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Sean Lowe, the most recent star of The Bachelor, is an outspoken “born-again virgin.” Scott Galupo scoffs at the idea and makes a broader philosophical point:

In a 1974 appendix to his study Conservatism Revisited: The Revolt Against Ideology, [Peter] Viereck wrote that classical conservatism, of the mostly British but also French variety, is “an inarticulate state of mind and not at all an ideology. Liberalism argues; conservatism simply is.” Once conservatism becomes conscious of itself—becomes aware that it is a thing set apart—it changes irrevocably; it becomes another species of rationalism. Viereck was writing in a sociopolitical context, in which classical conservatives recoil from Rights of Man universalism and other logical abstractions. But the observation applies just as well, I think, to traditional values in modern Western societies.

That couples should abstain from sex until marriage used to be more than an imperative; it was a norm, a widely-shared expectation of behavior. Today it is a value—inculcated and professed as against the more lax standards of the mainstream. It is joined to a narrative about honor and degradation. It is an argument, rather than something that simply is.

This no more presages the disappearance of the practice of abstaining from sex until marriage than it does the disappearance of any other rational, self-conscious ethical or political blueprint. It does, however, mean that its adherents must realize they are tending to something inorganic and exposed to a “torrent of change,” like Chesterton’s white post. It means they must become radical and set apart.

The inarticulate tendency in conservatism is what led John Stuart Mill to say the following:

I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it.

Of course, I think that’s a misunderstanding. The inability to articulate the value of something you have come to love or do is, to my mind, part of its value. Some things in life are ineffable and to explain them almost a violation of their essence. Most of these lie in the practical arena. How does a master chef explain exactly how he makes a dish with his singular skill, developed for years? How do those who are doing beautiful things with scooters answer when you ask them how they became so good at it, and why they keep at it? How do I explain why the cutting down of a small copse of trees near my childhood home traumatized me – because of what it did to my little universe of boyish escape?

There are reasons we can come up with. But they don’t capture the lived experience and never can. And it is precisely when you explain it that you undermine it. As soon as you call the town you have always lived in a “community”, it no longer is one. This is the Tao of conservatism. If conservatism were to be properly represented by a religion, it would be the opposite of fundamentalist Christianity. It would be Taoism. As Wiki notes,

The right libertarian economist Murray Rothbard suggested that Laozi was the first libertarian, likening Laozi’s ideas on government to F.A. Hayek’s theory of spontaneous order. James A. Dorn agreed, writing that Laozi, like many 18th century liberals, “argued that minimizing the role of government and letting individuals develop spontaneously would best achieve social and economic harmony.” Similarly, the Cato Institute’s David Boaz includes passages from the Daodejing in his 1997 book The Libertarian Reader. Philosopher Roderick Long, however, argues that libertarian themes in Taoist thought are actually borrowed from earlier Confucian writers.

Thomas Merton wrote: “I simply like Chuang Tzu because he is what he is and I feel no need to justify this liking to myself or anyone else.”

But no conservative thinker was as steeped in Taoism as Michael Oakeshott. If I were to pick one story that describes the essence of conservatism, it would be this one:

Duke Huan was in his hall reading a book. The wheelwright P’ien, who was in the yard below chiseling a wheel, laid down his mallet and chisel, stepped up into the hall, and said to Duke Huan,

“This book Your Grace is reading may I venture to ask whose words are in it?”

“The words of the sages,” said the duke.

“Are the sages still alive?”

“Dead long ago,” said the duke.

“In that case, what you are reading there is nothing but the chaff and dregs of the men of old!”

“Since when does a wheelwright have permission to comment on the books I read?” said Duke Huan. “If you have some explanation, well and good.  If not, it’s your life!”

Wheelwright P’ien said,

“I look at it from the point of view of my own work. When I chisel a wheel, if the blows of the mallet are too gentle, the chisel slides and won’t take hold. But if they’re too hard, it bites in and won’t budge. Not too gentle, not too hard you can get it in your hand and feel it in your mind. You can’t put it into words, and yet there’s a knack to it somehow. I can’t teach [explain] it to my son, and he can’t learn it from me. So I’ve gone along for seventy years and at my age I’m still chiseling wheels. When the men of old died, they took with them the things that couldn’t be handed down. So what you are reading there must be nothing but chaff and dregs of the men of old.”

But when it’s gone, it’s gone. Every attempt to replicate it rationally misses the point. If you can grasp that point – and it is often better grasped by those not schooled in the supremacy of reason – you have captured the essence of conservatism, properly understood.

Joe Linker turns to Thomas Merton to discern the meaning of prayer:

For Merton, prayer seems to be a kind of poetry, but only after acknowledging a marketplace uselessness of both … The modern world presents problems for the poet and the prayer: “Can contemplation still find a place in the world of technology and conflict which is ours?” Peace, and wholeness, Merton argues, are not “the most salient characteristics of modern society.” No kidding. Yet, “What is keeping us back from living lives of prayer? Perhaps we really don’t want to pray. This is the thing we have to face.” But, if we do want to consider prayer, or contemplation, or poetry, how do we go about it? “If you want a life of prayer, the way to get it is by praying,” Merton says.

Merton’s practical advice:

“The real purpose of meditation is this,” Merton says: “To teach a man how to work himself free of created things and temporal concerns, in which he finds only confusion and sorrow.” Still, we might find ourselves bored with all of this, with the idea we are going to spend any time away from our busy schedules on something as trivial as prayer or poetry. We want to feel productive. We want to help others. We’ll go to church, appear to be part of some community, put some bills in the basket, sprinkle some holy water on our face, just in case there really is something to all the hocus-pocus. For the bored or busy, Merton seems to advise to not only get it while we can but where we can: “Learn how to meditate on paper. Drawing and writing are forms of meditation. Learn how to contemplate works of art. Learn how to pray in the streets or in the country. Know how to meditate not only when you have a book in your hand but when you are waiting for a bus or riding in a train.” One can pray “with few words or none…half-hopeless.” There are poems like this, or there should be.

While researching Reinhold Niebuhr’s papers in the Library of Congress, Justin Hawkins uncovered a fascinating exchange between the theologian and William Nichols, editor of This Week Magazine, who asked him, “If as a result of some cataclysm, it were possible to retain just one passage from the Bible – what would your choice be?” Niebuhr’s response:

The passage of the Bible which I would choose is Ephesians 4:32, “And be ye kind one to another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ’s sake hath forgiven you.”  I take it that the purpose is to find a passage of Scripture which will contain as much as possible of the whole message of the Bible.  I have chosen this particular passage because it combines the high point of the Christian ethic, which is forgiving love, with a reference to the whole basis of the ethic, which is the historical revelation in Christ.  We are asked to forgive one another.  The charity of forgiveness is, however, not possible as a duty.  It is only possible in terms of the knowledge that we are ourselves sinners, and that we have been forgiven.  It therefore combines the Christian Gospel with the Christian ethic in succinct form.

Hawkins comments:

While this answer stands with the majority of the Christian tradition, it is also distinctively Niebuhrian in several ways.  First, it recognizes the limitation on human moral performance. Niebuhr notes that mere knowledge of the moral imperative is insufficient to actually perform it. Secondly, the humble approach we must take toward our moral performance is occasioned by the reality of sin.  Though Niebuhr would later mention that he regretted so frequently employing the language of sin because it entailed historical and doctrinal baggage from which he wanted to distance himself, that language is inextricably bound up with the rest of Niebuhr’s political, ethical, and theological projects.

Pivoting off Thomas Nagel’s book against scientific materialism, Mind and Cosmos, Andrew Ferguson summarizes the core issues involved this way:

As a philosophy of everything [materialism] is an undeniable drag. As a way of life it would be even worse. Fortunately, materialism is never translated into life as it’s lived. As colleagues and friends, husbands and mothers, wives and fathers, sons and daughters, materialists never put their money where their mouth is. Nobody thinks his daughter is just molecules in motion and nothing but; nobody thinks the Holocaust was evil, but only in a relative, provisional sense.

A materialist who lived his life according to his professed convictions—understanding himself to have no moral agency at all, seeing his friends and enemies and family as genetically determined robots—wouldn’t just be a materialist: He’d be a psychopath. Say what you will about Leiter and Weisberg and the workshoppers in the Berkshires. From what I can tell, none of them is a psychopath. Not even close.

Applied beyond its own usefulness as a scientific methodology, materialism is, as Nagel suggests, self-evidently absurd. Mind and Cosmos can be read as an extended paraphrase of Orwell’s famous insult: “One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.”

Earlier Dish on Nagel here.

Colin Dickey surveys the literary career of Thomas De Quincey, who built “his reputation as a friend and colleague of Wordsworth and Coleridge with an astute and encyclopedic mind—all the while managing not to produce any actual writing.” That is, until he decided to write about the very thing that had prevented him from doing so – his opium addiction:

Long his artistic nemesis, it had now become his subject. For all its drawbacks, opium had one beneficial effect for De Quincey, that of acting as the ice-axe to free the frozen sea within him. Opium, as it happens, does not enhance one’s dreams, it suppresses them, so that it’s really as one gradually comes off of the drug that those dreams come flooding back with heightened urgency and intensity. It also seems to have freed him from the need to produce a grand, unified and cohesive philosophical treatise; part of what would come to define De Quincey’s style are his fragmentary tangents, his proto-stream of consciousness style that allowed him to move rapidly between dream, memory, and philosophy.

His style was an instant success:

The young De Quincey had wanted to be Wordsworth, but the Confessions is in many ways the complete antithesis of Wordsworth’s writing: prose, not poetry; urban, not rural; eschewing transcendence in favor of the darker side of English society. Most significantly, its approach to time was radically different. For Wordsworth, in poems like “Tintern Abbey” and “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” the moment of epiphany came through recollection, and pleasure came from those moments, “In vacant or in pensive mood,” when memories flashed “upon that inward eye / Which is the bliss of solitude.” There was a magical frisson in a memory recollected at leisure over the space of years, and that gap of time was necessary to an ability to process the beauty of those past moments.

De Quincey found in opium a completely different relationship to the world around him. Speaking of the impact of music while on the drug, he writes: “Now opium, by greatly increasing the activity of the mind generally, increases, of necessity, that particular mode of its activity by which we are able to construct out of the raw material of organic sound an elaborate intellectual pleasure.” Opium, in other words, could render the same kind of epiphany Wordsworth sought in recollection, but could do so in real time. Under opium, according to De Quincey, “Space also it amplifies by degrees that are sometimes terrific. But time it is upon which the exact and multiplying power of opium chiefly spends its operation. Time becomes infinitely elastic, stretching out to such immeasurable and vanishing termini, that it seems ridiculous to compute the sense of it on waking by expressions commensurate to human life.” In these passages, De Quincey is closer to Virginia Woolf than Wordsworth, and particularly that modernist conception of time as bifurcated between, as Virginia Woolf put it in Orlando, the “time of the clock” and the “time of the mind.”

Previous Dish on De Quincey here, here and here.

Lizzie Plaugic unpacks a report (pdf) from UVA’s National Marriage Project that “showed increased rates of binge drinking and depression in non-married twenty-somethings”:

“Thirty-five percent of single men and cohabiting men report they are ‘highly satisfied’ with their life, compared to 52 percent of married men. Likewise, 33 percent of single women and 29 percent of cohabiting women are ‘highly satisfied,’ compared to 47 percent of married women.”

It’s a vague statistic though (“highly satisfied” could mean anything from an endless supply of Cheetos to a house in the Hamptons to daily sex), and it’s potentially misleading. Increased life satisfaction could be the result of marriage being an endorphin-increasing road to happiness, or it could mean that young people are waiting to get married until they have achieved happiness elsewhere, rather than the other way around. Whereas marriage used to mark the beginning of adult life, now it seems to be a thing you do after your adult life is already settled.

Libby Copeland figures that the study explains why many celebrities get married very young:

Once upon a time, men with high school degrees could obtain manufacturing jobs with solid wages and pensions that enabled them to marry and start families in their early 20s. Now, with the chances of nabbing a pension about as good as “winning the World Series,” as the Knot Yet study puts it, young blue-collar Americans can’t pay for a wedding, let alone a house and kids. But pop stars, of course, don’t have that problem.

Nor do they, like middle- and upper-class women, need to worry about finishing college and working for several years before contemplating getting pregnant. They won’t be sacrificing a $10,000 annual bump in salary by marrying too soon; instead, they’re probably making more in their late teens and 20s than they’ll ever make again. And getting married might well help their brand. (Having a baby certainly will.)

In other words, celebrities marry young not because they’re more mature than the rest of us (clearly) but because they have the means so much of America lacks. The move may be driven by youthful impulse, but it is also, in a strange way, logical. They’re just doing what so many of us would have (ill-advisedly) done as teenagers if we’d had loads of cash and legal independence from our parents: married our first loves.

Meanwhile, Megan McArdle considers society’s incentives to get married:

College improves your earning prospects.  So does marriage.  Education makes you more likely to live longer. So does marriage.  Yet while many economist vocally support initiatives to move more people into college, very few of them vocally favor initiatives to get more people married.  Why is that, asks Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry?

Her theory:

[A]ll economists are, definitionally, very good at college.  Not all economists are good at marriage.  Saying that more people should go to college will make 0% of your colleagues feel bad.  Saying that more people should get married and stay married will make a significant fraction of your colleagues feel bad.  And in general, most people have an aversion to topics which are likely to trigger a personal grudge in a coworker.

Like most millennials who don’t actually use their phone for phone calls, Eric Jett missed the “golden age of the booty call”:

“What are you up to?” read many a late-night text message during my years at Oberlin College. The text was a feeler, a thin, transparent antenna, projecting out into the night. While during the day, such an innocuous message could be followed up by any number of requests or offers, at two o’clock in the morning, it could mean only one thing. But unlike the analogue booty call of yore, which required at least a semblance of tact and care — “How have you been?” — the booty text is a Boolean expression, a true or false question, a gambit to be either declined or accepted. It is the ring — in that awkward moment between the caller ID and SMS — not the call.

Another casualty of smartphones? The ability to slam a receiver:

Hanging up on someone is a physical act, a violent one even, one that produces its own pleasure by discharging acrimony. Like the model 500, the flip-phone supports hang ups because its form is capable of resisting them; because it can survive the force a hangup delivers. Just try to hang up your iPhone or your Samsung Galaxy. I don’t mean just ending a call, but hanging up for real, as if you meant it. For a moment you might consider throwing the handset against a wall before remembering that you shelled out three, four, five hundred dollars or more for the device, a thing you cradle in a cozy as if it were a kitten or a newborn. Everyone is a milquetoast when a smartphone is in their hand.

Maria Bustillos interviews author and gaming aficionado Tom Bissell about the literary potential of the medium. Bissell was encouraged by a game version of The Walking Dead:

Obviously it’s got zombies, and so it’s both incredibly violent and upsetting, but, unlike most zombie games, you’re not just constantly pulling the trigger. It’s not a shooter. It’s not a shooter. In fact, it’s using the devices of one of the purer, more literary game genres out there: the old-school, point-and-click adventure game. You walk around static environments, looking at stuff, picking stuff up, and talking to people. That’s really what the game is about: talking to people, forming relationships. The relationship between the two main characters (a disgraced black academic and a little girl) is genuinely affecting. I wouldn’t put it on the same level of affecting-ness that you’d find in a really good literary novel, but there are times when it comes tantalizingly close to that. So it’s a writer’s game, in that sense. It’s a game that manages to create high drama out of deciding whether or not to cut a little girl’s hair, believe it or not, because if he keeps her hair long, a zombie will be able to grab it. And you have to have this conversation with her, and sort of allow her to see why she needs to get her hair cut without really telling her why, because you don’t want to alarm her. It must sound like pulpy nonsense described in this way, but the way the game humanizes these people really pays emotional dividends.

More and more, I’m seeing that games are mining good, old-fashioned human anxieties for their drama, and that’s really promising. Games, more and more, are not just about shooting and fighting, and for that reason I’m optimistic and heartened about where the medium is heading, because I think game designers are getting more interested in making games that explore what it means to be alive.

Relatedly, Liel Leibovitz reviews  “Applied Design,” a new MoMA exhibition of 14 video games:

While art is bound only by its creator’s imagination, code is bound by the limitations, more numerous than you’d imagine, of computer comprehension.

Code can’t, like Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, abandon logic and decide to imitate the sounds of nature instead. It can never be poetry, just a series of if/then statements. Code has more in common with the hinges that connect the museum’s doors to their frames than it does with Nude Descending a Staircase.

This divide between code and image, between the algorithms responsible for the experience of play and the pixels representing its visual manifestation, is what makes games so complicated and compelling. MoMA, however, has chosen to largely ignore this question: A number of the games displayed in its exhibition are merely loops of video footage, allowing visitors to watch, as the museum put it, “guided tours of these alternate worlds,” but not to play the games themselves.

The question, then, is not whether video games are art, but whether whatever is currently gracing MoMA’s walls could even be called video games. Anyone who has ever been truly transformed by a game—that is, anyone who realizes that games, unlike paintings or movies or books, are made not to be observed but to be actively played, repeatedly and over long stretches of time—knows that the answer is no.

Previous Dish on artistic videogames here.