Art and the Artist

(In response to Phoebe specifically, but also in general)

I tweet the following semi-periodically, and it probably deserves a longer explanation:

"A periodic reminder of how much relevance an artist's personal life has to the aesthetic evaluation of their work: none."

There are two primary reasons behind this: it is difficult, if not impossible, to know enough about an artist's personal life to make a definitive moral judgment about who they are, and the decision to let ethical questions dictate aesthetic responses has a tendency to crowd out the time one might take to enjoy art.

In order to get this argument off the ground, I have to stipulate one--hopefully uncontroversial--element: all human beings engage in a mix of good and bad behavior, and almost everyone's bad end includes some actions, opinions, and mental states they would prefer not to be made public. Nick Hornby has a riff on this in High Fidelity, where the narrator, having just admitted to having done five terrible things to an ex, asks his readers to think of the five worst things they've done to someone they were dating, and then asks them how they feel about being judgmental. People tend to want to accentuate the good things they have done and ignore the bad, or simply questionable, things. Outside observers who are not neutral tend to focus on the good or the bad. Consequently, the information that's available to us about artists from secondhand sources tends to be either good or bad, depending on whether it's a friend or an enemy speaking. But the information these people have is limited, and only the artist will ever really know.

Which is, as it happens, how it works with most of the people we meet: we just accept as a fact that their personal mix of goodness or badness remains unknown, and so we judge on those elements of their personality that are visible to us.

For artists, whose personalities tend to be in larger view, intentionally or not, the judgments appear to be trickier. How do we feel about Roman Polanski, or, assuming the charges are true, Woody Allen? I liked Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay, and The Yiddish Policemen's Union, but I also read the book of essays where he gets very judgmental about his single mother's dating habits, and humblebrags that even though he wasn't cool, he definitely slept with at least one of her friends, and many other women he found desirable. What do I do with that? Jonathan Franzen appears to want to be the world's worst posthumous friend to David Foster Wallace, and seems to have some issues with anger and women. Dan Harmon appears to be obsessive and alienating to a number of people he works with, and the Hollywood grist mill provides more examples than I could even list here.

(I also note that the routine excess of popular musicians never generates the same ire, or certainly doesn't now. The last things I can think of are David Bowie's saying England was ready for a fascist leader, and Eric Clapton's effusive praise of Enoch Powell, both of which have obviously harmed their careers. (It's also, I believe, not entirely clear that Clapton does not still agree with Powell))

The issues multiply with past artists: what are we to do with Hitchcock's misogyny (especially as it is mostly absent from his earlier British films)? Should we lend credence to the rumors about Grace Kelly's active personal life? The grubby details of Barbara Stanwyck's rise to fame? Spencer Tracy's multi-decade affair combined with a refusal to divorce his wife? How should we react to the more sordid details of W.H. Auden's personal life, or T.S. Eliot's anti-Semitism and crypto-fascism? Ernest Hemingway leaving his wife and young child for his mistress? Scott Fitzgerald's drinking, and treatment of his wife? How about Jean-Jacques Rousseau sending his children to the orphanage? And what of the people whose morality we can discern nothing at all: Homer, for example?

At this point, there are two options: one is to define a standard of those shortcomings which are morally relevant to consider, both present-day standards and those which are appropriate for the time. Failure to do the latter would require excluding large swaths of culture for insupportable stereotyping by race and gender. The former is also revealing, in that there are a number of indiscretions which are not considered to be reasons to boycott an artist's work. Even so, one can define an acceptable standard, assess the information available, determine what in it is reliable and does not come from a source that might be compromised, and come to a conclusion about whether the artist's work can be supported. This is, not to put too fine a point on it, a lot of work, and fully engaging in this process would eat up more time than the average book or movie would be worth.

The other is to conclude, perhaps even reluctantly, that ethical questions are separate for aesthetic ones, and aesthetic reasons should guide our decisions about what to consume. Works of art can get away from their creators, after all: even the staunchest defender of the view that Mark Twain was a racist has to acknowledge that Jim is the human and moral core of Huckleberry Finn, and Woody Allen can say something important about the need for moral standards in Manhattan even if he's a lout. If Roman Polanski makes a good movie, it is good because it is in some important way human, or truthful, or beautiful, or excellent, even if its director is none of those things. The capacity to create something unexpectedly great is one of the formative reasons for reading and watching and listening. And, moreover, the capacity to recognize in the thing one has done wrong its meaning is the redemptive possibility of art, and not to be taken lightly; Fitzgerald's late-in-life stories are his failures realized, someone who understands the depths of what he has done wrong. The emotional core of Annie Hall is those final scenes in which the character understands exactly how and why he was wrong, and creates something to fix it, which leads him to fix himself.

All that being said, I am fine with moral reasons working on the margin of aesthetic choices: vita brevis, longa ars after all. I've seen a couple of the 'good' Polanski movies and did not much care for them, so my uninterest and the additional moral reasons provide an incentive not to attempt a new film that garners good reviews. This is not incidental, since I consider periodically revisiting things I have disliked in the past to be one of my responsibilities as a consumer of culture. The moral judgments themselves I am also comfortable with: if Woody Allen did what is alleged, he deserves a mark against him. 

(A theological aside: I am uncomfortable with this even as I acknowledge my attitude about it. I think I am bound to hope for his redemption and to believe in its possibility, so even while maintaining my moral judgment I think I must also accept that one day I might need to transcend it, and let it go. And accept the possibility that this might come about without my ever being aware of it.)

There are also relevant economic angles and authorship questions along the lines of "A Woody Allen film or one he co-wrote and directed and which a bunch of other people made critical aesthetic contributions to?" and "Scott Fitzgerald or Fitzgerald and Maxwell Perkins?", but this post is too long as it is. 

I would guess a large number of intellectual crushes on Wendell Berry just got significantly more complicated:

He does support Obama’s embrace of gay marriage. “I’m in favor of it, too,” he says. “It’s really only because they’re being denied the benefits of inheritance and so on — otherwise I don’t think it ought to be the government’s business.” He regards the entire debate as a distraction: “I really don’t understand how you can single out homosexuality for opprobrium and wink at fornication and adultery, which the Bible has a lot more to say about. The churches are not going to come out against fornication and adultery because there are too damn many fornicators and adulterers in their congregations.”

In other news, this might finally make him interesting enough to me to be worth reading.

I read The Closing of the American Mind for a graduate seminar, and recall being distinctly unimpressed. The famous complaints about music came off as so much "kids these days" rhetoric. And while conservatives want to conserve something, but that something is usually not Freud, Nietzsche, and 1930s politics (though this is no more arbitrary than wanting to preserve 1950s politics, which is more common). This article, however, has almost convinced me the book may be worth revisiting.

An interesting post on SSM, interesting mostly in that it made something clear to me which I had otherwise not noticed: the debate over same-sex marriage is framed here, and in many similar arguments, as a question of religion, nature, law, culture, or war. What it is not framed as is a question of politics.

The absence of politics is strange, as is the emphasis on principles which can never anywhere be violated. The post is admirable in its commitment to the idea that both sides of the SSM debate are standing on principle and unwilling to compromise. Where it goes off the rails is the suggestion that the unwillingness to compromise is necessary and fundamental:

"The truth about something as important as marriage cannot be the price we pay to live with each other."

The statement is unconvincing because it does not mean what it might obviously be taken to mean: if compromise on marriage is the price we'd pay to live together, and it's not worth paying that price, we should not live together. In addition to being unconvincing, it's opposed to all the basic understandings of how to live in a modern polity. Rawls argues, to my mind correctly, in the introduction to Political Liberalism that the modern political project is launched as a response to the problem of plurality: how do we get people who don't agree on many things to live together? We find deeper, more fundamental principles on which they can agree (these are usually procedural or regulative principles) and build a society that focuses on those. The view expressed in the post is claiming that even a modus vivendi is impossible.

Except, so far as I can tell, that's not the claim: the suggestion is not that the United States should be dissolved, and each side allowed to regroup and found whatever marriage laws it likes. The claim is that, because compromise is impossible, my side should win an absolute victory. It encourages a rhetoric of threatening to take one's ball home unless one gets the ruling one wants; and this seems to me to be antithetical to any vision of pluralist politics, much less liberal or democratic norms. Even the classic examples of people who 'refused to compromise' were flexible on a number of political and policy expressions of their inflexible beliefs: the legislative and institutional histories of abolitionism and the civil rights movement demonstrate this well enough. I myself incline to a Blankenhorn-ish view of the underlying policy questions, in part because I think he understands the politics involved quite well. And, to be clear: the willingness to engage in politics is not compromise, or surrender, or attempting to curry the favor of powerful people in DC or elsewhere: it's choosing to engage in the most basic of obligations of a citizen.



(One of the odd features of conservative commentary on SSM that has been pushing things away from politics is the rise of the 'religious liberty' argument. The right or liberty in question is usually taken to be absolute, to function as a trump, and so to make any attempt to arrange trade-offs involving that right to be impermissible. Except, in my experience of dealing with human rights, there are almost no rights that are conceived of as being immune to trade-offs in all circumstances. The fact that the liberty exists doesn't tell us anything about whether a trade-off is acceptable in a particular case.)

(Also, given how much paragraph 3 of Article 16 of the Universal Declaration: "The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State," is quoted these days, it might be worth looking over the original meaning and legislative intent of the framers, especially with reference to paragraph 1, "Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family. They are entitled to equal rights as to marriage, during marriage and at its dissolution," which was intended to extend marriage rights to the maximum set of people possible, and put as few conditions on marriage as possible. Obviously, no one particularly had SSM in mind, but as study will show, the clause was intended to have the broadest possible meaning, a fact not lost on Saudi Arabia, who abstained from the final vote on the UDHR specifically because they were aware of this intended broadness.)

A weak and statistically unconvincing case from Mark Regnerus on his same-sex families study ends with the following, which even the statistically disinclined should recognize the problem with:

If I could have, I would have compared stably-coupled LMs and GFs (gay fathers) with everyone else. As I noted earlier, the longer the household stay of the two-LMs, the better the kids’ outcomes appear at face value, but a meaningful statistical comparison of those few is just not possible. Some feel it was unethical to have moved forward once I realized this. That’s extreme, a standard to which research prior to this study has not been held. I thought the information we could learn deserved a hearing.

The problem appears to be that even out of a starting sample of 15,000 or so, he could only find 163 children who were aware of their mothers having any kind of lesbian relationship. All those people were included as LM (lesbian mother) data points, regardless of whether they met the conditions for any other classification. About which there are two things to say:

1. My training in statistics and research design, such as it was for a theorist who nevertheless took the empirical side of political science seriously, is that statistical comparisons are only valid when they compare likes that are as closely related as possible. But the category of LMs already has a great deal of internal variation.

2. If there's not enough data, there's not enough data. Regnerus points out, usefully, that breaking up the category of LMs any further would lead to sample sizes too small to draw any valid conclusions. The point is important, and features in the best criticism of the study: it has not been widely acceptable for two women to raise a child together for long enough for us to draw any conclusions at all about whether they are better or worse than other parenting combinations. The data isn't there, and attempting to draw conclusions from what little data we have is senseless at best, dangerous at worst, and not unlike determining one's favorite ballplayer is going to have an MVP year because he's hitting .400 through the first 20 games of the season.

Rarely do I have much to say about a post that I first saw linked on Postmodern Conservative, but this complain about the dating habits of twentysomething men demands a response:

It is sometimes, though not always, the case that amongst twentysomething women, the author of the post in question very much included, that the identity of the man they are to marry is the last, and least consequential, of the details that will determine their future happiness. They are, on their own account, smart, funny, gifted with appropriate social graces, professionally successful, but happy to give all that up to be someone's obedient wife and mother of their children. Because they are, in all these respects, complete and ready to be married, they fail to understand why it has not happened for them yet, why all the nice and supposedly serious men out there have failed to notice their many captivating qualities and just up and proposed. The worst are those men who will date them once, or twice, or for awhile, and never be prepared to commit. This failure can only be explained by some sort of generational malady, a problem with Men These Days.

Dear readers, it is a fine example of the Nice Girl trope, no less annoying that its companion Nice Guy trope: if I want to get married and there's nothing wrong with me, there must be something wrong with all the people of the other sex who fail to appreciate me. There are obvious and important differences between the situation for men and women, because the societal expectations of men and women are different, but the solution in each case appears to be more self-examination, rather than looking to the world to see what's wrong with it.

The difference between this and other equivalent instances is the role religion plays in justifying this whole system. Christianity has a difficult time dealing with single, post-college people. I have never been to a church that doesn't struggle with this problem. College-age kids can have a standard youth ministry: married people are functionally equivalent no matter what their age is. Single people are problematic because they don't like family-oriented activities and don't like to travel around in one big herd. They have busy professional lives and different social activities. They are not an easy group to deal with.

This is compounded by the tricky place of singles within Christian ethics. The New Testament conceives of people who are married, and importantly conceives of people who might be single intentionally and for their entire lives. There are no precedents for people who are single only for awhile. Ironically, the problem is worse for Catholics than Protestants because, as the post-writer points out, marriage being a sacrament designed to be complementary to taking on holy orders and the two intended to be universal and mutually exclusive, every obedient Catholic has to have one or the other. The men who are not marrying her are actively denying her a grace she might otherwise have. Ironically, the Protestant model, for all the trouble it has with the "intentionally single for life" category, is in a better position, because it can at least conceive a flexible roles and intermediate stages in the lives of non-marrieds.

There's one other difficulty that's worth mentioning here: the problem of viewing marriage as a set of roles that vary little from one marriage to the next. One of the problems with the Nice Girl view is that it begins from the assumption that the woman is basically set and won't need to change; the man can be any man who will fill the role appropriately. And the conservative Christian view of marriage, Catholic and Protestant, encourages women to think of it this way: once they are ready they meet a man who is ready and get married. The alternative is the view that relationships are between two people whose strengths and weaknesses imperfectly correspond to the roles they are 'supposed' to play. A woman doesn't earn or deserve a man because she is ready to be married, any more than a man deserves a woman because he wants to be in a relationship: at the very least, they neither have earned nor deserve the particular human being they are dating, or want to date. If desert enters into the situation at all, it can only be after a period of adjusting to the person they are with. But desert certainly doesn't enter into the situation: spouses are not a prize to be won, and merit doesn't matter.

A more in-depth critique of the same-sex marriage study.

I more or less agree with this on the same-sex parenting study. It's worth pointing out the asymmetry between critiques of the study and responses to those critiques. The critiques tend to focus on social-scientific issues of study construction: the study can't be a good one because it stacks the deck by a. including any reported level of known same-sex parental interaction as functionally equivalent to being raised for life by same-sex parents and therefore b. moves over into the category of 'same-sex parents' a number of dysfunctional heterosexual relationships, thereby biasing the results. The responses to the critiques tend to focus on the political and social agendas of the people who are critiquing, e.g.

This is one of those instances where the CCOA's skepticism about social science doesn't serve him well: time spent with statistics and giving some thought to how to construct studies will, I think, make it evident that the critiques identify problems with the study that would exist regardless of what conclusion it came to. It would be interesting, though, to get hands on the raw data and attempt to re-run the study with a more neutral classification scheme. My guess would be that the highest level of dysfunction would correspond with people in a middle group--raised by putatively heterosexual parents except that one (or both) had unexpressed same-sex attraction, which contributed to tension within the marriage, or the end of the marriage. But the social and political implications of that would be much more complicated for all sides.

A small, pedantic point about the nature of conservatism:

Rod Dreher makes himself too easy of a target (having a bit too much of the journalist in him--he's far too likely to take "I talked to someone who told me x" as dispositive), so usually I avoid him. But he has a fear-mongering streak which occasionally goes too far. Witness:

Ross Douthat says we are going into an unprecedented social experiment — “the final, formal severing of marriage from procreation” — in which, liberal optimism notwithstanding, nobody has any idea how it’s going to turn out.

Which brings to mind several responses, the first of which is: duh. One of the key facts about the future in general is that no one has any idea how it's going to turn out. All we can say is that it will probably be different somehow. It's this uncertainty about future states that is supposed to drive conservatism: not a doctrine of no change at all, but a doctrine of slow and measured change. Turning from our current social and cultural mix towards "traditional marriage" is also a change and, as a change, one that is like to bring about consequences not anticipated by its advocates. So to claim a lack of knowledge about the future as the downside for one position on where marriage should go, and not for the other, comes off as bad faith, especially when the engine driving uncertainty is not the substance of the change but the fact of change itself.

Quote of the Day, snark edition:

"All my adult life, I’ve been pretty sure I’m a sentient, even semi-competent human being. I have a job and an apartment; I know how to read and vote; I make regular, mostly autonomous decisions about what to eat for lunch and which cat videos I will watch whilst eating my lunch. But in the past couple of months, certain powerful figures in media and politics have cracked open that certitude.

You see, like most women, I was born with the chromosome abnormality known as “XX,” a deviation of the normative “XY” pattern. ..."

Let's engage in a little close reading, and ask "what's missing?"

Our text is from the estimable Ross Douthat:

More than at any point in our history, the smartest people generally go to high school and certainly to college with one another, move en masse to “creative cities” after college, marry their fellow high achievers and then raise their kids in the cocoons of what Murray calls the SuperZips. The problem with this system isn’t that the meritocrats look down on working-class culture (though “Coming Apart” does get in plenty of digs at elite snobbery). Rather, it’s that the meritocrats don’t participate in working class culture, and that “assortative mating” and geographic clustering have deprived lower-income communities of the social capital (and with it, strong civic institutions, political influence, and so on) that the smart and diligent possess. In this sense, Murray’s analysis follows the late, great Christopher Lasch in arguing that meritocracy works almost too well: Plucking the best and brightest from every walk of life and then encouraging them to live in community almost exclusively with one another means that the rest of the country is deprived of people who otherwise would have been local leaders, local entrepreneurs, the hubs of local social networks, etc.

Okay, so, what's missing? So it used to be the case that smart people did not necessarily go to college and therefore become part of the meritocratic elite, who want to separate themselves from everyone else. Who are these people who were smart but didn't go to college back in the good ol' days? I'll give us all a moment to speculate on possible answers.

Pretty much has to be women and minorities, right? Particularly women, one would think, who now insist on dating and marrying men who are at least as smart and academically accomplished as they are. And the argument pretty much has to be: the personal fulfillment or individual happiness of those intelligent people is positively selfish because it's not devoted to the good of people who those individuals do not want to be around anyway.

So, we can all agree this is bad, right?

It's also remarkable to me the extent to which culture war issues have been heating up lately, which is uncomfortable for me as someone who likes to avoid them whenever possible.* So can we just go back to arguing about the economy?


*Not, let's say, out of any particular squeamishness concerning my views (which have remained mostly constant even as my mix of 'liberal' and 'conservative' has shifted over time), but rather because it's just not something I find to be very interesting, or find conversation about to be very productive.

Though I'm sympathetic to the point raised here, it does seem to fly past the obvious counter-argument:

If I were able to actually have a conversation with Santorum in which the historical reality of sanctioned polygamy in most human societies was made impossible for him to ignore or soundbite into oblivion, I’m willing to bet that the likely way out of the trap would be to argue that contemporary life has overcome that old evil, that we’ve progressed. Santorum and other American Christian conservatives would likely put the origin of that progress somewhere other than secular liberals would. They’d probably ascribe it to the rise of Christianity, all the way back to the early Church, whereas a more secular (or at least not religiously conservative) view would probably be than contemporary companionate, monogamous marriage (or any companionate, monogamous relationship, really) is a direct consequence of the working out of liberal individualism and rights-based personhood after 1750.

But it really doesn’t matter which claim you turn to. If you think that the relative eclipse of polygamy (still practiced and legally as well as morally sanctioned in many parts of the world) is a good thing, as I presume Santorum does given his suggestion that legally sanctioning gay marriage would open the door to polygamy, you believe in progress, that some aspects of the human condition have improved over time through the deliberate efforts of human beings to reform or change their social structures. And the moment you believe in that, saying, “It’s natural for people to live a certain way, all societies have done it that way” is off the table as a justification of contemporary policy whether or not your claim about the naturalness of living that way is true or not.

Breaking out of this trap is no more complicated than acknowledging the reality of social construction and continuing to assert a nature that lies underneath this. Following on Aquinas and all those people, human beings have a nature which, but for sin and free will, would express itself in the manner prescribed in, e.g., those infallible truths about faith and morals as expressed in the teaching of the Magisterium, which is and only can be consistent throughout time. But we have both the reality of sin and also of free will, therefore we have the construction of behaviors contrary or orthogonal to human nature. These do not accrue or decay over time in any necessary pattern--they simply change. That progress may have been made is no guarantee that it will always do so, or even probably do so. That things may get worse is no guarantee they always will. The trap into which Burke wants Santorum to fall is an easy one to avoid for someone with Santorum's beliefs.

The actual problem for which there is no good response is similar to the point Burke raises: what changes over time is not socially-constructed human behavior, but the definition of what constitutes natural. My favored example of this comes from John Finnis' Natural Law and Natural Rights. In the original edition of the book, Finnis makes a great show of his list of 'basic goods.' Other lists of human goods, he says, are general, or specific but not exhaustive. He will differentiate himself by providing the full list--and so he does. However, in the 10-15 years after the book comes out, he finds himself beginning to get into arguments about gay marriage, and happens to discover that he has omitted a basic good from his list: marriage, defined as the union for procreation of one man and one woman. I know (and have great respect for) many adherents of Finnis' New Natural Law view, but I know of no one who will defend that particular move. (Some will argue it should have been on the list in the first place, but everyone recognizes it as a bad scholarly response to political pressure) If there's an argument to be had along the lines Burke wants, with the recognition of frission required for a certain kind of social conservative view, it will have to be of that form.

Long-time blog-friend Joe Carter has a truly excellent evisceration of the Front Porch Republic phenomenon. He does a good job of isolating the problems of localism as it pertains to food:

For example, one professor (they were almost all professors) presented his localist bona fides by explaining how he bought his vegetables from a local food co-op. He was very proud of the fact that he paid a higher price to support a local farmer—despite the fact that the same vegetables from the same local farmer could be bought at Whole Foods. For most agrarians throughout history, food was considered fuel for survival and cheap food has made it possible for populations to grow and thrive. For the tenured agrarians, though, food is a totem, a symbol of how they are not only making the “right” consumption choices but how they are supporting the environment and the community in the process (a debatable assumption). The professor’s underlying message—though admittedly presented rather winsomely—was that if you bought bananas at Wegmans rather than whatever was in season from your local farmer, you were part of the problem.

During the question and answer session that followed, an earnest student stood up and asked how people like him—poor kids on the college’s meal plan—were expected to partake in the “luxury of buying local.” The professor’s rather dismissive and surprisingly smug answer was that the student should buy what he could afford and make his meals in his dorm room. And if the student couldn’t afford the higher prices charged by local farmers, then the right thing to do, said the professor, was to eat less food. Hunger was the price one pays for philosophic consistency. Can’t afford organic arugula? Let them eat leeks.

Here's where I disagree: "They respect freedom—they just want you to use it to make the right choices." If this were the case, I'd have no real problem with the FPR argument. I think the actual argument is different--something like "freedom only obtains when the right choices are made." The person who buys their bananas at Wegmans is not free, or is laboring under a delusion about their freedom, or (most confusing of all) somehow wasting their freedom by making the wrong choice. If freedom is only making the right choices about how to live, and the program of how to live is intricate (to put it nicely), freedom begins to look like its opposite.

This is where the libertarians have a serious advantage--the willingness to admit plural conceptions of the good. Modern city life and "authentic" rural life are neither better nor worse than each other, they're just different. One can live with integrity in either environment; one can live without in both. The behaviors, beliefs, and dispositions that actually matter can be fostered or prevented in either: country folk turned bad are no more incredible a possibility than good city folk. Making the worth of one's moral character hang on where one's food is bought, or where one lives, is just madness.*

Also, unrelatedly, except it's in the post: monarchism is to real conservatism what defenses of the antebellum south are to libertarianism: immature, politically and historically naive, and the sort of thing that (rightly) keeps each to the margins of American political life.


* Not least because it automatically disqualifies some from virtue because they were born in the wrong place. Rod Dreher will always have the proper bona fides no matter how much of his adult life he lived in major U.S. cities; someone born in Manhattan can stay there, and be authentic but contrary to the full spirit of liberty, or can move out to someplace rural, and be an interloper who has forsaken their roots.

There's a phenomenon that I like to call "arguing through adjectives." It occurs when one is reading an essay that is a clear attempt to pit two views of the world against each other. Rather than argue out the comparative strengths and weaknesses of each, it gets creative in the way it denigrates the side it doesn't want you to believe. This is arguing through adjectives in spades:

To many people, Eliot’s theory of culture and tradition is too arduous, imposing an impossible duty upon the educated elite. To others, however, it has been a vital inspiration. For let us ask ourselves just what is required of "one who knows." Should he, in the modern world, devote himself like Sartre or Foucault to undermining the "structures" of bourgeois society, to scoffing at manners and morals, and ruining the institutions upon which he depends for his exalted status? Should he play the part of a modern Socrates, questioning everything and affirming nothing? Should he go along with the mindless culture of play, the post-modernist fantasy world in which all is permitted since neither permission nor interdiction have any sense?

To answer yes to any of those questions is in effect to live by negation, to grant nothing to human life beyond the mockery of it. It is to inaugurate and endorse the new world of "transgression," a world which will not reproduce itself, since it will undermine the very motive which causes a society to reproduce. The conservative response to modernity is to embrace it, but to embrace it critically, in full consciousness that human achievements are rare and precarious, that we have no God-given right to destroy our inheritance, but must always patiently submit to the voice of order and set an example of orderly living. The future of mankind, for the socialist, is simple: pull down the existing order, and allow the future to emerge. But it will not emerge, as we know. These philosophies of the "new world" are lies and delusions, products of a sentimentality which has veiled the facts of human nature.

Seductive flattering of his audience's own perception of itself? Check. Attempt to stack the deck against the opposition? Check. Egregious misreading of, at a minimum, Foucault and socialism (I suspect Scruton has never talked to an actual socialist, or at least not in the last 30 years)? Yes. Strength of the 'argument' once intensifying adjectives have been removed? Nonexistent. I mean, goodness, he can't even get Socrates* right: the same Socrates defends his unjust conviction by appeal to the power of the laws of Athens. But I suspect imagined interlocutors make for a better essay than the messy business of dealing with the arguments made by the proponents of alternative views.


*(I know of no reading of Plato in which the Crito represents Plato's view and not Socrates', except perhaps if you submit to a purely dramatic reading of Plato, which seems unlikely. Aristophanes thought Socrates too much a fool to take seriously. Perhaps this is from Xenophon?)

No justice, no peace

So Joe Posnanski, the well-known sportswriter, happens to be living in State College, PA this year, as part of a book he's writing about Joe Paterno. Good timing, I know. He's of the opinion that JoePa is being treated unfairly on some level: at the very least, that he's serving as a sacrificial lamb (Posnanski says scapegoat, but I don't think that's quite what he means) for the collective public outrage. I think that's incorrect, and incorrect in a way that's of greater moral import, so I will break my promise not to talk about the situation anymore for at least this one extra post.

The problem with Posnanski's argument is that he's confusing judgments in the moment with considered judgments. Nobody's position on these will be the same: given enough time, people will come to think about Joe Paterno, and this whole situation, in a more rational and reflective manner. I suspect that it will end up having the same effect on Paterno's legacy that Woody Hayes punching Charlie Bauman has on Hayes': it magnifies or qualifies your judgment of him, but it doesn't change it. People who think Hayes was a jerk have their confirmation in this; people who like him will not exactly defend it, but note that it's one dumb and ill-considered action at the end of a long career of doing good.

Now, the Paterno case is different because what he did was worse, and it lasted for a longer period of time, and I think people will factor that in. It's also certainly the case that he did a lot of good for Penn State, and in the nature of the things he did, those goods will last (that library's not going anywhere). And now is certainly the beginning of time to reflect on the proper balance.

But, as Posnanski himself will admit, what Paterno did was wrong, and wrong enough that he had to be fired for it. So when Posnanski cautions us to wait, I have to wonder--wait for what? If what Paterno did is worthy of being fired, then he needed to be fired. No extra information is going to mitigate that. Is it true that some people were overdoing their level of moral outrage? Certainly. But Paterno needed to be fired for what he did. Was firing him before the end of the season necessary? Almost certainly--given what did happen after he was fired, having the same thing happen at a game would've embarrassed the university in a significantly worse way. Should it have been done by phone? Maybe not, but he had to be fired. The vengeance needs to stop now, but it was fair and reasonable up until what needed to happen happened.

This puts me in mind of one of those Margaret Thatcher quotes I picked up in college, either from the paper I wrote on the downfall of her government or else from reading her admirers at National Review. Either way, the quote is: "In war there is much to be said for magnanimity in victory. But not before victory." In this case, there is much to be said for a calm, reasoned approach to what happened that apportions moral responsibility where it deserves to go, including accepting the possibility that our snap judgments might be wrong. But the time for that approach is after the relevant parties have been dismissed. Not before.

It's useful to point out, I think, the perpetual tension between the pragmatism of the average CCOA and his idealism towards the Great Books, in much the same way that I pointed out that CCOAs tend to want greater authority in the educational system but deny that the sciences provide any useful model of what that might be like. But I do often wonder what role it is the Great Books are supposed to play: names are often dropped, but useful examples never given. I worry that all too often, great figures are pulled in to basically endorse the conventional values of American conservatism, with too little attention given to whether the fit is any good:

Johnson’s book is dogged in its efforts to turn Socrates into a twenty-first-century compassionate conservative, and to this end it frequently courts breezy anachronism. On women, we are told that Socrates “liked to think of them leading responsible and fulfilled lives, but he had no objection to their confining themselves to looking after their husbands and children, if that is what they wished.” On slavery, Johnson speculates that “perhaps there is a missing dialogue” in which Socrates condemns it. And on war? Socrates “fought heroically for Athens in his day, but he thought war was usually unwise and the struggle to the death with Sparta suicidal for Greece… ” Johnson then contradicts himself, claiming that Socrates “neither supported nor condemned the Peloponnesian war.” Johnson’s knowledge of his subject wobbles here. (Socrates is light on scholarship: Johnson cites only Gregory Vlastos and Karl Popper, though he recommends a few other books, such as Nickolas Pappas’s excellent introduction to the Republic.) In the Menexenus, Socrates blames Athens’s struggle with Sparta for the decline of Greece, but he never criticizes wars against barbarians. His feelings are probably due to his pro-Sparta sympathies, rather than a sense that war as such is a bad idea. (Socrates’s habit of going barefoot and lightly clad even in winter was an emulation of Spartan custom.)

If you're reading Plato and not, on some level, unsettled, then something has gone wrong.

Reading Pascal Probably Isn't Going to Teach You These Things, Either

Even when it comes to conservative critiques of academia, this is a strange opening paragraph, to say the least:

The egalitarian ideology of our time, writes the philosopher Philippe Beneton, in Equality by Default, cuts the human heart and soul out of the profession of the teacher. “Why give priority to classic literature,” he asks, “when Pascal is no better or no worse than any other author, when his style of writing is just one technique among others?” The teacher becomes a technician—and often a not highly skilled technician at that, as witness our millions of young people who cannot calculate a 15 percent gratuity for a restaurant bill, or who cannot name the nation south of the Rio Grande.

The snark in the title: I'm not sure how well Pascal would do at naming the nation south of the Rio Grande.

The great mission of education as “the formation of taste, of character, of will, of civic spirit” is set aside. “How can a school educate,” he concludes, “when it refuses to distinguish between an educated person and an uneducated person? How can it shape a human being when it no longer knows what a human being is?” (emphasis mine).

I don't think there's any great dispute about whether someone who can't calculate a 15% tip is well-educated (leaving aside the possibility that one might be educated in many other areas but not math; absent-minded professors presumably qualify as educated). The rest of the article seems to rest of the--prettily presented--contention that the Classics are More Valuable than Whatever It Is Kids Spend Their Time On Now (content left unspecified). Per the examples given, one is also not going to learn math or geography from Dante or Plato, and heaven help those who try to learn science from Aristotle.

Esolen focuses his essay on what might be broadly considered humanities education. At the very least the words "science" and "math" never appear. This is the problem: even accepting the contention that the humanities have sunk into a morass of relativistic judgments that fundamentally betray our youth, science and math have not. They are good, old-fashioned subjects where the teacher is presumed (usually correctly) to know more than the students, subjects in which there are tightly-defined correct and incorrect answers, subjects in which failure is possible and success, if it is to be had at all, must be earned through years of patient labor. (I have a friend in engineering who graduates when he gets his machine/experiment to work. Singular: it's just one experiment. He's in year eight at the moment. And if you've ever watched someone pipette or run samples for hours, it becomes obvious how intrinsically more interesting the humanities are.)

Instead of pointing to this as a continually successful model of good education, it comes in for criticism because science doesn't 'get it':

Where is that vision of homogeneity to be found? Wherever, Beneton suggests, we find the reduction of man to his constituent parts, or to his environment, or to whatever else will replace the mystery of the human person with a general and scientistic “law.” We would then be equal—in our unmeaning. The carbon that makes up my flesh, the calcium that makes up my bones, the iron that gives my blood its energy-delivering properties, are no different from those in anyone else’s body. The encounter with a particular being, the irreplaceable person, yields to indifference, as one lump of flesh is much like another. One family, like a molecule in the economic crystal that surrounds it, is no “better” than another such molecule. What has happened is that, instead of the object of knowledge determining the method of study, the method of study has determined and reduced the object of knowledge. “The great works thus lose their status of great works,” says Beneton, and are reduced to cultural artifacts, to be explained by the technician, the neutral archaeologist, and not honored for their beauty or wisdom.

So let's all appreciate the irony of someone beginning an essay complaining about the lack of objective standards to mark knowledge, and to separate the learned from the unlearned, eventually complaining about a surfeit of objective standards to mark knowledge, which somehow manage to reduce the overall body of that knowledge. Whatever learning science and math seem to represent, it doesn't count.

I am both a Great Books person and an avid reader. I don't disagree with the contention that most people would be better rounded as human beings if they read more, and read more of what's good. But this is not the argument for that position.

This week in incredibly obvious cultural commentary: rappers kind of have a problem with misogyny and homophobia. Film at 11:00.

Gil Scott-Heron in 1993:

But I think the young folks need to know, that things don't go both ways
You can't talk respect on every other song or just every other day
What I'm speakin' on now is the raps about the women folks
On one song she's your African Queen on the next one she's a joke
And you ain't said no words that I haven't heard, but that ain't no compliment
It only insults eight people out of ten and questions your intelligence
Four letter words or four syllable words won't make you important
It'll only magnify how shallow you are and let everybody know it

To be clear, I think it's a valid critique of a lot of rap music and hip-hop: even the nice-guy D.A.I.S.Y.-age stuff primarily considers women's value to be as something to have sex with. But I'm also not entirely certain that it has any bearing on the quality of the work being produced. It's that perennial tension that I have been trying to isolate my particular view on: I'm not sure someone's politics, sexual or otherwise, are sufficient to wipe out an impartial consideration of the quality of their work, but I'm also confident that it has to have some bearing on our judgment. If Childish Gambino really is no good, then it seems like the easiest thing to do is just ignore him, rather than providing the additional attention of another blog post.

Play 'em out, Gil:

Evergreen, even if I somehow hadn't seen it until today: How to Write a Conservative Article About Education.