Postmodern Conservative.

The Paradox of Change

Freddie has handed in the best blog post of the summer on George Will, making the argument against Willian prudence in as crisp and forthright a manner as possible. I almost quote the whole thing:

What men like Will never seem to understand, of course, is that people want change-- and not just gradual change but great, earth-shaking change, revolution and revolt-- because they are suffering, and only change can end their suffering. For some people the status quo just can't continue. Only radical, life-altering change can end their suffering. 

Now that doesn't mean we should always try to give it to them. Far from it. It doesn't mean that the plight of the suffering is society's only concern, though, yes, I find the elimination of suffering an absolute moral responsibility of a free and just society. There are always countervailing forces and other people with their own desires and needs. 

But I grow increasingly tired of men like George Will pretending that some of us call for change just for change's sake. I am weary of the conservative principle of denying the suffering of the poor, or the oppressed. Advocate for limited change if that's what your conscience and your intellect tell you is appropriate. But stop ignoring the fact that the desire for change comes from genuine emotional and physical distress.

Nearly all of the most important issues of moral philosophy, culture, and politics facing us today are captured here. When reading Will's piece, I lingered over his blunt insistence that we cannot remake the world anew -- not even close, Will implied. I flashed at once on one of my old comforts -- Ecclesiastes 1:9...

The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.

It is impossible to have this conversation without immediate and sustained reference to the paradoxes and puzzles of Christianity, which places believers in a singular position: the faithful are meant to strive to become ever-more-Christlike while knowing that they can never become fully Christlike. The tension between proactivity and passivity in Christianity has driven almost all the problems in Western civilization, and critics of passivity have railed with equal force against passive Christians who revel in their earthly glory or revel in their abandon. Proudhon tells us that no one who is not a socialist is a Christian, because a Christian sins to deny his species being; Machiavelli tells us that we do not have to live like refugees. For such thinkers, Ecclesiastes 1:9 is a source of delusion and affirmative harm, an invitation to the soft paralysis of passivity that grants much too much suffering as simply God-ordained. 

The contrast between Proudhon and Machiavelli is instructive because nobody much likes to think that Machiavelli could have actually been seriously advancing a kind of Christianity. (For different reasons, the same thing often happens to Hobbes.) I'm of the mind that what makes Machiavelli as gripping and dangerous as he is is that he's precisely offering a self-consciously radical reinterpretation of Christianity -- in which the Prince becomes the temporally suffering servant/sovereign on behalf of a flock that will fall into faction and passivity without him. It's a very Italian heresy, meaning at its most intense it is almost indistinguishable with merely corrupt piety, and it cashes out in the form of Cesare Borgia, whom Nietzsche liked to say he wanted as Pope -- precisely because Borgia reunited the temporal and spiritual power under a Machiavellian program of Will. (So I'm reading Nietzsche, at least in this instance, as more callous and cruel than Machiavelli.) 

But, to return to the main point, we have got to recognize that even very sincere and humane Christians can advocate the essentially Machiavellian point that we must strive to dominate and master nature as often as we can, through science and politics; that half a loaf (our control over fortuna probably will always top out, M. says, at 50%) is better than none, that freedom and power now are better than order and justice later. Machiavelli was no stranger (read the last chapter of The Prince) to the 'resolute urgency of now.' (And please note, for those among my critics who seem to be completely tone-deaf to subtlety of any sort, that I am not making the claim that 'Martin Luther King Jr. was no more than an American Machiavelli', or whatever. It should be clear that in taking Machiavelli's Christianity seriously I am going somewhere that scads of Christian intellectuals, not to mention Straussians, are absolutely unwilling to go, and that I am doing this to draw out the root of the tension that has brought about Will's remarks on the one hand and Freddie's on the other.) 

We can see, then, that Machiavelli and Proudhon are objects in the mirror of history that are closer -- to one another -- than they appear. So are Georges Sorel and Julien Sorel, for whoever's counting. The point of contact between them, the place where they can grasp hands, is the principle that the power of the state (coercive and violent as needs be) should, must, be used to eliminate human suffering so as to perfect human solidarity. Make no mistake, Machiavelli had a high threshold for tolerating the suffering of those with which he thought solidarity make the kind of solidarity he wanted impossible; but also make no mistake that Machiavellian civic republicanism is an explicit vision of using the power of the state as a vehicle of earthly salvation from the permanent passivity of suffering among an expanding group of flourishing citizens. The minute Machiavelli concedes that the best way to prevent your republic from collapsing is to steadily expand it, the die is cast for the convergence of Neoconservatism and Gersonism...and so Obamaism. But all these doctrines emerged from the European soil/soul. The French were here first. Whether the universal French European state that would be the product of conquest philosophical and military would be ruled by absolute reactionaries or absolute radicals was, in a basic fashion, incidental; what the Sun King dreamed of what was Napoleon dreamed of, and the only way the masses could partake in that dream, which they ever-more-fully did, was to democratize it as solidarity, fraternity. The crisis of the nation-state was with us almost just as soon as the nation-state was perfected; in Europe, it could be argued, the logic of nation-statehood before Hegel was its own destruction, its own supering. Citizenship was imagined as a primary-school education for immature human beings in the nature, God-given in its strongest assertion, of human solidarity. And it was recognized that the main obstacle to realizing this true solidarity was suffering, and that the main vehicle to overcoming it was proactive power. 

The fork in the road sends one path toward a duty to free any and all others from suffering and one path toward a duty to free yourself and your own from it. At one end of this fork is "where one is not free, none are free," and at the other is "rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God." Conservatives have always had a big soft spot for anyone caught in the latter position. But they have always had a hard spot for those trying to put the first position over on them. But the increase in power and flourishing that conservatives came to control as Republicans sustained their Presidential grip over the past 50 years led significant numbers of them, especially given the context and then mythology of the Cold War, increasingly to view their natural friendship toward rebels against tyranny as a God-given duty: whether a duty to defend Israel or a duty to end the genocide in Sudan. The principle of friendship with the world's enemies of 'political suffering' gave way to the principle of solidarity with the world's objects of social suffering. And the incredible relative and absolute gains of the United States in power and productive terms seemed to ratify the corollary of proactive coercion toward the ends of solidarity and the elimination (note Freddie's word) of suffering, with all deliberate speed. 

But the George Wills of the world persist in coming along and reminding us, as did Jesus and Nietzsche, that there is no earthly elimination of suffering, there is no way even to come close; that the best of us, the highest, may indeed be the ones who suffer most of all -- God or no God. This is the repugnant paradox that so outrages enemies of suffering and enthusiasts of proactive, coercive change toward solidarity. Freddie's first paragraph is absolutely spot-on. His third paragraph, almost so: Freddie may be right that some conservatives deny the suffering of the poor -- who, the argument runs, suffer for no meaningful other reason than that they are the poor -- but really he has to do battle against conservatives who openly acknowledge suffering but deny that they face any kind of moral obligation, much less an absolute one, to take proactive, especially coercive, action to do whatever it takes to eliminate it wherever it is found. This is about much more than D'Souza's allegation of loserdom. A certain strain of suffering-tolerant, suffering-accepting (paleo)conservatives are more than happy to be 'losers' in the capitalist-darwinian sense, and this is why they drive Wilkinsonian libertarians to distraction. 

As for Freddie's second paragraph, the contradiction afoot there gives the whole game away. There is only one way I can find to read it, which is to read it as saying that we face a vision of the highest which we cannot and will not ever fulfill. Heavy stuff, and right as far as it goes (for this is in the nature of all visions of the highest), but we are booted straight back into the paradox of change and the harrowing tension that Christianity first introduced into the world. In an absurd manner (for to the extent that human life is social, as I've gone out on a limb to suggest, it is absurd), there both is and isn't anything new under the sun, and our tutelage as to how this mysterious condition is so seems set to continue for a very long time. 

And on a final note, it is because of this mysterious profound tension that politics must not take its cues from faith. The power unleashed is destructive of politics because the first good of politics is order, and the pressure of the tension I have described upsets the delicate balance required to keep politics itself from being nothing but a cruel and crude game of power. Though the political relation is much different from friendship, politics can gainfully take cues from friendship that it cannot take from faith in solidarity. Because friendship is a radical yet modulated act -- one of the few acts that affords both radical change and maintains a certain distance while doing so, a distance which may be opened and closed but never collapses completely into love. 

The Hills Are Alive with the Sound of Oakeshott

I've got to thank Andrew for anecdotally raising the authority of my attack on Austin Bramwell's Weberian conservatism [DTO] by ten Oakeshott points:

at a National Review confab where Oakeshott was unfortunate enough to speak, his address received utter bewilderment from the muckety-mucks and Buckley proteges in the crowd. In the end, one of them mustered a question: "Excuse me, Mr Professor. But what does any of this have to do with the power of the president of the United States?" "Oh," Oakeshott reportedly replied. "The president of the United States has no power. He has authority."

This is misleading if cosmically accurate -- the office of the President of the United States is very obviously vested with certain powers which it takes a President to exercise. But the distinction Oakeshott and I and Andrew are drawing reminds me again of one complexity I couldn't quite treat fully was the difference between, say, Philip Rieff's theory of authority and Oakeshott's -- specifically as far as religion, faith, prophecy, revelation, guilt, and repentence are concerned. One more plate to keep spinning...

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.

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.

Pantheism and Catholicism: The Fateful Encounter

One of the few things Alexis de Tocqueville most underrated was the affinity in contemporary times between Catholicism and pantheism. I know this may be a revolting and outrageous idea, or allegation, to a fair number of friends and/or readers. But I have thought it over and have decided to move forward with it. For now I can only point you to The Immanent Frame, specifically to William Connolly's brief for pantheism (though he doesn't call it this), one of the plainest, frankest, and 'best' (yes, because it's Nietzschean) that I've seen in a while.

My main concern is that Taylor, and Catholics like him, are inclined to cede vast amounts of territory to the main thrusts and attitudes of the pantheist creed -- most importantly, the holiness of all love, in all its physicality, as an immanent and transcendent experience of peaceful yet powerful becoming in time -- as long as the Church and the Nicene Creed are kept intact. For at least a handful of Protestants, this amounts to something resembling worst nightmare territory. For what it's worth.

Liberal Faith, Liberal Feelings

A few points to add to Daniel's latest, lovely excoriation of Kagan. The latter has said that

[o]nly the liberal creed grants the right–the belief that all men are created equal and have certain inalienable rights that must not be abridged by governments; that governments derive their power and legitimacy only from the consent of the governed and have a duty to protect their citizens’ right to life, liberty, and property. To those who share this liberal faith, foreign policies and even wars that defend these principles, as in Kosovo, can be right even if established international law says they are wrong.

I'm not really interested in endorsing Daniel's remark that "Russia and China are in the position the U.S. and western Europe were in during the late 1940s with the beginning of containment, while the U.S. and Europe have adopted the revolutionary posture of the USSR and China." (Neither I suppose are a goodly number of Europeans.) But I do really dig Daniel's characterization of Kagan's 'liberal creed' as

an ideologically-driven mania that says sovereignty and international law can be compromised whenever certain powers feel (and feel is the right verb here) it necessary to protect “rights" [...].

Contrast against this Kagan's own self-appellation, "liberal faith." Perhaps the central failure of liberalism has been its inability to sustain its intellectual convictions without relying fundamentally on feelings. One could argue that a Burkean conservatism is frank about the indispensability of feelings in this regard, and a MacIntyrean whatever-you-want-to-call-it is equally strict about the indispensability of rational argument through but above them.

Our own Dr. Deneen has already put the question to 'democratic faith'; this matter of liberal faith deserves similar attention. Probably the best I can do here is to underscore why "feel is the right verb." Take, as Daniel does in the full post, Kagan's last sentence:

To those who share this liberal faith, foreign policies and even wars that defend these principles, as in Kosovo, can be right even if established international law says they are wrong.

Bracket for a minute the opening relativist gambit ("To me..."). That's not the problem. First, instead, notice how an aggressive war stops being aggressive because it is really only defending principles. Query how it is we're supposed to determine whether or not a certain principle needs defending. As hard as it is to remember, everyone must patiently acknowledge that a neoconservative point of view is compatible with prudence, as in sometimes the principles of the liberal creed may 'need defending' more than others. That what seemed blatantly obvious even during the Cold War now seems incomprehensible is a sign of just how far thinking discourse has degenerated on the matter. Even if one feels like one should be everywhere at once, even if in at the level of wildest dreams it would be ideal to be winning every battle one felt like starting, it simply doesn't follow that one should or even can be everywhere at once, or waging particular possible battles.

It's very sad and dangerous that the foes of neoconservatism and its loudest exponents  alike are persuading us that neoconservatism is incompatible with practical reason. If neoconservatism fails in this way as liberalism itself has failed, the fault seems to me not to reside in the structural characteristics of 'the liberal creed' as such but in the personal character of particular liberals and conservatives who fall prey to the temptation to embrace not only ideology but a conflation of faith and feeling.

Kagan's last quoted sentence is a textbook case. It is quite possible to reason as follows: (a), this Kosovo business (1999) is an affront to the basic principles of the liberal creed; (b), bombing the perpetrators of that affront, by contrast, would do more good than harm to the creed; but (c), international law prohibits us simply waking up one morning and bombing away; unfortunately, (d), violating international law (in this case, at least) does more harm than good to the liberal creed, and (e), on balance, as much as the creed would invite us to bomb, the creed rightly understood militates against simply serving as the henchman of the passions; therefore, (f), we will not bomb and yet we will remain good liberals.

Can this be done in practice? I think so. But it is more uncomfortable than simply swooning into your own arms. It requires the toleration of a certain kind of liberal suffering -- knowing that something which revolts and offends you and your most basic principles is happening, and that, with those principles in mind, you must counsel yourself well to let it happen. It transpires that a significant number of people often cannot stand the anxiety or agony which this last trap of liberals inspires in them, and that, in the end, they would rather know that they 'care more about people' than that they 'care only about principles.' Liberalism is always in fear of losing its humanity; this is its constant modern crisis of faith. The specter of being insufficiently feeling, and therefore insufficiently active, in the face of real suffering is what tortures the liberal soul -- tortures it so much that it pulls liberals away from the liberal creed itself. Sadly, not a few liberals -- and, to be explicit, not a few neoconservatives -- are willing to damage their faith to gratify their feelings. And as for conservatives --

Crossposted at The American Scene.

A Paradox

The best part of the day -- the warm, sunny hours between two and four-thirty p.m. -- is therefore the part of day worst to sleep through. But being the best part of the day, it is also the part of day best to fall asleep in.

Metadeconstructionism

At TAS, Matt Feeney delivers what might be the funniest and most well-conceived blog post of the year. Absolutely hopeless trying to pull a quote. Read it all. Big surprise: it's rife with implications for long conversations about prospects for postmodern conservatives. The main question is whether deconstruction has political implications, and whereas Stanley Fish says no, and Derrida goes so far as to say it's "justice" (this from the guy who also said Nietzsche's corpus might always only mean "I forgot my umbrella), Feeney sensibly enough says yes.

Briefly, all too briefly, I would contend that Matt's generally right and that's where the fun starts. Because Fish's claim that deconstruction does not (as opposed to should not) have political implications is a claim to what I call interobjectivity -- that is, to a shared and sharable conviction of the authoritatively true existence of a metaphysical item. (I continue to refine this definition.) It's not quite the whole story to say that Fish is just baldly masking a subjective preference with a truth claim. And it's not quite right either to say that Fish, as a bourgeois postmodern liberal, can, by the standards of authority internal to his own political philosophy, proclaim deconstruction as neutral with regard to 'political implications' and stop there. The phrase 'political implications' itself, in what it does and does not say, is positively rife with political implications. At its worst, as Matt hints, it can license "a trace of rapt passivity;" at its best, it can invite us to deconstruct what's going on when someone (contentedly or otherwise) settles for hovering over the surface of the world with the careful abstraction 'political implications' instead of saying more forthrightly that MY political philosophy can neither be attacked nor defended by recourse to any of the principles or conclusions of deconstruction.

Ironically I think one of the more pomocon things to do is to recognize that deconstruction does not equally threaten all political philosophies. But again this raises more questions than it answers. When it all boils down, Rorty and Fish (for instance) may paradoxically be able to rely on the United States Armed Forces to perpetuate and protect a system without any of their interests at the fore which nonetheless guarantees their best chance of survival and even flourishing. Postmodern bourgeois liberalism is parasitic on a global political system that's largely inimical to it. Yes, this is something of a dig, but then again Plato long ago recognized that this relationship also basically describes that between philosophy and democracy, at least until some philosopher or group of philosophers encounters the unthinkable (the people nominate them to rule or one day a ruler turns out to have been a philosopher). Whether or not a postmodern bourgeois liberal can cop to this relationship requires them to take a certain stance on politics, one which deconstructs Rorty's claim that we should/do call truth whatever wins in an 'open encounter'.

So what political philosophies are not as threatened by deconstruction as postmodern bourgeois liberalism? Well, postmodern conservatism, for one. Why? Fewer inherent contradictions and (perhaps because of) a more circumscribed commitment to social justice, I suspect. Postmodern conservatives, I think I'd like to suggest, recognize that truth is actually thrown into a constant state of extremity and crisis, or at least can't flourish, when all encounters are truly 'open'. This is different than the kind of cabalism that Straussians are accused of. It's more Aristotelian, insofar as it credits practical reason as a sharable resource for the maintenance and recovery of interobjectivity. But it's also Platonist insofar as it recognizes that the quest for a society of truly open encounters is a deconstructive project that never ends, and deconstructs some of the most noble and enjoyable things available to creative yet faithful human beings. The quest for the truly open encounter is a project of cumulative abstraction masquerading as a celebration of particularity. In that sense, it's like the charge leveled by Tocquevillian conservatives against modern liberals -- you think you're reveling in real diversity but it's really just a superficial compensation for the ubiquitous homogenization of equality.

In Nietzsche's terms, the point is more ominous: the only true diversity is a diversity of nobles. Postmodern bourgeois liberalism works overtime to avoid this conclusion, and to do so it requires of its nobles an endless set of shrugs when presented with the question of whether they are their own society's nobles. Pretty chintzy -- whereas postmodern conservatism -- even of a bourgeois variety -- would be more inclined to credit its own nobles with their nobility, even as it recognizes the virtues in permitting all manner of shades and subtext and subtlety when it comes to talking about and acting out nobility. Rah-rah sessions: generally to be avoided, and to be undertaken with the utmost care when necessary. That, too, has political implications, but my own claim is that, properly understood, deconstruction is like fire: it deserves respect and a little fear but, handled well, will not burn down the political philosophy of a well-informed postmodern conservative. But this in turn requires that the house of that philosophy is built with an eye toward the dangers of fire. And I suppose the bottom line is that a postmodern conservative thinks a postmodern bourgeois liberal is playing with fire but pretending not to be, whereas he or she the postmodern conservative is either not playing with fire or isn't pretending. And indeed, to make Aristotle suffer through a dance with Nietzsche, that not everyone can play well with fire.

That's where the 'political implications' come back in, in their honest guise as political morality, concerning the question of what nonpolitical standards should come into play in judging better and worse regimes. For this reason, America is a special treat for postmodern conservatives, because here is a place that doesn't always do as you'd like but which will probably always be okay in the end if its citizens aren't seduced away from their providential combination of small-bore innovation and wide-lens fidelity.

Happy Warriors

Thru Patrick at the Dish, I see the Economist is at it again:

extremists of both sides are happier than moderates. Some 35% of those who call themselves “extremely liberal” say they are very happy, against only 22% of ordinary liberals. For conservatives, the gap is smaller: 48% to 43%. Extremists are happy, Mr Brooks reckons, because they are certain they are right. Alas, this often leads them to conclude that the other side is not merely wrong, but evil. Some two-thirds of America's far left and half of the far right say they dislike not only the other side's ideas, but also the people who hold them.

But does jettisoning the concept of evil make you happiest of all? Evil must be feared, even respected; looking down on your comprehensively-wrong enemies with the contempt reserved for those too deluded even to accomplish evilness may produce new heights of joy. And yet...what is joy without the rejection of evil? Is 'happiness' itself only a pale, impoverished version of joy? A postmodern conservative, especially a religious one, might have an initially depressing but eventually joyful time of deconstructing 'happiness' as a stand-in in Western thought for joy. Perhaps even 'ideal' happiness already articulated a typically (small-l) liberal lowering of expectations.

At this juncture, Will Wilkinson is ready to say, no doubt, that greater happiness for a greater number is a far better public good than more intense joy for a smaller number. And when pressed, I will concede this point. But only because it's tied to a definition of 'public good' which I think works pretty well for America, though not necessarily other places. And at any rate the turn toward the 'American Idol' model of social entertainment suggests some bizarre and atavistic need to amp up the joy of a select number of individuals. Our strategy has been to attach the greater happiness to the vicarious enjoyment of the joy of super-talented special people...which is a hell of a thing for a bunch of (small-d) democrats to do. What's extra-strange about this phenomenon is its relation to democratic politics, made most striking in the form of Barackstar Obama. The ambivalence we feel about Obama's star power arises from just this funny feeling of aristocracy coming in through the back door -- or, better, a sense of aristocracy indulged in as such, the better to gain its emotional benefits without risking the costs of its actual reinstantiation.

Who Do You Love?

There is a mondo-importanto conversation going on about patriotism and nationalism featuring many of my favorite commentators. My backblog (that's a backlog of things to blog about) is already a groaning monstrosity, but this meme has added itself to the pile without complaint on my part. The main reason why is because the predicaments of patriotism and nationalism are very different in America and in Europe, and since most of the rest of the world has inherited the European, not American, model of statehood, no small bit of ugliness has to be sorted out with due attention paid to the weight and persistence and detail of the specific models. So stay tuned, and consult the whole meme meanwhile.