Defending Superman's Sentimentality

[Note: Spoilers follow.]

I’ve seen James Gunn’s Superman, and I’ve written up my take on it on social media: I thought it was absolutely wonderful, one of the very best super-hero movies I’ve ever seen, on the same level as—or maybe exceeding—such movies as Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 2, Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther, Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins, Jon Favreau’s Iron Man, even Richard Donner’s Superman: The Movie. Some disagree with that assessment, which is fine; there are all sorts of ways, both stylistic and substantive, to judge big pop entertainments like these, and I’m not inclined to argue (much) with folks whose takes differ from mine.

But a politico-theological argument? That I can absolutely get into.

Given that Superman, no matter how one tells his story, is by definition a hero of the underdog, someone who saves lives, stops disasters, and fights those who oppress and terrorize, it’s always going to be easy to fit him into a particular political narrative, and certainly there’s been plenty of that in the wake of the visuals and narrative choices which Gunn employed in making Superman. (As one of my friends said regarding Vasil Ghurkos, the evil ruler of Boravia who is central to Lex Luthor’s scheme to destroy Superman, Gunn made him look like Benjamin Netanyahu, but sound like Vladimir Putin.) From what I can tell, the lazy political attack on the movie—that it’s “woke” and therefore nothing but progressive propaganda—doesn’t seem to have legs; multiple conservative, Trump-supporting friends of mine have loved the movie, loved the humor and action and heroism the film contains. Another, slightly different attack caught my eye, though, and I want to say why I think it’s completely wrong.

It's an attack made by Daniel McCarthy, the editor of Modern Age, a rather idiosyncratic conservative journal. In a column titled “What Trump Knows About ‘Superman’ That Hollywood Can’t Comprehend,” McCarthy writes that attempts to hate on Superman because of its presumed (and I think actually quite obvious and accurate) messages regarding immigration and respect for civil rights and the rule of law are side issues, at best; the real problem with Superman is its “bland and demoralizing vision” of an America without values. He describes the film’s Jonathan and Martha Kent at “ludicrously folksy stereotypes”; he condemns the fact that this Superman “doesn’t utter a word about ‘the American way,’” but instead “when he confronts Luthor at the film’s climax…insists his failings are what makes him human”; and that Superman’s core replaces patriotism with sentimentality: “Superman hasn’t assimilated to America, but to an unplaceable idea of niceness and self-affirmation.”

Well, as Jules Winnfield once said, allow me to retort.

I called this a politico-theological argument, because it is: it is an argument which is built out of assumptions about the moral importance, perhaps even the moral centrality, of being a part of a national community, a community that itself posits its own character—its own “way”—as reflecting, perhaps even instantiating, something unique and higher. Without being attached to a people and place, moral positions become bland: “niceness” is a characteristic which anyone can possess, and it betokens no sense of strength or specialness. Superman is, McCarthy is saying, just this guy with powers; he does not inspire, unlike Trump, who understands that the point of national leadership is to never be humiliated, to be “so strong” he doesn’t need to engage in violence (unless he chooses to, of course).

Thankfully there are at least some conservative Christians who still haven’t forgotten that the theology which actually emerged from the stories of the Bible, both the Old and New Testament, and in contrast to the idolatry which motivates so much of the MAGA cult, isn’t at all about strength but rather is all about acceptance: acceptance of individual choice and accountability, acceptance of one’s common and flawed mortality, acceptance of the equal dignity of all persons, good or bad, weak or strong, journeying through this earthly life. On that reading, Gunn’s Superman is a deeply religious film, telling the story of the struggles and the triumph—for the moment!—of a tremendously gifted man who cares deeply about his fellow beings (regarding Krypto: “He’s not even a very good dog—but he’s out there alone, and he’s probably scared”), despite his own many limitations (his final words in the movie, after Mr. Terrific leaves Superman in a huff: “I am such a jerk sometimes”). But I think we can go even deeper than that.

Long ago, back when the Blogosphere was a name that was actually recognized by many, I was part of a long discussion over what some scholars of religious belief and practice had terms “Moral Therapeutic Deism.” My engagement in that debate touched on Barak Obama, Rod Dreher, civil religion, and more, but I’d like to draw out just one element of it: the thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. And actually, I wouldn’t be surprised if McCarthy had been actually subtly signaling to all the Rousseau-haters out there when he described the “sentimentality” of Gunn’s Superman as consisting of “niceness and self-affirmation,” because that’s just a step or two away from one of Rousseau’s key claims: that modern morality is built, first, upon pity or compassion for others, and second, upon amour de soi, a concept usually translated as “self-love,” but which really connotes a positive sense of dignity, self-care, and accountability.

In any case, for Rousseau, modernity has robbed us of the possibility of a genuinely organic connection to a national community, or really any community identity at all; to take its place, there is the need to educate people in a religious sensibility that arguably is a direct ancestor of MTD. “The Creed of the Savoyard Priest” is a central text here; its ideas were foundational for much 19^th-century liberal Christian theology, and frankly, that theology is as American as apple pie: God loves you. God has given you an inner sense of decency; don’t allow learned rationalizations to distract you from it. On the contrary, God wants you to follow your conscience, as that will allow you to best respect and serve and build community with others. As the Priest writes: “Feeling precedes knowledge. Since we do not learn to seek what is good for us and avoid what is bad for us, but get this desire from nature, in the same way the love of good and the hatred of evil are as natural to us as our amour de soi.”

I don’t deny for a moment that there is a potential for moral individualism here that can be, and in some ways absolutely has been, devastating to the moral conditions of modernity. And yet, modernity means more than just the worst aspects of individualism; it also means (as I wrote in that blog post 16 years ago) “the global regime of human rights, worldwide activism on behalf of the indebted and the poor, volunteerism and service in tens of thousands of places across the globe,” etc., etc., etc. How much are all the undeniably limited but nonetheless still real ways in which the world has improved, at least insofar as slavery, coverture, torture, and genocide, over the past two hundred years the result of “people absorbing anemic liberal doctrines about not shooting people who just want to get a better job or to express themselves, about recognizing the need to actually sit down and speak with and learn from those whom you had previously oppressed”? To connect this back to Superman, our hero’s defense of his involvement in the Boravian attack on Jarhanpur ultimately comes down to—and his contentious interview with Lois Lane makes this clear—one simple moral reality: “People were going to die!” Using super-powers to stop (again, for the moment!) a conflict because you don’t want people to die is, surely, pretty simplistic, pretty basic. It is also, well, compassionate; it is sentimental, it is nice.

And this, really, takes us back to the people, the community, that Gunn’s Superman does belong to: his parents in Smallville. As has been noted, past comic and cinematic incarnations of Jonathan and Martha Kent have tended to present them as “paragons of a certain kind of Americana nobility; strong, proud farmers from the heartland,” teaching their adopted son “all the right values and the responsibilities that come with his incredible abilities.” But Gunn makes them “normies” (by the way, this was something, as a Kansan, I recognized from the very first trailer; far from the stereotypical red barn with windmill and grain elevator, miles and miles from town, these are two far more typical rural residents of small-town Kansas in 2025, where the grain fields are overwhelmingly owned by large corporate actors: the Kents have a suburban ranch home and run cattle, and probably both have jobs in town on the side). Are they church-goers? One would guess. But churchgoing in small-town Kansas in the 21^st-century isn’t and can’t be imagined as being what it was when Glenn Ford’s Jonathan Kent clapped young Clark on the shoulder just before dying of a heart attack in Donner’s 1978 Superman: The Movie. For better and for worse, that stoic, American Gothic image of the heartland has now all but disappeared. What’s in its place? A lot of good people (even if they are Trump votes, as Jonathan and Martha Kent almost certainly are), who go to church and embrace a message of Christian decency and sentiment—the sort of message that would lead Pa Kent to say, it what was clearly the moral center of the Superman, whatever anyone else might say later:

Parents aren’t for telling their children who they’re supposed to be. We are here to give y’all tools to help you make fools of yourselves all on your own. Your choices, Clark. Your actions. That’s what makes you who you are. Let me tell you something, son, I couldn’t be more proud of you.

Right there, we have parental love, we have tolerance, we have individual responsibility, we have dignity and respect. Perhaps theologically those virtues are “bland” enough, in McCarthy’s words, to not provide a foundation for strength; on the level of philosophy, I’m open to that argument. But insofar as actually lived lives are concerned—particularly the lived lives of Kansans that I know, including many whose politics I think are appalling, but whose support for families and friends and civic work are rock solid—I think this kind of morality, Superman’s morality, a morality that saves dogs and squirrels, a morality that refuses to cause harm to others, fails to prevent all possible harm, but then keeps on trying again and again anyway, is a damn good one. Sentimental yes, but inspiring too, I think. (And from all the memes that are apparently out there celebrating the wonderful, stupid, absolutely Superman-ish line "Kindness, maybe that's the new punk rock," maybe there are more people out there who agree with me, rather than McCarthy.)

Some Possibly Helpful Thoughts on Localism, Populism, and Proximity During a Pandemic

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic]

The departure of Donald Trump from the White House [crosses fingers] will assuredly not mean the departure of Trumpism from American life. The collection of grifters, paranoiacs, and devout (and, I think, devoutly misinformed) Christians who embraced Trump as the salvation of our broken liberal capitalist state may or may not stick with the man himself (or rather with the narcissistic tweetstorms that will no doubt continuously flow from his mansion in Florida), but the populist discontent which he channeled, the sense of technological alienation, socio-economic frustration, and constitutional disregard many justifiably feel in relation to our ever-increasingly unequal, undemocratic, and elite-driven country--that, I'm certain, we're stuck with. That can been as a threat requiring constant condemnation--or maybe, instead, we can dig into this discontent, find its constructive elements, relocate them, and use them to build a different, more local and less easily abused political foundation.

Of course, figuring out how to disentangle Trump from ideas embraced by, at the very least, hundreds of thousands of voters, is no simple matter. Populism--which, borrowing from The Oxford Handbook of Populism, I'll define minimally as "an ideology that posits a struggle between the will of the common people and a conspiring elite," and thus is, among other things, "a normative response to perceived crises of democratic legitimacy--is an alluring idol, the promise (one which many consider democratically dangerous) of making political connections with the imagined masses who feel alienated from or resentful towards those who wield social power within the dysfunctional mass democracies of today. I say "imagined" masses not because I reject the possibility of such alienation and resentment operating on a nation-wide scale; rather, I call it imagined because the populist articulations we see around us, whether expressed as a positive or a negative, are almost inevitably couched in a statist, collective context--and the pioneering work of Benedict Anderson decades ago has made it impossible, I think, for serious people to speak casually of national communities and their political expressions through states without recognizing their fundamentally "imaginary" quality, as things constructed through acts of affective identification and imagination.

Scholars who recognize this imaginary element in the politics of the contemporary democratic nation-state are often quick to suggest alternative stories which the inhabitants of such states could, or should, tell themselves, so as to short-circuit the lure of populist stories that, in the view of many of them, invariably cast the fight between the “common people” and the “conspiring elite” in dangerously ethnic or exclusionary terms. Their goal is to find a way to cast the affective identification and imagination at work in liberal capitalist states into the civic realm: hence, “civic nationalism” or “constitutional patriontism.” This effort, while it has had great influence in the scholarship on national identity over the past 30 years, has seemed less than wholly convincing as populist narratives have revived over the same period. Rogers Smith, while sharing the fear of these scholars regarding the threat to liberal democracy which populist narratives present, suggests that any political story which fundamentally rests on “pledging allegiance to an abstract creed” is doomed to struggle.

Instead, Smith argues that those stories which will lastingly engage the affective imagination of a people are the ones which focus on “a shared endeavor that participants can see as expressive of their identities and interests as well as their ideas.” This is not a denial of the constitutive role which acts of political imagination will invariably involve, but it suggests that such affective expressions need not be either “mechanistic” (which suggest unchanging laws or identities) or “teleological organicist” (which suggest an inevitable evolution towards a destiny or end-state); a people can also see itself constituted through “contextual accounts” which derive themselves from mapping “how the interactions of different units in [society] foster change in those units and in the society as a whole.”

Given Smith’s appreciation of the constitutive function which a story about the contextual interactions of different parts of aspects of a social group can serve for the group itself--an appreciation he deepens even further when he associates the best kind of national stories with “reticulation”: that is, they will “weave networks” that “transform jumbles of differences into more orderly and attractive arrangements that generally have more utility and durability”--it is unfortunate that he never seriously considers any group besides the nation state. After all, his talk of contextual accounts of a jumble of different subgroups and distinct social units being woven into a network which constitutes an appreciation of the whole has an obvious analog in a very important, though clearly not national, form of imagined community: the city. Consider the applicability of Smith’s considerations to Jane Jacob’s justly famous description of the “sidewalk ballet” of a thriving city in The Death and Life of Great American Cities: 

Under the seeming disorder of the old city, wherever the old city is working successfully, is a marvelous order for maintaining the safety of the streets and the freedom of the city. It is a complex order. Its essence is intricacy of sidewalk use, bringing with it a constant succession of eyes. This order is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to the dance--not to a simple-minded precision dance with everyone kicking up at the same time, twirling in unison and bowing off en masse, but to an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole. The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any one place is always replete with new improvisations. 

That Smith does not recognize this obvious parallel is perhaps a matter of convenience; while he allows that our globalized and interconnected world allows for a cacophony of potential political stories, he sees “narratives of nation-states” as possessing a “simplicity, clarity, and authority” which “proponents of rival senses of political identity often can manage only with great difficulty.” Or it is possible that he sees that convenience as reflecting something natural and inevitable. William Galston, relying in part on the political theorist Pierre Manent, makes this point multiple times in his own recent attack on populist narratives; it is essential, he writes, to make a civic case for the pluralist and democratic nation-state, because only a government that is incorporated by national bodies can have the scale of representation to make genuinely “legitimate decisions about laws and rules,” and only a national body can incorporate enough resources to generate the sort of wealth that can reward the very human characteristic of “ceaseless effort and ingenuity in the service of material improvement.” Democracy at our present moment, according to this argument, requires a liberal capitalist nation-state, and since such states create elites, and elites can be depicted as threatening the common people by populist demagogues, the great task of theorists of democracy, in Galston’s and Smith’s minds at least, is to call for the sorts of stories and public policies that will prevent the populist narratives which are parasitic upon such states from gaining any political ground.

My concern, at this point, should be obvious: if the fundamental problem with populism--and the efforts which some theorists go to either counter or re-orient its appeal as a constitutive narrative of affective imagination--is the complicated fact of its appeal to the feelings of powerlessness and longings for popular control which exist in the contemporary nation-state, then what about focusing on the constitutive, people-building power of other, less statist scales of belonging? Of course, so long as our national governing bodies wield sovereign power, and our major media organs remain committed to casting every debate into terms of what effect said debate will have on the use or abuse of state power, any such alternative will face many practical obstacles. But those obstacles may not be insurmountable.

One particular way in which localism has taken on theoretical forms which potentially carry with them real possibilities for constituting a sense of popular identity is the family of ideas which are sometimes referred to as the “new municipalism” or “radical municipalism.” Heavily indebted to the “libertarian municipalism” of Murray Bookchin, but expressed in light of a more locally interconnected understanding of participatory democracy than his did, it is an attempt to think more seriously about what a politically empowered egalitarian commons would look like in a localized urban context. That such models can be productively imagined and politically built upon in relatively rural contexts is an understanding as old as Thomas Jefferson’s proposed ward system or Alexis de Tocqueville’s idealization of the egalitarian town meetings of 19^th-century America. The parallels between those associational forms and those spoken of by the Populists of late 19th-century America are strong--but considering how poorly the Populists fared in America's urban centers, that would only seem to further suggest the incompatibility between populist formations and the urban life most American citizens live.

Yet perhaps the distinguishing feature that municipalist narratives could offer, one which borders on the populist articulation of a defense of the common people and yet does not get hung up on inevitably statist definitions of citizenship and claims to a sovereign people--definitions which, in the 19^th century, became entangled with an anti-urbanism and an anti-immigrant ethnic sentiment, echoes of which continue to Trump’s so-called “populism” today--is their rigorous focus on the most basic phenomenological fact of urban life: bodies in proximity to each other (which is exactly the same central reality to Jacob’s sidewalk ballet). As Bertie Russell observed:

[The] municipalist movements have found themselves building on a unique potential of the urban--proximity. In its simplest forms, we can understand the quality of proximity the observation that...the local level is the place the space where shifts and changes can truly be transformative in terms of impacting people’s lives....[Their] initiatives are harnessing the potential of the urban scale through adopting a politics of proximity, the concrete bringing together of bodies (rather than of citizens, who already come with a [state-defined] territory) in the activation of municipalist political processes that have the capacity to produce new political subjectivities....[We] should understand the politics of proximity as attending to those forces that pull us together, as opposed to those forces that push us apart. Whilst contemporary urbanization is characterized by the ever-increasing massification of bodies...this same urbanization is driven by dynamics that pull us ever further apart. Perhaps it is precisely because of this contradiction that the municipality has been adopted as a key site through which a politics of proximity can be pursued. 

While the theoreticians of municipalism have thus far, to my knowledge, not thought to connect populist stories about constitutive identification (or their more civic equivalents) with the urban “subjectivities” that they see as emerging through the politicalization of the proximate bringing together and shifting and changing of human bodies, the parallels are, I think, obvious. The focus on the needs of human bodies, on organizing to maintain their proximate patterns of movement and change, or resisting those socio-economic forces which pull people apart, inducing alienation in the place of togetherness--that all can fit within a populist framework. Remember that Smith argued that the best stories of identification must incorporate some degree of “reticulation,” some respect for the pluralistic “patterns among the elements that constitute a larger whole.” In rural or suburban environments, it may correctly be the fact that the distance between bodies requires a narrative of affective and imaginary identification on a national scale, since locally there isn’t sufficient shifting and changing to prevent the craving for such stories to land upon exclusive, ethnic ones. But in cities? The requisite reticulation which the constituting story needs to making human plurality into a part of one’s imagined community, rather than an obstacle to it, will be as obvious as the foot traffic on the sidewalk outside one’s front door (or at least potentially could be, anyway).

Margaret Kohn's work on the "urban commonwealth" provides a specific example of putting this kind of imagined subjectivity--a non-statist, urban sense of the common people united against those who would alienate and privatize them from one another--to direct political work. Kohn refers to the theoretical construct she explores as “solidarism,” but at one point in her analysis the populist parallel is made explicit. Using the urban uprisings of a decade ago--Occupy Wall Street being the best known in the United States, but with parallels all around the world--as her model, she suggests that life in cities today is increasingly teaching more and more people to rethink how they see themselves as bodies which occupy public, democratically articulated spaces. In association with that particular urban education, Kohn postulates a greater awareness of how it is that those spaces, and the means by which they are "common" to those who live and move and change within them–speaking here of the roads and parks and playgrounds and markets through which healthy urban activity is expressed--are separated from them, thus making them, presumably, something that people can feel no politically identifying affection for.

Enabling this awareness are the operations of, in Kohn’s words, "two very different understandings of the term 'public.'" The first she calls the "sovereigntist model, which identifies the public with the state," and the second the "populist model, which sees the public as a force which emerges outside of state institutions in order to challenge policies and publicize issues that do not make it onto the government’s agenda.” Predictably, the sovereigntist model requires a regulative state in order for the urbanites to find identification through their actions in their spaces: “A public space is one that is owned, authorized, or regulated by the state.” Whereas the populist model defends the contentious interaction of persons, with their always shifting associations, as a necessary component of persuasion; it justifies “the public as a force that emerges outside of state institutions in order to challenge policies and publicize issues that do not make it onto the government’s agenda.” In short, Kohn is pointing to a kind of populist imaginary which comes from the same space as the subjectivities which radical municipalism invokes: finding oneself constituted as a community through the practice of “extralegal” action, putting bodies into public space “as a way of ensuring that the law does not protect the interests of the elite at the expense of the common people."

Obviously, talk of the people being able to exercise political force in regards to public places "outside of state institutions" is terrifying to those who consider state-enforced property rights to be sacrosanct. Such urban and local populist formulations do not necessarily take a clear position on the place of private property (Kohn herself doesn't, recognizing that the idea of "social rights" or the "right to the city" are far from fully developed), but again, the key point is not contesting every particular argument being made as part of this intellectual shift. Rather, the point is taking up the discontent which issues in the whole drive to politically express oneself through in connection with one's collectively self-articulated people and place, and explore the possibilities of the shift itself.

It is my belief--and, with a little creative re-interpretation, perhaps a belief which aligns with the theoretical work done by the theorists and activists mentioned here--that populism, the popular engagement of people against elites, can be made relevant to political formulations outside of national imaginaries. And if the rhetoric of populism really can be theoretically articulated as a local and urban matter, then perhaps exclusive national narratives, whatever their effectiveness, could also be understood as invoking a language which is parasitic upon the embodied place where populist feeling mostly actually resides. To be certain, it is ridiculously unlikely that a conceptual exploration like this one could be persuasive enough to be even just a small part of making incoherent any further Trumpist and state-dependent abuse of the valid populist sentiments out there. But given how likely it is that our national pre-occupations will allow bad actors like our soon-to-be-former president to continue to turn legitimate frustrations with the elite disregard of our  proximate (and, for most of us, urban) places in nationalist, exclusivist directions, any rhetorical and intellectual resistance, however small, is worth doing.

On Cities and Tongdong Bai's Confucian Modernity

[The following is a version of comments that I have been invited to give at a book symposium being hosted by the Center for East Asian and Comparative Philosophy at the City University of Hong Kong in October. It'll take place via Zoom, unfortunately. I'll get back to Hong Kong again someday, but not this year.]

Tongdong Bai’s Against Political Equality: The Confucian Case is a sprawling, ambitious, and often (though not always) compelling book. Going far beyond its title, Bai’s book does not only thoughtfully add to the ever-increasing literature on the relationship of the Confucian tradition to arguments about egalitarianism, meritocracy, and liberal democracy generally, but also aspires to make a comprehensive case for a Confucian alternative to liberal modernity entirely. Such a philosophical and historical claim might seem to be biting off more than any one book could ever chew, but there is much to be learned from the Confucian perspectives Bai brings to bear on the book’s many topics. In these comments, I will focus solely on the provocative framing which Bai sets up so as to situate the alternative which he spends the rest of the book describing, a framing which presents a way of conceiving of the Confucian tradition that leads directly to questions that, under some common interpretations, Confucianism had been assumed to have no answer.

Foremost among these interpretations is the assumption that the “familism” of the classical Confucian tradition--which Bai explicitly centers his analysis upon--is inapplicable to, or at least greatly constrains it direct applicability to, the modern world, which Bai himself characterizes as centrally involving the establishment of “large, populous, well-connected, mobile, plebeianized states of strangers” (p. 26). Given that, to quote L.H.M. Ling, classical Confucianism converges all the “various domains of human activity--political (ruler-to-subject), familial (father-to-son, parent-to-child), conjugal (husband-to-wife), and fraternal (brother-to-brother, friend-to-friend)--into one set of family relations writ large,” the notion of discovering in the Confucian tradition an arrangement that provides guidance to a society of characterized by mobility and anonymity is a surprising one. Bai’s argument this was accomplished through “the introduction of compassion-based humanness as a virtue,” thereby providing “a bond for a society of strangers” is powerful, though not, I think, entirely persuasive (p. 120).

That classical Confucianism lays out a moral and social system of signification and ritual which as a matter of theory served, and in practice through Chinese history frequently did serve, to tie together people beyond their basic family or village units is well understood. It is more commonly the case, however, that this understanding underscores a “civil,” as opposed to a “civic,” formulation of the possibilities for a Confucian politics. That is, the civilizing aspects of Confucian universalism are seen as not tied to any particular place or community, but rather to the simple fact of humans being everywhere in community with one another, beginning with the family and expanding out to potentially encompass anyone that any other given person could name (and be named by), thereby give real affective meaning to the obligations and bonds between them. As A.T. Nuyen put it, it invokes an “outward expansion of the individual self to a universal framework that encompasses the whole world.” How well can that vision of ritually realized civil relationships be adapted to the socio-economic reality of diverse populations capable of independent movement pursuing distinct, private goals in pluralistic civic spaces? Here, Bai qualifies his suggestions somewhat, and these are exactly the points where I find his basic framing of his argument most provocative.

Bait presents the centuries-long period of transition from the Zhou dynasty, through the Spring and Autumn periods and the Warring States period, until the establishment of the Qin dynasty (roughly 770 BCE to 221 BCE, a time which he abbreviates as the "SAWS"), as a time of modernization--though not the “modernity 2.0" brought on by the “industrial revolutions” of western Europe which “eluded traditional China” (p. 26). Nonetheless, as the SAWS saw the collapse of Zhou-era feudalism and its replacement with “a few large and populous states in which the kings had to deal with thousands of strangers without the nobility-based delegatory system available to them anymore,” Confucianism emerged in part as a response to “the demand for new political orders” which this early modern moment required. Bai elucidates this interpretation through some innovative use of well-known passages from the Mencius (in particular 1A7, with the story of King Xuan of Qi), concluding that “after the collapse of close-knit communities in feudal times [meaning the Zhou dynasty], the lord of a state lost the motive to care for his people, most of whom were now total strangers.” The Confucian tradition, in the hands of Mencius, presents compassion and humaneness “as a new bond between the ruler and the people, and as a new motivation for a leader of state to rule his people.” Thus the humane meritocracy of classical Confucianism, Bai goes on to argue, thus should be understood as a philosophical resource of direct applicability to the challenges facing liberal democracy today, since Confucian compassion and fellow-feeling were articulated in very socially similar--if very culturally distinct--milieus of modernity (p. 122).

My struggle with this--in many ways ingenious--justificatory argument is that Bai’s attempted association of the unique circumstances of the period of Confucianism’s emergence with the same period in European history which bequeathed so many of the conceptual developments that get lumped into “modernity” (the rise of skepticism and individualism in the wake of the Protestant Reformation and the scientific developments of the Renaissance period; the development of advanced capitalist forms as changes introduced by travel, exploration, technology. and imperial expropriation were codified into government and law in the 16th and 17th centuries; etc.) simply lacks one of the fundamental elements which his own original description depended upon: urban spaces of genuine mobility, diversity, and personal subjectivity. This is not to deny that the ancient Chinese cities of Linzi, Yangzhou, Jicheng, or others lacked any sprawling or cosmopolitan character; on the contrary, the evidence is clear that many did. But for the Confucianism of Bai’s SAWS “modernity” to be truly accepted as, in his words, an order fit for “a society of strangers,” then it must incorporate some analogue to the kind of “heterogeneity of anonymity,” to quote Stephen Schneck, which slowly but surely emerged through the changing urbanism of Late Middle Ages and the 15th and 16th centuries in Western Europe. It is not clear that is the case.

Bai suggests, in reference to the long periods of disruption in Chinese history, that the overwhelmingly agricultural and local “close-knit society of acquaintances” which most take to be the default character of Confucian communities might be better seen as temporary refuges which developed in the wake of turmoil, or perhaps even “a mistaken projection of contemporary observations on the whole history of China.” His support for that revisionary argument is thin, however. Thus he follows this argument with the observation that “even if we accept the judgment that the economy of traditional China was agriculture-based, and its villages were societies of acquaintances that were mobile...only at a rather slow pace,” that still doesn’t account for “the mobility of government officials who were often not even allowed to take a post in their hometowns.” He thus argues that his interpretation of Mencius’s emphasis upon the bonds provided by humaneness is compatible with a “dual structure...in which there were communities of acquaintances on the level of the common people and societies of strangers on the level of the political and commercial elite.” Admitting that “for businessmen and officials in traditional China living in cities, their economic base was still often in rural areas, and thus they couldn’t sever the ties with the communities of acquaintances they grew up in,” he concludes that “[n]onetheless, the bond developed by Mencius for the society of strangers remains relevant” (pp. 123-125).

On that I certainly agree! It is vital to consider, as Bai does, how the bonding power of Confucian humaneness can open up our conversations about representation, gender equality, health care, civil rights, international institutions, and so much more, all of which most Westerners have tended to conduct alongside unquestioned assumptions about liberal democracy. But it is equally vital to acknowledge that those assumptions became as widespread as they did not solely due to the success of liberal democratic states, but also because those states recognized, and institutionalized practices pertaining to, the new, transformative forms of human life that were the creation of the modern urban space. The cry of the apocryphal 15th-century German peasant--Die Stadtluft macht frei!--reflected far more than the particulars of feudal law, but rather a general appreciation of the diversity, privacy, and distant formality that urban spaces came to offer in modern Europe. Thus have arguments about strengthening the kind of intimacy and community which the shift from gemeinshaft to gesellschaft arguably weakened, perhaps fatally, always had to struggle against accusations of agrarian nostalgia, and find ways to express themselves in the context of modernity’s seemingly inevitable liberal and urban character.

It is unfortunately that Bai, in this fine book, did not consider building parallels between what he presents as the modernity-compatible Confucian conceptualizations of humaneness, and the large literature on republican civic virtues, civil religion, and other communitarian and neo-Tocquevillian forms of social organization that have emerged over the past 35 years, especially considering that a great deal of that literature has both similarly struggled to clarify its theories in light of the rural-urban divide, the controversial place of elites, and other matters which clearly relate to Bai’s own reconstruction of the classical Confucian tradition, as well as having frequently connected with the Confucian tradition itself as well. Without that comparative work, the conceptual reach of some of Bai’s most interesting arguments remains an open question. To posit the classical Confucian tradition as possessing conceptual elements that can resolve the same theoretical dilemmas as liberal democracy, by virtue of that tradition being rooted in and have developed in response to similarly “modern” conditions, means that Confucianism must possess, within its teachings about civil morality, resources that can be adapted to not only the context of “strangerness” which elites may encounter in carrying out their ritual roles and responsibilities (as hypothetically adapted to the contemporary moment), but also the “mass strangerness” that the characterize modern civic spaces.

As a further example, Bai’s discussion of such civic spaces when conceived in terms of the nation-state and international relations generally, following what he labels a “new tian xia model,” is rich and thoughtful. But it, too, bypasses the space which must exist between, at one end, those street-level communities of moderns which will invariably partake of an urban character--the “ballet” of strangers who nonetheless acknowledge one another, as Jane Jacobs described so well--and at the other end, the sovereign state. Bai, influenced by an argument by Friedrich Nietzsche, dismisses the idea of there successfully existing under tian xia “quasi-autonomous communities,” since “a small community with even a few thousand people may not be able to maintain even the most basic technologies and institutions to sustain itself as a significant competing unit” (p. 177). But while it may have been reasonable for him to set that question aside while demonstrating the ability to extend Confucian arguments into current global debates over state competition, it reveals, again, something missing: an argument about how, and to what degree, classical Confucian humaneness, and the civilizing connections it enables, can be brought into modern civic spaces of urban diversity, subjectivity, and contestation.

My belaboring of what appears to me as a gap in the original framing of Bai’s argument should not be taken as a greater criticism than it actually is; disputes over the actual “modernity” of classical Confucian ideas do not compromise the value of what Bai suggests regarding the prioritization of equality, as well as much more, in modern life. Bai’s work stands as a great accomplishment, even if the way it presents its valuable political engagements may be less than fully persuasive on their own.

Our Own Vines and Our Own Fig Trees: a Post-Independence Day, Post-Hamilton-Watching Sermon

[Cross-posted to By Common Consent]

Like plenty of other Americans (and, given likely demographics, probably in particular like plenty of readers of this blog), my family and I watched the musical Hamilton over the July 4th weekend. Our second-oldest daughter, who was home to join us yesterday, had actually seen the show in 2016 on Broadway; for the rest of us, as familiar as we were with the music, watching the show was a new experience--and it was a lovely one, a wonderfully funny and dramatic, visually and aurally compelling, and historically challenging (in more ways than one), piece of filmed theater. It was three hours very well spent.

Most of all for me, I enjoyed spending time in the virtual company of Chris Jackson's stylized portrayal of George Washington. All the musical's theatrical depictions are hyper-stylized, of course (it's fundamentally a work of fan fiction, after all), but there was, in my view, an astonishingly deep and consistent core to what Lin-Manuel Miranda put into the figure of Washington, brought to beautiful life by Jackson's presence and baritone voice. That core connects with something mythic, something, frankly, scriptural. Appropriately so, since Washington's central song in the musical, "One Last Time," in which Washington instructs by example the unfortunately mostly unteachable Alexander Hamilton the decency and wisdom of knowing when to walk away from power and the contests over power it always involves, is the only line in the whole libretto which quotes the Bible--Micah 4:3-4, specifically. It reads (from the NRSV):

He shall judge between many peoples,
and shall arbitrate between strong nations far away;
they shall beat their swords into plowshares,
and their spears into pruning hooks;
nation shall not lift up sword against nation,
neither shall they learn war any more;
but they shall all sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees,
and no one shall make them afraid;
for the mouth of the Lord of hosts has spoken.

This is a messianic passage, and generally speaking, folks in contemporary democratic (or at least democracy-aspiring) states don't like associating politics, and especially not specific political figures, with messiahs. And yet we do, constantly, all the time. After watching the music, my only comment on social media was to quote the devastatingly dark and funny (and, I think, fundamentally true) line given to the hilariously arch King George III, in the song "I Know Him," immediately following Jackson's rendition of the above song, when he learns that Washington was retiring from the presidency and John Adams had been elected to take his place: "Oceans rise / Empires fall / Next to Washington, they all look small." In response to which, a commenter linked to this command performance of the song:



Many of the mostly self-identifying liberal readers of this blog will likely find themselves touched by this moment, especially in light of the Trump years which have followed it. Yet at the same time, many of those same readers--to say nothing of those few of my fellow leftists out there--are likely to find themselves, as I see it anyway, in a bit of a contradiction. Isn't this kind of sympathetic idealization, which is really a kind of idolization, basically kind of wrong? Don't we want to avoid getting all romantic about those who stand before us in leadership positions? Aren't we obliged to respond to any kind of hero-worship, however wistfully expressed, with thorough-going critique, if not outright rejection? Shouldn't we be, as one of my By Common Consent co-bloggers recently suggested, iconoclasts, tearing down images which presume to situate some felt ideal in the body of some invariably flawed (and, unfortunately often in our history of public statuary, affirmatively racist and criminal) person?

If you don't see or feel this contradiction, more power to you; it may only manifest itself to people like myself who flirt with dangerous philosophical ideas. And I'm not being ironically self-deprecating when I call them "dangerous"--there is a lot of history which proves the danger of reading passages like Micah's above and believing, as I do, that's it's not just poetically describing a hopeful vision of peaceful rest, but is also communicating the holiness, the sacramentality, of being in a place of peaceableness and rest. Start thinking that way, and soon you're thinking: "where can I find such a place?" Or, "how can I make such a place?" And then, eventually, worryingly, "who can make such a place for me?" Could have President Obama? Despite his self-association with the old activist phrase "we are the ones we've been waiting for," he hardly governed in a manner which rigorously avoided any attempt to embody certain ideas for and on behalf of the American people. Nor has President Trump, for that matter. I mean, he did promise to "Make American Great Again," right?

The perversity of linking the actions of President Trump--who has basically never made any serious effort to pretend that his administration reflects or represents or embodies any kind of general civic ideal--with this idealization simply shows up the problem, I think. The very fact that so many will criticize Trump for being unpresidential underscores that most of us think, most of us want, presidents of the United States to be presidential, even if our critical sensibilities tell us otherwise. (The same goes, though obviously to much different and often much lesser degrees, for pretty much all leaders of all communities, I suspect.) Some part of us wants them to embody something! And while many might articulate it differently, I suspect that that wished-for embodiment might best be described as a identification with a longed-for place, or way of being in a place--in the case of the president of the United States, an "Americanism," if you will. A sense that, in other words, this person is making for us, showing us, the way it is supposed to be here. Here, under our own vines, under our own fig trees: it should be like this. Which means, I think, that while the substantive content is radically dissimilar, the phenomenology of putting on a MAGA hat may not be all that different from watching Hamilton and mourning that moment of classiness back in 2016. Especially when we think about it in connection with, and through a stylized and powerfully sung representation of, Washington at the moment of his Farewell Address, with such a thoroughly problematic yet aspirational phrase as "I want to warn against partisan fighting"! (It shouldn't have surprised me to learn from my daughter that there was a gospel remix of this song with Obama speaking lines from the address.)

I write all this not to critique this, but to sermonize on behalf of it. I like, and more importantly actually believe in, this part of politics (which means, this part of living in society with other people, no matter what the organization of that society may be). I like and believe in this admittedly dangerous sentiment; it has always--at least for as long as I can remember thinking about any of these matters--appealed to and made intuitive sense to me. I think it is not only a very human thing, but also, at least always potentially, a very good thing. I was up early this morning with a headache; it was still dark out, and the lines of "One Last Time," and particularly Jackson's gorgeous and plaintive singing of them, kept ringing through my head. And I found myself reflecting upon all the ways in which I've felt myself spiritually pulled towards feeling some real truth in, and thus wanting to defend, this conceptualization of our life as embodied, historical, dialogic, relational beings over the decades. Traditions, holidays, civil religion, public expressions of faith, presidential rituals, civic associations--they've all been part of this decades-old argument I've been having with myself (and others) over what it means to intentionally (and thus more often than not romantically) make, and then consequently to be in and belong to, a place. These vines, these fig trees, and being able to find in them, or having them revealed to us or invoked for us as, a peaceable place that is our own. My thinking about those places have changed over the years. I was much more willing to think nationally about places in the past, whereas now I think much more about local places, and the peace of the home and the neighborhood they can bring. That's a holy thing, I believe.

It is also, unfortunately, always potentially an exclusionary thing as well. Our vines--go away, they're not yours, they don't belong to you! That's a dangerous sentiment, or at least as a Christian and a man of the left I can't help but feel that way. The holiest--and thus, if you'd prefer I use the secular terms I consider to be equivalent, the most empowering and equalizing and democratic--approach to this messianic passage of scripture, the truth within it that calls to us, I think, no matter what the scale of the communities we live within or the character of the leadership which exists within them, is this one:



When Miranda put into Washington's mouth the lyric expressing a retiring president's wish to be "at home in this nation we’ve made," think, I would suggest, not of nation-states, but of the original meaning of "nation": natio, or as we might say today, a "peoplehood." It is both reasonable and even moral, I think, to long for, to look for the embodiment and instantiation of (and, yes, to memorialize through song and statuary, with the understanding that statues can come down and, just as Hamilton did, songs can be resung), one's people and place, one's vine and fig tree, one's home. But that longing has to co-exist with the imperative to enable all of God's children to have their people and place, their vine and fig tree, their home. Maybe their and our homes will turn out to be--will constructed to be, will be sung by someone like Christopher Jackson so as to be revealed to be--one and the same. As the hippies used to say, maybe all us critters have a place in God's choir--or in the Hamilton ensemble, for that matter. I won't presume to think that I could take Washington's place under his vine and fig tree. But maybe he can make space for me, and vice versa, all the same.

What I've Learned, and David Brooks (Perhaps) Still Hasn't

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic]

Among all the major right-wing voices of America's mainstream journalistic establishment, David Brooks is perhaps the most difficult to pin down. Ross Douthat is a millennial Christian conservative--smart, pop culture-friendly, lacking in the hang-ups of the Jerry Falwells and Ralph Reeds of decades past, but often lacking in their constancy as well. George F. Will was once a genuinely provocative and insight commentator, but his aristocratic Tory rigor has long since crumbled into Republican party hackery, with only the occasional glimmer of his old wit. But Brooks? The man is often sloppy with his facts, clumsy in the way he injects broad and simplistic sociological or historical reflections into narrow and detailed policy arguments, and condescending in a cloyingly liberal way (which in some ways is worse than Will's noblesse oblige, which at least used to have some real elitist dignity to it). For all that, though, he's a serious man, who can't help but look at the passing scene and connect what he sees to serious concerns--and the connections he makes are usually worth reading.

Brooks has made it absolutely clear that he considers the now-all-but-inevitably election of Donald Trump as the Republican party's presidential candidate to be catastrophic--for the party, but also for the country as a whole. (For the record, Douthat and Will have been contemptuous of Trump as well.) But in a column last Friday, Brooks did something a little unusual for him: he apologized, sort of.

This election--not only the Trump phenomenon but the rise of Bernie Sanders, also--has reminded us how much pain there is in this country. According to a Pew Research poll, 75 percent of Trump voters say that life has gotten worse for people like them over the last half century. This declinism intertwines with other horrible social statistics. The suicide rate has surged to a 30-year high--a sure sign of rampant social isolation. A record number of Americans believe the American dream is out of reach. And for millennials, social trust is at historic lows.

Trump’s success grew out of that pain, but he is not the right response to it. The job for the rest of us is to figure out the right response. That means first it’s necessary to go out into the pain. I was surprised by Trump’s success because I’ve slipped into a bad pattern, spending large chunks of my life in the bourgeois strata--in professional circles with people with similar status and demographics to my own. It takes an act of will to rip yourself out of that and go where you feel least comfortable. But this column is going to try to do that over the next months and years. We all have some responsibility to do one activity that leaps across the chasms of segmentation that afflict this country.

We’ll probably need to tell a new national story....I don’t know what the new national story will be, but maybe it will be less individualistic and more redemptive. Maybe it will be a story about communities that heal those who suffer from addiction, broken homes, trauma, prison and loss, a story of those who triumph over the isolation, social instability and dislocation so common today....

We need to rebuild the sense that we’re all in this together. The author R. R. Reno has argued that what we’re really facing these days is a “crisis of solidarity.” Many people, as the writers David and Amber Lapp note, feel pervasively betrayed: by for-profit job-training outfits that left them awash in debt, by spouses and stepparents, by people who collect federal benefits but don’t work. They’ve stopped even expecting loyalty from their employers. The big flashing lights say: NO TRUST. That leads to an everyone-out-for-himself mentality and Trump’s politics of suspicion. We’ll need a communitarianism.

It is admittedly a little rich to see a man who made his name exploring (many would say exacerbating) ambient class and cultural divisions in American society, and connecting those divisions with a story of the American polity which ultimately--in a shoulder-shrugging sort of way--embraced the idea that people (middle-class and better ones, that is) could and should find a degree of virtue and happiness by just making their own bourgeois worlds for themselves, talking now, in the face of the possible total collapse of his preferred political party, of a "new national story." But I should give him some credit. Brooks has spent the past few years thinking and writing about character and society. His civic-republican and communitarian side has always been clear, but too often his invocations of community seemed somewhat boutique and nostalgic, something that liberal individualists needed to remember and be inspired by and perhaps sometimes feel vaguely guilty about abandoning, but never as a way to explore or critique liberal individualism or American-style late-capitalism itself. To see him write here about ripping himself out of his professional demographic is hopeful, to say the least.

But perhaps not much more than that: hopeful. Because towards the end he writes:

[A]t the community level we need to listen to those already helping. James Fallows had a story in The Atlantic recently noting that while we’re dysfunctional at the national level you see local renaissances dotted across the country. Fallows went around asking, “Who makes this town go?” and found local patriots creating radical schools, arts festivals, public-private partnerships that give, say, high school dropouts computer skills. That solidarity can be rekindled nationally. Over the course of American history, national projects like the railroad legislation, the W.P.A. and the NASA project have bound this diverse nation. Of course, such projects can happen again — maybe through a national service program, or something else.

Fallows years-long investigation into America's cities (which is much more complete than the short summary article Brooks's references) does indeed make the case--a case I completely agree with, by the way--that the best kinds of innovation, conservation, and conversation are taking locally, not nationally. But even for Fallows, the lesson of his observations don't challenge his commitment to the centralizing myth of American life, that everything outside of the overarching collective consciousness of America's destiny or way of life must be preparatory or supplementary, not constitutive. So perhaps it's not surprising that Brooks, in recognizing that he needs to get out into the diverse local communities of our country and consider the reasons behind political responses which he doesn't understand, still ends with an expected nationalization of the resources he hopes to discover.

I used to be right there with him--or, rather, I used to be where he was, attempting to wrap my thinking about civil society and community and culture around nationality. I don't dismiss entirely those arguments I used to get into, more than a decade ago; I still reject the bottom-line libertarian identification of the state, even when it arguably serves as democratic expression of a national body, as a majoritarian, coercive instrument, and never an empowering one. There really is a sense, I think, in which anyone who takes the political (not to mention the Christian) value of egalitarianism seriously, as I do, needs to engage in at least a little abstraction, and be able to broadly see people as citizens, not just neighbors and not-neighbors. But Brooks was all of that idea at one time: conceiving as citizens (and the taxes they pay, and the service they do) as being ever enlisted into various nationally, culturally, and morally-shaping projects. There is evidence that he's learned to connect--or at least to respect those who connect--his conception of community to something more local (he's even at times sounded almost like a Porcher!). But as the above column shows, Brooks hangs on to his ideas pretty tightly.

What killed off that idea for me? Well, as I just admitted, it hasn't died entirely--but I am far, far less willing today to write about the imperative of community, tradition, conservation, and sustainability, in terms which presume that it is the American state, or the nation as a whole, that serves as the proper venue by which said imperatives must be realized. Reading James C. Scott (and others) on anarchism, particularly in connection to what the "anarchist squint" can tell us about city life, has been a huge part of my change in thinking here. Reading (and sometimes being chastened by) some smart libertarian thinkers has influenced me also. And so has been my own reconsideration of communitarianism, and my internalization of the fact that the best, most lasting ideas which came out of that philosophical and ideological movement tended to point towards actual lived communities, not culturally or ideologically "imagined" ideal ones. (Maybe Brooks needs to go back and re-read his Tocqueville in light of the last 20 years.)

But most of all has simply been involving myself in the struggles of my own city of Wichita. By really getting involved in politics and activism and reform movements in a particular place--which, I suppose, might be included in Brooks's wish to break out of his usual professional demographic--one's eyes can't help but be opened, I think, to the reality of the teaching, serving, innovating, organizing, building, and preserving which happens amongst people who actually share physical space, who actually interact together over food or projects or plans, who adapt to actually changing circumstances, and not solely to arguments on the internet. That's the sort of energy which America's communities are harnessing. To leap from there, as Brooks clumsily does, to solving America's political and structural breakdown on the highest levels (and what can be higher than the race for the presidency?) is to misunderstand the shared enthusiasm and felt needs and experienced familiarity which generated the energy in the first place.

No, I think Brooks needs to learn that the answer to America's multiple dysfunctions will almost certainly have to involve many diverse answers, answers which operate locally in response to larger conditions that, however wonderful it might be to address them holistically, almost certainly cannot be in our present condition, because the structures of discourse, information, and consensus, both politically and technologically, have changed--they're faster, more expensive, more divided, and less friendly to compromise than they were only a generation ago. (Brooks is right about the decline of civic trust.) Should those structures be challenged, set back to what they used to be, at least as much as possible? In many ways, I would agree there is nothing more important. But such broad efforts--overturning Citizens United, rebuilding the grass-roots infrastructure of political parties, prying the distancing meritocracy away from our schools, revivifying participatory democracy, generating smaller supply chains for most goods, getting people off their damn iPhones and into town meetings--may well depend upon local efforts at connection and experimentation, on creating locally enriching cultures through our churches and neighborhood associations and places of work, ones which are not simply reflections of (and thus often magnifications of) media-conveyed or generated agendas which can undermine collective efforts by situating us all demographically before they can even get underway. In a place-bound community, the possibility exists for genuinely shared interests which transcend abstract groupings of individuals of a certain class or ethnicity or race, and allow, instead, for actually effectual ones. That, far more than some new national service program, is likely to do the kind of healing Brooks is wishing for.

Of course, for those who don't see American individualism as at all a problem, but rather something to be celebrated and magnified, any talk of community, whether national or local or anywhere between, always implies a fascistic moralism or coercive planning or both, and so for them even the humbled, localized version of Brooks's argument I'm talking about is just a cover for tyranny. They're wrong, I think, but that doesn't mean we don't incorporate them into the conversation. After all, they live in our places (or we live in their places) too.