QUOTE FOR THE EVENING:

In the library today, looking for something else (is this not the best way to find a book?), I picked up a volume of T.S. Eliot's letters. And what should I randomly open to but this:

Mr. Hannay doubts whether I have justified my distinction between the critic and the philosopher, and suspects that I am making a distinction between a kind of philosophical criticism of which I approve and another kind of which I disapprove. If I have made this distinction between kinds to Mr. Hannay's satisfaction, and not merely shown that I like some critical writings and not others, then I ought to be content. The frontier cannot be clearly defined; at all events I trust that Mr. Hannay would agree that Hegel's Philosophy of Art adds very little to our enjoyment or understanding of art, though it fills a gap in Hegel's philosophy.

It's in The Athenaeum of 6 August 1920, for those interested. Maugham says something very similar about Kant in his essay on the Critique of Judgment, and also in Cakes and Ale. Perhaps there's something about Anglo-American literature that's fundamentally hostile to the systemization of experience?

UTAH GAME WRAP-UP:

I like to riff on chosen-versus-unchosen identities, with the idea that one's attachment to things one has chosen can be just as intense, just as formative, as those one is born into. If I had any doubt about that, yesterday's game cleared it up: despite having two other things that needed to be done in the early evening, despite vowing to turn the game off at halftime, then after the third quarter, I stuck around to the bitter end. And will watch again next week.

My general perspective on this matter is summarized (in a slightly more profane form) at Wolverine Liberation Army (here and here; I wasn't joking about the profanity, was I?), whom I love for this T.S. Eliot adaptation.

And, hey, good news: the visiting all-awesome quarterback from next year took a look and said, "shoot, if I make this work, they will treat me like some kind of lower deity," which is only a slight exaggeration away from true.

QUOTE: The mentality of your average University of Michigan football fan, in a sentence or three:

"Any illusions 2005 Chad Henne was a realistic ceiling for Michigan’s quarterbacks this year went out the window as I watched the turnover abortion that was the NC State-South Carolina game. We have no idea how bad it can get. Yet."

HEAD A-SPINNING: Trying to figure out if it's weirder that Republicans are now arguing inexperience may not be such a big deal, or Democrats are now arguing that inexperience should be considered an unacceptable handicap.

UPDATE: Came to a decision on this one. If you're of the opinion that the Vice Presidency should return to being like holding a warm bucket of spit, rather than the more aggressive Cheney-Gore model, you probably want someone who hasn't had a long career, established a profile, and harbored presidential aspirations of their own.

IT'S THAT TIME OF YEAR AGAIN: Put in a solid day of work today (course website has the new reading, and I'm particularly excited to pit Hobbes against Bentham on the subject of legislation), and as reward, I am flipping between Wake Forest-Baylor, NC State-South Carolina, and Oregon State-Stanford. It's not as good as actual college football, but it'll hold me until Saturday.

FILE UNDER 'THINGS I DON'T GET:'

Insomuch as I take a side at all on these things, I'm closer to Jacob Levy than Patrick Deneen. The whole situation seems to be needless rabble-rousing, and, as Levy says, based on being "cute and clever" rather than "principled," not unlike the reverse-Affirmative Action bake sales the College Republicans used to have at Michigan. If you think, as I do, that the local political environment is an irrelevant factor for the siting of your major convention, then there is exactly as much point in fussing over Toronto as there is over New Orleans: none. If you want to raise the point that Canadian abuses of human rights talk in the name of political correctness are a serious issue, there are less annoying ways to do so (see, e.g., CliffOrwin); and frankly, even if it were justifiable to respond in this manner, prudence would seem to dictate a number of better options (e.g. let's get together a panel for APSA in 2009 talking about the use and abuse of rights-talk).

A brief word on Deneen's extension of the argument, taking his discussion of the meaning of "American" in "American Political Science Association" as a starting point. I don't get it, the fear of cosmopolitanism and assuming identities other than one's own nation. I carry a number of identities, some relating to me personally, some relating to social groups of which I have chosen to be a member, some belonging to political communities where my membership is something less than up to me. The presence of all of these presents no issues to me. From that point, the addition of real or metaphorical identifications with those outside my particular state borders causes me no mental anguish. When I lived in Michigan, it was not difficult for me to imagine that people in Ontario probably had similar interests, and at least some of what I did (and Michigan did) should take those into account. I'd like to think this is a typically American attitude (whether that counts as a good thing or a bad one I'll leave to someone else): certainly, the authors of the Federalist thought loyalty to state and loyalty to nation could co-exist; I have no particular reason to think that's false. Perhaps I'm missing the force of the argument, but I don't see how adding one more kind of identification changes anything.

NOTE TO MARC AMBINDER:

Not all political scientists study American politics. Not all of the political scientists who study American politics study the Presidency or parties. What happens at conventions in the modern era is well understood and, I think, rather boring, on the whole. Political science does, or should, aspire to a certain level of remove from actual politics, all the better to gain analytic leverage on things when they do happen. Otherwise you end up overstating the importance of events, as Dan Drezner notes, or is evidenced by that famous Mearsheimer article about Europe after the Cold War.

APSA is on the weekend it is because that's always the weekend that it's on; the DNC convention is the interloper here.

ONE QUICK FOLLOW-UP: To the discussion of poverty, which Helen continues here. Part of what drives the divide (so much as it exists) between her position and mine (or the positions I'm prepared to defend versus the ones she's prepared to defend) is the definition of 'poverty.' One can distinguish extreme poverty from, as it were, regular poverty. The former is far too widespread, and people are far too lazy about it. When the choices facing some not-insignificant part of the world are to die tomorrow from malnutrition or diarrhea today, or else in six months, or else in ten years, that's not good, and at least some of the solutions are not, from an institutional standpoint, that difficult to enact.* But once the subsistence level is cleared, Helen's point holds. One can support a global minimum without falling into the trap of supporting a lot of redistributive (governmental) social policies--I think David Miller has a position very close to this one, at least on the question of global justice.


*Or maybe they are, but I'm certain there's been no widespread, systematic attempt to find out.

YOUR TEN MINUTE DISTRACTION FOR THE DAY: Can You Guess the Accent?. I scored a 37.

LINK: Those wishing to follow my teaching exploits this semester may do so here. Yes, I am starting them with The Spirit of the Laws.

UM: Helen:

"Suffering is either meaningful or not, either redemptive or simply unpleasant."

Helen, three paragraphs later:

"Alleviating poverty is a kind of anti-suffering policy I can get on board with; not all suffering is sacrificial/redemptive/awesome."

Which leads, I think, to the conclusion that poverty is unpleasant? Surely it's more than that, and the fact that it is motivates much thinking on social and global justice. Once one drops below a particular threshold, poverty becomes a combination of pernicious and preventable.* Thus the attitude "that the only way they can think to respond to suffering is to want it stopped as soon as possible" is a polemical and theoretical response to the fact that most people are happy to do nothing.


*Not saying, btw, that all poverty can be eliminated, but rather that effort will produce at least some effect.

ON THE SECURITY COUNCIL: And an observation on neoconservatism. Following on Helen here, an analysis of Article 27(3) of the UN Charter, addressing circumstances when a member of the Security Council needs to recuse themselves from a debate or vote. Also, Kenneth Anderson makes an argument about desuetude and the use of force (if you do not regularly go to Opinio Juris for your international law commentary, you really should).

The observation: say what you will about neoconservative foreign policy, but they take institutions seriously. The UN's inability to perform most of the functions people would consider basic--such as outlawing the use of force in anything besides self-defense--is often taken with a shrug of the shoulders, as if to say, "well, what can you do?" One might try to invoke the order-v-justice distinction here; the UN fails as an institution to support anything like just solutions to a number of international problems, but this is perhaps impossible anyway. So long as it provides order and stability, then it does good. I remain unconvinced, however, that it does as much work as it could with respect to order. The disorder instead happens in parts of the world it's easier to ignore, and what looks like stability--Georgia and Russia agree to disagree on the status of particular territories, but keep hostilities minimal--changes quickly to instability. A neocon is at least prepared to say that if an institution doesn't do the work (for justice or order) that the institution was designed to do, then the institution should be reformed or replaced. In this, they come close to liberalism, but I don't know that closeness to liberalism is fatal, even for conservatives, if the argument is right.

WHIT STILLMAN OVERLOAD: In honor of Metropolitan now being on Hulu, a long-ish interview with the reclusive man himself, and an old Diary he did for Slate around The Last Days of Disco.

Metropolitan held up very well under a second viewing--I thought less of it at the time than Barcelona, but I saw a few new things, including the surprising centrality of Audrey, but I'm saving those thoughts for another forum.

LINK: On the large-scale theoretical and political issues coming from the Russia-Georgia conflict, I haven't yet seen better than Henry Farrell (though I also recommend Kenneth Anderson's recounting of his early 90s experience in Georgia and Chris Borgen on discourses of international law):

This is where we are at the moment. Obviously, this is in part a fight about territory. But it also, more importantly, a fight about the rules that should shape international politics in the region surrounding Russia. And here, John McCain is at least partly right (although the mutterings about going to war over this seem to me to be completely off base). Russia sees the spread of democratization as a threat to its control of the ‘Near Abroad.’ It has been pushing quite deliberately for a redefinition of the norms of territorial integrity and intervention that would legitimate its continued presence in Georgia and elsewhere, and allow it to reconsolidate control over what it perceives as its rightful sphere of influence. What it would like to see is tacit or active recognition by other great powers of its right to intervene in countries such as Georgia, the Ukraine, Moldova etc. The Western powers have their own economic interests in the region, which they have been pushing assiduously, but also would quite genuinely would prefer to see democracies consolidate themselves in this band of countries, if for no other reason than because democracies over the longer term tend to be more stable, and chaos in these countries could easily spill over in nasty ways in Europe and elsewhere...

Matt’s acquiescence to this line seems to me to be a real mistake for a liberal internationalist who believes that the gradual diffusion of democracy is a good thing for international politics. It is tantamount to saying that a large chunk of Europe, which isn’t wonderfully democratic but is surely more democratic than it used to be, should be subject to the effective authority of a state that doesn’t welcome the spread of democracy. This seems to me to set a terrible long term precedent. I don’t have specific policy recommendations for how the US and Europe should respond to the Georgia-Russia war – I am neither an area expert nor a guns’n’bombs specialist. But I’m going to stick my neck out and say that the key objective here isn’t to support Georgia – it’s to prevent this becoming a precedent for the recreation of Russian local hegemony across the wider region.

I'm not sure I agree on his position on Kosovo: keeping them of uncertain legal status was clearly good for the US and the West more broadly, but I'm not sure it was best for the Kosovars.

A THOUGHT ON 'NATION AND UNIVERSE':

“What reasons do we have to expect a singular and universal justice? Is that not like protecting the plurality of playwrights while insisting that they all write the same play?” -Michael Walzer, "Nation and Universe"

I’ve written, below, in my post on Charles Taylor, a bit on the opposition between stability and justice as fundamental principles of politics. The two are mutually exclusive: if stability is the fundamental or first purpose of government, then on that theory, one has to concede that arrangements which are undesirable on almost any particular theory of the good nevertheless may be justified, and not merely in terms of pragmatics. As a recovering deontologist, I have little sympathy for that position. Justice has to be the first value of politics, though the political implications which flow from any particular injustice will differ. It’s easy, when the debate is put together in this manner, to take the side of anyone with universalist or justice-first sympathies, but there’s also such a thing as too much justice. In any good polity, there are lots of interactions and relationships that are governed by other principles.

The simile above is a bad one. “Nation and Universe” is an interesting lecture-turned-chapter, given that Michael Walzer, oft-times professed defender of self-determination, non-interference, and particularity, makes a defense of universalism and the primacy of justice. The form of universalism is called ‘reiterative,’ that is, a kind of justice that shares its broad form across nations, but without reference back to a single ur-morality. He contrasts this to ‘covering’ universalism, the idea that there exists one form of social life, political organization, and even justice, which it is the task of one particular nation to spread to all others.

Reiterative universalism should be appealing to someone like me, who supports both the idea of universalism and that individual societies are, and should be, free to determine their collective lives in ways they see fit (within limits). How one spins this theory depends on where the focus is placed: emphasize the universal portion and the theory looks more like traditional universalist morality; emphasize the reiterative portion, and it looks more like Walzer’s usual self-determination position.

It is my contention that the simile Walzer employs in the above quote (at the end of §3, p. 193 in Thinking Politically) is mistaken, and is mistaken insomuch as it misidentifies the role of justice in determining social life. To back up about a page, Walzer begins by asking if there is a universal ethic (I do not, for the record, claim to have any particular knowledge of what the universal ethic is, though I would claim there is one). He notes a series of ‘negative injunctions’—”against killing, torturing, oppressing, lying, cheating, and so on” and sees these as a feature of the ‘covering-law’ universalism.

Walzer goes on:

“Justice seems to be universal in character for the same reason that autonomy and attachment are reiterative—out of recognition of and respect for the human agents who create the moral world and who come, by virtue of that creativity, to have lives and countries of their own.”

What we are respecting when morality is formulated in this way is what he calls the ‘brute fact’ and the ‘divine image.’ Human beings have a capacity to create, to make things new, with an almost infinite variation. People recognize this, and it’s why the imago dei plays such an important role in Western thought, even for people like Walzer who are skeptical of its theological basis. He continues:

“The principles and rules of justice have been worked out, over many centuries, so as to protect human agents and set them free for their creative (reiterative) tasks: one set of principles for one set of agents.”

Though he claims that starting with the principle of equal respect for agents, one cannot stop ‘short of a fully elaborated description of a just society.’ But such a full description then imposes limits: “Why should we value human agency if we are unwilling to give it any room for maneuver and invention?”

One can make two answers to this: the first is that, through various human rights documents, many states (and, one might assume, the nations which are a part of those states) have committed themselves to a notion of justice of a character alien to the one Walzer is developing. Maybe those states are mistaken about the nature of morality, or what can reasonably be expected from law or politics, but there’s another conversation going on concerning this precise topic that gets neglected.

The second response would be that there’s no reason to believe a theory of justice must work itself out as fully as Walzer claims, extending, blob-like, over all of a nation’s collective life. One can retain a principle of universalism in justice without believing justice exhausts the description. Walzer has, in fact, already discussed the best candidate: a largely negative theory of justice that focuses on the things that are prohibited. We can recognize when the minimum conditions to respect the agency or autonomy of individuals are not being met (David Miller’s National Responsibility and Global Justice opens with a recognition that this is the case), and find remedial solutions to those problems as they arise, and in fact make this determination without specifying whether it is the job of government of individual citizens to do so. In fact, we should expect that many of these minimal duties will be fulfilled without any appeal to justice or rights ever being necessary. Justice, given too central a place, can be overweening, and look very much like telling the playwrights what the next play should be. But there’s no reason to give it that place.

BUSY, BUSY: I've been writing (heavily) this week, and hence had little time for blogging; the run-up to my class is almost here, and that will take more of my time. Writing has its own pleasures, especially when I can step out of the smaller debates I try to insert myself into here ('why does everyone believe sovereignty and intervention are incompatible?'), think in larger, longer terms about historical narratives and analogies, and the way in which those come to dominate our thinking whether we recognize it or not (we generally don't, even when it's pointed out to us). It's been a pleasant distraction, and a nice way of avoiding the heat. I'll return, as ever, when something piques my interest.

QUOTE OF THE DAY: Carrie Brownstein:

Presenting supposedly great works of art for the first time, or music dear to oneself, is always difficult. You're forced to hear the songs objectively, and to witness them via someone else's experience. We might know that a certain album is considered genius, crucial or revolutionary -- or that it changed our own lives -- but can a song or artist convey an essential importance or validity immediately? While Playing Hendrix, Wire, The Slits, Black Sabbath and the Stooges to my friend, I had to question (and I even worried) whether they really would sound thunderous or, for that matter, new. I'd hoped that something old even could sound new -- and certain songs, like the opening riff of "See No Evil" by Television, did.

I discovered last night that the albums we've come to take for granted can leave fresh marks upon us; they can override nostalgia and sentimentality; they can overtake a moment, permeate and flood. It's good to know, beyond mere mental recognition or a historical acknowledgement, that certain music can and does turn you inside out. It's hard to make the space, physically or mentally, for that power sometimes -- a lot of our music listening has become unintentional, crammed into crevices to make room for the rest of our hectic lives. Might I suggest, then, that every once in a while, you let some of your favorite songs or albums take over a whole room -- or, better yet, a whole night. But only if you're ready.

CHARLES TAYLOR'S RELIGION--AND MINE:

(Prefatory note: though Taylor falls within the orbit of political theory, I've never read him in a systematic way. This is an attempt to pull a thread that is present, I believe, in The Sources of the Self and A Secular Age. It may already be well-discussed in the literature on Taylor. He may say something that expressly contradicts this elsewhere--if so, I'd appreciate a pointer. Forewarned is forearmed. Now I'll proceed.)

Jacob Levy reminds me, in the comments here, that while Walzer's "Dirty Hands" is a reminder of a certain kind of conflict between Protestant theology and politics, so is Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience," which, quoting, "is an appeal to clean hands and to a highly [Dissenting-]Protestant conscience. Having separated spheres, the Protestant may decide to reject the City of Man altogether and choose quietism and faith."

A Christian (though perhaps not only a Christian) faces a Scylla-and-Charybdis moment: one can fuse one's politics to one's religion, or else see them as fundamentally opposed. The first looks, on occasions, like the New Natural Law movement, which discovers that marriage is a fundamental good just in time to bring it to bear on policy debates. The second is the typical Stanley Hauerwas rejectionism, or, in a more moderate form, something like Walzer's Spheres of Justice. I assume that the dangers of too closely identifying politics and religion are obvious from the perspective of the religious believer: at a certain point, it's hard to tell which set of beliefs is animating the other. From a political point of view, too-close identification makes compromise difficult, and without compromise, not much can be done, whether you're a modus vivendi or a overlapping consensus (or deliberative democracy)-type. The problem with a dissociation of the two is less evident. The political arena loses something when a group of citizens opt themselves out of public debates, but from the perspective of those who drop out, that hardly matters. Here's where I want to segue to Taylor.

Recently, I finished reading The Sources of the Self with a colleague, and one of the topics we discussed was whether Taylor is affirming or rejecting modernity. Those who have read A Secular Age know that he spends a great deal of time arguing against what he calls the 'subtraction story,' where through a combination of material and sociological factors, especially the rise of science and rationalism, people cease to believe in God, and the possibility of secularism can finally be realized. It's not that he disputes the broad historical narrative; he just doesn't believe it's quite so simple as 'God drops out.'

The question I raised concerning Sources of the Self was whether it was not, in its own way, a subtraction story, a declinist narrative of What We Have Lost. He ends the book by playing with the image of mutilation, arguing that every viewpoint available to contemporary man involves some act of mutilation, a part of what it means to be human that must be sacrificed in order to live in the world as best one can. He holds out one possibility, though:

There is a large element of hope. It is a hope that I see implicit in Judaeo-Christian theism (however terrible the record of its adherents in history), and in its central promise of a divine affirmation of the human, more total than humans can ever hope to attain unaided. (p. 521)

The condition of contemporary man is, to put it another way, brokenness. Much, including much religion, counsels that individuals and communities accept that brokenness and attempt to put the pieces back together in the best manner they can. Taylor's alternative is a wholeness that comes through relationship with God, that's not simply wholeness, but something even more than we might otherwise expect. In this, he echos his earlier description of Augustine's relationship to God.

Augustine is removed from contemporary man not only by a millennium and a half (and then some), but also by many of those changes that have made the modern age possible. In some very real sense, we can't occupy the same world, or have the same thoughts, that he did. And yet:

None of us could ever grasp alone everything that is involved in our alienation from God and his action to bring us back. But there are a great many of us, scattered through history, who have had some powerful sense of some facet of this drama. Together we can live it more fully than any one of us could alone. Instead of reaching immediately for the weapons of polemic, we might better listen for a voice which we could never have assumed ourselves, whose tone might have been forever unknown to us if we hadn't strained to understand it. We will find that we have to extend this courtesy even to people who wouldn't have extended it to us... Our faith is not the acme of Christianity, but nor is it a degenerate version; it should rather be open to a conversation that ranges over the whole of the last 20 centuries (and even in some ways before). (A Secular Age, p. 754)

Something about the nature of Christianity makes it possible to bridge this divide, to pick up the threads of history and make sense of them, in a way that transcends the particular, and may do so systematically, rather than in fits and starts. His position is broadly ecumenicist, and so is likely to be rejected by many within the Christian community of which he is claiming himself to be a part. But again: he sees the possibility of wholeness, and won't accept unnecessary division.

The problem of sphere sovereignty in Protestant thinking, of approaches that try to separate religion and politics altogether, and reject the latter, is that they are premised on the kind of mutilation Taylor talks about at the end of Sources of the Self. The individual is both believer and citizen. Each leaves a residuum in the other, whether that's desirable or not, and separation at this level is just not possible.

To set up the last related observation from Taylor, I'd like to take a detour by way of James Poulos:

But the George Wills of the world persist in coming along and reminding us, as did Jesus and Nietzsche, that there is no earthly elimination of suffering, there is no way even to come close; that the best of us, the highest, may indeed be the ones who suffer most of all -- God or no God. This is the repugnant paradox that so outrages enemies of suffering and enthusiasts of proactive, coercive change toward solidarity...

And on a final note, it is because of this mysterious profound tension that politics must not take its cues from faith. The power unleashed is destructive of politics because the first good of politics is order, and the pressure of the tension I have described upsets the delicate balance required to keep politics itself from being nothing but a cruel and crude game of power.

In addition to this, Poulos criticizes the tendency of conservatives to let "The principle of friendship with the world's enemies of 'political suffering' gave way to the principle of solidarity with the world's objects of social suffering."

If one thinks that the first good of politics is order, the line of thought follows; if Machiavelli and Hobbes are the starting points, the possibilities of political and social life are limited--and as someone who, insomuch as they affiliate with any liberal tradition at all, has a soft spot for a Judith Shklar-style minimalism, the appeal is clear. But a few points are in order: it's easy, much too easy, to be glib about the suffering of others. The world does not suffer, at the moment, from an overabundance of Christian engagement in troublesome parts, whatever one thinks of 'Gersonism' and whether that accurately describes our foreign policy right now. The overwhelming tendency is to want to wash one's hands of, say, Africa, as a lost cause. (I'm not accusing Poulos of holding this view, and he makes clear that he doesn't have a lot of sympathy with a paleo viewpoint that is perfectly uninterested in suffering.)

There is an alternative view of politics, most familiar from liberalism, but I think compatible with a religious conservatism, that says the first good of politics is justice. One can spin that out too far, and many have, but the core idea is that we shouldn't let the impossibility of a perfect state of things blind us to what we can do right now to make things better:

But it is still true that the civilization which grew out of western Europe in modern times... has given an exceptional value to equality, rights, freedom, and the relief of suffering. We have somehow saddled ourselves with very high demands of universal justice and benevolence. Public opinion, concentrating on some popular or fashionable 'causes' and neglecting other equally crying needs and injustices, may apply these standards very selectively. Those defending the unconscionable always try to point this out, as though the existence of other blackguards somehow excuses them. South African apologists sound the alarm over communism, and defenders of communist regimes ask their critics why they don't attack military dictatorships. The premiss of all this special pleading is that our commitment really is to universal justice and well-being. Hence the unsettling ploy of accusing us of unjust selection, even when we attack what is obviously a flagrant injustice.

The counter-story to politics-as-order is that the language of justice in which all politics happens now is an inheritance from Christianity. Like all languages, it is open to abuse. Like all political orientations, it may be applied well or badly. Humility is always in order. But the Christian can, and should, have the conviction that a well-applied, deliberate effort in the direction of justice can be successful, and constitutes an acceptable bleeding over between the identities of citizen and believer.

NEITHER BEASTS NOR GODS:

Rimwell, perhaps Patrokleia, was nice enough to leave a comment on my The Dark Knight/No Country for Old Men post, suggesting that I reconsider my view of the latter movie. You can follow his argument here and here.

The effort is a good one, and convincing in its way, but I remain unpersuaded. In part, this is because the text in question is so minimal:

Carla Jean Moss: You don't have to do this.
Anton Chigurh: [smiles] People always say the same thing.
Carla Jean Moss: What do they say?
Anton Chigurh: They say, "You don't have to do this."
Carla Jean Moss: You don't.
Anton Chigurh: Okay.
[Chigurh flips a coin and covers it with his hand]
Anton Chigurh: This is the best I can do. Call it.
Carla Jean Moss: I knowed you was crazy when I saw you sitting there. I knowed exactly what was in store for me.
Anton Chigurh: Call it.
Carla Jean Moss: No. I ain't gonna call it.
Anton Chigurh: Call it.
Carla Jean Moss: The coin don't have no say. It's just you.
Anton Chigurh: Well, I got here the same way the coin did.

Rimwell/Patrokleia points out the incongruity of the last line, and much of his(?) textual analysis is devoted to making it fit within the story. What one gets out of this exchange depends a lot on what one brings to it. There may be some Nietzsche in this exchange; I find the prospect of Heidegger a little harder to accept, though they may, even so, be valid for analysis.

However, I don't think the question even needs to raise to that level, because Carla Jean wins the argument. She doesn't let Anton or the coin decide what will happen to her--she decides, in her refusal to accept the explanation Anton wants to give. He will kill her, she knows he will kill her, and complicated explanations only mask, as it were, the brute facts of the case.

To return to the larger point, about the ways in which violence was used in No Country, and, by the best accounts I've read, in TDK, too (as a bit of sadism or an attempt to become morally serious), the contrast with the Whedonverse is instructive. To kill someone is to step outside of the moral community, a place no one can stay for very long. The obvious example is Faith, who kills someone, denying at first that it has any effect on her whatsoever, then celebrating the power that she's found, then finally collapsing in on herself. Assuming the time span between seasons three and seven is four years, it takes a long, long period (in TV terms) for her to reappear as a human who can be integrated into the community. And that was for an accident. One can think of other examples, though: "Ted," in season two, where Buffy works through the consequences of killing someone (she thinks), or the turn of Dr. Horrible (here I go on a limb), who is on the fence as a good guy/bad guy until Penny's accidental death at the end.

What makes these different? I think it's there in the term 'moral community.' Anton has no relationships with anyone, and so is less-than-human. I borrow here from Ted Boyton's Iron Man v. TDK review: "Where TDK is most critically lacking, however, is where Iron Man cranks pitch after pitch over the wall — the humanizing element of humor, the baseline acknowledgment that if there’s no laughter, then there’s nothing worth saving." Anton, again, is, or has become, something other than human; he's just an enigma to the viewer. He represents no real human possibility, and so is of limited interest to me (I remain with Irme Kertesz on this one). Faith, Buffy, and Dr. Horrible all receive something of their human dimension from their relationships; so long as others cling to them, they are good, or still have the potential to be good--Faith's rehabilitation, after all, is only possible because neither Buffy nor Angel will give up on her.

Now for a very odd contrast, my favorite movie from last year was Lars and the Real Girl. I knew the premise, and dismissed it initially as far too hokey to be any good. What's riveting about the movie is the way Lars keeps trying to drop out of society, and how the people around him go to extraordinary lengths to keep him included. The movie aims for something less--there's no grand philosophical point to be made, and none is attempted (so far as I can tell)--but succeeds because it is real in a way 'realistic' movies can never quite manage.