Postmodern Conservative.

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.

Work, Disenchanted

There's a good review of Ben Barber's book Consumed up at Spiked. Josie Appleton makes the persuasive point that Barber spends too much time recoiling in the face of consumption's contemporary tackiness and not enough time considering why and how that tackiness is a desperate attempt to make up for the disenchantment of work.

The enthusiasm with which people shop contrasts with the lack of enthusiasm with which they work. The work part of the day [...] is too often experienced as just a drag. In many Western cities, people start to live for Friday nights and the weekends: they live not for their work, but for the time after when they can have fun and let loose. They work not to work, but to make money to enjoy life and forget about work.

[...] Barber elides many of the nuances in today’s consumerist culture. He elides the contradiction between work and play; and the way people often consume and then apologise for it; and the gap between anti-consumerist books and people’s satisfaction at shopping… In short, he elides all the twists and turns, the lures and the loathings of modern consumerist culture, which would altogether be a rich subject to investigate.

I think this is quite right. The argument I make in my SOCIETY piece [$ for now, sorry] is that bureaucracy is desperate to reenchant work by transferring the experience of our rewards for work into the workplace. Since those rewards are increasingly entirely social entertainments, bureaucracy attempts, through Human Resources absolutism, to make work feel or be primarily an entertaining social experience. Apropos of consumerism, one should ask at this point whether this project is doomed because our apparently social entertainments are really just hallucinatory fantasies we construct to make up for the reality of how asocial our play really has become -- with all our supposedly interactive recreations massively mediated, idealized, and illusory. Loneliness still rules; the man or woman in the crowd has simply (according to this line of argument) switched places from the train station or town square to Spring Break or the downtown club.

Abstract Liberalism vs. Abstract Libertarianism

I'm just a little late here, but if you like Rawls-and-Nozick talk, Prof. D.L. Schaefer's reconsideration of the two at the, uh, New York Sun sports page is worth a read:

Like Rawls, Nozick sought to impose an abstract vision of justice on political life, relegating considerations of feasibility (i.e., of conformity with the likely demands of actual human beings) to be resolved by others, in the spirit of Immanuel Kant’s dictum, “let justice triumph, even if the world perishes by it.”

Either you love this sort of thing or you hate it. To loop back to an earlier conversation, the big problem with abstract justice from, I suspect, any 'perspective' is that it problematizes raising children -- because it can't explain good childrearing in terms of justice. Even Locke had to go in for natural emancipation at age 16. Rawls and Nozick both become crippled by an autism of justice when it comes to children, who represent not only individual human agents that should be able to leave their families as thriving members of their polity but individual human agents that should be able to leave their polities as thriving members of the cosmos.

Since Hobbes, a string of political theorists have well understood that the beauty of geometric truth is its correspondence between the abstract and particular -- any particular right angle will always also be a right angle in the abstract. What theorists have sometimes missed is that philosophy can't mirror nature in this perfectly-corresponding way because geometry, unlike, say, physics, is a relational science, the science of relations. It's not a science of bodies in motion. A philosophy that, in order to master human order, makes itself materialist can mirror geometry, but it can't tell us which geometry should be mirrored. So Badiou's attempt to express justice by set theory, disproving absolutist Hobbesian justice, is an interesting metaphor that, to many smart people today, better expresses what it means to be human. But that only underscores how even our most rarified abstractions really only gain purchase to the extent that they recapitulate and generalize cumulative particular narratives about our own interconnected lives.

NOW -- I go through all this because family is an inextricable part of our interconnected lives. It isn't everything, but even the extent to which it isn't is mostly resonant as the negative space around family. Family is a 'problem' with or without abstract political philosophy, in the same way that 'life itself' is, should be, and must be a problem, but abstract political philosophy exacerbates the general problem. Interestingly, I think there's a push lately away from trying to solve the special anxiety that family causes as an ineradicable remainder in abstract political philosophy. Theorists want, I think, to follow Martha Nussbaum's lead in recognizing that this problem is better coped with therapeutically than solved scientifically. This makes sense if you read the obsession of the abstract philosophers as not actually justice but suffering; and if it turns out that even a complete system of justice leaves remainders of suffering, it looks like theorists dedicated to such political systemization can tolerate a certain kind of suffering, too -- less the remainders they can't eliminate than the anxiety of coping with those remainders.

And to the extent that they succeed, the original remainders -- the 'injustices' of family -- get translated socially into the anxiety of coping with our unmoored reactions to those injustices -- 'counter-injustices' like one day leaving your wife, committing adultery, lying to your parents, in short, breaking the bonds of family on an ad hoc, pragmatic basis. 'Practical morality' of a Rortyan sort sneaks into abstract political regimes through the seams and comes, I suspect, to dominate the whole. But while Rorty would reject any attempt to mirror even geometry, if not physics, I'd suggest that practical morality can learn how to cope with, and even flourish within, political societies whose institutional architecture is significantly the outgrowth of abstract philosophy. The question is for how long -- and probably 19th-century France is one good place to look for an answer.

Indiana and North Carolina Predictions

What Matt said. I could go on, but it hurts.

When Good Arguments Are Taken Too Far

...Republicans fall for Hillary;

...a guy paints his coffin like a can of PRB;

...Baby Mama gets championed over Knocked Up;

...and Jack Abramoff gets the blame for low turnout at Nats games.

My Whiteness: Part One of a Continuing Series

Now that the list's all in one place, let's measure. Why not? Today's installment: #97 - 70.

#97 Scarves
I own two. One my sister made for me. The other was a Christmas present from Grandma. Do I like these scarves? Yes. Because they're scarves? No. Unless Scarves includes day scarves. Y'know, like Hermes scarves for greasy-haired, pointy-shoed, wiry little goombas with deep tans, little sweaty ringlets of chest hair, and sunglasses that are eating their face. Those rule.

#96 New Balance Shoes
I threw out my last pair last year. I did this because my wife started making firm and not unreasonable demands about this pair of shoes, which was purchased in North Carolina in 1999 after returning from London, where every punter, piker, pikey, pouf, ponce, nonce, nan, sod, and homeless person with hair so long it had turned into a yellow mat hanging over his buttocks was wearing a pair. In London I went to Pharmacy, spent three and a half minutes in Ministry of Sound, ate bad nachos, and ogled peoples' New Balance 'trainers', which I had never seen before and came in more colors than God. I will never again own a pair of New Balance sneakers.

#95 Rugby
My fraternity has a sport called Zamboni. Zamboni is rugby with all but three of the rules eliminated. The three remaining rules are a cruel mockery of real rugby, which I have never played in my life and am now too scared to play. In Zamboni, the 'ball' is a duct taped-up full roll of toilet paper. The 'goals' are two industrial-sized plastic garbage cans placed at either end of the large field. Finally, the game ends at halftime. Playing this game, I executed a victory backflip after scoring what I hope was the winning goal, popped out of the flip in midair, and pile-drove my neck into the ground, shattering two inches of collarbone and almost punching the crunched-celery-like stalk of bone through the skin. Bruising was instant, shock was imminent, and were it not for Duke hospital and the brilliant Indian doctor who inserted an invented-yesterday metal screw into my body, today I would be a hobbling freak with a hideously shrunken T-Rex arm, pointing with my hideously overmuscled 'regular' arm toward local playgrounds and neighborhood baseball diamonds, gesticulating and jabbering like Hillary Clinton after she lost Indiana.

#94 Free Healthcare
I like free healthcare, but I dislike bad healthcare, and I hate socialized medicine. My life as a normal person was saved by Duke hospital, remember.

#93 Music Piracy
As an independent artist, I stand foursquare against ripping off hardworking members of the musical profession, men and women who pour out their hearts for the sake of the art and the fans. Please stop pirating U2, Coldplay, and Aerosmith songs. These guys're in it for you, and without your money, they'll be driven right out of the business.

#92 Book Deals
If anyone wants to pay me to publish a 600-page novel I wrote eight years ago, yes, I like book deals.

#91 San Francisco
Growing up across the bay from this third-rate Boston with an ego big enough to eat Manhattan, I not only dislike San Francisco, I usually bristle instinctively when someone from San Francisco walks by. San Franciscans fake all the tuneless arrogance of Los Angelenos without actually being nihilists. In San Francisco, environmentalists drive Land Rovers and eat organic sushi off mahogany tables. The most fun you can have in San Francisco is repeatedly driving down Lombard Street at speed in a jacked-up Jeep Wrangler. The least fun you can have in San Francisco is parking somewhere, or smelling. If the bums took over San Francisco everyone would think there were fewer bums. I hate San Francisco.

#90 Dinner Parties
Dinner Parties are the greatest. I like to serve an appetizer of chilled Old Overholt, followed by Wild Turkey with muddled mandarin oranges, and three fingers of Glenmorangie to finish. For a really big do, serve artisan cheeses, cashews, and popcorn.

#89 St. Patrick’s Day
Last St. Patrick's Day, I had to ward off Ray Liotta from my wife and sister as the NYC parade went past. Ray had a Budweiser tall boy in a brown paper bag and kept jittering and muttering and leaning up against my back. He breathed fetid Bud breath over my shoulder, so I started whistling the hook to George Harrison's "What Is Life," and he faded back into the crowd. My ability to enjoy St. Patrick's Day is severely impeded by the posters passing off bad American beers as perfect ways to party that blanket cities everywhere on that morning, posters which linger long into the week. Anything that makes people drink more Bud and Miller -- and thus less PBR -- is playing with fire in the unlikeable department.

#88 Having Gay Friends
Because they're gay? Or because they're friends?

#87 Outdoor Performance Clothes
My idea of outdoor performance clothes is a Puck mask and a pan flute.

#86 Shorts
In LA, nobody wears these. It's the same pair of jeans every day, straight through the summer. I should qualify that to say no guy wears these. I have a few pair anyway, mainly to subconsciously convince myself to buy a boat and begin a neverending tour of the Mediterranean.

#85 The Wire
Never seen it. I read The Corner, though. Dag.

#84 T-Shirts
There's so little you can do with a t-shirt that's appealing except look cut, which you can do to similar effect without the t-shirt. But a favorite t-shirt is irreplaceable.

#83 Bad Memories of High School
Have them, but don't like them. For the same reason I can't understand why people want to come home from a day of lame interactions with annoyingly typical people only to sit down and watch four hours of situation comedies about annoyingly lame people interacting typically, I am out of guesses as to why anyone would want to nurture old hangups from a time when the deck was always stacked against maturity and relaxation.

#82 Hating Corporations
Yes, but only because most things corporations do or produce are things I wouldn't want to be a part of. Though this in turn is largely because I would ruin them within 15 minutes, probably along with the business, entirely through spacing out.

#81 Graduate School
Bonus: even more likable than grad school is exchanging consciously unjustifiable complaints about grad school.

#80 The Idea of Soccer
In theory, running around without respite across a field of play the size and shape of Portugal, never getting tired, ripping off your shirt, sweating Gatorade, being swarthy, and headbutting people for calling you swarthy is awesome. In practice, the fun lasts for ten minutes before the panting begins. Plant hands on knees, relax pounding heart, stick with contemplating the Forms.

#79 Modern Furniture
Only desks should be modern. Modern chairs belong in that scene from The Big Lebowski where the nihilist won't stop giggling at the Dude. Modern tables look like operating tables. Modern beds look like giant bars of nougat without the chocolate coating.

#78 Multilingual Children
And here I thought white people liked attaining bare literacy in one language, then smacking their children when they started talking like that Dora cartoon and blaming public education.

#77 Musical Comedy
As an independent artist, only Music & Lyrics is remotely watchable.

#76 Bottles of Water
Mmm. Make it Smart Water! Not for your brain, so you can ditch the chapstick, brah.

#75 Threatening to Move to Canada
Never have, never will. Am not now.

#74 Oscar Parties
Apparently these are fun, but only if you weren't invited.

#73 Gentrification
Particularly when the gentry in question is the New Scottish Gentry.

#72 Study Abroad
Cf. the hand-cammed sequence in Roger Avary's film version of Rules of Attraction. When I was in London, nothing exploded. Except the musical career of Kula Shaker.

#71 Being the only white person around
<awkward turtle>

#70 Difficult Breakups
See #83. If my generation and those surrounding could get over this -- their creepiest, most perverted, most wearying, and most contemptuous touchstone -- I would end my life as a public commentator. 

Cinco de Sucko

In honor of a holiday that needs a narrative, contrary to what some may think (judging by the incomprehensibly and perpetually packed Lauriol Plaza), Mexican food in DC sucks. My only consolation is having avoided Ezra's fate:

LA doesn't know how lucky they have it. I can hardly remember what it's like to have such a surfeit of delicious tacos that you'd support closing some down. It pains me even to think of it, particularly after last night's experience at the wretched DC chain "California Tortilla," where I got a mayonnaise fish taco that made me want to give up food forever. Seriously: I don't care if you support universal health care or progressive taxation or an internationalist foreign policy. But if you take nothing else from this blog, do not go to California Tortilla. I had to go by Tacos Pepitos this morning just to get the taste out of my mouth.

Which is all to say, if LA really feels overstuffed with taco trucks, we could use a few of them out here.

Give us your authentic, your tasty. If the taco trucks really look like they're in trouble, I may start a Facebook group advocating the exodus. If they can vote with their feet, we can vote with our mouths.

Cultural Castration and the Manly Aristocracy of the Future

Rod's got the male fertility crisis; Andrew's got the manliness blog. I've got gents who're just not in the mood:

Peter Bell, Relate’s head of practice, said: “Men used to come to us with   impotence – now known as erectile insufficiency – but Viagra has sorted some   of that problem. What we have is a lot of men who say, as women did in the   1950s: 'I can have sex but I do not want to. It’s not rewarding’.

“It is a serious issue. It counts as a pychosexual dysfunction rather than   just a relationship problem, because these men haven’t simply gone off their   partner but off sex altogether.”

Changing sexual roles for men and women and increasing rates of depression   among men could be some of the reasons behind the change, he added.

I fully recognize these are Britons here we're dealing with, but unless this steady gooey drip of Apatow flicks scabs over soon, we could be looking at a very flaccid couple of generations. With of course exceptions at the margin, where the dictates of diverse pleasures require that there are at least a handful of active male members.

In all seriousness, I think we're a bit too accustomed to take our male stereotypes too seriously, excessively crediting nature for their maintenance. A whole rainbow of men not interested in being manly is now available for cultural reference and imprint -- the schlubby manchild, the bloodless bobo, the queeny TV divo, even, er, the suicide bomber. (Apologies for that last one: but obviously this isn't a moral equivalence story. It's about 'surplus' males in a bear market for manliness.) These unmanly stereotypes themselves can be violated in a manly way, so let's not debunk one caricature for another. But let's consider just how varied and powerful are the cultural side effects generated by the steady transformation of manliness into a niche vocation, and let's not be mistaken about their common source.

I'm even willing to admit that we are 'doomed', at least for now, to push forward with that transformation. But its natural terminus, as I hinted in half jest above, isn't the abolition of manliness but the creation of a small, insular, alienated aristocracy of manly men. Some of these, though not all, are in the army. Some are in business (and think that anyone who doesn't work for themselves isn't worth talking to). Some are artists (right?). And some are intellectuals (danger! danger!). All will keep alive and cultivate an interest in attracting the most desirable of women. The interesting question is whether there will be so many of these [edit: these women] going forward that even the unmanly men will have a relatively unprecedented easy time too. And then whether the manly aristocracy will move to counter that situation through 'polygamist compound' techniques -- punishing and banishing less manly men, while guarding against radical loser blowback.

This would make a highly amusing and grippingly popular sci fi series, you creative exec readers out there.

Pantheism Watch

For you, the reader, I pull down the one good link on the whole Corner. Mark Steyn:

The mainline Protestant churches have long been beyond parody. America gave us the first Episcopal minister who's also a practising Muslim. Now Canada gives us a minister from the United Church (the merged  Congregationalists, Methodist and Presbyterians) who wants to move beyond the whole Jesus thing...

Long quotes follow from soft nihilists follow. An enervating read, actually, but far more vital than the endless posts on Rev. Wright and Hillary Clinton that surround it.

Random Acts of Blogging

DTO: Hill of Beans

DTO: ‘Iron’ Wrinkles [More on Iron Man from Reihan; Peter; Spencer Ackerman.]

DTO: Libertarianism and Moralism; Legalized Prostitution’s Lambo-Pinto Problem

DTO: The Quest for Responsible Neoconservatism

Lowering the Bar

Colombia is what Iraq should eventually look like, in our best dreams. -- Robert Kaplan

Oh dear. Even beyond this nightmarish new depiction of reality, note how the model of progress Kaplan proposes always asks for more. It'd be very paleo of me to suggest that international interventionism is just a means to international integrationism, but I do worry when success is couched constantly in the language of successive needs.