Crossing Cultures and Making Connections in Singapore (and Elsewhere)

A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to travel to Singapore to participate in conference dedicated to a topic I can't claim to be anything like fully informed about, much less an expert in: "Chinese Philosophy in a Multicultural World." Why was I there, then? Because of a marvelous and challenging book published by a scholar and friend, Leigh Jenco, Changing Referents: Learning Across Space and Time in China and the West. I and a couple of other folks interested in the question of how one actually does comparative or cross-cultural philosophy or political thought have been trying to put together a panel discussion on her book for more than a year; after many ups and downs, a panel finally came together the morning of July 7, with: (from left to right) Ranjoo Herr, a Korean feminist scholar who teaches in the U.S., me, the guy from Kansas, Goh Beng Lan, a Malaysian anthropologist who teaches there in Singapore, and Carl K.Y. Shaw, a Taiwanese political scientist, all providing comments on the book. Leigh herself, who is currently at the London School of Economics, had to Skype in at 2am, her time, to give her responses. Our many different disciplinary takes on Leigh's books turned out to be extremely fruitful, to say nothing of the fact that it was, bar none, the single most multicultural academic forum I'd ever been a part of, and a bit of a small miracle it came together as well as it did.

A few people have since asked me what was worth flying halfway around the globe to talk about, and it's a little hard to explain. Leigh's book, besides being (for me, anyway) a wonderful, eye-opening introduction to and theoretical argument built upon a too-little studied period of Chinese intellectual history--specifically, the revolutionary late Qing and early Republic era of the 1860s through the 1920s--is also a methodological broadside, taking a strong stand against the dominant hermeneutic and dialogic approaches to thinking through encounters between distinct cultures in the English-speaking Western academy, and insisting that a distinct philosophical alternative is available--all of which requires an understanding of debates within the sub-discipline of comparative political theory to fully follow. Speaking as one who has kept up with those debates, I have to say that whether Leigh really does outline such an alternative is an open question; at least three of the four commenters (myself, Ranjoo, and Carl) thought her understanding of what does--and doesn't--happen in a hermeneutical encounter is flawed. But my assessment doesn't mean that there weren't many ways her book called me up short, and made me re-think. So, for whomever is interested, here is a slightly modified version of the comments I prepared for the panel in Singapore. Enjoy!




Leigh Jenco is a brilliant and, sometimes, infuriating scholar. For over ten years, her work--including her first book, Making the Political, and numerous academic articles and reviews along the way--has challenged the still-young subfield of comparative political theory, particularly that variant which looks to Chinese and Confucian philosophical traditions, with a single question, articulated in multiple ways but always making the same point: why do the comparisons which cross-cultural studies make always seem to result in theoretical conclusions that may be (to quote from a 2007 review essay of hers) “usefully employed not by ‘us,’ but only by ‘them’”? In other words, aren’t Western students of East Asian philosophy and comparative political thought implicitly setting the terms of debate, introducing questions and categories which Chinese thinkers complement, but never supplant, implicitly reducing the thinking of hundreds of people over thousands of years to a secondary role, one that allows Westerners to bring themselves into Chinese struggles over various philosophical quandaries, but never actually be confronted by what was learned from those struggles themselves? Elaborating upon this charge has led Leigh to write a great deal about, and sometimes dispute a great deal about, the methodological and analytical norms that have emerged over the past 20 years in comparative political theory. In my view, Changing Referents is Jenco’s strongest and fullest elaboration of her challenge yet, and as such is a kind of culmination of more than a decade’s worth of argument.

It has been sometimes a contentious argument, because it is certainly not the case that the early advocates of comparative philosophy and the incorporation of non-Western thinkers into debates about political theory (and here I am thinking of individuals like Raimon Pannikar, Roxanne Euben, Hwa Yol Jung, Fred Dallmayr, Anthony Parel, and many others) were unaware of the exclusionary possibilities of their undertaking. On the contrary, the impetus behind comparative political theory has been, from its formal beginnings in the early 1990s until today, to challenge the implicit (and sometimes explicit!) colonialism, the condescending exclusion, which characterized so much of the Western academy throughout the majority of its existence. Comparative political thought, when done well, has always carried with it a deep awareness of the basic philosophical and ethical problems which a too easy universalism invites. Thus has it become normative for Western students of non-Western bodies of thought to incorporate into their approach a self-reflexive, dialogic, interrogative humility. As a result, as Jenco nicely puts it on the first page of Changing Referents, “our existing forms of knowledge are not transformed by this encounter with otherness so much as their limitations and possibilities are considered in a more self-reflexive light” (1). While not attacking humility, Leigh wants something more: she wants, I believe, to insist upon the possibility of the kind of direct encounters with a distinct philosophical perspective and a distinct linguistic world which alone would make, in her view, real transformative learning possible.

Jenco uses the term “culturalist” to describe her position, contrasting it to both the ethnocentric universalism of the bad old days, and what she calls the “particularist” account of various thinkers, all of whom, in her view, “affirm the inevitable embeddedness of our knowledge in cultural or historical background conditions over which we have little immediate control” (8). This is an interesting usage on her part, and one that points directly towards what I believe to be an important way of assessing Leigh’s methodological challenge. “Culturalism” was the term that Canadian theorist Will Kymlicka used--during an early iteration of the endless theoretical debate over community, identity, culture, and authenticity–-to distinguish his position from that of nationalists and, implicitly, what he saw as the assumptions of communitarian thinkers in general. For the culturalist, as Kymlicka presented it, “membership [in distinct historical, religious, ethnic, linguistic, or culture groups]...must not be imposed by the state, but rather be [must be recognized as] a matter of self-identity....[C]ulturalists support politics which make it possible for members of ethnic and national groups to express and promote their culture and identity, but reject any policies which impose a duty on people to do so.” (See Kymlicka, Politics in the Vernacular: Nationalism, Multiculturalism, and Citizenship [OUP, 2001], 42.) He believed that in making this argument he was distinguishing himself from thinkers like Charles Taylor and others who, in his view, treated linguistic and cultural communities as having their own non-subjective (or at least not entirely subjective) continuity, and thus were conceived as something insufficiently subject to individual choice.

This point is worth dwelling upon, because it is one Leigh is fully aware of. In her view, though, “the differences between Kymlicka and the communitarians...are not as consequential as they appear.” In her reading, they are all one or another variety of “particularist,” in that they accept that there are particular “‘societal cultures’...determined by claims about history: presumably self-evident past sociological associations among groups of people are treated not only as constitutive of their given self-identity but as so important and (in the short term) inescapable that they define boundaries between their way of life and that of others” (41-42). The kind of comparative theorizing which cross-cultural encounters allow under this framework, then, whether nominally liberal or otherwise, can only be Gadamerian in character, referring here to the writings of Hans-Georg Gadamer on the constitutive functions of language and culture. The upshot for Leigh is that particularists presumably accept that the problem of cultural incommensurability can only be elided through a dialogic evolution, through the emergence of a "third space" wherein, via long and evolutionary and often quotidian encounters with the cultural and linguistic other, a fusion of horizons becomes possible, the context of which allows for a reflexive, collective rethinking on the part of all involved.

Leigh is critical of the limitations which she sees baked into the presumptions of this hermeneutic negotiation of differences--and the way in which she presents her criticism gets at, as I alluded to above, something potentially rather important. Let me quote two (I think revealing) passages from her book. First:

Although intended to do justice to the particularity of diverse cultures, this (what I call) “particularist” account elides the extent to which many cultural practices, particularly those associated with knowledge-production, are not automatically historically and sociologically imparted, but rather are deliberately acquired by individuals and groups over time. As such this account provides no method by which other ways of thinking or organizing knowledge might become ours, in the sense of not simply enhancing our self-reflexivity but also of displacing existing modes of inquiry across communities and over generations (9, emphasis added).

And second:

Particularist arguments...are often advanced out of humility and respect for the unfamiliar. But they also entail ironically constrictive and underwhelming consequences for engagement with knowledge outside of the contexts in which one finds oneself. In drawing attention to the varied ways in which cultural and historical contexts influence what we take to be knowledge and how we produce it, cross-cultural engagement becomes constructed not in terms of political or social, but epistemological strategies....This emphasis is often applied self-reflexively, to draw attention to the variegation and partiality even of knowledge taken to be “our own” as well as to query the assumption of radical epistemological distance between “them” and “us.” Despite such affirmations, however, particularists inadvertently...draw a line between knowledge that “we” produce as theorists, and knowledge “they” furnish as objects of inquiry....This self-positioning effectively (if not intentionally) rigidifies the relationship of individuals to the particular contexts believed to structure their pursuit of knowledge (44-45, emphasis added).

There are, I think, multiple ways to engage with, and criticize, Leigh’s description of the hermeneutic approach here. Her notion that the interpretation of texts or ideas or practices which is the fruit of a dialogic fusion of conceptual horizons must involve no alteration or personalization of the concepts in question, but rather assumes such concepts to be historically or sociologically “intractable” (31), is, I think, one that seriously misunderstands what people working in philosophical hermeneutics assume dialogue actually consists of. One can accept the existence of limitations in one’s received horizons of understanding without thinking that, therefore, all received horizons are equally and in every way static and unshakable. They are, after all, constructed over time through the same participatory linguistic and mutually reflexive processes which dialogic encounters themselves always involve. And the movement inherent to such processes, I think, necessarily means for a change of position: a seeing of the other from a different perspective or point of view, which often includes seeing the other in oneself. (Gadamer himself described the “highest and most elevated aim” of working through the hermeneutic circle as that of “shar[ing] the other’s alterity,” and being changed thereby. See Fred Dallmayr, “Hermeneutics and Cross-Cultural Encounters: Integral Pluralism in Action,” in Integral Pluralism: Beyond Culture Wars [The University Press of Kentucky, 2010], 115.) Hence, Jenco’s insistence, when drawing upon the example of May Fourth leaders and intellectuals who truly did find their horizons of understanding shaken to the core by various events, that “incommensurability may not necessarily be....paradigmatic for all instances of cross-cultural engagement,” and that it is in fact “a synchronic rather than a diachronic phenomenon,” proves, I believe, much less than she may think it does (17). New communities do form, and old communities do change, even as the pre-understandings which constitute their conceptual horizons differently endure and find themselves reworked in multiple ways. The hermeneutic circle may not be a self-constituted one, but that does not mean the selves who encounter one another through it are not capable of experiencing through it their own disparate constitutions.

That being said, what stands out, on my reading at least, in Leigh’s discontent with both universalism and (her version of) particularism is the lurking sense that both fail to give full credit to the determined, self-motivated, intentional, border-crossing individual. And that is certainly true. There is an abiding communitarian sensibility behind any discussion of cultural authenticity and the need to recognize, in a sense, one's unavoidable submission to the historical and linguistic pre-understandings by which one approaches cultural discussions in the first place. You didn’t decide what you believe, this sensibility points out, and you didn’t determine the perspective by which you interrogate your own beliefs. The humble self-reflexivity which all this presumes connects very well, I think, with the tradition-, culture-, and community-sensitive side of phenomenological thinking. But it also probably does fail, at least a little bit, as an explanatory framework when one encounters the heroic individual thinkers that Leigh’s analysis depends upon. I choose that word purposefully: reading her wonderful book, and being introduced to the intellectual arguments of late 19th-century and early 20th-century reformers and radicals like Yan Fu, Liang Qichou, or Tan Sitong, provides strong evidence that conservative readings of the possibilities of knowledge within a framework of received constitutive understandings are arguably limited in their applicability when one looks at the actual record of this transformative, revolutionary historical moment, and the adventuresome individuals it includes. Leigh is respectful of Gadamer’s insights into “the prejudicial process of all knowledge-formation,” but it is very likely that China’s past simply didn't universally play a prejudicial role in the thinking of many Chinese activists and thinkers during the decades between the 1860s and the 1920s. As she observes, speaking specifically of the conversations in 19th and early 20th-century China over “Western Learning” (bianfa or xixue): “At no point did the ‘past,’ or even some self-conscious Chinese Confucian ‘tradition’ in [Alsadair] MacIntyre’s sense of the term, present itself as an obvious and clearly demarcated context for action or understanding” (134, 63). Leigh is, I think, obviously fascinated by the specifics of these debates, but also wants to strike a blow for the free individual against the tyranny of culture, language, and time.

This is why–again, on my reading–Jenco’s criticisms of the oppressive essentialism and the exclusion of subaltern voices which cultural particularity and the presumption of a received tradition has unfortunately sometimes involves (99-110), while strong, are not nearly as strong as her insistence upon culturalism as a specific, narrow, keyed-to-the-individual kind of universalism: “it assumes the general applicability of...cultural norms; this lies behind the claim that ‘anyone’ can become Chinese” (47). I did a double-take at that claim, as I’m sure others would as well (though, apparently, not Daniel Bell!), but again, she makes her case. Consider:

[C]ultural otherness may be better understood as one of the many kinds of otherness (such as the historical or idiosyncratic) that make learning of any type possible. It therefore may not require special techniques of assuagement, such as self-reflexive dialogue between presumably embedded interlocutors, but it may demand more of us in the way of self-transformative, disciplinary commitment to the standards and languages of a particular knowledge community--even as our own participation in that community shapes, in an ongoing and dialectical way, its distinctive features (23, emphasis added).

And:

Recognition of oneself as “Chinese” by others is authorized by one’s felicitous connection to particular pasts texts, practices, or events, even as those connections are necessarily reproduced and transformed as each new individual acquires them. New individuals join these communities of knowledge not automatically through birth but through gaining familiarity with their standards of intelligibility. Chinese culturalism can therefore be distinguished from universalist ideologies such as liberalism, in that the success of culturalism turns on acquired practices whose transmission and mobility are contingent and fragile--not secured in perpetuity through a priori assumptions about essential human attributes that are putatively universal (61, emphasis added).

As one who has always been interested in and has occasionally published on topics relevant to the Confucian philosophical tradition, and yet cannot read or speak Chinese, and thus is entirely dependent upon translators, this is a discomfortingly powerful argument. Might it be that I, and multiple other students of cross-cultural scholarship, are accepting of the conceptual limitations presumed by the dialogic model simply because we have not been successful, or simply haven’t been willing, to buckle down and do the damn work of learning the language in question? Quite possibly! (This is essentially Bell's argument which I linked to above: "Chinese-ness" is most fundamentally, in his view, a linguistically communicated cultural sensibility--defined, one might say, to borrow from Leigh's own argument, by its own particular "standards of intelligibility"--so given that he is fluent in Mandarin Chinese and has lived in China and built a family in China over the past 20 years, why shouldn't he be considered Chinese?) Leigh herself points to claims made by Chen Yuan, a historian from the 1930s, who advanced the claim that “literary production by non-Han peoples under the Yuan dynasty...expanded and enriched [the cultural property of the Han] in ways irreducible to, but still recognizable within, [the] past forms that others affirmed as part of a literary tradition they shared with them.” The argument, in short, was that these “‘sinified’ Yuan poets of Mongol ethnicity advanced Chinese literature” in as direct a manner as could anyone who received that cultural property as a part of their linguistic and cultural patrimony (59-60). If the perspective of these thinkers is such that becoming “sinified” really can make one Chinese, perhaps it is arguable that the sense of collective humility and the dialogic respect for difference which characterizes much comparative political theory may be taking things unnecessarily far in the direction of incommunsurability.

I am not wholly opposed to this idea, as much as it may indict my own failure in cross-cultural knowledge production; while I have written occasionally in ways which insist upon recognizing the anti-individualistic character of Confucian thought, I'm not unaware of the ways in which it also allows that the localization of meaning in particular places doesn't prevent such produced knowledge from serving broad, even cosmopolitan, civic purposes. And from that perspective, I can see the point of Leigh's argument. It's not, after all, that she insists everyone "will" be able to make themselves Chinese; only that they "could." Leigh turns to the writings of Qing-era reformer Tan Sitong to elaborate upon the dividing line here. Tan employed the ideas of the late-Ming philosopher Wang Fuzhi, whose interpretation of the Book of Changes emphasized the interdependence of the dao, or “the way,” and qi, or “vessel.” Quoting Tan’s observations, Leigh writes: “There is no dao without qi. Without a bow and arrow there is no dao of archery; without horses and vehicles there is no dao of driving....If we believe these words, the dao must rely on qi before you can have practical use; it is not the case that dao exists in some empty objectless space” (129). And remember, the qi are portable, not sociologically, historically, or even linguistically grounded in particular cultural communities--they are things, subject to individual intentionality, assuming they show sufficient discipline to master them:

Tan insists that culture--constituted by complex and dynamic daos whose true scope is essentially unknowable to any one human--necessarily is grasped and embodied only in qi (material objects, institutions, texts, and so on). But [it does not follow]...to conclude that at best a “fusion of horizons” will be forged to create a kind of third cultural space or understanding....Rather, the very replicability of qi enables the portability of culture....The portability of meaning here wrestles directly with the difficulties of social and not just individual self-transformation....Although these transformation will likely be beset by issues of translation and commensurability best handled in a “conversational” or dialogic way, to leave the issue of borrowing there would be to ignore the very real need to frame (and borrow) cultural forms in a set of institutions that can support a broad range of personal interests, needs, talents, and certainly interpretations (137-138, emphasis added).

Ultimately, then, Jenco is not wholly opposed to the humbling, collective character of the dialogic assessment of the cross-cultural project; she simply, on my reading, wants to insist that the writings of multiple scholars from these crucial decades in China’s history demonstrate that it is possible for understanding across otherness to be sometimes directly achievable in contexts where both personal engagement and an individual's disciplined mastery of the vessels of communication are present. Incommsurability, for Jenco, is therefore not an inevitable and necessarily negotiated consequence of cultural difference; while it sometimes may be, certain variables can make a major difference. And for Jenco, the key variable, I think, is often going to be the willingness and ability of the person encountering the other--whether Daniel Bell or Leigh herself--to make the vessel of understanding their own.

All well and good, yes? Probably. And yet...there is still something which sits badly with me, with all Leigh's (usually implied, but nonetheless, on my reading, constantly present) talk of individuals taking ownership of knowledge, of making it their own. Once again, the communitarian arguments which haunt any close consideration of the cultural work accomplished by language--the primary vessel that Leigh's examination of these thinkers who achieved so much in terms of bianfa focuses upon--comes into play. Here, the names which most readily come to mind are the philosopher Charles Taylor and the early Romantic translator and critic whose ideas about the constitutive role a spoken language plays in community-formation which he relied heavily upon, Johann Gottfried Herder. Herder's insights here are crucial, in that he developed a philosophical anthropology which allowed numerous counter-Enlightenment thinkers who came after him--Humboldt, Hegel, Merleau-Ponty, Polanyi, Heidegger, and many others, whether they acknowledged or even recognized the influence of Herder or not--to talk normatively about the interdependence of our identity and the received cultural structures and traditions which surround us, and how the realization of meaning depends upon that interdependence. Taylor's elaboration upon these Herderian themes has been hugely influential in arguments over philosophical hermeneutics...but of course, to start talking about how our knowledge of the meaningfulness of one thing as opposed to some other "depends" upon something "received" takes us right back to the kind of anti-individual conservatism or hesitancy which I think Leigh's sees as a problem in the dialogic approach to comparative political theory and cross-cultural thinking in the first place...and thus it's not surprising that, while she never mentions Herder, Taylor makes frequent appearances in Changing Referents--nearly always negatively.

Of particular concern to Leigh is an early essay of Taylor's, "Interpretation and the Sciences of Man," which argues, on Leigh's reading that knowledge has a "diffuse...social character," demanding a recognition of the particularity of each utterance, which in turn strengthens the assumption that, as Leigh puts it, "actos/interpreters in the present [necessarily produce knowledge in terms of] a certain degree of continuity with the past precedent of community of interpreters to which....they belong" (see 42-43, 122, 207). The idea that there are historical contexts which serve as "boundaries to the present scope and future malleability of culture" is one which Leigh, as should be clear by this point, strongly dissents from, insisting instead that, given that one can--assuming sufficient time and training and education--linguistically penetrate other culture contexts, why must there be any obviously boundary upon the audience most authentically served by the understandings which follow?

Taylor's response--and Herder's, and Gadamer's, and that of many other hermeneutic thinkers as well--might involve looking at Leigh's thoughtful claim (or at Bell's much more simplistic one), and observing that a language is more than words. It is a way of living a life, and of constituting a perspective on that life. In a response Taylor wrote to Kymlicka more than 25 years ago, he laid out this idea--in the context of the then-furious liberal-communitarian debates--quite succinctly:

The liberal accords a culture value as the only common resource of its kind available for the group in question. It is the only available medium for its members to become aware of their options. If these same individuals could dispose of another such medium, then the case for defending the culture would evaporate. For the people concerned, their way of life is a good worth preserving; indeed, it is something invaluable and irreplaceable, not just in the absence of an alternative, but even if alternatives are available....People who have lived in or near French Canada know the resonance of this goal of survivance. For the neutral liberal, the reasoning starts from the fact that certain already-existing people lack a crucial resource. For the community, the goal extend beyond serving the existing members to the continuance of the community through future generations. The goal that unborn people, say, my great-grandchildren, should speak Cree or French or Athbaskan, is not one that Kymlicka's liberalism can endorse...(Taylor, "Can Liberalism Be Communitarian?," Critical Review, Spring 1994, 259-260).

So the boundaries in question, and hence the need to prioritize the humility of the self-reflexive, dialogic approach to making connections across diverse cultures, has a deeply ethical component: it is about respecting the integrity of the culture one is trying to learn from.

I would never want to suggest that Leigh has anything but tremendous respect and ethical concern for the language and history and culture she has developed such a great mastery of. I can only say this: I see in Changing Referents a determination to show, through historical example as well as philosophical argument, that self-reflexivity and humility can be overdone in our thinking about comparative political theory; that there have been, and always will be, individuals who are not intellectually defined by their cultural inheritance and linguistic framework; and that as such the conservatism of dominant, dialogically-constructed comparative philosophical enterprise should be rethought. This is, I think, not wholly wrong...but it does fail to recognize the real, ethically and conceptually complicated target of the hermeneutic approach to cross cultural and linguistic boundaries. And it also fails to appreciate that Romantic and hermeneutic thinkers over the centuries have never fully sublimated the idea of individuality to one's received tradition. Consider the words Goethe put into the mouth of Dr. Faustus: “What from your fathers you received as heir, / Acquire [anew] if you would possess it. / What is not used is but a load to bear; / But if today creates it, we can use and bless it.” There always is, and always will be I think, a space for individual action and interpretation in any cross-cultural encounter, there is no need to insist that language really is "merely" a vessel capable of being mastered, and there is no need to dialogic approaches to knowledge-production as limiting willful action of those capable of crossing cultural divides.

In any case, this philosophical back-and-forth is hardly going to come to an end with this blog post, or with her book. Whatever else I think, I will remain troubled by the possibility Leigh's argument just might be right: that maybe Western comparative political theory, particularly in regards to learning from Chinese sources, really may have taken so seriously the reflexive, mutually inward, mutually cultivating, communitarian attitude which has been ascribed to Confucian thought that it has ended up working against recognizing the individual voices behind these sources...and thus also implicitly excused engaged individuals from mastering those voices so as to be able to fully learn from them. Leigh’s book invites us to not only rethink these Chinese thinkers and how we understand them, but also how we understand the relationship between culture and individuality itself. Leigh has opened up a large field of (again, rather challenging) study here, and for that I, at least, am grateful.

Immanent Communities, Consecrated Economies: Taylor, Herder, and What We Hope (or Work) For

Last month, at a local symposium on Christian faith and culture, I had the opportunity to listen to and learn from James K.A. Smith, a theologian and, lately, a valuable interpreter of the work of Charles Taylor, a Canadian philosopher whose writings have been very important to my own thinking. Smith's book How (Not) To Be Secular is a wonderfully helpful guide to Taylor's latest (and, quite likely, last) major work of philosophy and moral theory, A Secular Age--but I can't deny I found Smith's presentation and his book somewhat disconcerting, because it suggested to me that I may have misunderstood something pretty important about Taylor's philosophy. But I'm not sure about that, and I want to try to work out my thoughts here.

In my dissertation, I read Taylor's work primarily through a close examination of Johann Gottfried Herder, a late 18th-century German thinker who Taylor himself frequently seemed guided by--particularly in how he thought about language and meaning--but who also held to an ontological (in fact theological) conviction about the universe that appeared much stronger than Taylor's, or at least stronger than anything convictions that Taylor had chosen to share in his writings (I have to use the past tense, because I really haven't kept up on his work since the year 2000 or so). Herder's insistence that, through processes he labeled Einfühlung (a kind of empathetic listening to or "feeling into") and Besonnenheit (what might be called "reflective discernment"), the human mind was capable of naming and making poetic and moral use of certain organic verities which are immanently conveyed within and through all human history and language is, frankly, kind of mystical in a Heideggerian sort of way. But it also appealed to Taylor's desire to push back against a model of knowing which was committed to epistemological description, and instead think more communally and culturally about how we as persons know things, and what we can morally do with the things we know. Taylor's arguments about social and political life, from his moral anthropology to his claims about multiculturalism to his work on cultural toleration in his home province of Quebec, have all been shaped, I think, at least in part by Herder's particular approach to one of the essential problems of philosophy in modern pluralist societies: how to insist upon a unified standard of truth or identity or community while still respecting the fact of separateness or individuality? For Herder, the answer to that problem is found in an ontological claim that presents those aforementioned organic verities as reflecting the divine. Taylor doesn't go that far--as different scholars pointed out, Taylor's hermeneutics may be strong, but his ontology is weak. My conclusion was that Taylor's project gestured toward, but didn't fully lay out the terms of, what I called "immanent community": an idea that there can be, collectively realized from interpretive engagements with one's own historical and cultural traditions, bonds of attachment which are not merely localized expressions of morality, but authentic--if always evolving--connections to real moral truths.

Now given the tentativeness of much contemporary moral philosophy, that's actually an impressively firm communitarian conviction. Not Herderian in its religiosity, but certainly strong enough, I thought, to account for all the criticism Taylor received throughout the 80s and 90s from his more secular-minded colleagues. I'd hoped, when I heard that Taylor was working on a larger book to explore the sort of faithful "hunches" he talked about at the conclusion of Sources of the Self, to see him explore this theme of authentic-moral-communities-as-realized-through-affective-interpretation further...and perhaps, hidden (in plain sight?) within A Secular Age, that really is what he does. But from what I heard from Smith's presentation on Taylor and secularism, I wondered if my hopes were off-base. I came away from listening to Smith, and then from reading his book, wondering if Taylor's hermeneutics were actually "weaker"--or shall we say, less reflective and interpretive, less subjective or "Herderian"--and his ontology "stronger"--that is, more direct, more objective--than I'd long thought. That is, far from agreeing with Matthew Rose's interesting but ultimately rather silly attack on Taylor (which concludes that, by thoroughly and thoughtfully detailing contemporary secularism in terms of a self-enclosing "immanent frame," Taylor has made himself into "an apologist for...the secular status quo"), I'm finding myself intrigued by Smith's back-handed defense of him: that perhaps it would be "more consistent" with Taylor's own accounts of how we seek open ourselves up to the transcendent to push back against the sort of uncritically anthropocentric assumptions about human flourishing that undergird his arguments. Doing so, though, would, if not put the lie to, than at least greatly complicate my prior reading which presented Taylor's whole Herderian effort to work out a philosophical anthropology in terms of interpretively realized moral truths as a result of his determination to explain why subjecting the transcendent to the immanent (to make a twist on a very old and narrow theoretical joke which almost no one will get: the aim isn't to immanentize the eschaton, but to eschatize the immanent!) was a good thing, in that it historically allowed Christianity and moral philosophy to find a focus on "the practical primacy of life." Smith explicitly says that Taylor puts himself on the side of those "who might even say 'that modern unbelief is providential'"...and yet his treatment--as presented by Smith, anyway--of transcendence and the sublime seems to me to go beyond what I previously understood Taylor as saying: that--and here I'm using the words of Stephen K. White, another fine scholar of Taylor--"God as a moral source is now [in our secular age] inextricably entangled with subjective articulation."

I suppose I could just put all this on the shelf until that time, however many years hence, when I actually read A Secular Age for myself and come to my own judgments about what it ways, and what it means for how I should understand all of Taylor's previous writings. But in the meantime I've read something else, and it has intersected with my thinking about this philosophical problem in a complicated but, I think, interesting way.

Joseph Spencer is a Mormon philosopher and theologian; he's written a fine book--For Zion: A Mormon Theology of Hope--which looks closely at Christian and Mormon teachings about the virtue of hope, and connects that theme to the kind of transformative, utopian economic projects which, in our present capitalism age, almost no one can plausibly hope for, though that is what Mormons like myself are supposed to do. When I'd first encountered his work, I wasn't very impressed--but fortunately, I had a reason to re-read it, and when I did, a great number of connections seemed to leap out at me. In particular was Joe's investigation of the idea that far from being unreasonable to hope for things that are truly revolutionary, hope (at least as laid out by Paul and other New Testament authors) is in fact ineliminably connected to the unseen, unanticipated, and yet already assumed ideal. As Joe put it: "[Paul's emphasis] is, rather, an insistence that hope be oriented to the unseen but fully immanent anchor of the seen. Hope gains its strength neither from its rootedness in a constitutively invisible everywhere, nor from its orientation to an era yet to dawn, but instead from its attention to the complete lack of self-sufficiency invisibly inscribed in every created thing." Or, put more prosaically, and importing some Taylorian terminology: we here in the immanent frame of fragile belief and haunted doubts are called to hope for a transcendent event, not knowing in any sense what that transcendent event will involve or result it, but confident in its reality because that transcendent break-through is immanent to all creation.

Joe's arguments are narrowly focused; he doesn't present an anthropology of human existence, a history of religious belief, or an account of interpretation. But I found his narrow focus extremely illuminating in terms of this strange discontent I've had with Smith's presentation go Taylor's philosophical account of our secular moment. Joe's whole project is to get the Mormon faithful to think clearly about what it means--not just religiously, but also socially, economically, and ultimately (though he is ambivalent on this point) politically--to affirm a hope in something as revolutionary and ideal as a community where the ownership of private property (and thus the inequality which, in a world of both liberty and markets, would inevitably follow) is replaced by collective stewardship (and thus overall, if not absolute, equality). To say that you truly hope for the emergence of such an order of exchange and social relations is no easy thing. And by the same token, it seemed to me that the burden of Taylor's argument as I understood it was no easy thing--and that, perhaps, if my understanding of Smith's reading of Taylor is correct, and thus my interpretation was wrong, Smith is making Taylor's work a little bit easier.

I don't mean to suggest that Smith himself sees Taylor's teachings as simplistic or easy in themselves; he clearly recognized the obvious truth that they aren't. Nor do I think Smith is pulling "easy" answers out of Taylor's work--it's quite clear from Smith's writings that he sees the argument about how one is to understand the possibilities for acknowledging transcendence in today's secular world as demanding a great deal of attentiveness and thoughtful work, recognizing that God may be attempting to meet us in our social embededness, and in our own disenchantment. So no, it's not easy in the sense of telling all who doubt to look for a revelation which will overwhelm our own subjectivity. But I really do wonder if this presentation of the problem and our historical response to it isn't at least a little more straightforward than I'd originally believed. It reads to me as a kind of reception, not as a kind of co-creation. Part of what makes Herder's writings so maddeningly elusive at times is that he's attempting to describe how he can believe that we, in all our profound and very diverse historicity and individuality, are nonetheless actively realizing the singular meaning of things. It's a metaphysically heavy claim, almost Hegelian in its weight, yet one inseparably wrapped up with our own subjective cultural and poetic creations. To put it another way, I had understood Taylor, in light of how I'd understood Herder, as tying his moral realism to engaged acts of interpretation, because that engagement--with all its practical attention to human flourishing--in fact itself is the revelation that many feel haunts our secular moment. While now I wonder if actually we're best understood more as receivers than creators; that our engagement is more a matter of attending and waiting, rather than of sub-creation. (Smith's admiration for Rod Dreher's arguments about believers exercise the "Benedict Option" and waiting out the inevitable transformations around us--"waiting for St. Francis" as Rod has repeatedly put it--is perhaps revealing here.) Transcendence meets us, and we need to recognize it in its arrival...which I recognize as laying out a difficult philosophical (not to mention pastoral!) task, but still, it's not quite the same as saying, as I'd originally understood Taylor as arguing, that we are in the unenviable (or is it enviable?) position of needing to do the collective work to naming transcendence for what it is, and articulating the terms of our meeting of it.


Reading Joe's book put me in mind of an old discussion hosted by James Faulconer, a brilliant philosopher (and, I learned during last month's conference, a friend of James K.A. Smith) who, at different points separated by a decade or two, taught both Joe and I at BYU. Jim wanted to get people's thoughts about this essay by John Milbank, in which he explores what it would mean for Christians to seriously challenge the idolatrous marketplace which defines most of the fundamental social realities experienced by just about everyone in the modern West. Milbank's conclusion is to call the inhabitants of Western modernity (which, perhaps not coincidentally, is exactly the audience of Taylor's work) to exercise some hope in a gift economy--or what he has referred to elsewhere as "socialism by grace." My own response to Milbank is here, and I can't deny that it was somewhat intriguing, and maybe even a little gratifying, to realize that a full ten years on, the very same issues which are troubling me here were troubling me there. Milbank wants us to orient ourselves towards that transcendence which breaks apart what Taylor rightly calls--as quoted by Smith--the "terrible flatness....with [our] commercial, industrial, or consumer society." An order where production and exchange partakes of genuine love and authenticity, not the reductive grit of self-interest--an order where the economy (meaning here the whole panoply of modern life) is oriented around something higher something which in the Mormon traditions is labeled "consecrated." Joe wants this to, and Taylor and Smith are arguing about how we can make our ways to the point of being able to hope for and work towards such. Milbank, having laid out his arguments, turns towards the end of his essay to a serious of harsh attacks against the modern liberal state, contrasting it to the "liberality" that only a collectively received community may enable. I agreed with practically every step he made in that argument--but ultimately couldn't understand why he was so certain that there needed to transformation in the political (and by extension, I would argue, the interpretive) tools available to us in order to engage properly in the sort of hopeful work he claimed which Christianity calls us to. As I wrote towards the end of my response, thinking of all sorts of different populist political movements and reforms, "there are tools available to work towards the theological politics which Milbank assumes (rightly, I think) our belief in the Kingship of Christ to make incumbent upon us." I still believe that--and when I read Taylor and Herder, I thought I was seeing a way to understand how it is that such interpretive tools are also, despite--or perhaps because of--their decidedly quotidian, anthropocentric, practical character--immanent realizations of transcendence. And here I am essentially just quoting Martin Luther King, or Dorothy Day, or Tommy Douglas, or William Jennings Bryan, or any of the old Christian socialists: the bringing of people together into even such a crude instrument as a protest march or worker's union or a co-op is itself the kind of consecrated and transcendent hope which we believers ought to be about.

In the end, I suppose all this just can't get away from the simple fact that I am suspicious of anything which seems to point towards a quietist reception of that which will enable a transformation of our communities in and through which we live, rather that the always-interpretive struggle to build--and thereby transform--those communities. My taste for democratic governance is both agonistic and  process-oriented, in that way: I think interpretive confusion is not only an entirely ordinary and to-be-expected way of life, but that it is in and through such interpretive confusion that moral meanings and truths and realities are named and made. Our every transcendent revelation will turn out to have been an always-already immanent and communal co-creation, I think. I suspect that not a single one of the phenomenologically inclined folks I've referenced in this too-long post--Herder, Taylor, Smith, Joe, anyone--would take issue with that formulation; they just might disagree with me on the interpretive work and hope bringing it about involves. Those more sensitive to the need for patient attendance upon that which may be interpretively realized have taught be a lot, over the years; I'm far more local and variable and (I hope) humble in my sense of where and in what form the transcendent might appear to guide us towards more equal communities than I once was. But at the same time, I'm still pretty convinced that such moments of transcendent justice will be, nonetheless, built. If it turns out that my best philosophical understanding of what such hopeful building consists of  was wrong, well, it'll mean I need to some more thinking. I'm not sure it will change my mind, though. Maybe I'm just stubborn that way.

Local Wonderings in Wichita

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic]

Wichita, KS, is the home to a wonderful bookstore, Eighth Day Books. (Which isn't my favorite bookstore in Wichita, but that's partly because my wife works at its primary rival.) One of the main reasons it's such a wonderful place is its sense of identity and vocation. It's much more than a "Christian bookstore," though it is that, and tremendously good at fulfilling that role in our community (see Rod Dreher sing its praises here, here, and here). But beyond that Eighth Day Books is the heart of a sub-community that has fascinated me ever since my family and I moved to Wichita nearly ten years ago. Traditionalist, usually (but not always) conservative, literate but only rarely academic, both reactionary and radical, Eighth Day grounds a motley, earnest, often brilliant collection of Christian thinkers and servers; even when I find myself somewhat perplexed by what I hear from some of them, I want to learn more. It's very ecumenical; the folks involved are Orthodox and Catholic and evangelical Protestant (and so long as they keep on letting me through the door, Mormon too); within their numerous overlapping circles, you can find schools, retreats, university programs and institutes, study groups, and more. Once a year, Eighth Day hosts an already-large-and-still-growing symposium, which this year was devoted to exploring the idea of "wonder" in a world where longstanding traditions of the civic place of Christianity have radically changed. I was fortunate enough to be able to attend one of the days of the conference this year, and I adored it. What I saw and heard around me this past weekend was an example of the sort of both strengthening and challenging local and cultural civic work which communitarians like myself have banged on about for years (but which we, in all honestly, have only rarely managed to contribute directly to ourselves).

Let me share some ideas prompted by three presentations I listened to. The first was the symposium opening provided by Erin Doom, the director of Eighth Day Institute (and yes, that is how you spell his name). Erin is a fascinating guy; I suspect he'd far prefer to be considered a lay theologian than a community organizer, but really he's both (and in fact, his efforts are themselves a testament to just how much working to make manifest and build up a community in a particular place is a type of Incarnational work). In presenting his vision of bringing together hundreds of people who, for reasons of curiosity or concern or just plain community attachment, wanted to spend two days learning, reading, and talking about the possibilities presented by our "secular age," Erin talked about a "dialogue of love" which is needed, one that can best be realized through a return to certain key ecumenical elements of the Christian tradition. For him (as well as for many others throughout history), these elements are scripture, icons, and liturgy--all of which may be seen as revealing a certain kind of radical localist perspective. What they have in common is an enduring presence--as stories which get adapted and interpreted but which also transcend the passing of time and fashions, as images which transcend their own replication and commodification, as seasons of time which transcend the manufactured pressures of socio-economic life. These are points of resistance to the pace and the profits of our contemporary capitalist and centralized world; they can become resources of retreat, for those who wish to either prepare to hold on to something old and good, or harness their strength to push for something new and good--or, really, both. Its a wonderful vision--made all the more persuasive because those in attendance at this conference, siting in an Orthodox cathedral in a mid-sized city in the center of the country, could see fruits of such all around them.

One of the headline speakers was Dr. James K.A. Smith, a scholar and theologian who had recently written a superb book explaining the philosopher Charles Taylor's monumental work A Secular Age. It was about that book, and Taylor's fascinating (if convoluted) historical, cultural, and literary excavation of the meaning of secularism in the modern (that is, post 1500 A.D. or so) West, which Smith came to speak about. I was delighted to hear him, because--as some of this blog's readers may remember--I've made rather grandiose promises about reading A Secular Age on more than one occasion in the past, and always failed. Taylor is easily the most insightful and, I think, basically right-thinking contemporary moral and political philosopher I know, and his work has been greatly important to me--but in this case, I really appreciated having someone smart, witty, and provocative explain his ideas to me. The most important concept which of Taylor's which he unpacked--and also productively complicated--for us is the notion that the emergence over the past half-millennium of the "buffered self" (a notion of individuality that is, in principle at least, resistant to being shaped or determined meaningfully by outside forces which might pour into one, because the core of that individuality is psychologically and morally removed and protected from the larger world) is closely entwined with the collapse of a robust sense of sociality. While Taylor doesn't claim, and neither did Smith, that these were two entirely distinct or causally related phenomenon, it occurred to me that, if we grant that the festivals and rituals of the pre-modern West existed at least in part to moderate those anti-social pressures generated by the maintenance of the divisions and roles of a religiously defined world, then it seems reasonable to assume that human passions and their supporting understandings are going to always be at least partly self-interested. In which case, perhaps it was the transformation of the social world of the first thousand years of Christendom into something less dependable, more dangerous, and more characterized by divisive opportunities--and here I'm thinking of everything from scientific revolutions to religious wars to the rise of capitalism--which made the desire for "buffering" oneself from the mysteries of the wider world so appealing. Point being, the modern self, mostly closed off to the transcendent but perhaps curiously open to glimmers of it as such can be realized within our "immanent frame" can't be persuaded to attend to higher, impersonal goods by simply invoking the promise of tradition: the break with such is perhaps so deeply entwined with ordinary practices both personal and social that it is foolish to imagine that some new apologetic is going to open up atomists to what communion has to offer. Anyway, Smith's presentation and book are things I'm going to have to think about and write about some more.

Finally, it was wonderful to see Rod Dreher back in Wichita, and his presentation--both the parts I agreed with, and the parts I didn't--didn't at all disappoint. He's already reflected on some of his thoughts about participating in the Eighth Day Symposium here; let me just focus on something he said about "wonder."

"Wondering" has two complementary, yet still distinct, connotations. You can wonder about something, and be prompted to ask questions that you normally wouldn't ask. This was the main focus of Rod's presentation on the mass media, and how assumptions about certain "myths" end up closing down questions about worrisome or suspicious events or developments that really ought to be asked. I don't disagree with Rod about this reality at all, though I strongly suspect he and I would disagree somewhat on just what myths really are regent in newsrooms around the country today. But how does that phenomenon relate to another, deeper sense of wonder: that of being struck by the wonder, the mystery, of life? One seems to point towards the seeking of answers to questions, while the other suggests something which is beyond answers entirely.

In his comments, Rod quotes one of the other speakers at the symposium, a Catholic theologian named Bo Bonner (who I've met, and I agree: he's a great, funny guy), who talked about how the most profound truths of the Christian tradition are wild and weird, and that if one is interested in preserving the kind of enchantment which Christianity once provided, in so many different ways, to communities all around the modern West, then it must be allowed to be wild and weird again. I don't think this is necessarily "weird" in the "keep Austin weird" sense (an attitude which is not entirely foreign to Wichita as well), though there is likely some overlap there; rather, I think it involves living in a tradition so firmly--which, please note, is not the same as living it "confrontationally," and maybe not even living it "evangelically" either--that you can know and demonstrate through one's own life choices all the little mysteries and questions and weirdnesses which are inherent to it. We tend to imagine "awe" as involving something grand and mighty, a miracle so imposing as to defy description, but maybe we need to remember that being awed and enchanted is characteristic of the many marvelous idiosyncrasies which may be seen, assuming we can show at least a modicum of charity for ourselves and others, in ordinary, local lived lives. Let's face it: Erin Doom is, in all likelihood, kind of a weird guy. And so is Rod, and so are you, and so am I. That weirdness, and the pleasant wonder and unexpected questions ("Why does she do that?") which goes along with it, is not going to be known--at least not in a manner which can bring us, in our places, to contemplate permanent things--if we have just one "myth," one story, to reductively explain away all our own motivations and hopes and dreams. And neither will it be known if our lives become so transient, so ambitious, so committed to material accomplishments that don't ever give ourselves (or the structures of our meritocratic economy never allows us) the time or the place to fully live lives that are our own.

Well, Eighth Day has its own weird and wonderful and "wondering-full" little place, here in Wichita, and it's a blessing and goad and delight to us all. There are bound to be such places, built by such people, where you live as well: small corners of genuine social realization, mysterious happenstances, worthy of wonder. Go out and find them. They'll be worth your time, I guarantee it.

Pondering St. Francisville, Gilead, and our Stories of Place

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic]

Jeremy Beer's recent review of The Little Way of Ruthie Leming leads me to once again reflect upon Rod Dreher's excellent book (about which I've already had a lot to say), in part because it creates an opportunity to bring in some of Rod's own reflections about what it has meant for him to tell this story about the relationship between himself, his hometown of St. Francisville, LA, and his saintly but judgmental sister Ruthie. Jeremy's review of Rod's story comes to a wise--if necessarily only partial--conclusion: "the truth is that communities need their boundary-challengers as much as they need their boundary-protectors, their Rods as much as their Ruthies—even if the former can never occupy a central place in those communities." This sobering thought, in turn, leads Rod to think about fidelity:

What Little Way is, in part, is a meditation on what it means to live a life of fidelity. You can only judge that by examining the telos of one’s faithfulness, of course. But even that is insufficient, because it is possible that there is nothing at all wrong with the telos of one’s fidelity, but that one has failed to see that it is not one’s nature to be absolutely faithful to a relative good. To put it in less abstract terms, there is nothing wrong with being faithful to one’s family and to one’s place, but not at the expense of one’s nature and calling.

This is a crucially important--though complicating--thought. Can it really be the case that some people are, by nature, constituted to be faithful to something other than those specific things (like family, community, and place) which constituted them, and which therefore arguably enabled their faithfulness in the first place? That would seem to be the implication of Rod's supposition--namely, that the realization of ones telos is not limited solely to a re-embrace of one's particular inheritance--and there are many good philosophical arguments in support of such. (For example, Charles Taylor: "We are now in an age in which...[t]he only way we can explore the order in which we are set, with an aim to defining moral sources, is through...personal resonance"--Sources of the Self, p. 512.) But what does that do to the very idea of valuing such specific things--things like St. Francisville parish--on their on terms, as opposed to transposing whatever it is they are and offer to some individualistic or utilitarian metric? As I wrote once before, "isn't the entire point of embracing stability and putting down roots and learning to live within limits exactly to deny that we our entirely a product of our own preference maximization?" To be sure, insisting on the value of being faithful to one's own resonance doesn't mean leaping (or falling) completely into individualism--but that doesn't mean one shouldn't be careful, all the same.

Such care should be taken by every person attracted to communitarian and localist thought, as I am--as well as by everyone who is critical of such. To put some philosophical meat on the bones of Rod's comment about, the premise of just about every possible expression of the idea that one's community or place or family has some virtue to it is the belief that such forms of attachment constitute in and through ourselves an end, a purpose, a narrative for our own lives--or as Rod put it, a "calling." (And I would insist that talking about callings in this way doesn't at all minimize the religious content implied by Rod's choice of words; as a Christian believer myself, I'm fully on board with the notion that, absent rare incidents of outright revelation, God's ends are ones that we realize in and through ourselves.) I'm leaning on the work of Alasdair MacIntyre here, but not just him: many have argued that the traditions which attachments incubate in us are the essential building blocks of judgment, cognition, and identity: that is, of being human in the fullest sense, being engaged in our lives purposively. But the complicating idea of Rod's story is that showing fidelity to, or giving respect to, those purposes and building blocks isn't necessarily the same as being defined by them. One can (and, at least in the modern United States, many, maybe even most people do) embody their attachment to a tradition by working out a purpose informed by a rejection of that community or place or family which shaped them. A contrarian or dissident or unconventional nature and calling still is--or at least still may be, assuming it does not take a destructive or nihilistic turn--one which remembers within itself a shaping, a tradition, which began with certain attachments, even if the customary implications of those attachments are now rejected. (The distinction between "memory" as "custom," in this context, is quite important, as Christopher Lasch argued in The True and Only Heaven; a community defined by acts of memory is characterized by "judgment," while custom suggests that which is "habitual and unconscious"--p. 133.)

I recently finished reading (after having set the book aside after one attempted reading too long ago) Marilynne Robinson's Gilead, a book about which I can't say too much good--and one which, surprisingly, incorporates into it's story a great deal which anticipates and testifies to the complications which Rod's position suggests for any defense of community, identity, and fidelity. There is, for example, the story of Edward, the older brother of the book's narrator, John Ames, an old Congregationalist minister, the son and grandson of ministers, who through the book's narrative looks back with great profundity on his remarkable--and yet remarkably plain--life in the little, abolitionist-founded Iowa town of Gilead:

Edward studied at Göttingen. He was a remarkable man. He was older than me by almost ten years, so I didn't really know him very well while we were children....Edward left home at sixteen to go to college. He finished at nineteen with a degree in ancient languages and went straight off to Europe. None of us saw him again for years. There weren't even many letters.

Then he came home with a walking stick and a huge mustache. Herr Doktor. He must have been twenty-seven or twenty-eight. He had published a slender book in German, a monograph of some kind of Feuerbach. He was as samrt as could be, and my father was a little in awe of him, too, as he had been since Edward was a small boy, I think....[T]he congregation took up collections to put him in college and then sent him to Germany....He took a position at the state college in Lawrence teaching German literature and philosophy, and stayed there till be died. He married a German girl from Indianapolis and they had six little towheaded children, all of them well into middle age by now. He was a few hundred miles away all those years and I hardly ever saw him. He did send back contributions to the church to repay them for helping him. A check dated January 1 came every year he lived. He was a good man.

He and my father had words when he came back, once at the dinner table that first evening when my father asked him to say grace. Edward cleared his throat and replied, "I am afraid I could not do that in good conscience, sir," and the color drained out of my father's face....[T]his was the dreaded confirmation of my parents fears. My father said, "You have lived under this roof. You know the customs of your family. You might show some respect for them." And Edward replied, and this was very wrong of him, "When I was a child, I thought as a child. Now that I am become a man, I have put away childish things." My father left the table, my mother sat still in her chair with tears streaming down her face, and Edward passed me the potatoes. (Gilead, pp. 24-26)

What I find most thoughtful in that passage is that John Ames, as his life comes to close and he writes the letter which forms the frame of the novel, is not saying that Edward was wrong for becoming a cosmopolitan (later Edward tells his younger brother, "John, you might as well know now what you're sure to learn sometime. This is a backwater--you must be aware of that already. Leaving here is like waking from a trance."), not even for becoming an atheist, but for speaking so condescendingly to their father. And yet, the narrative also makes it clear that it is not as thought Edward had somehow lost all contact with or allegiance to the shaping which his religious upbringing had provided. One can't look into the mind of another person, not even a fictional other person, but I suspect that Robinson was allowing us to see, through the eyes of John Ames, that there was a purpose to Edward, an integrity and identity to him, which tied him to the community which John had made his whole life as much as every other character in the book.

And there is another, even more challenging parallel between Robinsons's and Rod's stories, a parallel which fleshes out the careful line regarding tradition and fidelity that forms the heart of this particular problem. Rod's estimation of his own story, as he has expressed it on his blog numerous times, is profoundly conditioned by the late revelation that his own parents--or at least his father--was somewhat dubious of the way he allowed his place, the community of St. Francisville, to define him for so long. When interviewing his father, the following exchange takes place: 

"There's something else I regret even more," he carried on. "I can see now, at the end of my life, that it would have been better if after your Mama and I got married, we had packed up and left here."

I couldn't believe what I had just heard.

"What do you mean?"

"I mean what I said: we should have left this place."

And then Paw told me how he had spent his entire life sacrificing for his mother, his father, his brother, his aunts, and his cousins--all of whom, in his recollection, worked him like a dog and never gave him a moment's thanks. They could always count on Ray to fix anything, to do any job they asked of him, to give up his free time and spend his own money, to help them. They used him up.

"I was a sucker," he said, the bitterness heavy in his voice. "Aunt Lois was the only one of the whole bunch who was ever straight with me. But there was only one of her....Your sister, she was right to stand up to me over marrying Mike....And so were you, when you went back to Washington to be a writer. I was too strong-willed and stubborn back then. I regret that very much."

We sat in silence for a moment.

"Daddy, I have to tell you, I don't know what to think about all this," I said. "Here I am, a man who turned his life upside down to move back here for the family, and because of the land. And now here you are telling me that you made an idol of family and place, and that you wish you had left it all behind when you were young, just like I did. What am I supposed to make of that?"

His chin trembled, he wrung his hands together, he looked me straight in the eye, and then my father said: "That I'm a sorrier man than you." (The Little Way of Ruthie Leming, pp. 258-261)

Anyone who reads Rod's book, and gets into his story of the divide which grew up between himself and Ruthie, the way she identified with the particularities of their hometown while he found himself struggling between his love for his family and his profound disconnect from the lives they lived (and, more importantly, the way they all thought--or didn't think--about the lives they lived), can't help be between surprised by this late revelation. But once again, Robinson had showed us something much the same. Very nearly at the end of his long, rambling, beautiful narrative, John Ames abruptly shares something new:

I have mentioned that my father and my mother left here. Well, they certainly did. Edward bought a piece of land down on the Gulf Coast and built a cottage for his own family and for them. He did it mainly to get my mother away from this ferocious climate, and that was kind of him, because her rheumatism became severe as she got older. The idea was that they would spend a year down there getting settled in, and then they would come back again to Gilead and only go south for the worst of the winter until my father retired. So I took his pulpit for that first year. And then they never did come back, except twice to visit, the first time when I lost Louisa and the second time to talk me into leaving with them. That second time I asked my father to preach, and he shook his head, and said, "I just can't do it anymore."

He told me that it had not been his intention to leave me stranded here. In fact, it was his hope that I would seek out a larger life than this. He and Edward both felt strongly what excellent use I could make of a broader experience. He told me that looking back on Gilead from any distance made it seem a relic, an archaism. When I mentioned the history we had here, he laughed and said, "Old, unhappy far-off things and battles long ago." And that irritated me. He said, "Just look at this place. Every time a tree gets to a decent size, the wind comes along and breaks it." He was expounding the wonders of the larger world, and I was resolving in my heart never to risk the experience of them. He said, "I have become aware that we have lived within the limits of notions that were very old and even very local. I want you to understand that you do not have to be loyal to them"....

I don't recall that I actually said anything, taken aback as I was. Well, all he accomplished was to make me homesick for a place I never left. (Gilead, pp. 234-235)

"Homesick for a place I never left": what a powerful line that is. What I'm suggesting here, by way of Rod's story and Robinson's novel, is that a proper notion of fidelity--whether to a place or to the purpose that a place may constitute in and through us--would align all of us, localists and cosmopolitans alike, with that phrase. We all are, or at least can be, and arguably (I think, anyway) should be, homesick: or, to express the psychological state I have in mind more positively, always attendant to and seeking for the kind of purposive fulfillment which occurs when our circumstances match our identity, our calling. Reading Gilead makes me, among many other things, quite conscious of why so many people desire to live in big cities (with their complex economies and invasive regulations and diverse populations): because to experience the anonymity and fecundity and creativity which the busy-ness of humankind makes possible can serve as a salve for the frustration which that seeking so often involves. Edward--who had left home and benefited from the opportunities which a broader world made possible--had the wherewithal to take his and John's parents out of their place; they obviously took to such a displacement as a respite from the difficulty of their circumstances, but accepting that removal from place also changed them, introducing a break between them and their non-prodigal son. John does not judge his parents, he simply notes that change, their turning away from a constant homesickness and the consequent intensifying it had upon him, as one example of the mystery of place.

From Iowa to Florida is perhaps not so much different from St. Francisville to Paris. Rod has also, in thinking about how much his own Parisian experiences liberated and transformed him, and how those experiences were perhaps the crucial divide between his own life and his sister's, noted that making moves like that can only appear to others (and perhaps often to ourselves) as involving an outright rejection of tradition, an act of--here Rod borrows the words of Ta-Nehisi Coates-- "burning down the house":

I esteem devotion to prescriptive Tradition. But my sister lived by that ethic, and so did (does) my father--and it made me miserable. I ran away from here in part because the weight and the strictures of our family’s Tradition was too much to take. If it--if they--had been more flexible, allowing for some modification of the Tradition, I might have chosen a different path. But they could not see any other way. They were not conscious of Tradition as Tradition, which was the very thing that allowed them to be so devoted to it...but was also the same thing that prevented them from accepting any deviation from it.....The thing I have to concede is that I want the benefits of Tradition without the painful strictures. If I “burn down the Big House,” so to speak, where do I shelter? Where do my children shelter? The thing is, it’s not possible to live in the modern world and remain in the Big House. Human flourishing requires building a different house, one more suited to the way we live today. If we want things to stay the same, things have to change.

Figuring out exactly how we make this work--how we defend tradition as so important to providing our world with virtuous sources we may and should show fidelity to, for the sake of our own collective enrichment and identification, while at the same time not locking down what actually grounds those traditions, for the sake of allowing us all as individuals to move from standing in one place to standing in another--is probably a constant, irresolvable mystery, one which will always carry a fair amount of pain along with it. As Rod himself admits, "looking back on [my story] a year after I finished the manuscript, I can see that I was trying to talk myself into something that probably isn’t true, or at least is more mysterious and ambiguous than I was able to accept last yea...that I am outside that blessed circle, and can’t ever cross that boundary, no matter how far I’ve traveled." Rod, because he returned to St. Francisville after having left it, can be a part of that community, but he cannot seamless connect with it--he cannot stand where his sister stood, and enjoy his community's moral sources the way she did, because he changed, and she didn't. (And, of course, that means she can't show any fidelity to the moral sources and traditions which Rod has discovered, and the places where he discovered them, because she was never there, and couldn't ever see them for what they are in any case.)

All this is perhaps partly why Rod has increasingly become less interested in addressing who connects and who doesn't and why and what to do about it, and more interested in the stories of connection and disconnection themselves. I was originally a little put out by Rod's refusal to acknowledge the argument in his story, but after reading Gilead, I think I can appreciate better that, for example, if I tried to turn Robinson's novel into an argument about life in small towns, or the importance of religion, or the pain of growing older, I'd be doing the whole thing a disservice, and that's the sort of disservice Rod clearly doesn't want perform on his memory of Ruthie. Fair enough. But let's not forget what Lasch and Taylor and others have pointed out--that any act of memory, properly speaking, is going to be an action characterized by our own "personal resonance." We're all interpreting, in other words, all the time. And when we find--through experience, or argument, or both--our interpretations to be wrong, we change perspective, and try them again. That is, we argue, we try out new theoretical construals of our own lives, we keep trying to figure out what we are (or should be) showing fidelity to, whether we realize it or not.

The arguments about tradition are lengthy and contentious; perhaps there is no possibility they could be otherwise in our modern world. In fact, I would suspect that, should Rod choose this task, he could find in time that those same arguments and changes were present in Ruthie's world as well. I wonder if there might even be a way for him to someday write his story from Ruthie's point of view: a story of her relationship with a strange, intellectual, perhaps arrogant, yet worldly wise and accomplished older brother, and both the love and dissatisfaction she felt for him, and how those feelings, in their own unaccountable ways, changed and fit themselves into her place. A place where her students grew up and stayed, or grew up and left, and pastors came and stayed or left, and people were married and given in marriage, and the world and its traditions and all its occasions for fidelity just continued to turn.

Canaries in the Coal Mine? (APSA Reflections)

So, I'm back--back from a crazy end of summer filled with rushed deadlines, back from the late nights and late mornings and returning to the family's usual school-year schedule, back from Canada, where I spent three hurried days last week tearing from one APSA session and appointment to another. And, of course, back to blogging--at least until I take another break, that is.

I love going to the American Political Science Association's annual meetings; I really do. It's a great opportunity to meet old friends, encounter new ideas, pick up books, and just jazz myself up intellectually. This conference was no exception (and the fact that it was being held in Toronto, thus giving me the opportunity to meet up with an graduate school friend, being a much appreciated added bonus). Still, I have to admit that I had a lot of ups and downs over the three days I was there, a lot of running from one place to another, a lot of hurrying up and then waiting and just missing someone or misunderstanding some conversation and feeling somewhat lost. That was probably just me...but I wonder if others might have felt the same.

Political scientists--and in particular the political theorists with whom I spend most of my time, and the theoretical debates I'm most interested in following--are hardly the most expert and reliable barometers of the directions in which our shared (or at least observed) political culture may happen to be evolving at any one time. Still, it somewhat surprised me, once I completed my exhausting final day and returned to Kansas, to think back and see in my memory of the previous three days, scattered everywhere, like tea leaves waiting to be read, signs of a common pre-occuptation. In all sorts of ways, it seemed to me that everyone was talking about, or at least opening the door to, the limits of, or the problems with, sovereignty, and centralized power, and the state.

Jacob Levy, in giving the best paper presentation I heard the whole conference (but then Jacob always gives great presentations), attacked the idea that modern liberal democracies, premised upon a social contract ideology, somehow escape the subtle moral teleology which is usually seen as fundamentally characterizing pre-modern political forms...which opens to the door to the argument that the only way to avoid investing political organizations with unwarranted normative presumptions is to look towards non-political forms of social organization entirely. In a couple of presentations given by my philosophical hero, Charles Taylor, one as part of a roundtable on his report on accommodating minority differences in Quebec, the other on different ways of responding to religious claims in a liberal and pluralistic context, he repeatedly emphasized that the practical response to all of the contesting and conflicting demands free people have must be expressed locally, that principled and over-arching and contextless legal determinations--at least beyond an absolute bare liberal minimum--will almost always be counter-productive, and that, in the end, these kind of arguments must lead towards the question of decentralization, and a critique of the moder juridical state. In a couple of workshops on comparative political theory (a continuing interest of mine), and even in a couple of panels I attended addressing thinkers and conceptual categories from contexts as diverse as ancient China and contemporary Eastern Europe, repeatedly harsh questions about economic globalization and state sovereignty emerged, and names like Herman Daly, E.F. Schumacher, and John Milbank were tossed about. The late G.A. Cohen's just released and, presumably, final book, Why Not Socialism? (nicely introduced and discussed in this Crooked Timber thread here), makes one of the best cases for essential socialist principles that I've ever read...and then quite plainly admits that, despite continued experimentation, we yet have no idea how to actually institute those principles on any basis much larger than a group of friends going camping. James C. Scott, he of the extremely insightful Seeing Like a State, has just come out with a huge, meticulously detailed volume, The Art of Not Being Governed, making an "anarchist" case for the non-state organizations by which millions of Zomia peoples (a collective terms for the upland inhabitants of Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Burma, and south China) traditionally resisted state-builders both capitalist and communist. All of that, plus the conversation I overheard between a couple of political scientist bigwigs, discussing how the fundamental problem with all of the very good, very persuasive, and very true arguments which President Obama's people have put forward about how much more efficient and effective the delivery and funding of health care is in just about every other industrialized nation on the planet, is the simple fact that all of those nations which advocates of health care reform--like myself!--refer to have smaller populations, and smaller economies, than does ours...which makes all comparisons, however worth making, slightly hard to take seriously.

Well, I don't know--it's all probably more a matter of my own interests and concerns than anything else. And it's not like all that is anything like a representative sample of the tens of thousands of conversations taking place Wednesday through Sunday at the Toronto Convention Centre. And even it is was, it'd only be, as I said, at best just some stray tea leaves looking for an interpretation. Still, for whatever it's worth, if political scientists are any kind of canary in a coal mine, I can't help but wonder if the lurking issue that may suddenly emerge to shape political thinking in the near future might simply be a sense that, well, enough is enough: that politics--state politics, national politics, to say nothing of international politics--claim too much, and try to do and to mean, too much. An awareness of the need to balance state and market imperatives with local humility, perhaps? That's not a bad lesson to learn, if it turns out that anyone really is teaching such a lesson at all.