Category: Keepers

This morning I watched the president’s speech in Boston yesterday. It felt like a campaign rally. At first, it seemed off-key, although the combination with Sebelius’ dogged endurance of the deserved brickbats by Republican members was, I’d say, a relatively good day for the White House, which is not saying much these days.

But as I listened to the speech, it seemed to me that the president made some points that really do need to be re-made. Nothing makes me madder than a technical problem I cannot understand, let alone solve. Last night, as we were thrashing out various technical issues for the Dish, I got real testy and frustrated. So I can perfectly understand not just the frustration but the rage at healthcare.gov. I can also see why the cancellation notices for individual insurance policies because they don’t cover enough and perpetuate the free-rider problem would be maddening. Obama’s relentless repetition that if you like your plan, you can keep it, period, was bullshit, and he must have known it at the back of his mind. Trust is a very dangerous thing for a president to risk. And he deserves some shellacking for it.

At the same time, look. I’m running a small business now – and we are talking to our insurance broker about what the ACA means for us. We’re not panicking, and we may well pay less. As we go through the process, I’m going to keep you informed as to what happens. As for me, with the mother of all pre-existing conditions, I cannot express how relieved I am that having HIV will no longer carry the risk of bankrupting me, if I have to seek insurance one day on the individual market. I wonder if I would have risked going independent with the Dish without the security that, even if it all fell apart, I wouldn’t be left to the ravages of the individual market for insurance for those with chronic conditions. At a small level, it gave me some sense of security to take an entrepreneurial risk. It may be a huge boon for business for people to switch jobs or try new ventures knowing that the health insurance caveat against risk-taking is now gone.

But I’m extremely lucky and privileged. How can you put a price on the relief of struggling middle-class families whose current insurance policies can be abruptly canceled, or amended with little recourse, or those who simply cannot afford insurance at all and face not just the pain of sickness but bankruptcy as well?

I tend to agree with John Kasich who urged sympathy for “the lady working down here in the doughnut shop that doesn’t have any health insurance — think about that, if you put yourself in their shoes.” Yes, put yourself in her shoes. She’s not on TV like I am, making points. She is waiting for medical support and help for all the trials that flesh is heir to.

The ACA also offers a real chance to bend the cost curve in healthcare. At its worst, it’s a start – and something that can be worked on as time goes by. Every law can be amended. But what the ACA does at its core is bring everyone into the same boat – and a bigger pool is always better for insurance purposes. That’s both a moral and a fiscal gain. I can see how it could be amended. At some point, we might be able to get rid of the employer subsidies and expand the individual market considerably. Or we could move to a single payer. But it will force all of us to grapple with this question more directly and more practically. If you don’t see it as a panacea but as a baseline for the future, it looks better.

What I’m saying, I guess, is that we should not miss the forest for a few rotten trees. If they get the website working, if more people get to sign up, if premiums remain below what was expected … then we will have a very different debate than we are having right now. And look: this is the law. It’s not a project we can simply ignore. But it is a project we should see in perspective – which our current partisan brouhaha is obscuring.

(Photo: President Obama spoke at Faneuil Hall to bolster support for his national health care law in Boston on October 30, 2013. Cathey Park, of Cambridge, displayed a cast on her broken wrist with ‘I (heart) Obamacare’ written on it. When U.S. President Barack Obama finished his speech, he shook hands with the crowd and signed her cast, next to the heart. By Yoon S. Byun/The Boston Globe via Getty Images.)

The best part of Wilfred McClay’s new essay on what Michael Oakeshott could contribute to today’s American Republicanism is a gem from George Santayana, perhaps the most under-rated conservative writer I know. In thinking of America, Santayana was struck by the vastness of its wildernesses, its gigantic mountain ranges and deserts, its inherent difference from the genteel English conservatism of what Tolkien called the Shire.

But he didn’t draw from this any sense of American exceptionalism, in which this country’s sheer might could empower it to run the world, or to unleash the animal spirits of capitalism. He saw something else in those mountains:

A Californian whom I had recently the pleasure of meeting observed that, if the philosophers had lived among your mountains, their systems would have been different from what they are. Certainly, I should say, very different from what those systems are which the European genteel tradition has handed down since Socrates; for these systems are egotistical; directly or indirectly they are anthropocentric, and inspired by the conceited notion that man, or human reason, or the human distinction between good and evil, is the centre and pivot of the universe. That is what the mountains and the woods should make you at last ashamed to assert…

It is the yoke of this genteel tradition itself that these primeval solitudes lift from your shoulders. They suspend your forced sense of your own importance not merely as individuals, but even as men. They allow you, in one happy moment, at once to play and to worship, to take yourselves simply, humbly, for what you are, and to salute the wild, indifferent, non-censorious infinity of nature. You are admonished that what you can do avails little materially, and in the end nothing. At the same time, through wonder and pleasure, you are taught speculation. You learn what you are really fitted to do, and where lie your natural dignity and joy, namely, in representing many things, without being them, and in letting your imagination, through sympathy, celebrate and echo their life.

There is a Whitmanesque celebration of America here – but in the service of emphasizing the limits of human activity, the insignificance of so much that rivets us day by day, and the more fruitful option of mere enjoyment of these wildernesses, a giving over to them. And this uniquely American sense of the promising yonder and awe-inspiring West will – and should – shape an indigenous conservatism. Why such an emphasis on contingent space and place? Because conservatism in its best sense is about the constant situating of the individual within a cultural and historical context. Indeed, the very idea of the individual, an Oakeshottian would insist, is a contingent and unlikely achievement of the modern European and American mind, forged first by Augustine from the moral kindling of Christianity, and elaborated ever since. Individualism can never therefore be an ideology. “I built that” is an excrescent simplification, a form of contempt for tradition and society.

McClay asks the obvious yet overlooked question in our politics today: what is it that American conservatives want to conserve? It’s a great question. I am sympathetic, for example, to some conservatives’ dismay at the decline of unifying cultural events like Christmas or Easter. I am sympathetic to conservative resistance to changes in, say, marriage law, or the cultural impact of mass Latino immigration. There is real loss for many here as well as real gain for many more in the future. But the key to a more productively conservative defense of tradition is, it seems to me, a civility in making the case and an alertness to the occasional, contingent need for genuine reform, as social problems emerge in a changing society.

Today’s Republicanism is, in contrast, absolutist, ideological, fundamentalist and angry. It has ceased to be a voice among others in a genuine conversation about our country and become a rigid, absolutist ideology fueled by the worst aspects of the right – from racism to Randian indifference to the many others who made – and make – our lives possible. A lot of the time, it is quite simply philistine. Here’s what McClay gleans from Oakeshott’s writing that could help the cause of conservative reform:

First, the idea of conversation as the model for civilized life.

Second, the need to create and preserve appropriate scale in our communities, for the sake of fostering just such conversation.

Third, the profound human need for release from the burden of purposefulness, which is perhaps another way of expressing the enduring need for transcendence, an avenue that Rationalism tends to foreclose to us.

And fourth, the irreplaceable mission of liberal learning.

To translate: civility in public discourse, maximal federalism and subsidiarity, a sense of transcendence to overcome the delusions of materialism and individualism, and a relentless defense of universities as the core places where our society learns to breathe and grow in the light of knowledge and understanding.

Is this an agenda? Not in any sense of the word. And that is the point. There is no fixed set of policies that an Oakeshottian conservative will embrace. It will all depend on the time and the place and the problem. He will question change and reform as a constant necessity – which is what makes him (and me) allergic to the bromides of progressivism. But he will also try and judge when reform is necessary to preserve the coherence of a society. So, for example, I favor immigration reform, legalized cannabis and gay marriage because they are contingent and creative responses to emergent social facts: the existence of millions of undocumented immigrants, widespread illegal use of cannabis, and the arrival of a self-conscious minority denied the dignity of equal citizenship. There are Oakeshottian conservative critiques of all three reforms, as well. The issue, in the end, is one of prudential judgment about all these questions, a skill and virtue that can never be reduced to an ideology or “ism”.

Understanding the limits of one’s own understanding makes a political conversation natural. It’s what I’ve tried to foster here on the Dish and failed to live by during the more emotional period after 9/11. It’s not just a blogging formula. It’s a way of thinking. And until we revive that manner of thinking, American conservatism will remain defined by its ugliest and dumbest protagonists.

Recent Dish on Oakeshott here. My own book on Oakeshott’s thought (my doctoral dissertation) can be bought here. My more accessible book, The Conservative Soul, deeply influenced by Oakeshott’s thought can be bought here.

Their exchange is one of the high moments of debate as journalism evolves in the digital era. If you haven’t, do yourself a favor and read it. I come down in favor of both approaches, i.e. alleged “objectivity” or an attempt at impartiality in competition with a press more open about its own biases and point of view. I think readers deserve both. In Britain – though it is far from working perfectly – the biases of the papers make more sense because of the massive resources of the BBC aspiring to impartiality.

But on the basis of this exchange, I think Glenn has the advantage. And that’s because his idea of journalism is inherently more honest – declaring your biases is always more transparent than concealing them. That’s why, I think, the web has rewarded individual stars who report and write but make no bones about where they are coming from. In the end, they seem more reliable and accountable because of their biases than institutions pretending to be above it all. In the NYT, the hidden biases are pretty obvious: an embedded liberal mindset in choosing what to cover, and how; and a self-understanding as a responsible and deeply connected institution in an American system of governance. These things sometimes coexist easily – as a liberal paper covering the Obama administration, for example, with sympathetic toughness. And sometimes, they don’t – as a liberal paper covering the Bush administration, for example, and becoming implicit with its newspeak.

On the latter, Glenn’s strongest point is about the NYT’s decision not to call torture torture when reporting on the torture regime of Bush and Cheney.  Keller still has no good answer here – except, quite obviously, his desire not to burn bridges with an administration and not become a lightning rod for right-wing press critics. Trying to appear objective, in other words, by appeasing both sides in a dispute, is not actually being objective or impartial. It’s enabling war crimes – which I think the New York Times did under Bill Keller’s leadership. No one ever hesitated to use the word torture to describe waterboarding in the past, and the NYT itself did so when other countries were guilty. So hiding your biases, and trying to appear objective, can mean the opposite of honest. That’s why, up there, the Dish has a simple motto: biased and balanced. You know where I’m coming from; and you can also judge if we fairly provide counter-points and dissent. The Dish evolved toward the “biased and balanced” mindset out of a desire to get things right, after I had proven myself all-too able to get things wrong.

Of course, I’m not running (as of yet) original reporting. But reporting, to me, is about finding stuff out, and publishing it without fear, and being accountable for it.

That means publishing without fear of being called leftist by the right, or of being called fascist by the left; publishing without fear of unsettling and even enraging governments; without fear of upsetting, offending, or even boring, readers because some difficult truths need to be gotten out there; and without fear of being called unpatriotic, or biased. That requires enormous discipline, constant tough judgment calls, brass balls, and discriminating restraint. Withholding the truth – unless for fear of risking others’ lives – is something you only do in extraordinarily rare circumstances. So, to take an obvious example, reporting about Iran’s nuclear program without noting Israel’s nuclear and chemical weapons – a key piece of context the NYT routinely refuses to note – is not impartial. And bias is best concealed within an allegedly unbiased news outlet.

Equally, it means matching revelations from democratic societies with revelations from autocracies. A press that constantly make the US government unable to keep secrets reliably needs to put in a lot of effort to do the same with far less porous regimes. It means careful consideration of internal government documents before publishing; it means eschewing excess zeal in revealing secrets, in favor of measured and responsible explanation of the broader issues involved. That’s called balance.

We have yet to see what Glenn and his future colleagues will produce under much more strenuous institutional boundaries. But we need him. And with any luck, the competition will sharpen the NYT as well. There is a golden mean here – one which the NYT aspires to but often fails to achieve. It will only do better with Glenn nipping at their heels.

(Photo: The Guardian’s Brazil-based reporter Glenn Greenwald, who was among the first to reveal Washington’s vast electronic surveillance program, testifies before the investigative committee of the Brazilian Senate that examines charges of espionage by the United States in Brasilia on October 9, 2013. By Evaristo Sa, AFP/Getty Images.)

The fusion of politics and religion – most prominently the fusion of the evangelical movement and the Republican party – has been one of the most damaging developments in recent American history. It has made Republicanism not the creed of realists, pragmatists and compromise but of fundamentalists – on social and foreign policy, and even fiscal matters. And once maintaining inerrant doctrine becomes more important than, you know, governing a complicated, divided society, you end up with the extremism we saw in the debt ceiling crisis. When doctrine matters more than actually doing anything practical you end up with Cruz cray-cray. How does one disagree with a Taft:

Watching the Republican Party use the full faith and credit of the United States to try to roll back Obamacare, watching its members threaten not to raise the debt limit — which Warren Buffett rightly called a “political weapon of mass destruction” — to repeal a tax on medical devices, I so wanted to ask a similar question: “Have you no sense of responsibility? At long last, have you left no sense of responsibility?”

But there is some light on the horizon. The Catholic hierarchy has been knocked sideways by the emergence of Pope Francis and his eschewal of their fixation on homosexuality, contraception and abortion. That fixation – essentially a Christianist and de facto Republican alliance among Protestants and Catholic leaders – has now been rendered a far lower priority than, say, preaching the Gospel or serving the poor and the sick. Francis has also endorsed secularism as the proper modern context for religious faith:

I say that politics is the most important of the civil activities and has its own field of action, which is not that of religion. Political institutions are secular by definition and operate in independent spheres.

But perhaps a more powerful shift against Christianism is now taking place among evangelicals, especially the younger generation. Check out this terrific profile of the Southern Baptist Convention’s new public voice, Russell Moore. Money quote:

“We are involved in the political process, but we must always be wary of being co-opted by it,” Mr. Moore said in an interview in his Washington office, a short walk from Congress. “Christianity thrives when it is clearest about what distinguishes it from the outside culture.”

Moore, moreover, is not alone. At 42, he is more in touch with the next generation of evangelical Christians who do not share or support the harsh political agenda of their elders:

A March survey of nearly 1,000 white evangelicals by the Public Religion Research Institute, a nonpartisan polling organization, found half of those under 35 favored same-sex marriage, compared with just 15% of those over 65. The younger evangelicals were more likely to be independents over Republicans, while the opposite was true of their elders.

“The religious right was born on the theology of numerical expansion: the belief that conservative churches grow while liberal ones die. That conceit is gone now,” says David Key, director of Baptist Studies at Emory University’s Candler School of Theology.

And that conceit was very much behind the stance of a Catholic like Ross Douthat, who, despite his youth, sounds at times more like a theocon of the 1990s than a Millennial Catholic or evangelical. What Ross and others got wrong, I’d suggest, was being too utilitarian in a context where truth still matters. No one should support a church’s doctrine because it is more effective in the short run at putting bottoms on pews, as they say in England. A doctrine or moral position can only be defended as true, not useful. And the Christianist positions on gay people – they can be cured or should be required to be celibate their entire lives, without even masturbation – is so ludicrous as an example of what God would want for a small proportion of his Creation that it has rightly evaporated among the next generation.

Ditto the silly notion that contraception somehow violates the order of nature in ways so grave it must be outlawed. Evangelicals never had to deal with this transparent nonsense, but Catholics still labor under its staggering lack of persuasiveness. The idea that universal healthcare should be opposed because of a tiny detail about contraception coverage is as theologically ass-backwards as the notion that the church might shut down its services for abandoned children or the homeless for fear of employing one spouse of a married gay couple. Perhaps a strong dose of the old medicine could firm up the older generations – but clinging to arguments that no one under 40 finds even vaguely plausible, let alone humane, is not a long-term strategy for the health of Christianity.

The exception to this is abortion, where the moral arguments against it remain powerful and coherent, if impractical as a political project. So it’s no surprise that it’s that issue the younger generation have not shifted on. But the political program to criminalize it may not be as appealing to this generation as a prophetic call against abortion’s dehumanization of human life, and violence against the most vulnerable. To oppose contraception as well as abortion strikes many, rightly, as morally contemptible as a practical question.

And so the pendulum swings back. We do not yet know what a more apolitical, Gospel-centered, life-centered Christianity will achieve, how popular it may be, or whether it will lead to higher levels of commitment to God than at present. But I suspect even Pope Benedict finally realized it is the only way forward – hence his resignation in the face of his papacy’s near-total failure. What matters now and always is truth, not usefulness, faith, not politics. The next generation gets this.

Know hope.

(Chart: from the WSJ. Photo: A visitor inspects a light installation by British-born artist Anthony McCall during a preview of the exhibition “Anthoy McCall. Five Minutes of Pure Sculpture” at the Hamburger Bahnhof museum in Berlin on April 19, 2012. By Stephanie Pilick/AFP/Getty Images.)

In a review of Permanent Present Tense by Suzanne Corkin, Steven Shapin reflects on the life of Corkin’s famous patient, Henry Molaison, whose ability to form new memories was destroyed by a brain operation when he was 27. How Molaison’s sense of memory relates to our own:

In everyday life, we don’t much care whether what we remember is contained between our ears or resides on a piece of paper. We rely on our partners, colleagues, and friends to remind us of obligations; we stick Post-its on computers and fridge doors to cue us to buy milk or have the car serviced; our cell phones ping to announce coming appointments and remember all our phone numbers for us. Increasingly, our memories are distributed across a landscape populated by things and other people, and, in that respect, it’s possible to see Molaison as standing merely at a pathological extreme of memory’s normalcy: after the operation, all of Molaison’s declarative memory lived outside his own body, while only some of ours does.

Shapin imagines a future in which “technology will banish forgetting”:

The Quantified Self movement encourages everyone to follow Silicon Valley utopians in forming a personal digital register of every item of food consumed and every measurable bodily state. A camera worn on the neck of a “lifelogger” records everything seen, and a digital recorder captures everything heard. It’s all there—nothing filtered, nothing lost, nothing distorted by the messiness of internal memory. Wearable computers like Google Glass hold out the promise of still more powerful modes of self-archiving. We shall be as gods, and about ourselves we shall know all things. Technology will banish forgetting, and the stores of undeformed memory will live forever in the cloud, retrievable at will. The name for our remaining problems will be “search”: all we’ll have to do is remember what we’re looking for, master a few tricks for finding it, and, finally, offload the initiation of search onto external prompts that will remind us to remember.

Last Saturday I spent a relatively harmless and hugely enjoyable few hours with some friends and the conversation got a little 3 am college dormy. My friend elaborated an epiphany about eternity.

As the years go by, and our lives are digitally recorded in more and more ways, he argued, there will be digital versions of ourselves – from selfies to web trails, from precise consumer preferences to social networks, from thousands of emails and texts to videos and Facebook likes – that will have more data embedded in them than even the most industrious biographer could have used on the most famous person in the past. We will also come, inevitably, to refer to these digital summaries of ourselves, to remind us of our past, to get digital proof of previous loves or ideas or events or friends. We will therefore need to remember less and less, even as the imprint we make on the world becomes more and more indelible and eternal. We can just look them up, the way we reach for Google when we cannot remember the answer to a trivia question or need to resolve an empirical debate.

Writing a blog every day for thirteen years and counting brings that home rather firmly. So many feelings, thoughts, asides, facts, wishes, errors, home-runs, and massive fails are all there for anyone to see and for me to flinch from. But just as surely, I do not need to remember much of my life any more. It is remembered for me and exists in something we call the cloud. The cloud is eternal. It reaches into the depths of the past and makes it instantly accessible to the present and to any non-apocalyptic future.

The concept of a personal trail that makes a life eternal isn’t new, of course. I think of Emily Dickinson’s vast trove of scribbles or Pascal’s unfinished scraps of paper we now know as the Pensees. But in the past, only a few managed to achieve anything like the record we are currently assembling of our own lives every day. For most, there was the Parish register or, if you were really lucky, a mention in government or church records. A gravestone here; a family genealogist there. Far, far more human beings ended their lives with no lasting memory of them remaining among those still living. We were almost all unknown soldiers once.

Now, we are all so known. And the key aspect of the cloud, it seems to me, is not just its powerful storage, but its instant accessibility to anyone with an Internet connection. Just like the seventeenth century poems we publish afresh here on the Dish alongside the written-a-few-minutes-ago blog-posts, the old and the new exist as equals, because they will increasingly become equally available to us. And so time itself disappears as an experience online. It truly is an eternal now, that connects past and future to a perpetual present.

And in some ways, our personal digital records are very much the summation of ourselves. Not our physical, intimate, human selves – the selves we eat with and run with and fall in love with – but our abstracted selves, the conglomeration of every detail, feeling, idea, thought, impulse, and friend that tells the story of me. Long after I am dead, will that not be the most accessible incarnation of me – alongside all the published words I have written in part to live past my physical expiration date? Will I not continue to exist in some form that is available to all of humankind for ever?

Ambitious types in the past performed all sorts of amazing and horrifying things to become immortal, to leave a legacy, to be remembered by history. But increasingly, that form of immortality is available to to more and more people in principle. In the future the scale of the recording – the Big Data Of Humanity – will only increase and deepen. In practice, of course, our lives will exist only in so far as others care to find us. And that is how it has always been. But now, more and more of us will never fully die. We will always be available for rebooting.

Is it a purely etymological accident that we call this collective memory a cloud?

Was it also purely by accident that for aeons, humankind looked up past the clouds to see Heaven?