NOTES FROM ONE UNNATURALLY BORN:

I became a conservative slowly (that is to say, conservatively) in the period after 9/11. It was a natural move at the time: the sort of activist foreign policy I favor had its home on the right, and the intellectual life it offered seemed markedly superior. The left, as I was experiencing it at the time, had a hermetic quality: one identified with some particular variant of their philosophy (multiculturalism, feminist theory, race theory, etc--these things endure in popular intellectual culture long after they are out of fashion in academia). Conservatives were the sort of people who wrote about the things they loved--literature, movies, poetry--with an evident love of them. They worked as critics and had things they didn't like, but for the most part were jaunty and affirmative.

Both of these things have changed: the conservative reaction to any active foreign policy puts the liberal response to shame. Skepticism is the mood of this paticular time, but nowhere worse than with the people who muddled through the arguments--or never bothered to understand them--or think the vehemence of their rejection now will somehow propitiate for their perceive failures then.

The intellectual side of things is more difficult. Much of the cultural writing I enjoyed was, in fact, of that kind, but one begins to notice after awhile that its scope is incredibly narrow. The names involved have a way of repeating: Waugh, Wodehouse, Chesterton, Eliot above all, and Orwell to demonstrate some catholicity in taste. Leaving aside that they are all drawn from the same intellectual milieu, it gets a bit boring to hear them invoked time and again. To find that Eliot is still a vital center of intellectual life is exciting when one is first discovering Eliot; to find, as I did later, that he's a fetish or a measure for all things (as he has a tendency to become) lessens one's enthusiasm--or at least mine.

Which leads me, finally, to the big blog fight going on between the Postmodern Conservatives and the Front Porch Republic-ers. I am, like Alan Jacobs, tired of debates about modernity and its meanings--but especially these debates. The Pomocons are at least occasionally funny: "it takes a medieval village" is as good a line as I've heard. The problem, though, is that both sides are reactionary: the FPR response to modernity, whatever that may be, is that it is fundamentally a corruption and so we must turn back to before; the pomocon response is that modernty, whatever it may be, is fundamentally a corruption and so we must move beyond it as quickly as possible. The latter is politics as deracination; the former is slightly insane (a conservative, of all people, should be wary of the idea that one can escape or easily replace one's history).

But really, what bothers me more than anything else is the way modern philosophy, especially Locke, is discussed. One might be left with the impression that social planners have used the Second Treatise as a handbook in their ceaseless campaign to undermine traditional marriage, among other ills. Political theorists often complain about the habit of philosophers to quickly go from a text to a "position:" i.e. the move from "Locke" to a "Lockean" conception, which, though they vary only by two letters, are tremendously different things. They complain because it's poor intellectual history to assume that anyone who takes up a thinker has understood the nuances of their thought (or, goodness, read the text); almost everyone in the debate assumes Locke is Nozick's Locke, or one very similar; this is not unlike assuming that Plato is Popper's Plato--an interesting contribution in its own right, but a bad reading of the underlying text.

So this is a plea I launch into the blogosphere, certain to be ignored, but nevertheless requesting two things: when debating about the thought of some important, canonical political theorist, it would be immensely helpful to see the text--or at least have it cited--which is the source of the commentary being given. Second, someone has to be willing to play contrarian pretty consistently--just to keep things honest.

ONE, TWO, THREE:

i. Here:

Furthermore, we should note that, against the grain of some post-Augustinian liturgies, the church is not instructed by its Lord to approach its Father with “Sorry” as its first word. Even the Prodigal Son began his speech with “Father.” There is, to be sure, an appropriate place for penitence, both for communities and individuals. But the normal Christian approach to the Creator God is the unfettered and delighted “Father.” There is a time for penitence, but its location within the Lord’s Prayer suggests that it should not take pride of place in regular liturgical worship.

ii. Here:

‘Ah, but’, someone will say, ‘that sounds very arrogant. It sounds cocksure, almost triumphalist.’ Well, there is a note of triumph there, and if you try to take that away you will pull the heart of the gospel out with it. But actually it is the least arrogant, least cocksure thing of all. When St Aidan gave a beggar the horse the king had given him, was the beggar arrogant to ride off on it? Was he not simply celebrating the astonishing generosity of the saint? When the prodigal son put the ring on his finger and the shoes on his feet, was he being arrogant when he allowed his father’s lavish generosity to take its course? Would it not have been far more arrogant, far more clinging to one’s own inverted dignity as a ‘very humble’ penitent, to insist that he should be allowed to wear sackcloth and ashes for a week or two until he’d had time to adjust to the father’s house? No: the complaint about the prodigal’s arrogance, I fear, comes not from the father, but from [34] the older brother. We should beware lest that syndrome destroy our delight in the gospel of the free grace of God. We mustn’t let the upside-down arrogance of those who are too proud to receive free grace prevent us from hearing and receiving the best news in the world.

iii. Here:

I think there are at least two things going on there. From one point of view, of course, there is always the tension between the very earliest members of a movement, and then the really bright guy who comes in a bit later and threatens to take it over. There’s a sense of, who do you think you are, we were here first, and what’s more you were a rat. You may be a converted rat, but we’re still not totally happy with you. That’s a very natural human reaction, but I think, in addition to that, there’s the sense that Paul has this astonishing mind. I mean, he is one of the great minds of the Western world. I cut my teeth on Plato and Aristotle—and Paul ranks with people of that caliber. And to be honest, Peter and James and John and the boys—you know, they’re good guys, but they’re not in the same league. Whoever wrote the fourth gospel, if that was John the apostle, then he certainly is in the same league, though with a very different style. But I suspect in most cases that Paul was just intellectually head and shoulders above them. Now—sorry, I said there were two things. That’s two, now here’s a third. Paul, with this very sharp, quick mind grasped from very, very early on that though Christianity is and remains ineradicably Jewish, it is for all people equally. Paul had grasped that and was implementing it at a time when many of them were still so aware of the pressure on Jews to conform to paganism, etc., that any going away from the food laws, circumcision, the Sabbath, was just rank disloyalty. How could you possibly do that? Paul had the intellectual and moral courage to say, you know, this is what the crucifixion of Jesus means, so we’ve got to get on and do it. And they hadn’t thought their way round that circle at that point. And so he’s out ahead of them saying, “Come on chaps, it’s all right,” and they’re saying, “No, but this is disloyalty, our Jewish friends and neighbors will be very cross with us if we do that.” And in a sense, they were right; but in a more important sense he was right.

DATA POINTS IN SEARCH OF A THEORY: I'm not sure FLG's explanation for why novelists tend to be older makes a lot of sense (though it's an explanation I've heard many times before). A few reasons:

1. Something appears a little off in the definition of the greatness of a novel: "they reveal the inner thoughts and feelings of the characters." There's a certain sort of novel for which that's true--indeed, some of my favorite novels: 19th century, particularly French and Russian. To put it differently: I think it explains why Crime and Punishment is a great novel, but not why David Copperfield is a great novel. Dickens makes the Murdstones more sinister by giving us less information about them--opacity is a great virtue in literature. Then there are unreliable narrators who one can't entirely trust in reporting their own thoughts and feelings (an interesting example of this is Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in its earlier sections)

2. Quite apart from this, the comparison to songwriting is apples-and-oranges.

The typical song is about angst, lust, longing, etc. You know, teenage emotions. So, of course, a teenager or 20-something can write a song about them. The depth, scope, and nuance required to write a novel necessitates somebody who has had more life experience.

I will attempt to explain why by bringing in a third area: poetry. Some poets only work when they're young (Rimbaud) or notably flame out (Coleridge), but I'd have a hard time pegging the latter's writing in "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" to a 25-year old sensibility, though my math indicates that's approximately when he wrote it. Subject and method and technique vary wildly over a career.

3. Two interrelated phenomena are also difficult to explain in this framework: the first-novel-only and the end-of-career-malaise. In music, as in the novel, there are no shortage of people who are able to write one good book/album, and never replicate the feat. But if a sensibility improves as it ages, why wouldn't the depth or insight of a follow-up work increase? As to the second, see the late-career declines of Eliot and Auden (one can presumably think of writers who crank out monotonously similar novels at the end of their career, like Maugham's mock-Hardy does in Cakes and Ale); their declines extend, I think, even beyond their creative to their critical work. Why the muse comes and then leaves--that no one really knows.

MATURITY AND IMMATURITY:

The work of a young writer--Werther is the classic example--is sometimes a therapeutic ac. He finds himself obsessed by certain ways of feeling and thinking of which his instinct tells him he must be rid before he can discover his authentic interests and sympathies, and the only way by which he can be rid of them forever is by surrendering to them. Once he has done this, he has developed the necessary antibodies which will make him immune for the rest of his life. As a rule, the disease is some spiritual malaise of his generation. If so, he may, as Goethe did, find himself in an embarrassing situation. What he wrote in order to exorcise certain feelings is enthusiastically welcomed by his contemporaries because it expressed just what they feel but, unlike him, they are perfectly happy to feel in this way; for the moment they regard him as their spokesman. Time passes. Having gotten the poison out of his system, the writer turns to his true interests which are not, and never were, those of his early admirers, who now pursue him with cries of "Traitor!"

That Auden is fine with an aphorism is beyond (reasonable) dispute (there are always wags and cranks, after all). His vision of adulthood has something very compelling to it: sometimes it takes the form of "one must first learn to be oneself, then must learn to be not oneself;" here it takes the opposite form--it is only by having the disease fully that we can pass beyond it. The point, so far as I can see, is that a person, will it or not, is always in the process of changing. Some of those things will be more like who that person really is, some will be less--though it will not always be clear to the person involved which is which, sometimes not clear until long after. That change will happen is a given: the choice is whether we let it happen to us or take control of it; let ourselves be directed to ends by outside forces or choose our own.

But, and this is key, the perspective on which to judge any particular moment is not the one we find ourselves in now. One doesn't judge the worth of Werther by recognizing Goethe abandoned, perhaps never really held, its point of view (there are other questions that have this comparative angle, but they come later).

LINK: N.T. Wright v. Neuhaus. I was raised, intellectually, with the belief that one takes one's opponents arguments seriously by disagreeing with them; it's a sign of disrespect to refuse to engage. Needless to say, I think Wright comes off better in the exchange.

LINK: The Department Chair, whose musings on Europe are all entertaining, links to a paper on the problems with math education. I sympathize (quite a bit) with the argument of the paper: I lost my interest in math with Algebra I, had it briefly revived with Geometry, then lost it altogether in Algebra II, which had, so far as I could tell, nothing to do with anything. Calculus was a wash: I enjoyed--very much--the concept of calculus, thinking in terms of differentials and integrals--but the actual work not very much. I was not an engineer, I was not going to be an engineer; I had zero interest in figuring out the volume of oddly-shaped solids or comparing two random functions with no relation to anything. Not surprisingly, I dropped the class for Public Speaking (my teacher, bless her heart, told me I was the only one in the class who appreciated what was really beautiful about calculus; I still suspect this was a way of her telling me I was not very good at it).

There's a claim in the paper I find interesting and relates to other fields as well:

By concentrating on the what, and leaving out why, mathematics is reduced to an empty shell. The art is not in the 'truth' but in the explanation, the argument. It is the argument itself which gives the truth its context, and determines what is really being said and meant. Mathematics is the art of explanation. If you deny students the opportunity to engage in this activity--to pose their own problems, make their own conjectures and discoveries, to be wrong, to be creatively frustrated, to have an inspiration, and to cobble together their own explanations and proofs--you deny them mathematics itself.

The idea that the explanation matters as much as the truth of a statement is appealing on both a substantive and a pedagogical level. As substance it indicates that possessing the truth is not enough--that truth is inseparable from the means of arriving at it, that to some extent the meaning of truth is determined by the means by which it is discovered. A premium is placed on failure and creativity--what one is trying to do is make connections, and the best and most useful connections are made each person taking up the task for themselves. (There also appears to be a claim, backed up by the author's frequent mentions of the history of math, that the truth is seldom known ahead of time, but almost always discovered--there's a danger in treating a priori truths as ones that must simply be believed or accepted, even if they're a priori)

As pedagogy, this relates to a significant problem in the teaching of political theory. Is the point of, say, an intro course to introduce students to the thought of significant figures in the history of political theory, or to introduce them to particular ways of answering political problems? On the one hand, we expect students to know the importance of fortuna and virtu in Machiavelli, the appeal to heaven in Locke, the censor of the general will in Rousseau--certainly, without the ability to explain these things, the students won't really have understood what is going on in the text. But the text itself is a means of answering a question: why does Machiavelli think historical examples are useful? Why does Locke mention natural law? Why does Rousseau focus so much on institutions? Ideally, one teaches both--the answer is determined, in part, by the method, and we need to ask whether both the method and the answers are good. But there's often a tendency to think in terms of sequences (e.g. early modern, late modern, liberalism), or else of disparate topics that don't necessarily link up (ancients and moderns, but rarely the medievals who help make sense of the oddities of modern political thought).

DISCONTINUITY IN HISTORY: FLG is reading Berman's Law and Revolution and doesn't like one claim in particular:

As a historical culture, a civilization, the West is to be distinguished not only from the East but also from "pre-Western" cultures to which it "returned" in various periods of "renaissance." Such returns and revivals are characteristics of the West. They are not to be confused with the models on which they drew for inspiration. "Israel," "Greece," and "Rome" became spiritual ancestors of the West not primarily by process of survival or succession but primarily by a process of adoption: the West adopted them as ancestors. Moreover, it adopted them selectively -- different parts at different times. Cotton Mather was no Hebrew. Erasmus was no Greek. The Roman lawyers of the University of Bologna were no Romans.

FLG says:

I viscerally disagree with this statement, but I've been unable to find a real flaw with it. The best response I can come up with is that even if we emphasize some parts of our past over others for social, political, or aesthetic reasons our past is still our past. If one emphasizes Great-Great-Great-Great-Etc-Grandpa John who came over on the Mayflower over Crazy Uncle Bobby the Ex Con, it doesn't mean that either was chosen as an ancestor. They simply were ancestors.

The family-resemblance argument is difficult to sustain if only because of the very different shape European intellectual life had between, oh, 400 and 1300. There is almost no Aristotle until the end of that period (the bishop of Paris did ban the teaching of Aristotle twice); only one Platonic dialogue in wide circulation; no Greek drama to speak of (Petrarch, if I remember, assembles the dialogues we have today); no work with Biblical texts in the original; and law itself tends to be commentaries on commentaries (or glosses) of Roman law rather than the law itself.

This is not to make the argument that intellectual life was dead in the period mentioned: there's still Anselm and Boethius and the sometimes very interesting work done by the commentators, especially after the Papal Revolution ('interesting' is not coterminous with 'correct'). But it's also not the case that there's a simple line that can be drawn from the ancient past to be medieval or modern worlds--certainly not so easy a line as an 'Athens and Jerusalem' storyline would make it sound.

The interesting question that comes out of this, then, is whether it makes sense to think of humanism/renaissance/the reformation as historically continuous or discontinuous--a case could be made either way (it also raises the possibility that discontinuity may actually be a more faithful representation of the past than continuity).

LINK: I've gotten, oh, 25 pages through this, and have no idea what's going on (I'm told the beginning is blasphemous). And yet I keep clicking...

LINK: The Elegant Variation broke the news last week: Shaman Drum would be closing. My feelings about it match Brian's: I know we're supposed to root for the local, independent bookstore to win out, but it was actively hostile to a large portion of its clientele and made its profits only by charging 50% or more of the list price of the books it sold. Good riddance.

QUOTE FOR THE DAY: Auden, The Dyer's Hand:

Though a work of literature can be read in a number of ways, this number is finite and can be arranged in a hierarchical order; some readings are obviously "truer" than others, some doubtful, some obviously false, and some, like reading a novel backwards, absurd. That is why, for a desert island, one would choose a good dictionary rather than the greatest literary masterpiece imaginable, for, in relation to its readers, a dictionary is absolutely passive and may legitimately be read in an infinite number of ways.

WONDERFUL THINGS I JUST REALIZED: A week ago a very chatty telemarketer succeeded in talking me into digital cable and a DVR for $5 a month more than I am currently paying. I did not realize, until just now, that this means I get the Big Ten Network. This means, then, that I will be able to watch every single Michigan football game next year.