ABOUT $800:

The bottle cap of my Magic Hat #9 asks:

"What is the Cost of things you have Lost"

LINK: Via Emily Hale, I saw an essay by Harvey Mansfield on the hook-up culture at colleges, about which I don't have very much to say. However, it deals, in part, with the 'purity culture' established at a number of Christian schools (and that finds an outpost in evangelical protestant youth culture more generally), about which I have much to say.

One observation: as Mansfield notes, the primary effect of the contemporary evangelical approach to relationships is to raise the stakes of marriage to the point it becomes a kind of single-minded obsession. As a matter of logic, the approach will lead to more early marriages, and there's nothing wrong with that; but it should also delay a lot of people in their decision to marry, because it changes the decision-making calculus. To marry is, at the bottom, to make a guess about your compatibility over a long period of time; when you make the decision, you have a lot of information about compatibility now, and, at best, speculation about the future. Nothing complicated there: people make decisive, life-altering decisions every day (going to grad school, for example). But catch this up with the (sometimes unrealistic) expectations of romance when wooing/being wooed, the emphasis on marriage that makes being single into one's mid-20s a sign of personality defect (evangelical culture has but refuses to muster the resources that could lessen the casual shame that attaches to the single*), and the infrequency of male-female relationships at differing levels of intimacy**, and it's enough to make a person neurotic.


*I love almost everything about my church, but the invisibility of being single is maddening.

**I can envision an approach to dating that takes some of the good parts of courtship culture (making sure, early on, both sides have the same general opinions about marriage and family) while avoiding some of the bad parts (the assumption that one does not date unless one realistically anticipates marrying the other person in the relationship, should all go well), that would make it possible to recognize, early on, that if the relationship does not work out, it won't be the end of the world, and that some male-female pairings are better off as friends, even close friends, than as a relationship (and some male-female pairings are even better in a relationship than as friends), while not stamping out the possibility that the person you're dating is someone good to share a life with, which is, ostensibly, the reason why people like me spend any time at all thinking about dating, courtship, or marriage.

A SHORT POST ON THE MERITS OF BUREAUCRACY:

My car will finally be liberated either late today (God willing) or tomorrow. Odd though it may be, I can't get very worked up over the break-in; I don't feel like my privacy has been forever violated, or that my guitar equipment is unique and irreplaceable (had a very cathartic evening playing my bass (all that's left) to Portishead).

In part, this is because the initial moment of shock gave way to a list of things I had to do--call the police, cancel my plans for the day, find a place to put my car for the night, call my car insurance company--and that gave way to another list: fill out paperwork, deal with insurance adjusters, wait for my car to get fixed. Some of these things are small hassles (I was on hold with Geico for about 15 minutes, but I do believe the woman I spoke with was trying to get me some coverage for the items stolen from my trunk), some of them substantial (how exactly do you document owning things you bought ten years ago, in high school?), but all of them are quotidian and difficult to take as anything more than hassles. Focusing on them is more pleasant than the alternative.

OVERRATED/UNDERRATED PRESIDENTS:

Unlike Megan McArdle and Ross Douthat, I think presidents who are not rated, but should be, would qualify as 'underrated,' so I'll feel free to include them.

Underrated:
Chester A. Arthur--for civil service reform, if nothing else

Calvin Coolidge--for being distinctly less corrupt than any of the presidents in the 50 years or so before him, also for being generally awesome (he may have better anecdotes than any 20th-century president)

Gerald Ford--total homer choice, I know--Eagle Scout, went to Michigan. Bad on economic policy, which is a minus, and lost to Carter, also bad. But there's a lot to be said for stability and a lack of ambition, especially in a difficult moment, and he strikes me as a man who did not mind receding when it was time, more than can be said for some others.


Overrated:
Ronald Reagan--I didn't come around to conservatism until, oh, five years ago, so I come from the perspective of an outsider. I really don't get the fuss. He doesn't have a lot of signal policy accomplishments, and the ones he does have are of dubious value (expansion of government spending) or multiple causation (the end of the Cold War). Unified a Republican coalition, which after him went on to... something? Welfare reform was good, I guess. Maybe someone can explain this to me.

Jimmy Carter--will take care of this by himself soon enough.

SNAP! The NYT defends Rutgers against Notre Dame.

Spent something like literally all day either meeting with students or answering questions about (tomorrow's) final. So I'll be blogging a little to compensate.

I commented on one possible explanation of the graph Alex Massie has on his blog, comparing Party ID amongst those 18-29. Another occurred to me: I'd be interested to see the breakdown between 'leans D' and 'D,' and the same for Republicans. Not that the change in declared affiliation isn't real, but I'd be curious how much movement there's been across categories (and the rest, I presume, are Independents? Unaffiliated? Other?).

WHIMSY? Whimsy. I don't find the point compelling (when do I ever?), but this bit from Norm is too good not to pass along:

I don't find 'godlessness... a little scary' and I don't want to be participating in an exercise in which I have to utter this sort of thing:

Where is my light?... My light is in me.

My light, such as it is, comes through the window or else gets turned on with a switch on the wall.

So, uh, yeah.

Someone broke into my car last night.

It's going to the repair shop tomorrow morning, and it'll get fixed tomorrow (they promise).

All my guitar equipment was in the trunk (I was going to play music with people today); I don't put a lot of emphasis on possessions--I pointedly refused to name my electric guitar on a number of occasions--but it's odd that they're gone. They'll be replaced, if my renter's insurance covers it, or else more slowly over time, but--again--odd.

I'll probably not be in the mood to blog for awhile, or else more vitriolic than usual, just so's you know.

THERE ARE NO WORDS:

HUMAN SHAMELESSNESS: Never surprising. A google search that led someone to this fair blog:

'brief, but genuine "thank notes"'

Let me suggest that finding text on the internet compromises the extent to which your note may be genuine.

If searching for principles upon which a good thank-you note ought to be based, you could do worse than Eve Tushnet's article on Miss Manners:

It's somewhat startling how many of her rules and guidelines stem from the basic principles of putting others first and protecting them from our rougher feelings: how to write a thank-you note for a present you didn't like; how to respond to a friend who gets embarrassingly drunk at a party (and how that friend ought to behave the next morning!); how to politely and charitably point out that someone has cut in front of you in a line. Even the correct way to refuse an invitation (apologize, but say no firmly, and don't make excuses) is concerned in part with sparing others' feelings: If you say, "I'd love to, but I'm afraid I'll be flossing my otter," you not only invite argument and attempts to persuade you away from your excuses. You also let your friends know exactly where they rank on your scale of priorities -- possibly above cleaning the gutters, but definitely below otter dental hygiene.

Which is to say, genuineness--or authenticity--needn't always be your key criterion. In a thank-you note you say, I imagine, 'thank you,' name the thing for which you are extending thanks, and then include any other appropriate personal sentiment concerning the one you're addressing. Even if you have nothing for the third, the first two should cover your bases in almost any circumstance.

SONG FOR THE EVENING: This came up on my ipod today. It's from the great Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, and is probably the last great song Jeff Tweedy did before he felt the need to stop writing songs with identifiable melodies.

I like the song because it reminds me of my old days in bands* (and it so happens that the guitarist for many of the instantiations of those bands lives in Chapel Hill, as I just discovered). One memory in particular: walking about 10 miles or so across town with my best friend (now a poet, or so I hear), mid-July, in order to listen to some bands play at one of the local parks. We're sitting on the side of a hill with some friends as the first band is tuning for a surprisingly long time... like around 20 minutes. At one point they stop tuning to say "alright, thanks for coming, here's our last song." Naturally, many jokes followed about the quality of their 'songs' (I may have made a Sonic Youth reference). Also, I should mention, the name of the band was Eggsnot. They ended their set by saying "Thank you! We are Eggsnot!" to which my friends and I shouted back "yes you are!"

Ah, youth.


*For the record, I was opposed to Kiss covers on principle, and, actually, none of the rest of it directly applies to my experience, but as far as the genre of 'songs about playing music' go, it's still way up there.

James asks a question, in re: the last international law post:

I'm surprised you don't take issue with what seems to me to be the main point, and one both more interesting and (perhaps) more wrong, from a moral point of view. Why is it "reasonable to expect" that aggressors will be more likely to violate in bello conventions? What's the argument there? It seems an obvious logical leap, and I rather doubt it would be borne out empirically, too.

I don't take issue with it because the narrative concerning legality is largely wrong. As it happens, I re-read the UN Charter the other day, and came across 1(1), which reminds us that 'the suppression of acts of aggression' is one of the formative principles of the UN. It also so happens that members states of the UN can, under Article 35, bring any dispute to the Security Council. That being the case, it's surprising that Iraq does not make a big deal out of US bellicosity, obvious to anyone following current events at that time.

The reason Iraq does not do so is Resolution 1441 (pdf), where (at the end of page 2), the Security Council explicitly invokes its Chapter VII powers against Iraq. That is to say, there's a very important definitional slide in the argument. Returning to Larison:

There are aggressors in war, and in the case of Iraq I hope we could agree that our government was that aggressor. Since aggressive war is itself a crime and a violation of international law, it is reasonable to expect that governments that wage aggressive war will be more likely to ignore legal conventions against other kinds of crimes committed during war.

Along the lines of that Anthony Coates essay quoted below, one might notice that Larison slips between a sense of 'aggression' meaning 'country whose forces enter the sovereign territory of another state,' and another sense meaning 'crime under international law.' I think it's a genuinely unclear point how far, if at all, the US was outside the mandate of the UN (/what it means if the UN makes threats it doesn't enforce, with absolutely no prejudice to the discussion of whether invading was a good idea for political, moral, or military reasons--staying only on the question of whether it violated international law); that is to say, the mere crossing of a border doesn't tell us much without a more substantial interpretive apparatus.

But to the larger point: is it reasonable to expect states that wage aggressive war will be more likely to ignore other legal conventions? I can posit a model on which that's entirely reasonable to expect. Is it reasonable to expect the opposite? Well, it probably depends on which conventions you have in mind (and whether the state in question is a signatory, what reservations and understandings it might have attached to its signature, and the status of CIL in the legal area). From a social scientific perspective, the number of cross-border 'aggressive' wars in the time period with a relevant level of international law is so small, one can derive almost any conclusion one wants.

QUOTE FOR THE EVENING: From today's introductory talk:

"Madness is definitely interdisciplinary."

Sadly, this was followed by a serious point.

ER, KIND OF: Larison:

In fact, except for this parenthetical remark, I generally agree with Ms. McArdle in this post as well, but the remark seems unnecessary. There are aggressors in war, and in the case of Iraq I hope we could agree that our government was that aggressor. Since aggressive war is itself a crime and a violation of international law, it is reasonable to expect that governments that wage aggressive war will be more likely to ignore legal conventions against other kinds of crimes committed during war. No one would deny that governments defending against invasion can commit atrocities, but because as the state of the war has been created by the aggressor there is some sense in which all atrocities that take place during the war can be traced back to the aggressor and the aggressor is responsible for them to one degree or another. Obviously, no state wages “peaceful” or “passive” wars, but not all states wage wars of aggression and I would wager that there is a connection between launching wars of aggression and the frequency of war crimes and other violations of international law. (bold mine)

I presume he refers back to the 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, which identifies "The Crime of Aggression" as a crime under the terms of the statute. But with an exception:

In a communication received on 6 May 2002, the Government of the United States of America informed the Secretary-General of the following:

"This is to inform you, in connection with the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court adopted on July 17, 1998, that the United States does not intend to become a party to the treaty. Accordingly, the United States has no legal obligations arising from its signature on December 31, 2000. The United States requests that its intention not to become a party, as expressed in this letter, be reflected in the depositary's status lists relating to this treaty."

And you'll note that many states put interpretations or reservations on their signatures, so the behavior of the United States, though more extreme, is not fundamentally out of the character of the behavior of other states. So there's one question of whether or not aggressive war is a crime under international law, and yet another (unrelated) question of whether that law applies to the U.S.

QUOTE FOR THE EVENING: From One, Two, Three

"Is everyone in this world corrupt?"
"Well, I don't know everybody..."

I HEARTILY ENDORSE THIS EVENT OR PRODUCT II:

Taking a pause from Alan Patten's excellent book on Hegel in order to watch a bit of the Yankees game, I noticed (via a graphic) that Jermaine Dye is from Vacaville, California. I cannot adequately express how much I love a town with the name of 'cowville.'

Speaking of Patten, I wish I could remember where I saw a reference to his book, which is a uniquely clear and compelling exposition of Hegel's main works. It's a shame I didn't know about it when I took my Hegel seminar.

The New Yorker on The Landmark Herodotus.

Brian Leiter, using his powers for awesome. I haven't spent a lot of time thinking about academic freedom issues, but I find his arguments persuasive.

Via Reihan Salam, an N+1 post on dating-v-marriage. A sampling:

We must stop dating. But we can’t. Because the only way to stop dating would be to date more, and more efficiently, to become more adept at spotting, on the first date, those things that on the fifth or fifteenth date are going to become a problem. Of course that only makes it worse—by that standard, even Abelard and Heloise wouldn’t have made it. The other option is to change yourself. But you’d have done that by now, if you could.

The conclusion of that bit is something less than encouraging. I don't know that you change yourself, at least not as an effort of will over a short period of time; everyone changes in the long term, which I suppose is why the imperfections, such as they are, bring about more attachment than the perfections--who knows how long those will last? Ah, but the prospect of changing with someone else, because of someone else, obviates the search for perfection. At least I think that's how it's supposed to work...

LINK: This has always been one of my favorite songs; no reason for the link, other than that the album (with at least four other unmistakably excellent songs (Norm Geras discusses one here) has been played a lot recently.

Norm also addresses the pretty typical complaint about Iris DeMent:

There are people of a grumbling inclination who will tell you that Iris DeMent is a bad cultural influence, helping by her contributions to the Momma 'n' Daddy tradition to shore up a sweetened, wholly uncritical vision of home and family life. Do not listen to such people. Their critique is based on too partial a reading of Iris's work. Even in this song we have the line 'But I never knew about the things I missed', a condition suffered by many in childhood - indeed one might say an unavoidable condition of childhood. But there is also darker stuff from her.

Part of what makes "You've Done Nothing Wrong" so great is the impossibility of its premise--who could ever say some of that after a relationship ends?--with the precision of its emotional reference--what else can you say about certain parts except 'just so?'

NITPICKING: I enjoy reading Rod Dreher on a number of things, though I think his tendency to the apocalyptic works against him in many instances. But in this post discussing, among other things, confirmation bias, I noticed a passage that seemed odd to me, in the context of discussing whether modernist-city-dwellers would be better off after an energy crisis than agrarian land-lovers:

If the weather gets unbearably hot -- which it does in this part of the country -- all they have to do is open the windows and turn on fans. Far from a perfect solution, but me, I can't open the windows of my old house (though it was made for pre-a/c weather) because they've been painted closed to prevent thieves from breaking in. I could have them opened, and put screens up, but there's no way I'd leave the windows open at night. You'd have to be crazy to do that. How about you readers -- how many of you live in a place where you could sleep easy at night, even though the windows of your house were all wide open to let in the breeze?

Hobbes writes about this in the Leviathan:

Let him therefore consider with himself--when taking a journey, he arms himself, and seeks to go ell accompanied; when going to sleep, he locks his doors; when even in his house, he locks his chests; and this when he knows there be laws, and public officers, armed, to revenge all injuries shall be done him--what opinion has he of his fellow subjects, when he rides armed; of his fellow citizens, when he locks his doors; and of his children and his servants, when he locks his chests. Does he not there as much accuse mankind by his actions, as I do by my words?

Hobbes is working on the intuition his readers will do at least one, perhaps all of those things, or else think them all reasonable to do, and this in 1651. I don't know that the condition Rod describes is ever readily attainable; it's a great good when it happens, but it's probably not reasonable to expect.

LINK: I don't know Courbet very well, but I do know Poussin, and found this LRB article on the two of them to be an interesting read.

ON SOMETHING LIKE THE SAME THEME: Larison:

Here is an admission that democratist interventionism is based on an ideological fantasy and has no legal basis at all. It is revealing that Kagan writes an entire article about the “autocracies” and seems not to notice the irony that they, not the democratic West, are on the side of international law as it actually exists. If democratists were right that only other kinds of regimes are the revisionist, aggressive ones, this might be less worrisome, but in a world where democracies believe they have a higher calling to violate international law in the name of “rights” the preservation of international order necessarily falls to authoritarian and authoritarian-populist states. (I would still say that Russian is not undemocratic, but it is illiberal because it is democratic, but authoritarian populist will do for now.) This is a very undesirable and potentially explosive arrangement. On one side, you have an ideologically-driven mania that says sovereignty and international law can be compromised whenever certain powers feel (and feel is the right verb here) it necessary to protect “rights,” and on the other hand there are states that now have every incentive not to reform their political systems, because reform has been inextricably associated with foreign subversion and attempts at isolation and encirclement, and have absolutely no incentive to help the West isolate pariah regimes around the world.

First of all, I'm surprised he calls the Kagan quote "refreshingly straightforward:" virtually everyone who writes on humanitarian intervention says exactly what Kagan does: the law in no way delimits morality.

Second, I assume that when Larison refers to 'international law as it actually exists' he means something like 'the United Nations Charter,' and not international law in a broader sense, including, for example, Customary International Law. The first problem any conservative should have with positive international law is the shallowness of the tradition from which it springs. The UN Charter appeared, fully formed, in 1945; there was not much precedent for it when it was created, and there was much criticized about it at the time (Hersch Lauterpacht (who edited the 8th edition of Oppenheim's, among other signal accomplishments), and J.L. Brierly both wrote very critically of the Charter after it was passed). It is a perfect example of something made, not inherited, and conservatives ought to retain a position of skepticism that it can do what it ought to do (keeping in mind that there is no consensus on 'what it ought to do,' in the way we might speak of domestic constitutions).

Third, it's a standard trope in international law thinking that the conflict Larison identifies, between the provisions of the Charter which venerate sovereignty and non-intervention; those portions of the Charter that envision a collective security system (W. Michael Reisman was written interesting, though flawed, work on what should happen given that the collective security system never came into being); and the subsequent adoptions of, to name just the first two, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Convention on Genocide. So Larison is wrong to say:

If democratists were right that only other kinds of regimes are the revisionist, aggressive ones, this might be less worrisome, but in a world where democracies believe they have a higher calling to violate international law in the name of “rights” the preservation of international order necessarily falls to authoritarian and authoritarian-populist states.

If the implication is to be that the authoritarian states have international law on their side, and the democracies have only an act of will. There is a genuine legal question of how these provisions are to be read against each other; each side can point to duly enacted pieces of international law and ask legitimate questions about how it is to be implemented. I would recommend, on the legal intricacies of these questions, the section in the 2005 edition of Fernando Tesón's Humanitarian Intervention on the international law reaction to Kosovo, Michael Byers' essay in the J.L. Holzgrefe-Robert Keohane edited volume (which considers possible means by which unilateral humanitarian intervention can become licit under CIL), and Allen Buchanan's "From Nuremberg to Kosovo."

On Poulos' reply: the emphasis on feeling is rightly placed: that's the weakness of, e.g., Samantha Power's book, though her pitch of moral indignation is exactly correct (Philip Gourevitch's book on Rwanda has something of the same weakness)--the result is insufficient attention to politics; and neoconservative (or liberal internationalist) politics more generally are quite compatible with practical reason. But that practical reason (and the allied portions of international law which would go undefended but for 'illegal' action) may sometimes advise action; it seems to me that one might engage in the process of reasoning he suggests and nevertheless conclude that we should have bombed Kosovo.

One other note: Poulos usefully notes the distinction in modern international law between aggressive and defensive war: "First, instead, notice how an aggressive war stops being aggressive because it is really only defending principles. Query how it is we're supposed to determine whether or not a certain principle needs defending." Anthony Coates has a provocative essay in the NOMOS on Humanitarian Intervention suggesting that there is nothing essential in the aggressive-v.-defensive war opposition:

The traditional concept of just cause is broader and more critical than its modern counterpart. The simple equation, in much contemporary thinking, of the just war with a war of self-defense and the unjust war with a war of aggression reflects the dominance of the states-system with its twin principles of sovereignty and nonintervention. From a traditional viewpoint, the equation begs too many of the fundamental moral questions about war. The aggressor-defender distinction is understood too literally to be morally illuminating. In that restricted, nonmoral sense, it is of little use as a means of distinguishing just from unjust war. Without reference to some notion of justice, the distinction is ethically unproductive.

I don't believe any of these arguments settle the question. But it is worth remembering that there is an intellectually serious tradition, going back very far indeed, to which the interventionist can appeal, and such an appeal does not require failing to take the law seriously. It's just that the law no more settles the question than does an appeal to morality.

A QUESTION I DON'T EVEN KNOW HOW TO BEGIN ANSWERING: here:

I just finished a column for next Sunday's paper, arguing the negative, saying that while there must be allowances made for prudence, as a general matter the law has to be grounded in transcendental moral principles, and that the people should conform to the law. My opponent, a libertarian, will argue that yes, the law should be changed to reflect how people actually live.

This seems a perfect analogy to descriptivist-prescriptivist debates in linguistics. But it should be obvious that in both cases, the answer to the question "Should the law reflect how people actually live?" is 'no;' Rod's position is "the law should be composed in such a way to reflect how people ought to live," and the libertarian position relies very heavily on producing a good explanation of "how people actually live," which in any sort of democracy or pluralistic system I take to be an impossible task (indeed, a Mungowitz-style libertarianism would, I think, resist the very idea of aggregation implicit in creating a system of law).

A NON-RHETORICAL QUESTION ABOUT COLONIALISM:

I've had two conversations on the topic in the last few days, so it's at the front of my mind. The first conversation arose from my explanation of a talk I heard last week, where the speaker, by way of castigating Hobbes'(!) support for colonialism, criticized Grotius for offering a doctrine of approximately this form: native peoples are capable of making contracts, and may be punished when they fail to live up to the terms of those contracts. Setting aside the question of whether this is an accurate reading of Grotius, the speaker appeared to set up his distinctions in such a way that, no matter what position one takes on this question, one can reasonably be assumed to support colonialism. If you accept the 'Grotian' argument, then you permit the use of force to ensure the performance of contracts even if the people who signed the contract did not understand its terms, or would not, on reflection, agree to the terms of the contract. To deny the argument appears to require believing that, because of vast differences in power, and limited cross-legal comprehension, native peoples were not capable of entering into any valid contracts at all--but this, I think, is to deny them autonomy, and treat them as children, or something less than full adult humans. Am I missing a third option here?

One of my personal hobby-horses, writing as I do on human rights and humanitarian intervention, is my embrace of cosmopolitanism. Not surprisingly, I find non-interventionism, especially of the Larison sort, to be somewhat baffling:

John Schwenkler and Clark Stooksbury point to this Bill Kauffman column on the importance of identification with and loyalty to place, and he makes many of the points that need to be made, especially with respect to the policy implications of a rootless and boundless internationalism. The connection between a lack of local horizons that define a person and the lack of any sense of limits on what constitutes national interest is an important one. Unable to mind their own business, because they do not really have their own business, rootless people seem to find meaning in supporting projects everywhere and anywhere.

His position makes me uncomfortable because it reminds me that cosmopolitanism and conservatism do not make ready company. What conservative will speak poorly of 'identification with and loyalty to place?'* I am made doubly uncomfortable because I understand my cosmopolitanism to be more properly basic to my beliefs than my conservatism. The lure of cosmopolitanism is, for me, in part a reflection of my ecumenicist Christianity, which relies heavily on the dissolution of difference in Christ as found in Galatians 3**, the imperatives for other-regard in, say, Proverbs 24:10-12, and finds one apotheosis in Grotius' insistence that all distinctions among people, though serving valuable and important functions, are effaced by the clear and simple demands made by common humanity.

To return to the question at hand: surely we owe our first loyalty to those who are closest to us? Certainly we do, and in some circumstances giving proper regard to the needs of those closest will exclude (for reasons of time or energy) those further afield, but I don't know that we can ever have, on that basis, a reason to exclude those concerns. It is simply the case that in the world, there are a number of people who just are rootless, lacking a place to which they can be loyal, or a place that (in any meaningful sense) would deserve loyalty. Dedication to place is all well and good, but conservatism needs something to say to those people, yes?


*Not me; my desires for home, family, and a community of which I can be a part are, I think, perfectly typical

**I have a difficult time accepting Rorty or Connolly's belief that formation of identity necessarily implies exclusion, for precisely this reason.

LINK: If there's one thing that keeps me watching The Office, it's their unwillingness to do the usual Sam-and-Diane, Ross-and-Rachel dance with Jim and Pam: hence, all the talk about marriage. Not that there should be anything revolutionary about the idea that two people, who like and respect and have affection for each other, eventually come to realize they'd be happiest (though not perfectly happy) together, and so are together, but that's the age we live in.

Heh. (Only funny if you know college football)

Now, I obviously have more sympathy for rap/hip-hop than Ross Douthat, for whom "if the fortysomething intellectuals of 2030 end up dragging their griping kids to hear the N.W.A. in the Park concert series - it will be a vastly more plausible indicator of cultural decline than the highbrowfication of Miles Davis." Peter Suderman responds in parthere. Three observations:

1. N.W.A. in the Park, in 2030, or any other time, would be exceedingly difficult, as Easy-E died in 1995.

2. Suderman mentions "So, sure, maybe N.W.A. won’t be kiddie stuff a few decades off," which to me is a sign that he hasn't seen the second best video on youtube (or perhaps has forgotten about it).

3. Suderman again:

N.W.A. might not find its way onto the playlists of most future New Yorker readers, but more complicated, mature hip-hop — acts like El-P and M.I.A. — probably will. And if more mainstream variants like Kanye West and Outkast, who share roots with more hardcore acts, don’t make the 2040 equivalent of classic pop charts, well, I’ll eat my Blackberry.

On those occasions when I reflect on the history of hip-hop, I believe there are two impulses which battle against each other, one of which is best represented in "Rapper's Delight:" entirely about the hook, which is easy to discern, as the lyrics are complete nonsense. The other is "The Message" (or perhaps "White Lines") where the hook is secondary to the lyrics. One can then tell a fairly easy story of ebb and flow: Run DMC and LL Cool J, N.W.A. and Public Enemy, the Daisy-Age Hip-hoppers, novelty rap (Sir Mix-A-Lot), Tupac and Biggie, Puff Daddy, Jay-Z, etc; either the hook or the lyrics are ascendant in any particular moment, though there are always elements of the other.

Ross makes the connection back to jazz, but the better connection is to punk, which has a similarly ambivalent relationship between credibility and success. Blondie is a punk band that sells out to become successful; Patti Smith does not, which naturally limits the size of her audience (though includes many of those who like their music more mature and complicated--the same sort of people who presumably like M.I.A.). Nirvana was more successful and reached a wider audience than the Replacements ever will.

I make all these observations as a long-winded way of saying three ideas are getting conflated in the two posts mentioned: that there is a difference between highbrow, middlebrow and lowbrow (inasmuch as they exist anymore), and the difference is one of quality; that popularity and quality are correlated (I return, as ever, to the Somerset Maugham below); and that the ascendance of particular forms of entertainment constitutes, on its face, a cultural decline (because, honestly, with everything that's out there, you pick NWA? I don't want to commit the quintessential modern sin and venerate authenticity, but I think there are aesthetic, sociological and theoretical reasons to believe their popularity constitutes less of a decline than, say, The Hills. Also: decline from what?). All those points seem contentious to me, and none of them are established.

CRUELTY AND CRUELTY: Norm writes, on Baze v. Rees:

It is a matter of dismay that the Supreme Court of one of the world's greatest democracies should still find itself comfortable with ruling that the use of lethal injection on someone doesn't constitute cruel and unusual punishment. It's high time that that august body re-examined its own legal concepts in light of the meanings of words available to ordinary people, which I take it the members of the Supreme Court also are, their membership of it notwithstanding.

When he takes up the ordinary-language challenge with respect to 'cruel' he writes:

As for the cruelty of it, how can any civilized person look squarely at the procedure of doing someone to death before their time by administering an injection, and fail to see any cruelty in it? (italics mine)

The answer, I think, is that Norm's ordinary-language approach is slipping between meanings of 'cruelty.' Or, to answer his question: of course any human being is capable of seeing some cruelty in lethal injection; but incarceration also has a level of cruelty to it. So also the seizure of assets in, e.g., the case of tax evasion. Any punishment or sanction will, taken from the proper perspective, have an element of cruelty; the ordinary-language approach won't do here. This is not to say one couldn't make the case that lethal injection is cruel in a way both different and worse from the regular sanctions arising from the police and law-enforcement functions of the state, it's just that the case must be at least slightly more complicated than Norm presents it.

PRESENTISM AND CONSERVATISM: Minus one of those 'conclusions' I keep hearing so much about:

One of the things I recommend to friends and colleagues, in my paternalistic moments, is to occasionally take time away from one's dissertation project. The temptation, I find, it to write too much for too long, with the result that energy flags below the level necessary to work at a sustained pace. If one turns to other things, especially fiction and good short-form essays, then problems with the argument one wishes to make have a way of getting worked out in one's subconscious: hence a few days off have turned, for me, a shapeless mush of argument into seven typical stages of a humanitarian intervention, which contemporary theorists attempt to solve in four broad ways--but I digress.

In the course of reading, I found an interesting essay by Hazlitt called "On Reading Old Books." I don't mean to speak of his politics, but he expresses a sentiment early on which I believe can be identified as 'conservative:'

I do not think altogether the worse of a book for having survived the author a generation or two. I have more confidence in the dead than the living. Contemporary writers may generally be divided into two classes--one's friends or one's foes. Of the first we are compelled to think too well, and of the last we are disposed to think too ill, to receive much genuine pleasure from the perusal, or to judge fairly the merits of either... All these contradictions and petty details interrupt the calm current of our reflections. If you want to know what any of the authors were who lived before our time, and are still objects of anxious inquiry, you have only to look into their works. But the dust and smoke and noise of modern literature have nothing in common with the pure, silent air of immortality.

On my first reading, I took this to be just a stronger form of the same idea Montesquieu puts in the pen of Uzbek in Persian Letters (Letter 108): "The great mistake made by reviewers is that they write only about new books, as if the truth could ever be new. It seems to me that until a man has read all the old books he has no reason to prefer new ones instead." That is to say, old books are or can be a font of wisdom in a way new books cannot, because we have not just the evidence of the work itself, but knowledge of the approbation of many generations. One may read, so far as possible, with impartiality, not having to make much of a judgment about the deserved greatness of the work. I take this to be at the basis of conservative attempts to defend the canon, or a broad, deferential respect for tradition.

One of my favorite conversation-starters when in the company of political theorists is the 'who would you kick out of the canon' game? (Hegel and Kant are common answers, you will not be surprised to hear). Insomuch as it works, it does by highlighting the reverence for tradition we professionally maintain: I may think Rousseau is wrong about virtually everything, and establishes in his politics several trends I find disturbing (and I do), but that's only after considering its attractions at some length that I come to this view. That is, the disagreement comes only after broad deference to the history that has made his work an integral part of the story of political theory.

Now this is, I think, the right attitude towards the old. But what of the new? This comes to mind as a reflection on the view, expressed in various parts around the blogosphere, that perhaps what conservatism needs is fewer people in Washington, D.C., and more people living according to correct notions of virtue out there in the world. Then comes to mind the long passage in Cakes and Ale where the narrator discusses the literary merit of Edward Driffield. A sample:

The elect sneer at popularity; they are inclined even to assert that it is proof of mediocrity; but they forget that posterity makes its choice not from among the unknown writers of a period, but from among the known. It may be that some great masterpiece which deserves immortality has fallen still-born from the press, but posterity will never hear of it; it may be that posterity will scrap all the best sellers of our day, but it is among them that it must choose.

Hazlitt, in his single-minded focus on the past, entirely neglects the present because he finds the task of judgment, of sorting out biases and trying to be objective, too difficult, perhaps impossible. To which Maugham would reply: but that's nevertheless our task, however distasteful, and we should remember the long-term consequences of failing to confront what is incorrect or misunderstood now.

(I recommend Emily Hale's thoughts on feminism and conservatism as a model of productive engagement, and any of Helen's thoughts on tradition, especially here)

EPIGRAM FOR A DISSERTATION II:

'It's not a matter of reason or justice. We all get involved in a moment of emotion and then we cannot get out. War and Love--they have always been compared.'

-Graham Greene, The Quiet American

LINK: For those of my readers interested in the architecture of public spaces, I point out an article in the New Yorker on new airport terminals:

Foster placed the gates for domestic travel along two sides of the front triangle, which means that some of the planes, instead of being on a faraway concourse, nestle right up to the building. That’s one part of his reinvention. The other is in the kind of aesthetic experience that Foster gives international travellers as they disembark. In most airports, you are hustled off the plane and up stairs, down escalators, around corners, and along endless low-ceilinged, interior corridors before you have the privilege of standing in a line to show your passport. At Beijing, Foster has put all the international flights in the rear three-sided building, which is similar to the front one and almost as grand, and you walk off the plane right into his vast space, a celebration of arrival awash with natural light. Nothing could be further from the windowless basements of Kennedy airport.

Nothing bothers me more when traveling than losing my sense of direction: between my Orienteering merit badge and the frequent experience of getting lost on purpose, it takes a lot for me to not be able to figure out where I am, what direction I'm facing, or reverse my directions. But this happens with surprising regularity when I fly: Frankfurt, London Stansted, Houston, and Pierre Trudeau are all a big mush in my head.

I am in complete agreement with Brian Leiter that John Yoo should not be fired for the implications of his academic work, or his actual political work within the Bush administration:

If Professor Yoo's arguments to "encourage the use of torture" and his "fundamental lack of respect for the rule of law" are the reasons he should be terminated, then he is to be terminated precisely for his "views", views which he has expressed in law reviews, as well as to Bush. Are we really to believe--fifty years after the McCarthyist witch hunts!--that academics should be punished because their bad ideas are then used by bad people to do bad things?

I HEARTILY ENDORSE THIS EVENT OR PRODUCT: Elsewhere:

An epitome of Fire Joe Morgan, if you care at all about baseball and are not afraid of statistics (I will grant, however, that two semesters of graduate-level statistics training, combined with any exposure whatsoever to the use made of statistics in political science, could well instill that fear).

Portishead: kind of awesome. Dummy is the perfect soundtrack for being chased through the country late at night by aliens, or sitting in a parking structure, depending on your typical evening activities.

Peter Hitchens, at Normblog, on The Book of Common Prayer.

RANDOM THOUGHTS ON TAXES:

Taxes were not the bitter experience this year they have proven to be in years past (it helps that I had a reasonable expectation of how much I would have to pay, not true, e.g., last year), but even so, I support the Jane Galt Tax Plan, and you should, too.

Relatedly, this Slate article would be perfect for Patrick Deneen; I have more sympathy than some for our glorious, modern, globalized, capitalistic age, but even I found myself thinking the author is a fine example of everything wrong with America today.

IF BEING A COSMOPOLITAN IS WRONG, I DON'T WANT TO BE RIGHT:

Something bothered me in reading a post on the Balkans at Crunchy Con. I've been able to identify two larger problems with its view of international politics:

1. A too-credulous approach to history. Now, I am not one of those who believe national identity to be entirely socially constructed; I do, however, believe that nationalist movements have an interest in appropriating as long as history to their struggle as they dare. Thus you will be interested to know that conflict in the Balkans stretches back to 1389, on the assumption, I take it, that there has been no significant change in group or national identity in the meantime, so one may trace out divisions without a problem (I admit to having only a broad familiarity with the history, but I find any claim to continual identity over a long stretch of time wildly implausible). You may have some trouble with this claim:

"Never content to see a fire without pouring gasoline on it, the Bush administration promptly recognized the new “state” of Kosovo, as did some forgetful European countries. Russia, which may remember history too well, responded by announcing its support for Serbia. Within a week, Kosovo’s unilateral declaration of independence and the Great Powers’ response to it had set the stage for a classic 19th-century Balkan crisis. A few old fogies may recall that the last such crisis, in the summer of 1914, led to a certain amount of unpleasantness, not entirely contained within Balkan boundaries."

if you happen to remember that the US and 'forgetful European countries' (France and Great Britain, oh so forgetful) opposed Serbia (backed by Russia) twice in the 1990s, without it leading the world back into war. But neither one of those wars counts, you know:

Then, following the eternal Serbian narrative, came more betrayal and defeat. Russia, Serbia’s only Great Power supporter, pulled the rug from under the Serbs and demanded they yield. Why? History may some day find out, but as of now, we don’t know. Rumors of payments to Russian President Boris Yeltsin swirled. Certainly his titles never included “the incorruptible.”

Things are different now, what on account of Putin and all:

When NATO bombed Serbia in the 1990s, Russia was too weak to respond. That is no longer the case. The Russian economy is doing well, flush with petrodollars. Russia’s military, while still somewhat ragged, is in far better condition now than it was then. Most critically, the boozy, corrupt Yeltsin has been replaced by the new Man of Steel, Vladimir Putin. The results of the recent Russian presidential election, where Putin’s handpicked successor won with 70 percent of the vote, show that he has the Russian people behind him.

Leaving aside my skepticism that Putin's successor receiving 70% of the vote is anything like a sign "that he has the Russian people behind him," we can now grasp the historical narrative in total: the situation in Kosovo may lead to world war because the last historical instance of Balkan conflict that we allow to count led to world war.

Also conspicuously missing from the article: any mention of 1917 or communism. If you're going to make a broad historical claim, you might do well to acknowledge that Russia may have drawn some lessons from World War I itself, or its experience of communism and maintaining satellite regimes. Sadly, these options are not contemplated even to dismiss them.

2. Contrast Dreher's approval of the AmCon article with his disapproval of the Absolut vodka-reconquista ad:

Secondly, the reason this ad offends some Americans is more or less the same reason it is attractive to some Mexicans: a sense of grievance and anxiety over territory. If this ad had run 40 years ago, Americans would have been able to laugh it off. Not so much anymore, not with illegal immigration and the Mexification of much of the US Southwest -- which, as the ad indicates, was historically part of Mexico. The ad plays to crude nationalism, but in the Internet era, that can cut both ways. An ad for the Mexican market that depends in some sense on putative Mexican customers' latent hostility to the United States to sell them stuff inevitably will harm the same product's image in the United States, because it associates the brand negatively with American customers' fears.

And: it's easy to laugh at those fears if you aren't living in the Southwest.

So, to be clear: when the irredentism and 'crude nationalism' belong to Mexico, the right thing to do is recognize it and oppose it, and to take seriously the consequences of laughing it off. When they belong to Russia, we should respect their interests and avoid provoking that country, lest we start a war. Which is to say, it seems, that so long as my ox is not the one being gored, it doesn't (and shouldn't) matter to me.

QUOTE FOR THE DAY:

"I've been to India, Pyle, and I know the harm liberals do. We haven't a liberal party any more--liberalism's infected all the other parties. We are all either liberal conservatives or liberal socialists: we all have a good conscience. I'd rather be an exploiter who fights for what he exploits, and dies with it. Look at the history of Burma. We go and invade the country: the local tribes support us: we are victorious: but like you Americans we weren't colonialists in those days. Oh no, we made peace with the kind and we handed him back his province and left our allies to be crucified and sawn in two. They were innocent. They thought we'd stay. But we were liberals and we didn't want a bad conscience."

-Graham Greene, The Quiet American (with an instance of the famous triple-colon sentence)

Everyone else has been discussing the NYT article on literary dealbreakers, so I will, too. I'd mostly like to associate myself with Helen ("The idea that taste in books can be a relationship-killer is uncontroversial..."), but will disagree with her, flagging one comment in particular:

124. Children’s writer E.L. Konigsburg talks in a speech about how to truly know someone, you should ask what children’s books they’ve read. It’s a good idea. When you’re a kid, you don’t know enough to try to impress anyone with what you’re reading.

True enough, but if it's taste in books you're after, this seems a dead end. Taste, at least in the Eliot-ian scheme to which I subscribe, is a development that takes place over time. A child may read well, but almost by definition reads indiscriminately (I would hate to be judged by what I read in, oh, 6th grade). When you're an adult, especially once you're done with college, your reading habits become a reflection of your underlying personality. To illustrate the point in a different way: I loved Susan Cooper's books when I was young, and for more than a few years they were my absolute favorites. If they were still my favorites after attempting my way through world literature, my inclination would be that something has gone terribly wrong.*

The two comments that leaped out at me were number 81:

There aren’t really any deal-breakers, although I generally find that people who have very limited interests in genre have limited interests in many areas, and less to say. I also find it disturbing when people say that they ‘hate’ reading. You’re out of school. It’s not mandatory (but you are losing out)!

and 107:

I met and fell in love with a handsome, funny, hard working, intelligent man twenty years ago. I almost, quite ignorantly, dismissed him because he doesn’t read.
I learned throughout our marriage that my perfect fit came with a man willing to jump out of bed to change the baby, even when he had am early flight, or, who used his vacation time to fix up our house, or any one of a million other generous, supportive things he’s done for us.
I’m the one with the ivy league degrees, I’m the English teacher who reads Richard Ford and Zadie Smith and tosses off essays in minutes. But you ask any one of our kids who is smarter and they’ll always pick their dad.

Which is to say, I have sympathy for both the notion that tastes in reading signal an important piece of information about an individual, and for the idea that there are many other more-important qualities in a potential spouse. I'd order my list in the following manner:

Reading is better than not reading

Better to occasionally read books that challenge you than to consistently read things of middling quality (I am fortunate that other requirements, i.e. being Christian, screen out a good deal of the pop-'metaphysics' that many commenters worry about)

Better to occasionally read lowbrow books, or do other things with your time, than to only read books of 'high quality' (I enjoy movies of all kinds, sports, music, doing things with my friends, and will likely not turn off an episode of Friends if it's on and I don't have work to do--people who can only get enjoyment from a limited number of activities are kind of boring, and people who rule out certain forms of activity have already limited themselves.)

But, of course, Norm captures the absurdity of the discussion better than anyone.

*Some exceptions, of course: Dickens has literary merit, despite the fact he's almost universally left to younger children nowadays; Robinson Crusoe and Rudyard Kipling amongst books for boys; I'm sure there are girl equivalents. I like all of those, but I recognize Dante's working on another, higher level.