kenneally in a comment to a Peter Lawler post at Postmodern Conservative:

One could argue, as Delsol has, that the big thing now is a kind of cosmopolitanism without Xn faith, or a peculiarly secular interpretation of the Pauline spiritual unity of mankind. In a sense, today’s cosmopolitanism is easier to theoretically construct since the archimidean point, human rights, is so emptied of real content but practuially harder since there’s so little that functions as the ground of political unity.

I'm hardly a PoMoCon as the posters there call themselves, and I've not been reading there stuff long enough to understand exactly what one is, but I'm intrigued by the concept.  I largely agree with them regarding the limitations, even the sickness of modernity, but I'm not so sure I'm groping for remedies in the same places that they are, even though I share the faith with them.

It could be that I just don't understand their point of departure well enough to understand why they think it, but PoMoCons and PaleoCons like Larison, seem to have a problem with the modern rights tradition.  I'm not sure why, and I'd like some clarification on the point if any readers can offer it. 

I left my own comment asking Kenneally for clarification:

Could you clarify why the rights tradition is empty of content? This seems to be a PaleoCon/PoMoCon meme, and I’m not sure what the basis for it is.

I think there’s a common-sense understanding of rights that almost everyone grasps, regardless of how little such a person understands about sources from which the rights tradition grew. I would describe that common-sense content as a basic recognition that every human being has a fundamental dignity that must not be violated by other individuals, groups, or the state. That gets parsed out into particulars through the political process, for instance the one that gave us the Bill of Rights. How much more content do you need?

My guess is that the problem for these conservatives is there need to conflate the cultural with political, and that's something I've been arguing against here for a long time.  I would agree with those who argue that the rights tradition in the West derives from Christian ideas about the universality of mankind, but does that mean that Christians own the idea?  Why not just look at it as a gift to the world that the world can then take and make us of in its own in a way?

My argument here is that we live in a pluralistic world, and that Christians have to be true to themselves and to their deepest beliefs, and they have every right to make their case for the beauty and profundity of their understanding of the world and the nature and purpose of the human beings who live in it. But that does not mean that they have to make that case in the political sphere. Cosmopolitanism is a practical necessity in our world. A Christian cosmopolitanism is not empty of content.  The thoughtful Christian is happy to explain the content of his beliefs to any who would be curious to find out about them, but that is not an activity for the political sphere. The Christian can bring his concerns, which of course largely derive from his Christian values and sensibility, into the political sphere, but he must argue for them using the rights language that is the lingua franca of the political sphere.

I'm interested to be challenged on this assertion.  It seems so obvious to me, I'm certain I must have a blind spot that prevents me from understanding why this is difficult for thoughtful conservatives to understand.

Growth Idolaltry

Just saw Douthat's Sunday column on the causes of inequality, so I thought I'd comment on it in the light of my last post. Here's his set up:

The latest census figures show the gap between the wealthiest Americans and everybody else widening — rather than shrinking, as some economists expected — during the crash of 2008. An August report from Bank of America/Merrill Lynch suggested that middle-income Americans, buried in real-estate debt, will have to wait much longer than the rich to see their finances rebound.

This landscape will put liberalism to the test. Since Ronald Reagan was elected nearly 30 years ago, Democratic politicians have promised that their program could reverse the steady post-1970s growth of income inequality without sacrificing America’s economic dynamism.

But having promised win-win, they may deliver lose-lose. In the short run, Barack Obama could preside over an America that’s more economically stagnant and more stratified.

There’s only so much that politicians can do about broad socioeconomic trends. The rise of a more unequal America is a vexingly complicated issue, whose roots may wind too deep for public policy to reach.

Liberals, though, have spent decades telling a more simplistic story, in which conservatives bear all the blame for stagnating middle-class wages and skyrocketing upper-class wealth. So it’s fair to say that if a period of Democratic dominance doesn’t close the gap between the rich and the rest of us, it will represent a significant policy failure for contemporary liberalism.

It's interesting that he admits that this problem has become more serious since Ronald Reagan was elected, but dismisses as simplistic the idea that there might be a causal relationship there. Rather this column seeks to make the case that things are too far gone for the Democrats to do anything about it. I'm not sure that Douthat grasps the irony because he refuses to admit Repubiican culpability. But really what he's saying is that Republicans have dug us into such a deep hole that the Democrats will find it impossible to dig us out, and that's great news for Republicans because the Dems will get all the blame. But let's leave that aside for now.

Decent conservatives and Libertarians will tell you that they see increasing inequality as a problem, but that they disagree with Liberals about how to solve it. In terms of the Liberty/Equality balance I've been talking about, a libertarian/conservative is someone who sees the danger as coming from large institutions so focused on promoting Equality that they create torpor where there should be initiative and creativity. "You want to solve the inequality problem?", they ask, "Well then, l increase Liberty and initiative. Big Government is never a solution; it's main function is to bog things down, not to engender dynamic improvements.

He then goes on to predict failure for the Democrats' because of their use of ineffective tactics that relate to the tax code, immigration policy, and educational reform. Democrats aren't going to increase taxes on the rich, because they are as coopted by the rich as the Republicans are.  And even if they do, it won't change anything.  Democrats' liberal attitudes toward immigration means that there will always a new influx of the poor, which won't help them in the numbers game. And then goes on to blame teachers' unions and the national educational establishment--both Democrat strongholds--for preventing a choice-oriented competition to produce better schools and teachers. Whatever.

The bottom line for him is summed up in his final grafs:

This is the lesson of Western Europe, where the public sector is larger and the income distribution much more egalitarian. The European experience suggests that specific policy interventions — the shape of the tax code, the design of the education system — may matter less in the long run than the sheer size of the state. If you funnel enough of a nation’s gross domestic product through a bureaucracy, the gap between the upper class and everybody else usually compresses.

But economic growth often compresses along with it. This is already the logic of our current fiscal trajectory: ever-larger government, and ever-slower growth.

That combination could eventually create the more egalitarian America that Democrats have long promised to deliver. The question is whether Americans will thank them for it.

Right: Less Liberty = More Equality, but less growth = more unhappiness. But we had plenty of economic growth during the last thirty years that correlated with disconcerting levels of  growth in economic inequality and economic anxiety. Maybe slower growth is an acceptable tradeoff if it means less in the way of extreme levels of both wealth and poverty. And maybe happiness is not really linked to growth.

Although it is axiomatic for American politics, economic growth is not the be-all and end-all of social happiness. People really don't need that much to live decent lives.  Where real happiness, creativity, and initiatives lie is not in the economic sphere but in the cultural sphere--the sphere of soul--and that's where we have a serious social deficit--insofar as we've allowed materialistic ideas of happiness push out more soulful ones.  We need more equality in the economic sphere, and to look for initiatives in the cultural sphere to deliver the soulful satisfactions that come with a life well-lived, and you don't need excessive amount of wealth to do that. But you need enough.

A  win in the direction of economic equality now might mean a slight loss for Libertarian ideas of economic growth--but it's not a zero sum game, it's not about either win/lose, win/win, or lose/lose, but of adjustments to find the right balance.

More on the Balance between Liberty and Equality

I've been thinking a lot about why this country almost broke apart in the 1860s, and why it's a good thing it didn't, and why the secessionist mentality lingers now as a destructive force in this country. In a globalizing world, the secessionist mentality is analogous to the adolescent who eats his dinner in his  room rather than to join the family party downstairs because "Those people don't understand me. Those idiots criticize me for being self-absorbed, delusional, and often mean spirited." [Monday Update: Just saw Krugman's column making a similar comparison.]

We all have a stake in the free flourishing of local cultures and groups, but we also have a stake in learning how to get along. We want a society with self-reliant individuals, cultural particularity, and robust community life. We need the local and the concrete to counterbalance the abstract, centralizing forces that seek to homogenize us, but we also need centralized institutions that enable us to work together and coordinate and regulate our efforts. Nobody wants cultural homogenization or Big Brother, but we can no longer afford the adolescent violence associated with nationalism and the separatist movements they engender.

Contrary to the assumptions made by many in the conservative intelligentsia,  "statism" is not the principal engine of leveling and cultural homogenization. The problem of the Last Man is not a political problem but a cultural or spiritual problem. And let's get real: Consumer capitalism and the mass media have been and will continue to be a far more powerful homogenizing and leveling force in the U.S. than the "state" will ever be. I understand principled conservatives' concerns about statism and leveling, but statism is assumed to be such an evil among so many conservatives that I see them as largely blinded to the real threat that comes at us from elsewhere. 

I know, some conservatives understand that consumer capitalism presents a serious problem to the flourishing of the spirit, which for them, as for me, is their central concern.  But the reality of the world we live in demands that they recognize that centralization, coordination, and regulation are practical necessities, and the danger is not the State qua State, but the state's historical tendency to serve the interests of oligarchs of one kind or another rather than the broader public interest. The American experiment provided the first modern opportunity to resist that tendency on the level of the nation state, and it has frequently succeeded.

But I digress.  I want to talk about how the secessionist mentality derives from a dissociated valuation of Liberty. Liberty is a sacred value for Americans, but it is not