Month: November 2008

Jennie Yabroff praises Orwell:

Though many of Orwell’s essays describe single incidents, his concerns are political, in the largest sense: the way human dignity is corrupted by false phrases. He was less interested in what motivates people to act without integrity than in the words they use to camouflage and perpetuate their dishonesty: for Orwell, bad language and bad politics were one and the same. Yet for all his penury and despair, his faith in the power of clear, strong language can only be read as optimistic.

(hat tip: Frank Wilson)

"Try to imagine Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire dancing to a song of infinite length. Their technique would remain as dazzling as the talent of the resurrected Lou Gehrig, and it is just as tempting to fantasize about them dancing forever as it is to imagine him playing his last game one more inning, and then another…but what was most valuable in their art, as in his play, would then be lost. Without a sense of the end, and thus of the shape of their movements, the beauty and drama they achieved in finite time would become the infinite and thus meaningless repetition of technique; or, if eternity be imagined as all moments gathered together, this finite beauty and drama would become the absurdity of every move executed at once, and so on for every activity we know. Life itself, as the activity of activities, requires the finitude imposed on it ultimately by death to preserve its meaning," – Patrick Lee Miller, Immanent Frame.

Timothy Fitzgerald at The Immanent Frame:

The invention of “religions” in the modern discursive form is also the invention of the secular state and the modern idea of “science” as essentially different from “religion.” In any given context of modernity we are always dealing with “religion” in various binary oppositions, which are all dependent on the bottom-line distinction between religion and whatever is assumed to be non-religion, now referred to rhetorically as the secular. In discussions about religion, its separation from, and thus relation to, other discursive non-religious domains such as science, politics or economics is usually only acknowledged tacitly and in passing, if at all, conveying (say) an untroubled and unquestioned sense that religion and politics or religion and science or religion and economics are essentially distinct, and thus in danger of getting confused.

(hat tip: 3QD)

Michael Hirschorn on the under-appreciated work of meta-genius Peter Watkins:

Like a Centre Pompidou of cinema, Watkins is forever laying bare the arti­fice. Fiction and nonfiction merge: non-actors improvise roles in fictional accounts of factual events (the effect is very reality-TV); and the contrivance inherent in any media narrative is exposed as Watkins shows the cameras, the sets, his directorial technique. His endlessly recursive gambits serve as a metatextual critique of how fact and fiction are just different ways to impose narrative—and yet they never seem like academic posing; indeed, they carry an amazing emotional wallop.

And yet, I find this election campaign to have been an impressive testament to post-modernism’s limits. The post-modern candidate was Palin: a hologram of cultural resentments, crafted to win votes through image, propaganda and untruth. And yet we saw right through it. Fact mattered in the end, didn’t it? And truthiness finally lost.

One thought that the right should consider more deeply: is the whole idea of a "conservative movement" an oxymoron? Austin Bramwell, whose piece I linked to before, thinks movements are overrated. I guess I’m relieved when I read someone else who actually seems to have understood a little about Oakeshott:

Michael Oakeshott…characterized conservatism as a mere disposition—a theory that negates the very possibility of a conservative “movement.” But Oakeshott wrote precisely in reaction to the more ideological understandings of conservatism like those the movement was beginning to develop in America. The conservative movement continues to pay lip service to Oakeshott, but his theory of conservatism, if accepted, would fatally undermine the rationale for having a movement in the first place. The practical, “cash value” of every other theory of conservatism is that the movement should pursue this or that set of goals and not others.

In short, conservatism is not a philosophy or approach to political affairs that inspires the set of institutions known as the conservative movement. Rather, the conservative movement is a set of institutions that inspires the ideology known as conservatism. In the absence of a movement, the felt need to develop a coherent understanding of conservatism would evaporate.

Of course, the movement is not going anywhere and debates as to the meaning of conservatism will continue. Suppose, however, one agrees with this or that position closely associated with the movement. Does it follow that one should engage in movement-building activities? No. Non-movement conservatives have arguably done more to advance conservative ideas and without the burden of fitting them into an ideological system or wondering how they may affect their standing within an ideological movement.

A non-movement conservative by definition has no meaningful affiliation with movement conservative institutions. He may not even care whether others call him a “conservative.” (Indeed, movement conservatives may be quick to denounce him.) But that needn’t limit his influence. On the contrary, consider the impact of these notable non-movement conservatives going back to the era of the movement’s founding.

James Surowiecki writes about the investor class information overload:

These markets and indexes are valuable as a way to help investors hedge risk. But, in an environment of profound uncertainty, investors have a natural if troubling tendency to turn to them as horoscopes, particularly since they now get so much attention in the business press: you have only to turn on CNBC or go online to find that the Japanese market is cratering or the VIX index soaring. The result is to draw investors away from the grind of analyzing corporate performance and economic fundamentals, and to encourage pure speculation—investing as an exercise in anticipating what other investors will do. Meanwhile, traders in other markets are looking to our stock market for guidance—Nikkei traders usually react positively when the Dow rises—or, like VIX and futures traders, are overtly trying to forecast what our stock market will do. Investors find themselves trapped in a mirror maze, like the gunslingers in “The Lady from Shanghai.”

Mark Lilla has a must-read in the WSJ today. (Dislcosure: we were political theory students of Shklar and Mansfield at Harvard together years ago). It charts the collapse of the intellectual right from a pioneering attempt to re-think established nostrums about public policy to … well the Caribbean cruise now floating around on a sea of denial and contempt:

The Palin farce is already the stuff of legend. [but] John McCain’s choice was not a fluke, or a senior moment, or an act of desperation. It was the result of a long campaign by influential conservative intellectuals to find a young, populist leader to whom they might hitch their wagons in the future. And not just any intellectuals. It was the editors of National Review and the Weekly Standard, magazines that present themselves as heirs to the sophisticated conservatism of William F. Buckley and the bookish seriousness of the New York neoconservatives. After the campaign for Sarah Palin, those intellectual traditions may now be pronounced officially dead.

Irving Kristol’s bitter capitulation to populism a quarter century ago was the harbinger. It’s all been downhill since:

Their function within the conservative movement is no longer to educate and ennoble a populist political tendency, it is to defend that tendency against the supposedly monolithic and uniformly hostile educated classes. They mock the advice of Nobel Prize-winning economists and praise the financial acumen of plumbers and builders. They ridicule ambassadors and diplomats while promoting jingoistic journalists who have never lived abroad and speak no foreign languages. And with the rise of shock radio and television, they have found a large, popular audience that eagerly absorbs their contempt for intellectual elites. They hoped to shape that audience, but the truth is that their audience has now shaped them.

One reason I believe the reconstruction of conservatism will require a generation’s work is that the rot has gone so deep among so many with so much patronage. If it weren’t for the blogosphere allowing new thoughts and debate to bubble up from below, and outside the Kristol-Lowry-Steyn axis, I’d despair.

Paul Comstock interviews Rowan Jacobsen, author of Fruitless Fall: The Collapse of the Honey Bee and the Coming Agricultural Crisis. Jacobsen on what would happen to human civilization if bees completely died off:

No mass starvation, because the grains that make up the bulk of our diet are not at risk. (Wind-pollinated.) So we’d have corn, bread, oatmeal, etc. And certain fruits, such as grapes, are wind-pollinated or self-fertilizing.

And then there’s human pollination, as they’re doing in China. (Take millions of peasants, hand them bundles of chicken feathers, and let them climb through the fruit trees, touching every flower with a bit of pollen from a bucket.) What we’d have is extraordinarily high prices for most of the fruits and vegetables that provide our vitamins and antioxidants, if they could be found at all. And the beef and dairy industry, as Michael Pollan has pointed out, is switching more and more away from natural forage to corn, even though corn makes cattle sick, because it’s cheaper to feed corn and administer antibiotics to sick cattle than it is to use nature pasture. So we’d still have a beef industry, though a freaky one.

But honeybees aren’t on the edge of going extinct. They are, however, on the edge of not being able to provide all the pollination we’ve asked of them.

I’m still bemused by the drop in gay support for Obama after Kerry. I’d put it down primarily to the fact that the gay political establishment, with its usual brilliance, fused itself with the Clinton campaign very early on, and there was a real slice of Clintonian anti-Obama hate that wouldn’t go away. For much of the campaign, I expressed surprise at how so many gay men and lesbians were indifferent or hostile to Obama. Maybe there was a particular lesbian bond with Clinton, which may have led some lesbians to pick McCain (they’re susceptible to a little Alaskan boobage as well). Maybe that goes for some diva-worshipping gay men as well, men who so identified with Hillary that they couldn’t reconcile themselves to Obama. But a reader suggests that racism may be more alive and well in the gay community than some of us want to believe:

I think you could do quite a bit more with that startling statistic – McCain 27% vs. Bush 23% among gays, Obama 70% vs. Kerry 77%. As a married gay man I’m upset about Prop 8, but I’m also upset about this blame-the-blacks line. The black vote in California simply wasn’t large enough to make a difference, so why are people focusing on that? The eagerness to jump on the black vote for Prop 8, together with the statistic above, points to a smoldering issue in the gay community.

Now, if there were any signals of reluctance from Obama on gay rights, that would be one thing, but here’s a candidate who made his debut on the national stage with a speech whose most electrifying passage contained the phrase "and we’ve got gay friends in the red states." I remember being thunderstruck when he said that ‹ I’d never heard a national candidate talk so matter-of-factly, so un-self-consciously, about gay people. And a version of that line has been in every stump speech he’s given, probably more than a thousand times across the country. So there’s no way you can argue that McCain is better than Obama on gay-political grounds.

McCain is admittedly more gay-friendly than a lot of Republicans, but his record is demonstrably worse than Obama’s, and if you throw in Palin and the Supreme Court you have a pretty bleak picture. So what is going on here? I have to say, anecdotally among gay friends I notice a certain amount of casual racism that shocks me, notwithstanding the dancing to black music and the supposedly affectionate impersonations of black voices. People talk about the irony of blacks voting for Obama but against Prop 8. Well, let’s also talk seriously about the irony of gay people voting Republican in greater numbers than ever before — in the year of Obama.

I take the point – although we should also note the overwhelming support for Obama as well. But I think there’s something there as well.