WELL, IT MAKES A DIFFERENCE THAT THE LAST TWO WERE NOT THAT GOOD: From the NYT's profile of R.E.M.

Mr. Buck bristles a bit that “Accelerate” is being widely greeted as a comeback album. “I don’t feel like this is a return to form so much as this is the level we work at generally,” he said. “Of the 14 records we’ve made, I think 12 of them are pretty close to this.”

A note: Any day that begins with a red curry chicken soup-ish dish at 9:30 am will be a good day.

ALL TRUE: EDSBS and The Hoover Street Rag both take on 'Stuff Maize and Blue People Like.' All 100% true. EDSBS:

Weltschmerz. Grrrrr: Sodden gray skies, the biting wind, and tight white underpants. Show Michigan fans a dollar, and they will tell you it’s not a sawbuck, but rather one hundred sad pennies waiting to clatter on the ground and roll into the sewer grate of life.

Life’s a bitch, and doesn’t deserve the reward of your tears or your joy. 9-0 isn’t an accomplishment: it’s only the brokedick ineptitude of the nine chumps they had to play to that point that allowed them to get that far…and even then, the light that they’re seeing is the oncoming train, or the massive lantern fish hanging out a lure to get them within gobbling range.

Life is pain. Pain is life. And the bright summer day of joy is just waiting until you relax to toss a rogue lighting strike right up your ass, chum-o. That’s why they don’t stand at football games: because fate only strikes those brainless enough to attract notice by standing. If Icarus could be added to the Zodiac, Michigan fans would all fall under its sign. The month of November would have to be its calendar slot to accommodate the inevitable loss to Ohio State.

Hoover Street Rag:

Tradition

If there's one thing Maize and Blue people prize above all else, it's Tradition. The varsity football team played its first game in 1879, Fielding Yost came to town in 1901, and Michigan Stadium hosted its first game in 1927. Maize and Blue people will ramble on about their "13 national championships", even though only one of them came after 1948 and it was a split title. Traditions include: Winged helmets, no in-stadium advertising, touching the GO BLUE banner, anything Bo Schembechler ever said, "The Victors", calling "The Victors" "Hail to the Victors", winning the Big Ten, losing the Rose Bowl, Ron Kramer, having an offense that's a decade past its expiration date, and pretending that beating Minnesota is worth a trophy. Losing to Ohio State at the end of the season is a relatively recent innovation and is not yet a tradition. However, if you told Maize and Blue people that the Wolverines and the Michigan State Normal School had fought over a chamber pot in their 1896 game, Maize and Blue people would immediately adopt their series with Eastern Michigan as a traditional rivalry (All-time record: Michigan 8, Eastern 0).

If you only look at two blogs today in order to understand the multitudes I contain, make it these two.

HOLD OUT FOR THE CHIPATI:

MVictors notes the ramifications of strike by U of M GSIs.

Of all the things I miss about Ann Arbor (a list of varying length, dependent on the day), chipatis are near the top of the list.

IN WHICH I CONTEMPLATE MY OWN ABSURDITY:

Found myself not five minutes ago, reading a book (The Establishment of Modern English Prose in the Reformation and the Enlightenment) which begins with a lengthy discussion of how to compose a sentence. 

That Socrates was onto something.

LINKS: Another office hours, another students-not-showing-up-even-though-they-emailed me. I will resolve to no longer be surprised if this happens.

Moving on, I noticed the NYT has a review of Nicholas Baker's new book, Human Smoke. It occurred to me that I had seen, and flagged to in order to blog, a review of the same book somewhere else. That somewhere else: The NYT. The tenor of the two are, you might say, different. The more recent:

Baker knows he is preaching to readers who already believe that the Nazis were evil, and that the German war machine, including the blitz, was, to say the least, conducted with ruthless carelessness for human life, and that many ordinary Germans were implicated in the Holocaust. It is possible that “Human Smoke” will infuriate those who believe that Churchill was a hero and that war, in all its viciousness, is often the only way to defeat those who declare or threaten war. “Human Smoke” will not be admired by those who argue that methods used to win a war may seem, especially to novelists writing more than 60 years later, impossible to justify. Nonetheless, the issues Baker wishes to raise, and the stark system he has used to dramatize his point, make his book a serious and conscientious contribution to the debate about pacifism. He has produced an eloquent and passionate assault on the idea that the deliberate targeting of civilians can ever be justified.

I trust the penultimate sentence is self-parodying. Perhaps it's my youth, or the fact I'm feeling acerbic today, but raising issues (at one degree of remove) is not the same as making an argument, nor do I find merit in dramatizing to make one's point; I suspect the only way to make a plausible case for pacifism in the second world war is to hone the small detail, to focus on the merit and virtue of the individual, and under all circumstances avoiding placing the choices of individuals in their broadest context, a point made by the other review:

Mr. Baker’s title, a grim reference to the crematoriums at Auschwitz, effectively demolishes the edifice he tries to construct. Did the war “help anyone who needed help?” Mr. Baker asks in a plaintive afterword. The prisoners of Belsen, Dachau and Buchenwald come to mind, as well as untold millions of Russians, Danes, Belgians, Czechs and Poles. Nowhere and at no point does Mr. Baker ever suggest, in any serious way, how their liberation might have been effected other than by force of arms.

Of course, this does not mean we surrender the ability to make judgments in a time of war (I have observed, on multiple instances, students who are introduced to the idea of just war for the first time assuming, as if naturally, that a war fought for just ends justifies any methods necessary to win). It's a distinction brought out, among other places, in Michael Walzer's article "World War II: Why Was This War Different?" (jstor here) and incorporated into Just and Unjust Wars. The ability to separate causes from conduct is one of the real contributions of the just war tradition, a distinction that appears to be blurred by the book in question. As such, it's not a new argument, or set of considerations which we ought to take up: it's a series of questions which have already been asked and answered.

SENT ON BY A FRIEND:

HAPPY EASTER!

No big plans for the day: I'm off to Chicago on Wednesday, and will see family and friends while I'm there (through my conference). Today is finishing the novel I started yesterday (Graham Greene, The Heart of the Matter), reading something appropriate for the day (a little of N.T. Wright's The Resurrection of the Son of God), some music (Iris DeMent is serenading me in the background as I type), correspondence to a few people I want to see before I head out, or while I'm in Chicago, basketball, etc etc.

A little Iris DeMent for you to enjoy here.

And a properly Graham Greene sentiment for the day:

"Why, he wondered, swerving the car to avoid a dead pye-dog, do I love this place so much? Is it because here human nature hasn't had time to disguise itself? Nobody here could talk about a heaven on earth. Heaven remained rigidly in its proper place on the other side of death, and on this side flourished the injustices, the cruelties, the meannesses, that elsewhere people so cleverly hushed up. Here you could love human beings nearly as God loved them, knowing the worst: you didn't have to love a pose, a pretty dress, a sentiment artfully assumed."

QUESTION WHICH I ASSUME NEITHER FOWLER'S NOR THE OED CAN ANSWER:

Is is a straightforward implication of the concept "national holiday" that it occurs annually?

I JUST DON'T KNOW WHAT TO DO WITH MYSELF:

I wrote a ~45 page paper in, what, five days?

What does one do without the crushing sense of guilt that one should be working?

...

WHAT I'VE BEEN WORKING ON: Or what's currently the introduction to it, anyway. It's a little talky and general, but one, it's an introduction, and two, the panel I'll be presenting this paper at will be historically-oriented on issues of just war, so I don't think I can assume broad familiarity with contemporary international law literature. (I assume, for those with more technical knowledge, the positivist side in the positivist-legal realist debate on how to interpret the UN Charter; in part because it makes for a better contrast with Grotius, and in part because, as one of the essays in the Holzgrefe and Keohane volume notes, international lawyers tend overwhelmingly to take that view)

It is a commonplace to begin any discussion of contemporary international law by saying “there are few topics so central to international law as x,” but it is to be hoped that the overuse of the cliche does not dampen its proper deployment. There are few topics so central to international law as humanitarian intervention. The UN structure was born in the final days of World War II, and though originally conceived as a more effective means of preventing yet another world war, it quickly found further moral purpose in preventing crimes against humanity. Two of the notable early achievements of the UN were the Convention on Genocide and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, both enacted in 1948. Humanitarian intervention, a concept centered around a remembrance of the Holocaust and the slogan ‘Never Again,’ has not receded since that time; with humanitarian justifications claimed for interventions in East Pakistan, Cambodia, Uganda, Sierra Leone, Granada and many other places besides. The failure to intervene in Rwanda and the NATO-led intervention in Kosovo feature prominently in the most recent scholarly work on the topic. Commentators will frequently claim that Rwanda and, in the present day, the Sudan, provide evidence the regime of law under the UN is broken, and new and better legal and institutional solutions must be found.

Hugo Grotius, the seventeenth-century Dutch jurist, often credited as ‘the father of international law,’ did not have a doctrine of humanitarian intervention in the contemporary sense. What he did have, however, was an ethical theory of intervention, which incorporated many of the concerns found in the modern literature. His theory, not bound up, as modern theories so often are, in the particular legal-institutional nexus brought into being by the UN Charter, is both a model for those now wishing to discuss humanitarian intervention, and an important point outside the contemporary debate from which to see its characteristic shortcomings.

The difference, to put it in its broadest terms, is between sentiments such as these, from the UN Charter, Article II section 4:

“All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.”

And Article 51:

“Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations, until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security.”

And two selections from Grotius, Book I Chapter 5:

“But tho’ there were no other obligations, it is enough that we are allied by common humanity. For every man ought to interest himself in what regards other men.”

And Book II, Chapter 25:

“But if the injustice be visible, as if a Busiris, a Phalaris, or a Thracian Diomedes exercise tyrannies over subjects, as no good man living can approve of, the right of human society shall not be therefore excluded.”

Under the most widely accepted reading of the UN Charter, the only legitimate use of force by any group other than the UN Security Council is force used in self-defense. Humanitarian motives, so central to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Convention on Genocide, are nowhere mentioned. J.L. Brierly, a prominent international lawyer during the mid-20th century, makes a perceptive criticism of the United Nations structure along these lines:

“It is not unresonable, therefore, that when a decisions of the Security Council may have major political consequences, especially when it may require enforcement measures to give it effect…the Great Powers should refuse to allow this burden to be thrust upon them by some majority of less interested smaller powers…it seems probably that the result of insisting that only a body that had power to make binding decisions could act effectively has been to give us a body that can neither decide nor act.”

The United Nations system, in other words, attempts to create an international society by giving broad prerogative to each state in order that it may defend its own interests. The entire problem of humanitarian intervention, from the cases where no one is willing to act, to those where states act under questionably legal and ethical motives, arises from the UN Charter system and its blanket prohibition on wars in anything other than self-defense. Grotius, who outlines a superior alternative, allows the modern reader to see the extent to which law is turned against morality.

LINK: I only got 105 in ten minutes, not great for someone who studies international politics. In my defense, I had spelling issues with Bosnia and Herzegovina and Liechtenstein (I have never seen the first 'e' in it before), and apparently "Republic of Congo," "Democratic Republic of Congo" and "Bahamas" were not acceptable answers.

BLEG: I have the vague idea that there exists a piece of figurative language to the effect of 'to spin the thread out as far as it will go.' Unfortunately, I have no idea if that's correct, or even a thing. Anyone? The alternative is a fishing metaphor, so this is a dire situation.

STRANGE BUT TRUE: Apropos Helen Rittelmeyer:

For the record, I object to the taboo on supposedly jargon words like "liminality" and "narrative" as much as Dara does, but I object even more to the insistence that all dialogue be oriented towards concensus rather than one side's victory or defeat.

With one exception, I have never used 'liminality' to do anything but make fun of people who incline to post-modern-speak, which seems odd for a political theorist.

AFTER READING 'AFTER READING BURKE'

Somerset Maugham, master of the paragraph:

We all know Buffon's dictum that Le style c'est l'homme même. If it is true then by making yourself acquainted with the man it should be possible to come to a better understanding of his style. But is it true? I think Buffon thought men more of a piece than they really are. They are for the most part an amalgam of virtues and vices, of strengths and weaknesses so incompatible that it is only because they are manifest that you can believe it possible for them to co-exist in one and the same person. Burke was much discussed in his day, passionately praised by some, violently decried by others, and from the various reports that have come down to us, from Hazlitt's essays and the excellent Life of Sir Philip Magnus, it is possible, I think, to get a fairly accurate impression of the kind of man he was. But it is not a plausible one. It is with difficulty that you can persuade yourself to believe that merits so rare can go hand-in-hand with defects so deplorable. You are left utterly perplexed.

Inspiring, no? An excellent piece of text to follow, though if one were so inclined, one could name the defects: an over-reliance on pieces of metaphor and idiomatic expression ('hand-in-hand'), multiple instances of alliteration (which he decries elsewhere in the essay), and that stem-winder of a sentence beginning 'Burke was much discussed in his day...' But the direction! Beginning with common knowledge and demolishing the foundation on which it claims to stand. A better articulation of the principle I sometimes call 'everyone's politics make sense to himself.'* In all, an admirable introduction into the 'biographical' portion of the essay.

I came across 'After Reading Burke' by accident, searching in the library for Spring Break reading (Cakes and Ale was the book I was searching for--and well worth the search). The volume containing it, The Vagrant Mood, contains a number of other worthwhile essays, especially Maugham's interpretation of Kant's Critique of Judgment (no, really; and no worries, it is a far sight better than Eliot's interpretation of Machiavelli). Maugham, noting that Hazlitt (his favorite among the great English essayists) spares no extravagance on Burke, decides to re-read the material with which he was familiar, and take on for the first time Burke's other major work:

I hasten, however, to tell [the reader] that I do not propose to deal with Burke's thought; for that it would be necessary to have a much greater knowledge of the eighteenth century than I can claim and an interest in, and familiarity with, the principles of politics which I must admit (and it may be that I should admit with some shame) I am far from possessing. I desire to treat only of the manner in which Burke wrote without paying more attention than can be helped to the matter of which he wrote.

The rest of the essay succeeds admirably, and repays well the time spent reading. I have reflected on occasion that political theory is a discipline built on reading and writing, in which we do little instruction on how to read or write. To some extent, this is justified: if you cannot string together a sentence by the time you hit graduate school, you are most likely a hopeless case; if you have to be told how to read, you're not reading enough. Style is a funny thing, and bears little correlation to academic success (or deserved success). Debates, such as the textualist-contextualist debate, purport to be about ways of reading, but are really about ways of constructing an argument. Everyone knows how to read The Prince, we just disagree about which facts are relevant when interpreting it.

For me, this is the value of essays like Maugham's, or Fitzgerald's "One-Hundred False Starts" and "How to Waste Material," or the marvelous Paris Review interviews with Eliot, Faulkner, Dorothy Parker, et al--much of what goes on simply isn't talked about. One must glean assistance where one can. To see one solid writer of English prose do an analysis of another is a rare window in to the questions of how to read and write.


*Coined this one after hearing a professor of my acquaintance talk to an audience in which they gave an expression of their personal views on a number of political matters (those familiar with professors of my acquaintance will have no trouble guessing the individual's identity); I could discern no common thread except that the person believed them all to be true.

NOTHING IS NEW, EVERYTHING IS OLD AGAIN or THIS MIGHT TAKE AWHILE: I think this post of Patrick Deneen's, while interesting, is wrong. In part:

Yet, what we see today arising alongside the seeming apotheosis of this predicted process is its opposite: the renewed assertion of nation both as a reaction to this process, but more deeply, in anticipation of its exhaustion. Written in 1848, Marx and Engels rightly foresaw a world in which commodities from one place would be shipped elsewhere, seeking out foreign markets for the import of money or other goods, while other markets would be employed for cheap labor for assembly and production. Their vision - that shared by most mainstream (non-Marxist!) economists today, was premised upon a future of expanding and seemingly endless resources. Nations would gladly rearrange their internal ordering - would sweep away "all fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions" and make "new-formed ones antiquated before they can ossify." While there is overwhelming evidence that this is the case, some signs suggest that this theory may be confronting a different reality.

The history involved first strikes me as suspect. Deneen invokes 'Political and economic theory dating from the 18th-century' earlier, and here talks about what Marx and Engels 'foresaw.' But the passage from M&E he quotes begins: "All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed" (italics mine). Whatever was going away, it was already going away in 1848. This is supposed to be the power of the Manifesto: having recognized the trend in a number of forms otherwise ignored, it makes a logical (though false) extrapolation about the consequences of that trend. Capitalism, as we all know, was and is the stage in the development of the means of production immediately following upon feudalism. Keeping on this theme of history, we might well examine when M&E thought the transition occurred:

The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie. The East-Indian and Chinese markets, the colonisation of America, trade with the colonies, the increase in means of exchange and commodities generally, gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry, an impulse never before known, and thereby, to the revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society, a rapid development.

I don't want to make too much of this, as I trust M&E neither as historians nor analysts of history (or economics, but that's another post). However, we can take from them that the impulse to scour the world for resources is very, very old indeed; as much as 250 years prior to M&E, probably more. This historical claim I feel exceedingly comfortable with, as Hugo Grotius makes his name in the first decade of the 17th century by disputing Portuguese methods of trading with peoples far afield.

From this, my second point, which is economic. Deneen:

Consider the current economic system, writ large. While it appears, at least on the surface, to resemble the order that was predicted by thinkers ranging from Smith to Montesquieu to Marx and Kant and beyond, another way of looking at it is that far from representing the growth of cooperation and growing empathy bordering on the transcendence of nations for a cosmopolitan worldview, what we are actually seeing with growing clarity is a system in which each player is trying to use the others to the greatest possible extent before scrambling out of the system to avoid the wreck. It's like a gigantic game of "Chicken" with all of us heading to a point of convergence - cosmopolitan bliss? - while in fact realizing that someone is going to swerve, and that everyone will get burned in the process. Economics is just war by another means.

One extra bit:

For this circulation to work well and readily, those commodities had to be plentiful and relatively cheap.

The last is perhaps excellent logic for the current practice of international trade, but not, I think, a very good explanation for its origin, where it was the rarity of commodities and their expensiveness that justified immense capital outlays with dubious chances of success. It is important to see that there's not just one logic driving trade across nations, lest we think there is just one problem to which one solution might do.

But I want to cue into the sentiment informing the longer paragraph above. The relevant Plato is quoted here. In any political community where one man is not expected to perform all possible economic functions, where he does not have all the resources he needs near-to-hand (that would be near all of them), we accept a division of labor and a means of transporting goods from areas of high concentration (and thus low value) to areas of low concentration. Just so: no one wants to live in the City of Pigs. It's not clear to me that there's anything different between trade across regions within a country and trades across countries, except that trades across regions generally do not raise tariff or currency issues (but I'm not sure this fact hurts the free-trader).

To attempt to bring a close: economics may not be war by other means: it may be a substitute for war. If you want resources someone else has, traditionally you just go to that country, take it over, and take whatever you like.* What is remarkable is that no one does this: everyone just trades instead. But look: even if Deneen is right, there's still a problem to which conservatives in particular should be attentive. The urges driving international trade have been translated into action for almost 500 years, at this point. Much like the (slightly older) Protestant Reformation, both reveal something about human experience which is emphatically not modern, except in the broadest possible signification of modern. And I suspect we will have both until Judgment Day.


*I accept many other criticisms of the Iraq war (though I may disagree with them, but I categorically reject this as an explanation, though invite others to point me towards evidence to convince me otherwise. Not least because, given my understanding of how oil markets work, this would be

LINK: I'm unsure whether I should be happy that the police found both people connected to the Eve Carson murder in about a week, or whether I should be disconcerted that the one captured this morning was also charged with the (in-home) murder of a Duke graduate student earlier this year.

GREATEST NAME EVER? My vote's in the comments

LINK: In the course of looking for something else, I came across the following Ezra Klein post, to which I link for the sake of those who may be interested:

Used to be that calling a friend up to chat was no big deal. But now it would seem very strange for me to call one of my friends without an express agenda or specific query. You'd get the initial exchange of pleasantries, and then, an expectant, "so, what's up?" Nothing is no longer an acceptable answer to that query.

But that's a shame. I don't really bother keeping in touch with people by e-mail. Even the most well written, comprehensive rundown of the month's events doesn't do me much good. After all, I'm not actually that interested in simply keeping up with the signposts of their lives. I'm interested in keeping up a connection with their lives. And that's very, very hard to do through written text. There's a big difference between informing and interacting.

...all of which is true. But it's odd, because the obvious manner of keeping a connection with the life of someone you're not in the immediate physical vicinity of would be... a letter, which requires thought, a measure of dedication, and retains permanence. A good correspondent will manage to do more than merely run-down the month's events (and a phone call which is simply a listing of what-I've-done often has the same problem, though it does allow you to ask for expansion on things that pique your interest).

ON THE SAME TOPIC: Though this American Scene post raises a number of authorship issues (even if I suspect it's very much the like 'Notice' that begins Huck Finn), I think the sentiment is a little too snarky:

Of course do-over. How could we have ever thought it different? This is the Era of Do-Overs. Ours is the cult of doing over. Rules — the unforgivable, the final, the no give-backs — are every day seeming more and more an injustice on principle. “But-but-but…!” Blubbering exceptions everywhere, Appease the Child, each outstretched hand and trembling lip justified by one or another feeling. They wanted to count, those voters in Florida and Michigan; who are you to dare to deny them? Getting our cathartic frisson and malicious jollies out of irrevocable disses is for television, not really-real life. Not politics, where — with the quadrennial vote for President the lone last twig on the tree of citizenship — no end of gross piety is too much fawning before the altar of Every Voice Heard! The Democratic Party, fool that it was, tried to stifle the vox populi with the audacity of command. And what could be more Democratic than enjoying one’s own sloppy seconds of repentant publicity? We absolve us, we absolve us! God loves a sinner come to his understanding…!

Rather, the decision to re-open the possibility of seating delegations from Florida and Michigan has much to do with the current delegate math. Denying Michigan and Florida made a lot of sense when it appeared the consequences of that denial would not be great, and someone would earn the nomination without either state's support. Now, of course, neither candidate can reach a majority with just pledged delegates, barring something catastrophic. It is reasonable and pragmatic under those circumstances to consider restoring the original rules. On some things, rules should be less flexible; the rules by which a private organization chooses representatives for its own activities is not one of those situations.

LINK: I read on OTB about the DNC's plan to refuse to seat the Michigan and Florida delegations, with the following analysis:

"This is a dangerous stand for the Democrats politically, in that it threatens to disenfranchise two states that will be important in November..."

and thought of Conquest's Third Law:

"The behavior of any bureaucratic organization can best be understood by assuming that it is controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies."

WHILST WAITING FOR THE LAST EXAM GRADES TO COME IN:

I saw, via Facebook, that newly tenure-tracked Chris Lawrence had joined a group dedicated to the first edition of Fowler's Modern English Usage. As Fowler's is one of the mainstays of my reference collection, and as I use Facebook groups as a way of signaling my dedication to esoterica, I joined.

Now, it so happens I used Fowler's last week, when commenting on (and editing) a friend's prospectus. 'Upon' was consistently used as the preposition of choice, including in some circumstances I thought plainly incorrect. I turned to Fowler's for guidance (look under 'upon' if you happen to own a copy). The rule, so it seems, is that 'on' and 'upon' can be used mostly interchangeably, except there will be some instances where one or the other will sound awkward to the well-attuned ear. I left no more certain than before, but quite sure my uncertainty was the preferred, indeed natural, position.