Postmodern Conservative.

Indie's Self-Anointed Handpicked Successors

Indie-Glam: 1998 or 2008?

A few nights ago, out on the town, Courtney Love appeared to be following me around. At bar after bar, strains of her big Hole hits from 1998-9 came streaming out, reminding me of the bizarre time when alt-rock found itself, in the space of some four years, awash in cash, fame, and prestige. The short middle passage of the '90s took Hole from the low-fi creepshow of "Doll Parts" to the hi-gloss prom of "Celebrity Skin;" took Garbage from the grunge-hop Sneaker Pimps peerage of "Queer" to the transatlantic centerfold of "I Think I'm Paranoid;" took Smashing Pumpkins from the granola-punk aesthetic of "Disarm" to the center of the known universe. Marilyn Manson went from riding a boar, dipped naked in green paint, to eclipsing Rose McGowan on the red carpet. The list goes on and on. Alt-rock, as Scott Weiland discovered, had become alt-glam.

Then the war came. Not the War on Terror, the War on Taste -- boy bands, bubblegum pop, Fred Durst and that guy from Staind. Only Korn drummer Dave Silveria attempted to bridge the difference between alt-glam and the forces intent on destroying it, posing in 2000 for an evocative series of Calvin Klein Dirty Jeans ads that featured the likes of Liz Phair. Slipknot -- and not only Slipknot -- burned him in effigy. There would be no looking back.

And so both alt-rock and alt-glam were banished from the public eye. Britney beat Billy. And, quietly, carefully, introvertedly, a younger generation of sensitive types stayed away from the Warped Tour and the Summer Sanitarium in preference for their bedrooms, often in solitary diligence, softly preparing a revolution.

They weren't rich like their alt-rock ancestors; weren't already famous; had no record deals of the sort their aesthetic parents enjoyed in an era when labels like Interscope and even Maverick could make the earth tremble. What they did have was talent, time, and the means of production, and that's all an artist ever really needs. And so was indie-rock born into the world.

Fast forward a few years. These indie-rockers, needy but prickly individualists that they are, seem to prefer the ad hoc collective and the solo framework to dedicated band bonding. One can hardly blame them. It's not just a matter of living out psychological stereotypes. It's a matter of making new kinds of music. And I must confess that the large collectives do less for me than the new one-man and one-woman bands. It would seem, judging by John Wray's six-page New York Times feature on the Return of the One-Man Band, that I am not alone in this matter:

Advances in recording and performance technology now make it possible for musicians not only to fire the drummer but also — if so inclined — to do away with accompaniment altogether without losing the richness, or seemingly the spontaneity, of a full-size band. And Pallett is by no means alone in pursuing these advantages. The past few years in progressive pop, which have given rise to a series of popular and acclaimed collectives — uncommonly large bands with a disdain for clearly defined hierarchies, like Montreal’s Arcade Fire, or even a fluid definition of membership, like Toronto’s Broken Social Scene or Brooklyn’s Animal Collective — have also produced a wide variety of solo performers. Among the most notable are Pallett, Noah Lennox and Annie Clark. Even more curiously, the two trends are intimately connected: Pallett has toured with the Arcade Fire as a violinist; Noah Lennox, who plays solo under the name Panda Bear, is an active member of Animal Collective; and Annie Clark — who records and performs under the nom de rock St. Vincent — has played with a veritable Who’s Who of supersize outfits, from the Polyphonic Spree to Sufjan Stevens’s band to the no-wave pioneer Glenn Branca’s all-guitar orchestra. When I asked the 25-year-old Clark to explain this apparent paradox, she considered the question for a while. “I think a lot of bands decided to maximalize their sound — if that’s a word — as a kind of reaction to the stark, sort of minimalist indie rock in the 90’s,” she said finally. “One way to do that is to form these massive collectives and put on big stage shows: a ‘more is more’ kind of thing.” She smiled to herself demurely. “Another way is to maximalize yourself.”

Wray's article is great, complete with a shout-out to DC's own Rock and Roll Hotel. He covers a lot of cool one-person bands, but he can't know them all, or not yet, anyway. He missed, for example, one of my new favorites, The Handpicked Successors. (Don't let the plural fool you.) Now that indie rock has resuscitated the alt-rock bloodline, I expect to see the alt-glam aesthetic return under freshly liberated, privately produced auspices -- call it indie-glam. You heard it here first. The revolution may be bad for corporate music, but it's awesome for fans and artists, and with a win-win like that, it's all very rock and roll.

(Time-straddling Scott Weiland courtesy of Flickrer Mark C. Austin.)

Jack Bass's Diabolic Scheme

Alive!
Dead!
I was inside your head
Had time well spent, I got your mind well bent
Snuck back into shade...
                    -- The Hives, "Diabolic Scheme"

I haven't heard a worse idea all year:

Once the campaigns agree on an Obama-Clinton ticket, Mr. Obama calls Gov. David Paterson of New York, lays out the situation and gets an agreement that if an Obama-Clinton ticket wins, the governor appoints the former president to fill Mrs. Clinton’s Senate seat, where he would serve until 2010. He could then run in a special election for the two remaining years of the term.

Upon being sworn in, Mr. Clinton would immediately be the most prominent member of Congress. He would carry the prestige of being a former two-term president — and he would be married to the vice president, who also happens to preside over the Senate. -- Jack Bass

Jack Bass must really want to make Barack Obama the most ineffectual, compromised, captive, clawless, creeping-coup-threatened, beseiged, one feels inspired to say token President of all time. And that's just the half of it; Bass must also want to make the Clintons into the sort of outfit that the Cheneys would be if Lynne changed her name to Lynnedon and became Master of the Senate. The transformation of the Veep office from sleepy backwater to Dept. of Protean Skulduggery under Cheney wasn't something everyone saw coming. But is there any doubt at all what one Clinton -- much less two -- would do with the chance to fulfill all the vile promise of the stillborn Reagan-Ford condominium?

'Two for the price' of one sucked eggs back in 1992. Without Hillary, Bill would have avoided both of the signature embarrassing failures of his Presidency: health care and adultery. Like the boy on the playground who's a little too old for his grade, there is no safe public place to put Bill Clinton; he will always be looking for someone's sandbox to traipse through, some game of hopscotch to mess up, some skirt on the monkeybars to find himself standing under.

Probably it would be amusing in a soul-sucking way to watch Bill make Hillary's life intermittently ridiculous and awkward the way she did his last time around. But meanwhile every nepotistic and cliqued-out abuse of power to run riot in the Bush White House would take larger, more blatant, egregious form, like certain species of dinosaurs at the height of a late-Jurassic bout of punctuated equilibrium. Superfluous horns! Giant faces! Full-body plumage! And of course conjoined twinning, or at least doubled heads. America cannot stand one more year of such a freak of nature, much less four eight.

Not Blood But Spirit

Hilzoy flips out on Kathleen Parker's widely-circulated op-ed on "full-bloodedness" -- "an old coin," we're told, "that's gaining currency in the new American realm." Parker writes, inter alia:

Politics may no longer be so much about race and gender as about heritage, core values and made-in-America. Just as we once had and still have a cultural divide in this country, we now have a patriot divide. [...]

It's about blood equity, heritage and commitment to hard-won American values. And roots. [...]

Although I have not an inkling of what blood equity is, I'm all in favor of tradition, virtues, and memory. But those things have little, or perhaps nothing, to do with 'full-bloodedness" -- certainly not during an election season in which the real point of contrast between McCain and Obama is actually full-spiritedness. And no way is Obama the "smart, contradictory person...more in tune with our times" because his father was Kenyan. I'd say he's that way because of a complex combination of his traditions, virtues, and memories. Just like McCain, who's considerably less smart and contradictory and tuneless than Obama but who, for just those reasons, attracts and reflects a quintessentially American spirit.

If Obama had McCain's spirit, as Hilzoy recognizes, this blood talk would be even more absurd and pointless than already it is, and Obama lacks McCain's spirit for reasons tangentially connected, at best, to his half-whiteness. On what planet are Obama's catlike cool and easy confidence the phenotypical hallmarks of biracial genes? Parker's whole concept is the political-journalism equivalent of telling an assailant that Elvis has just rounded the corner and fleeing while the dupe (hopefully) stops to look. You want to go after Obama's spirit? Knock yourself out. The issue isn't even so much that blood talk is and must forever be verboten -- it's that 'fullbloodedness' is a false description of the actual contrast in character between Obama and McCain (even if you flip the account I've given here, making Obama the spirited pep boy and McCain the doddering fogie).

Our Dumb Grammar

Daniel points our attention [to! - JGP] the below:

Missouri, Kentucky, Arkansas and Ohio all went for Jimmy Carter in 1976 and for Bill Clinton twice. All but Ohio have been dominated by Democrats at the congressional and gubernatorial levels for decades. But all five went for George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004. The reason: Casey Democrats. “Democrats’ difficulties with this group surely have a great deal to do with these voters’ sense of cultural alienation from the national Democratic Party and its relatively cosmopolitan values around religion, family, guns and other social institutions/practices,” blogged Democratic strategist Ruy Teixeira after the 2004 election. Just two years earlier, in their book, “The Emerging Democratic Majority,” Teixeira and John Judis had predicted that the party’s economic liberalism would bear the Democratic nominee to victory in such states. -- Mark Stricherz

Surely 'Casey Democrats' not only experience a sense of cultural alienation from the 'national' Democratic Party [i.e. the hegemonic regional Party], but know that they actually are culturally alienated. When will we wake up to the significance of the sleight of hand involved in speaking only of senses of things? Ah, but then again my contention is that our dumb grammar has developed more or less deliberately in order to evade the responsibility for attributing convictions to one another or to ourselves.

Suffering Gerson

How did I miss an opportunity to discuss this again? Ross:

It isn't necessarily the policy substance: Gerson may be right about PEPFAR and Tom Coburn completely wrong. It's the style of argument, which invariably casts opponents of any humanitarian program Gerson supports as un-Christian, uncharitable and inhumane - or as this particular op-ed puts it, "rigid, stingy and indifferent to human suffering."

In a nutshell, the reason why I take such a contemptuous joy in beating on Gerson is this insistence of his on depriving anyone of the right to any joy other than the kind he feels in relieving -- or, what's really worrisome, in fantasizing about relieving -- human suffering. Gerson paints his enemies as "rigid, stingy, and indifferent to human suffering," as if there was some kind of moral equivalence between stinginess and indifference to human suffering, as if anyone who doesn't leap into action the instant the human suffering Bat-signal lights up the night simply doesn't care about people who suffer.

That posture betokens an attitude about suffering just as intellectually truncated and emotionally haywire as the one Gerson pins on anyone who begs to differ with him. Gerson cares about human suffering with a not only rigid but hyperbolic, hyperventilating, manic, and obsessive fanaticism. This eminently unreasonable and unreasoning will to help is guaranteed to obliterate, and desires to obliterate, the line between religious or cultural or social responsibility and political duty. Whenever the exercise of political power becomes necessary to some supra-political end, tyranny is afoot. When that end is a utopian end, like the impossible-to-realize elimination of upsetting human suffering, political power is inevitably chained and collared by scientific power. Deliberation becomes morally offensive; only deeds will do. The science of perceiving the spectacle of suffering, capable of bearing witness to an entire world of human discomfort, is meant to trigger instantaneous and unquestioning collective action.

What amount of mitigated pain can ever be enough for Gerson? When will his own suffering servitude end? What quantum of relief will relieve his own fevered estate? These are questions that Gerson can only contemplate as forms of creative impoverishment, morally stingy acts of intellectual obtuseness. It's one thing to cry that the Lord will provide. It's another to demand that America do so. One of the precious few accomplishments of modern liberalism has been to free the practice of politics from the boundless, overflowing passions of people certain that their desires are justified by unshakable foundational truths. Such passions are of great importance to a culture, but they are toxic when introduced into a free government. This may be a dilemma, but Gerson's would-be solution is a disaster.

The Merits of Wrong

I just want to second Matt's recommendation of Michela Wrong's In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz: Living on the Brink of Disaster in Mobutu's Congo. There are a few different books out there, of varying ponderousness, charting the Congo's sad and occluded history. Wrong writes with a snappy and succinct verve that never overwhelms the gravity of her subject matter. Plus she structures the book around a series of cool quotes, like the Kasaian proverb that runs "It's when it's raining that you can pee your pants with a quiet mind."

Also, Matt's right that the Americans involved in this story aren't very well acquitted, but in the heinousness category the Europeans are all too often in a class of their own.

Cleanup

In an effort to appease Joe Knippenberg, I have ditched the filthy straw hat and graced my masthead with an even more smugly self satisfied-looking portrait, sure to soothe the angina pectoris of my most dedicated critics. Those gas-station sunglasses rotted off two days ago in the waters of St. Maarten, but on the internets, they live forever!

In other news, I've made an effort to update the collection of books you might enjoy at bottom right of this blog. Some of them are newish, some not so new. Every time you click through, I get like 50 cents, so if you're extra bored this month just keep clicking forward and backward on your browser and listen to the sound of my piggy bank filling up with nickelless change.

Blogwise, I'm ever so slightly behind, so rest assured that all those topic suggestions I called in last month also live forever in the tubes, and I'll be returning to them, and also that I'll be filling out the rest of that Whiteness Test. And now, your moment of zen. Start at 2:25:

Pique Oil

Clark Stooksbury is feelin' disgraced:

Jim Manzi (responding to an excellent post from Patrick Deneen) assures us that we have nothing to worry about on the energy front.

Crude oil production will reach a maximum at some point in the future. I don’t know when that will happen, and the record of those who have tried to forecast this not been very good over the past 70 years or so. When that happens, the price will probably rise. We will develop technological alternatives and find substitute fuels. It’s not time to start burying Krugerrands in the backyard. (emphasis added)

So we will know when oil has peaked because prices will rise. Too bad he didn’t tell President Bush – it could have spared us the ugly sight of seeing the leader of the free world debasing himself by begging our Saudi Masters to turn up the pumps.

Let's be clear that the only reason why Bush's request was begging was that Bush is pathetic and nobody needs to listen to him anymore, even our bosom Saudi buddies. Any President with an ounce of clout and gravitas could have discovered a way, by hook or by crook, to get even a symbolic increase in oil production with at least his public honor intact. Not George.

I guess I should weigh in in some way on the debate between my Scene colleague and respected Professor -- and do so of course in the interestingly idiosyncratic way we have all come to expect from bloggers. If I had to make a guess, sovereign state control over oil resources -- call it 'oil nationalism' -- will be a much bigger factor going forward whether we're under peak oil conditions or not. And if we are, oil-rich states and states with oil-rich allies will probably be able to transition much more easily to a non-oil-based energy infrastructure, while oil-poor states without oil-rich allies will suffer. Pretty much exactly what's happened with the distributional justice of natural resources since the Dawn of Man.

States' Rights or Judges' Fiat?

Thru Ambinder, Jim Antle reveals that Bob Barr is experiencing some cognitive dissonance. As I hem and haw over California's gay marriage ruling, I don't want to come right out and say that the court's holding was legally impossible. I do want to emphasize that the opinion itself is linguistically incoherent -- 'illegal' in that sense. But I also want to admit that the reason why a ruling and an opinion like these have come into being in the first place is because public opinion itself is linguistically incoherent, and the result is that we have no real comprehension of what law means, because we have been diligently deconstructing the convictions and assumptions necessary to support a vocabulary in which the rule of law is possible. Sigh.

Returning to Barr for a minute, the implication here for me is that he is not an intelligent alternative to McCain, although he may be the 'better' alternative.

Yale Mafia Update

1. Helen on my SOCIETY piece:

What happens when having an identity starts to feel like (ugh!) management? For one thing, it makes selfhood a matter of technical expertise. For another, it locates all inspiration—which, even after we toss Romanticism out a tenth floor window, is still something that only an individual can have—in the managing meta-self, essentially killing it.

Also: any manager who thinks the road of teamwork leads to the palace of creativity needs to sit down and read the Phaedrus; I'm not sure what a communal "flash of inspiration" would look like, but it sounds unlikely.

Yet for every Phaedrus there's a Symposium. At any rate, the managerial attempt to turn bureaucratic hierarchies and networks into social entertainment and self-realization opportunities strikes me as less a creativity-unleashing gambit than a ploy to make people feel more like they do when they're not working when they are in fact working. And as everyone knows, happy hour is hardly a surefire setting for flashes of mutual inspiration. Creativity is a means to a different end -- even 'creativity for creativity's sake' has its primary use in bureaucracy as a catalyst for the sense of shared creativity, which is what presumably motivates a human cog in a human machine to feel like working -- which in turn ends up seeming more important than actually working.

Also see Helen read Rieff and Sennett. Read, woman, read! If anyone knows where I can find Sennett's mythical book on conservatism, do let me know.

2. Nicola's put up part of a chart from the '30s that purports to offer a scientific methodology for appraising your wife. Demerits 4, 6, 7, 8, 10, and 12 are bad, but 11 is the only true sin. Merit 9 is surprisingly contemporary.

Also read Dara's ruminations on the 'neediness' factor in hookup culture --

which recognizes sex as a separable biological urge and therefore permits hookups under the logic that they’re “filling a need” — but won’t allow the student to hook up with anyone he might develop a lasting interest in, because that would constitute distraction. I know it’s perverse, but it’s also equally reliant on the divisions hookup culture imposes and on disdaining the side of that division it reveres.

How perverse, indeed, to try to prove we're not emotionally needy by throwing ourselves into the arms of merely physical 'needs'.

3. I was going to write a big screed, maybe even an article, on this so-smart-it's-stupid 'nudge' idea of Cass Sunstein's. But I may wind up only with this post to show for it. Will makes the right point:

libertarians will freak out about "soft-paternalism" for psychological reasons; while cool, cool reactionaries such as myself will be disgruntled for cultural reasons.

Of course, since culture is really the lived-out memory of a ruling psychology, it's complicated, and I'm not as concerned as Will is that

The trouble with soft-paternalism is not so much that it's a bad idea or that it's anti-freedom (it isn't), but rather that it leads us to value the wrong things in our leaders.

I'd say the big problem is that it leads our leaders to value the wrong things in us. Drawing a fly on our urinals reduces spillage by 35%! Efficient, sure, but why are aggregate statistics the proper way of looking at citizens? The aim isn't to reduce my spillage by 35%, but to reduce total spillage, regardless of whether some people freak out at the sight of the fly and pee all over the wall. The individual as such is meaningless, is not the unit of analysis. Individualism, as such, is not only inefficient but quantitatively irrelevant. Mass outcomes are what matter. The problem is less soft paternalism than it is soft despotism. The psychology of scientific rationalism understands progress as possible only when human beings are treated as holistically analyzed data points, not as unique individuals. Applied social science on this model is only possible by leveraging large-n 'trends' and 'samples'. This may be interesting at the level of pure science, but as an education for politics it stinks. Public policy should not be set by leaders who do not care what individuals do, or who they are, as long as the big picture produces the 'right' size and rate of change.

See also Will's creepily sharp eye for the creepy side of that lovey-dovey oceanic feeling I keep trying to ruin for everybody:

Giles Foden argues cogently that al-Qaeda and the Japanese doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyo may both have been inspired by Asimov's Foundation trilogy.

Thankfully, the essay moves beyond etymological quibbling (al-Qaeda means "the foundation" in Arabic), and tosses out a few gems like this:

"More generally, the space opera sub-genre of science fiction offers the possibility of a massive expansion of self-mythologising will-to-power. In a 1999 New Yorker article on galactic empires, Oliver Morton beamed up French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, author of The Poetics of Space, to explain all this: "Immensity is a philosophical category of daydream. Daydream undoubtedly feeds on all kinds of sights, but through a sort of natural inclination, it contemplates grandeur. And this contemplation produces an attitude that is so special, an inner state that is so unlike any other, that the daydream transports the dreamer outside the immediate world to a world that bears the mark of infinity." [My bold - JGP.] A world, one might add, in which knocking down the twin towers with passenger jets seems a possibility that can be realised...

In retrospect, I can recognize that a somewhat masturbatory desire for encounter with the infinite was one of the things that most attracted me to science fiction -- and to science.

Asexual onanism? The aphysical orgasm is the wettest dream of science, and also its most unnatural and dangerous.

How Did We Drink Up the Sea?

Peggy Noonan asks not for whom the bell tolls:

What happens to the Republicans in 2008 will likely be dictated by what didn't happen in 2005, and '06, and '07. The moment when the party could have broken, on principle, with the administration – over the thinking behind and the carrying out of the war, over immigration, spending and the size of government – has passed. What two years ago would have been honorable and wise will now look craven. They're stuck.

Mr. Bush has squandered the hard-built paternity of 40 years. But so has the party, and so have its leaders. If they had pushed away for serious reasons, they could have separated the party's fortunes from the president's. This would have left a painfully broken party, but they wouldn't be left with a ruined "brand," as they all say, speaking the language of marketing. And they speak that language because they are marketers, not thinkers. Not serious about policy. Not serious about ideas. And not serious about leadership, only followership.

Even just last year it could've been done. Republican primary season was the natural time for it to be done. It almost was done. But no. I don't want to say I told you so, but...I'm glad I'm on the side of the fence where we saw it coming. Not just for face-saving purposes. To have missed this would betoken a grave mental malfunction.

Summer of last year I laid it out plainly enough in a post now lost in the American Scene matrix. Fortunately Rod snipped a bit of it, and here it is again. Won't be the last time.

Rejection is not the same as mockery, derision, and disgrace, though there are conservatives who would have no trouble heaping any or all of these three upon Bush. Emotional adulthood requires in this case only firm, clear rejection to be effective. Humiliating the president does nothing to solve the problems facing the United States. Nor does humiliating ourselves in a last-ditch attempt to salve the bleeding wounds of loyalty. Treating the Bush legacy the way Bush treats the surge -- no Plan B, it'll work because it has to -- will not shore up our pride but bring it to ruin, not least because supporting a presidential candidate who cannot repudiate the president in an election focused solely on the bitter fruits of his policies will eventually make Nixons of us all, disillusioned, sorry for ourselves, estranged from our own accomplishments, drinking, muttering, doomed.

[...] What the candidates have already gotten away with, in the way of tepid criticism of tactics in Iraq, has gone over like a dream. Mitt Romney's more adventurous knocks against Bush's leadership have gone unanswered. This is because everyone knows they are accurate. They want more. They want to stop living a public lie. Instead of the national reign of fear predicted by the president's leftist critics, it is the political right that suffers silently in dread. This is a needless shame and waste, and the clock is ticking.

Line up, Republicans. It's battle stations.

 

Neuropean Not-So-Buddhism and Other Mystical Experiences

Daniel's comments on Caleb's comments on the much-gummed Brooks piece are worth reading, and he is right to coin a new phrase. Indeed, that commenter somewhere in the Scene combox below my post on the Brooks piece is also right to emphasize (as does Daniel and Ross) that Buddhism is really the wrong word to slap on the Eros lo Volt! crowd.

While I'm on a Rorty kick (see below), I should also point out that the strange newness of this intellectual western scientific mysticism was somehow lost on Rorty, who thought that God and Truth would simply wink out from neglect and fruitlessness if we dedicated life to whatever talk wins in an open encounter. Rorty strangely failed to take having our cake and eating it too all the way down, failed to see Jung in the shadow of Freud, failed to see how, if Humbert had lived, he could easily have converted (or converted on his deathbed!) without creating any further paradoxes or regressing away from his character.

Rorty seemed to think of religion as the one pathology that boundless personal idiosyncrasy could somehow not thrive on. This is a major failure of the imagination where religion is concerned -- or at any rate 'spirituality', which, as religion without a dogma, is not quite what this Neuropean Buddhism thing is either. Bumper sticker version: Rorty can't explain Wilde. That's why Rieff is a better Freudian. Ironic, isn't it? Rorty is also wrong on opinion -- or rather on the collective unconscious. Still love the guy. But I digress.

One other thing on Daniel's dukkha reference:

In the March 1992 issue of the Atlantic one could read about Dr. Ralph G.H. Siu, author of Less Suffering for Everybody. Dr. Siu is the founder of the new science of panetics, which aims to help reduce suffering by designing scientific criteria for quantifying it. (He has named his proposed unit of suffering the dukkha, from the Pali language spoken by the Buddha.) Having determined the quotient in dukkhas of every known kind of suffering, we could construct dukkha flow diagrams, which would display the net suffering costs (or benefits) of policy alternatives by charting the degree to which the sum of dukkhas relieved by it. "Someday," Dr. Siu has suggested, "you could diagram the whole United States. Can you imagine all the thousands, all the millions, of streams of dukkhas going in and out?"

That's from "Rousseau and the Discovery of Political Compassion" by Cliff Orwin in the edited volume The Legacy of Rousseau (Chicago, 1997). Siu has disappeared, but his dukkha flow diagrams now exist and flourish, marketed under various names (Sitemeter, Google Analytics, etc.).

Protestant Nationalism, Catholic Cosmopolitanism, and US Exceptionalism

While meditating on Richard Rorty, Raymond Geuss takes a curious detour, pausing to recount the educational and religious origins of his rejection of Rorty's 'ultra-nationalist' social democracy. It is odd, after defending American Catholic intellectuals yesterday against the charge of running a right-nationalist cabal, to wake up this morning and critique the left-internationalist Geuss for the limitations of his Euro-Catholic imagination. But here we go.

Here's the nut of Geuss's beef with Rorty's putative American exceptionalism:

Achieving Our Country, though, represented a step too far for me. The very idea that the United States was “special” has always seemed to me patently absurd, and the idea that in its present, any of its past, or any of its likely future configurations it was in any way exemplary, a form of gross narcissistic self-deception which was not transformed into something laudable by virtue of being embedded in a highly sophisticated theory which purported to show that ethnocentrism was in a philosophically deep sense unavoidable. I remain very grateful to my Catholic upbringing and education for giving me relative immunity to nationalism. In the 1950s, the nuns who taught me from age five to twelve were virtually all Irish or Irish-American with sentimental attachment to certain elements of Celtic folklore, but they made sure to inculcate into us that the only serious human society was the Church which was an explicitly international organization. The mass, in the international language, Latin, was the same everywhere; the religious orders were international. This absence of national limitation was something very much to be cherished. “Catholica” in the phrase “[credo in] unam, sanctam, catholicam, et apostolicam ecclesiam” should, we were told, be written with a lower-case, not an upper-case, initial because it was not in the first instance part of the proper name of the church, but an adjective meaning “universal,” and this universality was one of the most important “marks of the true Church.” The Head of the Church, to be sure, and Vicar of Christ on earth, was in fact (at that time) always an Italian, but that was for contingent and insignificant reasons.

What has always seemed patently absurd to me -- and possibly not only because I was never educated by polylingual priests and nuns from various small European nations that never had empires -- is the very idea that there is nothing in any way unique or incomparable about the character of the United States of America relative to that of the many European states and statelets that have appeared or disappeared since the fall of the Roman Empire. At any rate, Geuss's is the more 'interesting' position, I warrant, because mine is obviously plausible and his leaves him with some explaining to do. But as the Bioethics Club, no doubt, can tell you (or Ross or Michael -- or Andrew!), taking one's Catholic faith seriously and properly dogmatically (at least when it comes to the one-true-church component) has little necessary impact on one's concept of the strangeness or relative uncategorizability and therefore the 'specialness' of the United States of America. Indeed, if you want to go there, I think the record of the John Carrolls and Orestes Brownsons of the world pretty much renders Geuss's take on US exceptionalism bunk.

Yet it also seems to me that the reason why Geuss's take on US exceptionalism is so incorrect is revealed by how correct is his take on ethnonationalist exceptionalism generally -- a position which would surely incense Geuss further, because, after all, to state that is simply to restate the basic proposition of US exceptionalism. Right? Well, not quite. Really the argument here I think is an argument about sovereignty: US exceptionalists incline to think that the sovereignty of the US is of great, sometimes even cosmic, importance, whereas the sovereignty of, say, the average random Continental state is not. At all. And here's where Geuss's Catholic spin on state sovereignty takes on its important character. Europe's main problem has been the unity of the Church and the disunity of the many States. After the Reformation, the unity of the States developed into an even more disorienting problem. Geuss is right that Protestantism contributed directly to nationalism in Europe, but it is silly to pretend that, say, Napoleon's effort to conquer Europe without disbanding and destroying the Church was not a nationalist enterprise. Europe has always had no option but to transcend nationalism through nationalism itself, which is silly to notice because critics of US exceptionalism, especially on the right, correctly charge its exponents with the desire to transcend US nationalism through US nationalism itself. Geuss appears not to grasp the subtle commonality.

The bottom line is that even if all of Europe went Catholic again, ethnonationalism would remain a bigger problem on the Continent than it did when all those Irish and Polish and Italian families intermarried over in totally unspecial America. Europe's failure to unify politically is a political problem, and the problem is that European nation-states really are less unique than the United States, yet patriots, nationalists, and chauvinists of all descriptions share some minimum interest in maintaining the sovereignty (as opposed to just some romantic idea of the 'exceptionalism') of their nation-states. Now the even deeper problem is that Europe cannot look to the Catholic model of unity for a path toward politically transcending the relatively less exceptional character of most European nation-states, because the hierarchy and absolutism of the Church cannot successfully be applied to the kind of government all those nation-states and their citizens or subjects can tolerate. Every time this has been tried it has been a calamity of epic proportions. This should be more than enough reason for even a Eurocatholic social theorist of the left to credit the US as 'special' -- it offers a lesson to Europe about how to structure a decentralized large republic and transcend the crippling ethnonationalism that has understandably made cosmopolitan ingrates out of thinkers like Geuss.

Of course a US exceptionalist would be a fool to expect Europeans to whip up a United States of Europe. But at least one European cosmopolitan in a smart tradition of them recognized that the US was a world-historically singular phenomenon that offered Europeans as a collectivity an amazing set of generalizable, transportable, and fungible practices and ideas that could heal the fraud of ethnonationalism which absolutist princely rule cemented into place. It is interesting to note that the cosmopolitans of whom I speak were either Protestants or Catholics of a particularly muted variety. What is important, to sum up, is that Geuss's Catholic contempt for ethnonationalism doesn't supply an answer to Europe's specific problem of unification, which as Geuss himself proves isn't a problem only for those who want Europe to emulate America; and the ideas box that pro-unification thinkers must repair to is the puzzle of American exceptionalism, which a Catholic could just as easily imagine as the Providential gift whereby petty secular allegiances may finally be transcended, in due ironic fashion, in Europe.

Catch-Up

As I dig out, blogging will regain its usual pace. But I've still got to unpack -- so read these meanwhile:

Michael and myself and Caleb Stegall consider what David Brooks calls the Rise of the Neural Buddhists;

I think Burma will keep suffering [DTO], because sometimes people still go to church after they lose faith, especially in the face of complex social pressures;

and Ramesh Ponnuru and I [DTO] tackle the possibility of moral opprobrium without hypocritical in-group self-valorization.

Virtual Blogging

I'm in the Caribbean right now, so blogging -- I hope obviously -- is light. Later this week things will pick back up. In the meantime, Daniel's point about the intractability of the narcissism of small differences -- which is to say the intractable differentness of even small differences -- is key to recognizing how hard (small-l) liberalism really has to work, and also how much we ought to recognize liberalism's seemingly trivial accomplishments. The rise of trivia is proof that liberalism is working.

And until Thursday, here's a selection of hits from DTO:

More on patriotic philanderers.

Is Hillary right about white voters?

Are 'millennials' a name for an experience group that doesn't exist?

Eschatological Patriotism

The latest disturbing slippage in the meaning of patriotism, at (where else?) The Corner. Peter Robinson:

ME: Henry Luce famously called the twentieth century “the American century.” Will the twenty-first century represent a second American century?

TOM WOLFE: I believe we’re on the edge of about 800 more years of American centuries.  The biggest problem is all the people who see a problem. It’s very fashionable to think that the end is near.

Eight hundred more years. At that moment, I confess, I could have leaned over and planted a big wet smacker right in the middle of Tom Wolfe’s forehead, white suit or no.

Tom Wolfe, journalist, author—and patriot.

What can one say? Wolfe is plainly right that apocalypticism is always in fashion, or at least has been since real anticipation of the Second Coming of Christ was replaced by the voluptuous German Romantic anticipation that civilization was just about to reach the nadir of decay and ruin -- after which would follow the glorious rebirth of Man.

But what to make of the unnerving way in which Robinson transforms that bit of snobbish, contrarian, aristocratic conservatism into occasion for the sloppiest of dog kisses? It's no coincidence, I think, that this precipitous drop of Robinson's pairs an attitude with an ideology. The idea that someone who thinks the United States is sure to rule the world for another 800 years is definitionally a patriot strikes me as even more absurd than linking patriotism to belief in the Thousand Year Reich. At least patriotism can plausibly be associated with the hopeful conviction that one's patria will exist indefinitely. But that would require generation upon generation of good governance and proper statecraft, two qualities unlikely to appear among any people certain that the secret of sovereign durability is found in indefinitely protracting global hegemony.

At any rate, the real problem as I see it is that the same sort of people who mercilessly ridicule the left for seeking a 'holiday from history' actually fetishize an eschatology of their own -- the idea that permanent American world dominance is right around the corner, that if enough people say it, it will become true, because people who say it are patriots and patriots are infallible. This bargain-basement theory of the will to power -- this armchair Nietzscheanism -- not only makes a parody of actual 'master morality' but a farce of patriotism in the bargain. If the lone entrance exam for election into the People's Pantheon of Patriots asks of its would-be inductees nothing more than a nice, hearty chorus of "American Centuries Forever!" then our Pantheon of Patriots is sure to increasingly resemble that of North Korea.

Anyway, if massive race riots, gas rationing, runaway inflation, drug epidemics, divorce epidemics, Vietnam, the Great Society, and barely averted global thermonuclear war all add up to an American Century, I'd just as soon not the second, third, or eighth time around.

United They Fall?

If you don't like my unbending take on the nightmarish Obama-Clinton ticket, The Plank's been asking around for more serene judgments. See Mark Schmitt, Ed Kilgore, and Alan Wolfe.

Heritage Pains

So far as I can tell, this is a sign that has rendered the name Dimitrius Apostolopoulou in English as James Poulos. Tragically, that is roughly the limit of my felicity with the Greek language. I have no idea, for instance, why the word or acronym ODOS has been spelled above Mr. Apostolopoulou's name and my own.

But in an act of solidarity, I've got to link -- for the benefit of all you literate Greeks out there -- to this extraordinarily entertaining and poorly Google-translatable page.

This is as good enough a time as any to go on record as one of those Greek Americans who've 'been back', if only to Athens and Myconos. And if someone granted the right to use it, It'd be supercool to post this little pic hither and yon for an indefinite period of time.

This concludes this episode of dorking out on one's formerly recognized 'nonwhite' ethnic status.

Scumbags

Ah, news like this just screams Clintonism, doesn't it?

In a heated phone call with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi late last month, Hillary Clinton supporter Harvey Weinstein threatened to cut off campaign money to congressional Democrats unless Pelosi embraced a new plan by the movie mogul to finance a revote of the Democratic presidential primaries in Florida and Michigan, according to three officials who were briefed on the contents of the conversation.

What business a slobbering box office troll like Harvey Weinstein has in browbeating the United States Speaker of the House is beyond me. But then, no business is too low-class and shameless to keep the Clintons in power.

Pomoconniving

Another intimation of MacIntyro-Nietzschean fusionism, courtesy of Nicola Karras:

The only answer we have yet found to the argument—perhaps the only answer there can ever be—is in the value of the argument itself. Our telos can be found, if nowhere else, in continuing our search for it. The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill the heart of a man. One must imagine the Humanities student happy.

The 'must' is doing most of the work here, followed by 'one', with 'happy' bringing up the rear. The ancient discovery that our telos is only ever recognizable as our search for it was replaced in modern times by the radically different idea that our telos is only recognizable as the history of our search. The postmodern task, if you'll permit me, is to heal this divide. We cannot and should not forget history. If we are stuck with virtue, we are also stuck with the world as the expressly historical world. But we must also recognize -- in a way to which religion, I think, is of great importance -- that fate and history are not identical, that fate is how the ancients lived in the present and history how moderns lived so awkwardly in the future.

The Christian bridge between these positions involved living wholly in the present in whole, constant anticipation of the future: a powerful premonition of the later credo (somehow both dumbed-down and tarted-up) "Become who you are." The key to striking what seems like this mystical balance between passivity and agency is the obsession of the late moderns; left postmoderns typically want it to emit from the immanent self, whereas, I reckon, right postmoderns want to note that the mystically immanent self actually has much less self there than their left opposite numbers desire; that occupying that space, not terribly mystically, are the external authorities of particular narratives, particular others, and -- are you with me? -- a particular God.

Post-Biological Humans, but Still Creatures?

The Reactionary Epicurean raises an excellent and complex point.

William Saletan is delighted that once we've replaced all of our blood vessels with plastic,

"it'll go a long way toward loosening our concept of ourselves as biological creatures."

I'm actually surprisingly okay with that, so long as we don't loosen our concept of ourselves as incarnate creatures (incarnate in the broadest possible sense).

Can we move forward with the kinds of self-manipulating technologies that characterize the 'posthuman' project in such a way as to retain a shared reality of incarnate creaturehood (that is, as beings which were and are always already created)? If so, should we?

Skeleton Crew Watch: Will the Last One to Leave the '90s Please Shut Off the Lights?

There's been a round of exasperated incredulity among commentators who have taken a look at Newt Gingrich's proposals to save the Republican party from (real enough) disaster. But I think Rod's takes the cake:

Repeal the gas tax? Empty the strategic petroleum reserve? Implement a GPS air traffic control system? Declare English the official language?

Is Newt smoking pot? Really, it is to laugh. This is one of the smartest thinkers in the Republican Party, and all he can come up with to save his crisis-ridden Congressional party is midnight freakin' basketball?! If that doesn't indicate how intellectually bankrupt the GOP is now, nothing will. Rahm Emanuel has got to be peeing his pants with laughter.

Obama's Faith

Daniel reminds me of another interesting wrinkle in what I've been considering hopefully not too cavalierly as Obama's aristocratic character:

Let’s be clear about something: Obama is a liberal Protestant, which means that by definition his kind of Christianity is not going to mesh with mine or Alan Keyes’ or most conservatives’, in part because his denomination emphasises the Social Gospel and the activism associated with that, but also because it belongs to a very different theological tradition.  The unwittingly hilarious adoption of the very literalist idea that we should not place a period “where God has put a comma” is a perfect example of how the UCC almost makes a dogma out of the idea of evolving, adaptable religion.  Obama has read and actually likes Reinhold Niebuhr, which I assure you is exceedingly rare among anyone who is not genuinely interested in Christian theology, however liberal its form.  As a rule, agnostics would not bother to read Niebuhr or, having read him, would either become convinced atheists as a result of boredom or would become Christians.  Everyone who knows much about Obama understands that he came to Christianity intellectually, as one might expect given his style and personality, and this is the one place where I am most sympathetic to Obama, because my conversion was similarly not produced by a blinding flash or light or a tolle, lege moment, but was the result of a gradual process of reflection, study and a slowly dawning understanding why God became man to save us.

It's somewhat difficult to have this conversation without conjuring up some hoary stereotypes, but I do think there's something significant about Obama's intellectual Protestantism, which is what really contrasts to Keyes' Christianity and, more importantly, occupies a pretty depopulated territory. The long tradition of intellectual liberal Protestantism has sort of petered out in its own right, and intellectual conservative Protestantism oftentimes seems like a legendary unicorn. If you really want to get into the pejorative stereotypes you can whip up a picture on the Right dominated by godless Straussians and habitual holy rollers. As much as I think that's largely an absurd oversimplification, these caricatures aren't imagined at random. It's possible, I think, for conservative Protestant intellectuals to agree with Daniel that Obama's version of Christianity isn't the model while still appreciating the kind of path he took to get there.

What's the Prob, Bob?

Hillary's a loser, but a popular loser. That's a problem for Republicans.

Bloggers: they talk to each other. You got a problem with that?

When is pro-American globalization bad? When pro-American globalizers really see America as a problem.

Newtered

One of the most frustratingly disappointing politicians of modern times is Newt Gingrich. He is so habitually and instinctively able to transcend the mire of politics by rote and rut that it's doubly annoying when he keeps rising up toward the clouds and disappears into the aether...only to reappear mysteriously in the small-ball world of ineffective political tokenism, as if, like Pac-Man, he disappeared off the top of the game board in order to come back in at the bottom.

So everyone I know is laughing bitterly at his prescription for avoiding what is indeed likely to be disaster for the GOP in 2008. Daniel covers it well enough. Among Newt's game-changing designs:

Introduce a “more energy at lower cost with less environmental damage and greater national security bill” as a replacement for the Warner-Lieberman “tax and trade” bill…

This will also be known as the No Trade-Offs/Free Lunch Act of 2008.  Gingrich forgot to mention introducing the bill to protect endangered unicorns.  Gingrich supplements this with such proposals as, I kid you not, an earmark moratorium (take on those tough issues, Newt!), a gas tax holiday that will allegedly be paid for by “cutting domestic discretionary spending,” using the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to manipulate oil prices (very slightly), tackling all of the outrageous waste at the Census Bureau (?), and, naturally, banging the drum about the judiciary.  The one idea that sounds mildly interesting is an overhaul of air traffic control systems, and it is the most technocratic of the nine, which means that it will take the longest to put into practice and will have limited impact on public opinion.  This list is nothing more than tinkering around the edges and is so far removed from an agenda of “real change” (whatever that’s supposed to mean) that it’s laughable.

UPDATE: concurrences at AmSpecBlog from Jim Antle and Paul Chesser.