Postmodern Conservative.

Livin' the Dream

There's that pesky Kantian enlightenment, still trying to spread o'er the world. But will the dream live us? Camille Paglia presents another smooth and graceful brief for the limitations of practical reason as the lodestar of our lives:

Progressives must start recognizing the spiritual poverty of contemporary secular humanism and reexamine the way that liberalism too often now automatically defines human aspiration and human happiness in reductively economic terms. If conservatives are serious about educational standards, they must support the teaching of art history in primary school—which means conservatives have to get over their phobia about the nude, which has been a symbol of Western art and Western individualism and freedom since the Greeks invented democracy. Without compromise, we are heading for a soulless future. But when set against the vast historical panorama, religion and art—whether in marriage or divorce—can reinvigorate American culture.

The whole piece is putatively about the way art and religion have intertangled in Christendom and post-Christendom (and everywhere, everywhen), but the subtextual contemplation of the pathologies of Catholicism is even more intriguing. And then of course you get classic lines like these:

And I would question whether Mapplethorpe's cool, elegant torture and mutilation scenarios were an ideal advertisement for gay male life.

Yet the Paglia Protocol, for all it's worth, runs us headlong toward the eclectic pseudotheism of Jungian psychology -- a therapeutic use of faith entirely in accord, as Rorty never wanted to admit, with pragmatic reason. Alex Wendt, that amateur philosopher and IR genius, understood the therapeutic uses of science itself:

The emergence of an international public sphere signals the emergence of joint awareness, however embryonic at this stage, of how their own ideas and behavior make the logic of anarchy a self-fulfilling prophecy. With that joint awareness comes a potential for self-intervention designed to change the logic and bring international society under a measure of rational control. In individuals we might call this 'therapy' or 'character planning'; in social systems like international society it would be called 'constitutional design', 'engineering', or 'steering' (Social Theory of International Politics 376).

But in privileging of a scientific understanding of friendship and truth, Wendt missed the way therapeutic logics keep bringing other understandings back into culture. For now I'll have to leave that first claim unelaborated. (Maybe this is a relief to you.) But as far as the second, other concepts of friendship and other understandings of verity -- like those you get from philosophy, politics, or religion -- are placed under great pressure, and almost squeezed out entirely, under the logic of Wendt's academically popular brand of secular practical reason. This makes it radically incomplete, as Paglia, Jung, Obama, Huckabee, and others reveal to us all the time. The inability of secular scientists to fully model therapeutic logics blinds them to the way especially religious or metaphysical conceptions of verity may be integrated into frameworks of therapy that end up challenging the status of empirical truth itself. Perhaps more painfully, acolytes of secular practical reason must lower their expectations as encounters with devotees of political, philosophical, and religious conceptions of truth and friendship fail to result in transformative social progress -- or turn (back) into anxious neoconservatives and neoliberals.

The EU as Smithereens

For a while I've played around with how to theorize the form of social organization which maxes out the particularity of its diverse parts and also maxes out the character of its unity at the highest level of abstraction. This form of organization, at its fullest, would travel comprehensively within and across all its units: so the individual self would be, like the 'state' or the 'market'  -- or whatever it is that we would call the even more abstract unity that combines the state and the market into a single organ -- maximally 'thin' as an identity encompassing a maximum number of interacting and interchanging particularities ('me in 1992,' 'my feminine side,' 'my professional face,' 'on the weekend I'm a freak,' etc.). I keep going back to describe this accounts of the abyss in post-Enlightenment writing. Nietzsche gets some of this but the best is probably captured in the words of Bulwer Lytton -- otherwise known as the guy who coined the phrase 'It was a dark and stormy night'. B L referred to a sea of qualities 'all blended, yet all distinct.' The 'sea' is the maximally 'thin' descriptor of the unity; the all blended/all distinct particulate units, fleeting, contingent, interchanging, yet distinct in their co-diversity, are the contents. I decided to call this very fungible and weird and curious and monstrous form of social organization Smithereens.

I'm reminding you and myself of all this because it looks like those kooky kids in the Labour government actually like this monstrosity and want to make the EU into the world's first political Smithereens. Foreign Secretary and Utter Ding-Dong David Miliband apparently desires the following:

* To work toward expanding the EU as a political entity into Russia, the Mahgreb, and beyond;

* To "gradually bring the countries of the Mahgreb, the Middle East and Eastern Europe in line with the single market, not as an alternative to membership, but potentially as a step towards it;"

* To equip the EU militarily to fight for human rights and the rule of law within and outside of Europe; and

* To develop shared institutions to overcome religious and cultural divides.

I should say up front that I (still) like continuing EU negotiations with Turkey at a slow and indefinite pace, and that anyone who wants to invade Sudan to stop the universally acknowledged genocide there is both morally and legally honest, an admirable combination. But it's clear to me that Milibandians want to actually fuse European politics and economics so as to transcend both -- so 'the single market' and 'the single union' will be two phrases for the same thing -- and then to expand that Smithereens-like unit across the globe as far as they might wind up liking.

This is bad enough as it is in my opinion, but one of the main reasons why is a serious worsening factor of its own. Namely, Milibandians I think are happily denying the continuing breakup of European national identities into smaller, not bigger, pieces. Belgium, Britain, central Europe, Italy -- where will this movement push next, especially when Muslim immigration hits a critical mass? With the nation-state increasingly incoherent as a descriptor of unity, and with the EU a sea of particulars, identity drives downward toward the local, the tribal, the ethnolinguistic. This merely enforces the Smithereens effect. I suspect that when pressed the Milibandians will actually admit, accept, and finally celebrate this transformation, recognizing after all that they are one of the main pressures bringing it about. Eventually the sub-states that will appear in Europe will be as contingent as anything else, mostly decorative arrangements without any real power.

Oh, except extralegal gangs of enforcers will prowl around stabbing filmmakers and kicking in heads, as 'marginalized' youths of every stripe from suicide bomber to skinhead will band together in small but extremely annoying clumpets to enforce the 'law' of their cliques on those who presume to transcend them. Politics as we once knew it will thus in effect be criminalized. Everyday life will be unprecedentedly commodious and choice-glutted but also at an unprecedented level of crisis, anxiety, and gnawing nihilism. The need for security -- personal, physical, communitarian, psychological, economic -- will become an obsession. Cameras will be everywhere. Gendarmes, almost entirely undercover, will silently prowl every street and restaurant, secretly bristling with networked technological surveillance and protection enhancements. Bombing will be the new mugging, but bombing will also be as rare as mugging in secure areas. Politics, fracturing along with everything else into ever tinier, tighter, and more fleeting affiliations, will become as violent as war but entirely outside of the everywhere/nowhere political/economic order emanating spectrally from Brussels; politics will be crime. And then on that basis it will organize again, streaming into the underground from its deep and equally spectral roots in Russia and its periphery. And finally this counter-Smithereens will interpenetrate the ruling management system of EU Smithereens, and the insanity will consummate itself.

I bet Miliband would hate this life, if he ever fell into scandal and disfavor and got hurled out from the comfortable glass pyramid into the craziness of being a citizen with neither patronage or protection. Some smart bastard should write this novel: JG Ballard, this means you. Miliband ought therefore to fear and despise what he and his ilk want to do with the EU, but his imagination seems fatally crippled by optimism, and so instead he loves the strangeness to come and enthuses over it.

Niche Sized Targets

Everybody's favorite man-sized target (now appearing in the blogroll) issues a timely reminder:

Big business and pro-business politicians should never be confused with conservatives; businesses exist to make money, and they’ll gladly promote counter-cultural causes so long as they can make a buck off of it.

Worse, they've realized that a brand is a dollar sign with a universal adapter on it; why not the Super Bowl and the Fetish Bowl? Not just counter-cultural causes, some of which I guess are pretty cool and worthwhile, but narcissistic lifestyle niches of all stripes, may be slapped with Miller sponsorship, and the big corporations are as slaphappy as they come. The business plan of ubiquity requires the most unnatural proteanness -- any identity, all identities, no identity.

Not only is this psychologically and culturally eviscerating for the people who have to adopt these techniques as their vocational lodestar, it's also morally enervating to the people who have to endure the public affiliation of major brands with incommensurate and sometimes contradictory lifestyles.

In an era where political and moral unity seems completely unattainable, the unities that dominate in our democratic age are primarily service- and feeling-slinging corporations that reveal how empty our abstractions look when it becomes clear they can be stapled onto whichever banners might for the moment fly. "Refreshing taste" -- "Extreme experience" -- "Health-conscious drunkenness" -- nice minute to minute, but then you stand back and realize: in spite of the vast palette, the corporate support-staff mastery of diverse lifestyles with the same banal demands leads to a life of grandly subsidized default, a big flattening, where everyone feels riotously individual and uproariously edgy-niche but everyone's drinking Bud at night and Diet Coke in the morning.

I know a lot of people, including counter-cultural types, are and have been hip to the bummer of this trip for a long time. This is worthy of praise. The Adbusters wing of the American left is already kissing cousins with, by my lights, a good number of paleo and pomo conservatives.

Cultural Libertarianism: Political Servitude, Social License, and the Rise of the Pink Police State

That the gay thing is the biggest news to come out of the Ahmadinejad thing is quite revealing in both directions. Mad Mah opened himself to the loudest and most deprecating laughter by denying the existence of homosexual Iranians. And, via Sullivan, the Columbia Queer Alliance opens itself to the same by revealing everything I ever need to hold up on a placard when trying to explain cultural libertarianism:

Our cultural values and experiences are distinct, but the stakes are one and the same: the essential human right to express our desires freely.

Andrew may be right that the closet drives a significant number of people to despair, but this central fantasy of cultural libertarianism marks the walls of the closet by the bounds of social order. The very language used to try to describe this uber-right with a universal adapter must maximize abstraction and formlessness. Important nouns that once were political ends (freedom) become adverbs that now are social means (freely). Just as the right of 'the pursuit of happiness' has been corrupted (by Cadillac) into the right to 'the pursuit,' political rights of nouns (life, liberty) become replaced by social rights to verbs (to express).

In a schema in which mere consistency of behavior creates by definition an impediment to freely expressing desires, rights must primarily be 'action words,' indeed must resolve into the broadest of all action words, the verb 'to express.' 'To act' itself became obsolete when we discovered psychology; actions which are not expressions cannot fully express desires, and regimes that grant even full rights to political action fail to throw open the doors to freely expressive social action.

Tocqueville recognized that the seeds of this move away from the political and toward the social -- toward a cultural libertarianism which fantasized, as Foucault's heirs do, over absolute rule in politics and absolute license in society --  in the nature of democracy itself. (Tocqueville, like any reasonable person today, was capable of pointing out the most dangerous and troubling tendencies of the democratic spirit while also judging that spirit to be ineradicable and, understood properly, to the good.) At the beginning of the chapter entitled "What Causes Democratic Nations to Incline Toward Pantheism," Tocqueville beheld that

as conditions become more equal, each individual becomes more like his fellows, weaker, and smaller, and the habit grows of ceasing to think about the citizens and considering only the people. Individuals are forgotten, and the species alone counts.

At such times the human mind seeks to embrace a multitude of different objects at once, and it constantly strives to link up a variety of consequences within a single cause.

The concept of unity becomes an obsession. Man looks for it everywhere, and when he thinks he has found it he gladly reposes in that belief. [...] If one finds a philosophical system which teaches that all things material and immaterial, visible and invisible, which the world contains are only to be considered as the several parts of an immense Being who alone remains eternal in the midst of the continual flux and transformation of all that composes Him, one may be sure that such a system, although it destroys human individuality, or rather just because it destroys it, will have secret charms for men living under democracies. All their habits of mind prepare them to conceive it and put them on the way toward adopting it. It naturally attracts their imagination and holds it fixed. It fosters the pride and soothes the laziness of their minds.

So despite the radical difference that cultural libertarians constantly seem to promote, the doctrine of the essential human right to express desires freely expresses most of all the obsession of the democratic imagination with a great unity of particles/particulars -- what Bulwer-Lytton called "all blended, yet all distinct" and what I have been calling for several years (the category of posts is to the right) Smithereens. Bulwer-Lyttons characterization of psychological pandemonium matches up, as Rieff helps us understand with one of his marathon footnotes in Fellow Teachers, to Burke's description of the sublime terror of the spectacle.

And as Rieff points out, the spectacle that transfixes psychological man in the age of the therapeutic is the realization that if everything and everyone is a particular without predicates, the only organizing principle is the totality of Nietzsche's teeming abyss, the totality of all power that looks right back at you, and into you. There is no choice but to fling yourself in, because there are no choices, no anything, outside. As Continental Airlines puts it so glibly in its latest ad campaign, transgressively inverting and profaning one of the last interdictory folk tales standing in the American memory: "There's no place like everywhere. There's no place like everywhere."

So our cultural libertarians seek to have their present and eat it too, partaking of the unity of all power as both its slave and its executor. "Thus," Tocqueville writes, "he oscillates the whole time between servility and license." What a temptation it is to channel servility, security, unity, and the voluptuous gratifications of the slave relationship into politics, leaving the social radically open for freely expressing our desires for license, luxury, licentiousness, diversity, division, and the exploitation of a consensus to enter a sort of state of nature where social power moves are permitted and rewarded and refined to capture the pleasures of personal domination.

Thus the very creepy and revealing case of the Jewish lesbian with just a tiny little crush on Mahmoud Ahmadinejad; she can run away from the underlying desire until the legs of her irony fall off, but she cannot hide. Cops and queers, Marilyn Manson reminds us, make good-looking models: thus the fantasy of the pink police state [see "The Dope Show" video at the 2:06 mark, watch through to the 2:47-2:50 mark]. Remember too Rieff's no longer strange-sounding remark that the Nazi uniform was the most erotic ever devised.

Anyway, it all seems to me to make very plain what are the stakes of the cultural libertarian challenge: political servitude and social license, a model now underway, in varying forms and to varying degrees, in Russia, China, and the UAE. Such a devil's bargain can take root in any type of regime -- totalitarian, despotic, authoritarian, monarchic, socialist, or democratic. And it, not religious extremism, is the truly dangerous enemy we face in the 21st century. Nobody worries that Osama bin Laden really has it right; nobody in the West worries, as they used to with Communism, that sharia law really might be the wave of the future. Our imagination is transfixed elsewhere.

The Therapeutic Erosion of the Democratic Ideal

We can converse, for a while, over a cup of coffee. It is unclear, however, if all the coffee shops that have appeared since the state has started to withdraw from the social existence of men in any way embody the kind of public sphere that Habermas described: a forum for discussion available to all who want to express their views and are prepared to advance and listen to arguments without consideration of hierarchies and official positions. To drink coffee involves a lifestyle choice, and constitutes yet another example of how we build our identities through acts of sophisticated consumption. -- Jakob Norberg, Eurozine

Blast Culture to Smithereens with your Inner Economist

Thanx to my fellow Scenester Peter Suderman I have this paragraph to thank for the rotten prejudice against popular economics bubbling afresh from my spleen:

The best sections of the book concern tactics for maximizing one’s cultural consumption, or what amounts to imitating Cowen. He lists eight strategies for taking control of one’s reading, which include ruthless skipping around, following one character while ignoring others, and even going directly to the last chapter. Your eighth-grade English teacher would faint. But the principle here is valuing the scarcity of your own time, which people often fail to do. It works for movies, too—Cowen will go to the multiplex and watch parts of three or four movies, rather than just sit through one. Why wait for a highly predictable ending when a fabulous scene might be unfolding in the movie playing next door? Cowen also offers advice for how to defeat the boredom that, despite our best intentions to be culturally literate, overtakes many of us minutes after we enter an art museum. How do we deal with this “scarcity of attention”? Pretend to be an art thief, he suggests—in every gallery, pick one picture that we’d like to run off with. Sounds juvenile, admits Cowen, but it “forces us to keep thinking critically” rather than daydream about the snack bar.

This is a horrible list. Read the below through clenched teeth for maximum effect:

1. Narrative maximizes the experience of culture.

2. The opposite of wasting time is not 'valuing' scare time.

3. The opposite of wasting time is making yourself more time.

4. Serial, unscheduled narrative-hopping wildly increases boredom. So does narrative minimizing.

5. One of the worst forms of narrative-hopping involves rushing to the unknown at the first sign of boredom. In exchange for certain escape of one likely boredom event, you raise the likelihood of ten more. The effect of responding in kind when they come along is cumulative.

6. The result of this lifestyle reduces the flight from boredom and the pursuit of exciting experiences (however fleeting) to a minimal, but maximally abstract, narrative of consumption, which is...an anti-narrative.

7. The experience of culture suffers accordingly. (Eventually becoming impossible, at the point of cultural illiteracy?)

8. But the mindboggling explosion of microcultures, fleeting niche 'lifestyle experiences,' expands quickly and indefinitely. The result is 'smithereens.' The beneficiaries are those whose 'cultural interests' are most lethal to culture itself.

Sorry. But this is what we get when our rules for culture are written by doctors of enjoyment science trying to treat distraction, listlessness, incuriosity, and boredom with the very drugs that cause it. Freakonomics indeed.

Our Daily Vernacular

is an anti-narrative of transformation. Marx said money is the pimp between man's need and the object. Make of transformation -- the transaction of the self from one condition to another -- an object of desire and need itself, and pimping becomes a sought-after property, an enabler. Pimping oneself in this sense represents 'empowerment' for sale. The object sought generalizes to the satisfaction of power in the abstract, the arc of transformation from 'is not' or 'has not' to 'now is' or 'now has.'

The challenge is to keep these primal transgressive urges adequately domesticated. They must be totalized across all mundane fields of everyday life to escape their natural association with the more dangerous forms of (Marx's term) self-stupefaction -- the momentary loss of self that comes from the passing satisfaction of consummating acts of sex and violence.

But this massive refugee flight into trivial transformations and trivial transactions cannot help but take the darker varieties of transgression with it, as Oscar Wilde knew well. So the thrall to sex and death must itself be trivialized in an attempt at control. The thrall must be converted by transactive turns into a game. The ability to have fun playing that game demonstrates mastery and domestication over it.

But this is a knowingly phony act. We know the thrill is getting away with that power -- not merely in the sense of transgressing against the thou-shalt-nots in the way, but in the sense of transgressing against ourselves -- putting ourselves in danger but escaping the pain of overindulgence. The kick is the kick of stealing from Eros and Thanatos -- or, more precisely, stealing knowingly and acting as if, pretending as if, the theft was not knowing at all.

Aggressive naivete, mendacious ambiguity: here are signs of the democratization of those hallmarks of art  gone truly decadent and anti-cultural, the topic covered below.

Bummer Man

Back when Brian Doherty wrote his Reason piece on Burning Man -- a frown-inducing seven years ago -- I was a little LA snotnose thinking about going out there and writing something up about it for, like, Flaunt, or whatever. One book and several Official 'Principles' later, Doherty now has a nice take on the way that Burning Man grows more and more bourgeois every year. Of course, if I was a pop cult-addled LA yuppie with a penchant for swinging around my dingaling in blinding sandstorms, I would be bitter about the seepage of corporate branding into my peaceful playafront community. Hell, I get hives just picturing the DC metro peppered with more advertisements, being just the guy I already am. But, all things considered, I'd rather see a few Aquafina banners fluttering overhead than thousands of drugged-up naked people in goggles, not necessarily young or attractive, seeking out and destroying every last bit of resistence to premature intimacy.

I feel so torn. Doherty's right that a motley, disorganized clutch of strangers doing an extreme flaming desert campsite thing has a flavor and a promise not quite captured by a ritual human beehive of well-planned sybaritic 'craziness' prancing around on carbon tiptoe:

As a long-term customer of the event, I confess I’ve been wary from the instant years ago when they began hyping “principles” beyond “come to an interesting place and do whatever you want. Lots of courageous, very active creative types will be out there too, most likely, and you maybe should try to be one yourself.”

But then he almost makes a final pitch for Burning Man as resort destination for bourgeois libertines enlightened enough to accept all comers:

I doubt I’ll be spending much time in their pavilion of green technologies this year, but an important message can be found in what they are doing: that the free play of creative action, even in a corporate market context, can be interesting and important, create win-win situations, and be engines of innovative and exciting new ways to act, to accomplish, and to live. Anyone lucky enough to live in America in the 21^st century knows this in their bones, even if they are loathe to admit it out loud.

Yes, lifestyle commodification is our best chance yet at a utopia we can should all enjoy. Cultural libertarianism not only gets tiresome but tends to fail itself when everyone around is a cultural libertarian. (Is this an example?)

Fake Life, All Too Human

Read Andrew, or rather one of his readers, on Second Life and the increasingly concerning (but here, mostly perceptive) Michael Gerson:

Gerson writes:

"But Second Life is more consequential than its moral failures. It is, in fact, a large-scale experiment in libertarianism. Its residents can do and be anything they wish. There are no binding forms of community, no responsibilities that aren't freely chosen and no lasting consequences of human actions. In Second Life, there is no human nature at all, just human choices."

A world without consequences? That's not libertarianism, it's liberalism.

Well, liberalism is life where the only consequence of there not being consequences is the proactive corrective of concentrated public power. Second Life -- or the convivial junkheaping of human 'nature' with human 'choices', anyway -- is, yes, cultural libertarianism. Of course, it should be of no surprise that this 'works' best of all in fake life, and it should be most distressing to speculate upon how popular the surrender of increasing portions of real life in favor of fake life will become for exactly that reason. On the other hand, such a turn might do the best and most humane job of thinning the herd, leaving real life to those who 'value' it for reasons incidental to 'choice'. Yet somehow fake life, I bet, will get realer and realer the bigger it gets, until finally it starts initiating events in the real world, not reacting to them.

Update 1: Will Wilkinson hates Gerson's "idiotic column," indicting "censorious moralizing scolds" everywhere. Another great victim of the Bush Administration has been popular confidence in the idea that a human being can both hold people in contempt -- or mere disapproval -- for their behavior while somehow mustering the incredible restraint necessary not to fight with every fiber of his or her being to ban that behavior nationwide and start making arrests.

Update 2: Matt Yglesias links to Brink Lindsey, godfather of the correct conclusion that cultural libertarianism is the "soft consensus" on top in this country and the incorrect conclusion that this is not stinging proof of the pathetic depths to which we Libertine Bourgeois have sunken. Spring break is the new free lunch, yes, but America still crawls with moralizing scolds, to varying degrees censorious or polite, and the silent soft consensus remains 'social democratic' -- populist, protectionist, instinctively arrayed against cultural libertarianism more than any other strain. No surprise Hillary, very weak here, has brought on Gephardt.   

Another Day, Another Sense

From Arts & Letters Daily (alas!):

Today's Neo-Malthusians harbor a powerful sense of loathing against the human species. Is it any surprise that some of them actually celebrate non-existence?...

Why are Neo-Malthusians of today not permitted to harbor a powerful loathing against the human species? Why do we persist -- to the point where 'sense of' language has become a vast unconscious verbal and mental tic repeated everywhere in public everyday -- in depriving ourselves of ownership of emotional nouns? Why must every feeling, attitude, and condition be screened off and accessed through a scrim of vagueness and gauzy imprecision?

What is a 'powerful sense of loathing' anyway? An intense feeling that...well...something or someone is...gosh, I don't know...somehow...loath...able?

I'm not going to ignore this until it finally goes away. 'Sense of' talk belies a habit of double therapeutic value: stripping the feeler of the responsibility for unconditionality, for even an instant; stripping the feelee of the felt duty to hold the feeler to that kind of account. It is a grand bargain of cultivated inaccuracy, a mindless conspiracy to undermine the ontology of accuracy itself. There are no real feelings, you see...at least none we can access in real life...aside from these foreclosed and unreal abstractions -- loathing, belonging, inadequacy, love, home -- we crippled creatures have naught but our senses thereof.

Then an eyebrow rises devilishly: so...what's a 'sense,' again?